Newstead Abbey
Newstead was the Monastery of Sherwood Forest, founded by Henry II. in contrition for the murder of Thomas a Becket, as a priory of Black Canons of the order of St. Augustine, who professed great austerity of life.
It was frequently visited by the Kings of England, and was richly endowed by many friends; among others, Edward I who in 1304, granted thirty eight acres of the land in Sherwood to this convent.
At the dissolution of the monasteries it came into possession of the Byron family.
During the reign of William the Conqueror they had large possessions in various parts of England. Ralph de Byron, who was the direct ancestor of Lord Byron, held Manors in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire in the twentieth year of the Conqueror's reign. Ralph was succeeded by Hugh de Byron. In 1485, Sir John Byron of Clayton, present at the battle of Bosworth Field. was appointed Constable of Nottingham Castle, and Master of the Forest of Sherwood.
He died without issue, leaving his brother Nicholas his heir, who was created a Knight of the Bath on the occasion of the marriage of Prince Arthur in 1501. Sir Nicholas Byron married Joan, daughter of Sir John Bushier, and died in 1503-4, leaving John his son and heir, and five daughters, the youngest of whom, Dorothy, married Edmund Pierrepont, of Holme-Pierrepont.
His only son, Sir John Byron, on the dissolution of the monasteries had a grant by Henry VIII in 1540, of the Priory of Newstead, with the Manor and Rectory of Papilwick and the surrounding closes about the priory and commons in Ravenshede and Kygell, in the forest.
From that time Newstead became the principal seat of the family, and passed in regular descent to John, the first Lord Byron, who was Lieutenant of the Tower in 1641. On the breaking out of the rebellion in 1642, Byron joined the King when he hoisted his standard at Nottingham, with a body of men-at-arms and a large sum of money for the King's service. After the battle of Newbury, Byron was rewarded for his services by the title of Lord Byron of He died without issue in 1652 and was succeeded by Richard, his brother, the second Lord Byron, who was conspicuous for his valour at the battle of Edgehill. He married, first, Elizabeth, daughter of George Rossel, by whom he had William, his son and heir, and four other sons who died young, and five daughters. He married secondly, Elizabeth, youngest daughter of Sir George Booth, of Dunham Massey, but by her he had no issue. He died in 1679, and was interred at Hucknall Torkard, where a monument is erected to his memory. 1 William, third Lord Byron, married Elizabeth, daughter of John, Lord Chaworth, and by her had ten children. He died on November 13, 1695, and was buried at Hucknall.
William, his successor, the fourth Lord, was one of the gentlemen of the bedchamber to George, Prince of Denmark. He married as his second wife the Lady Frances Williamina, daughter of William Bentinck, Earl of Portland, and by her he had three sons. He married thirdly, Frances, daughter of Lord Berkeley, of Stratton. William, the fifth Lord Byron, was born in 1722. John, brother of the fifth Lord, was born in 1723, afterwards Admiral Byron. Isabella, daughter of the fourth Lord Byron, became wife of the fourth, and mother of the fifth Earl of Carlisle.
The fifth Lord, in 1738 he was appointed lieutenant of his Majesty's ship Falkland, and afterwards of the Victory, which he had the good fortune to leave just before the ship was lost. He succeeded to the title and estates in 1736.
He quarrelled with his neighbour, Mr. Chaworth, the proprietor of Annesley Hall, his kinsman and friend. Being together in London, in 1765, in a chamber of the Star and Garter Tavern in Pall Mall, Byron insisted on settling their quarrel upon the spot by single combat. They fought by the dim light of a candle, and Mr. Chaworth, although the most expert swordsman, was mortally wounded. Lord Byron was committed to the Tower, and afterwards tried before the House of Lords, where he was found guilty of manslaughter, but exempted from punishment as a peer.
He retired, a marked man, to the Abbey, where he shut himself up to brood over his disgrace ; grew gloomy, morose, and indulged in fits of passion that made him the theme of rural wonder. It is said that he threw Lady Byron into the lake in front of the Abbey, where she would have been drowned but for the timely aid of the gardener. Being displeased at the marriage of his son and heir, he displayed inordinate malignity towards him. Not being able to cut off the succession to the estate, he endeavoured to injure it as much as possible, so that it might come a mere wreck into his hands. He was baffled in this unnatural revenge by the premature death of his son, and passed the remainder of his days in his deserted and dilapidated halls, brooding amidst the scenes he had laid desolate. He was spoken of as the "wicked lord"; he encumbered his estates and made a sale of the Rochdale property. His children and his only grandson (the son of his son by the daughter of his brother John, the Admiral) died before him. Admiral Byron had two sons John, the father of the poet, and George Anson (ancestor of the present peer), and three daughters, one of whom became wife of her cousin, the son of the fifth Lord ; another married Colonel Leigh, by whom she was mother of another Colonel Leigh, who married his cousin Augusta, daughter of John Byron, the Admiral's eldest son. This John Byron was known as " Mad Jack." He married the Marchioness of Carnarvon after her divorce from the 5th Duke of Leeds. She became Baroness Conyers on the death of her father Robert 4th Earl of Holderness; and he had by her a daughter Augusta, who married Colonel Leigh in 1807. Lady Conyers' death, in France, deprived her husband of an income of ,4,000 a year. He soon after met at Bath a Miss Catherine Gordon, of Gicht, with a fortune of .23,000. The pair were married at St. Michael's Church in that city, in 1785. John Byron took his second wife to France, squandered a great part of her property, and returned to England, where their only child, George Gordon, was born in Holies Street, London. John Byron's creditors became pressing. His daughter Augusta was sent to her grandmother, the Dowager Countess Holderness. Mrs. Byron returned to Scotland, took lodgings in Queen Street, Aberdeen, and lived upon ,150 a year, the interest on ,3,000, the remnant of her fortune. She was followed to Aberdeen by her husband. With money got from his wife, or his sister Mrs. Leigh, he escaped to France in 1791, and died at Valenciennes in the same year. 1 On the death of his grand-uncle, the fifth Lord Byron, the next heir, George Gordon, having become a ward in Chancery, the Earl of Carlisle, being the son of the deceased Lord's sister, was appointed his guardian, and in the autumn of 1798 Mrs. Byron and her son, attended by their faithful May Gray, left Aberdeen for Newstead. Mrs. Byron settled at Nottingham, and sent her son to be educated there by a Mr. Rogers. In 1799 he was taken to London by his mother and put under the charge of Dr. Glennie, of Dulwich, preparatory to entering a public school. In the summer of 1801 he went to Harrow. To a shy disposition such as Byron's was in his youth, the transition from a quiet scholastic establishment like that he had been attending at Dulwich to the bustle of a great public school was sufficiently trying. From his own account, for the first year and a half he hated Harrow. The activity and the sociableness of his nature, however, conquered this repugnance, and from being, as he says, a most unpopular boy, he rose at length to be a leader of all the sports, schemes, and mischief of the school. After some continuance at Harrow, and when the powers of his mind began to expand, Lord Carlisle, his guardian, desired to see the head master in London. Dr. Drury waited upon his lordship, and in reply to the Earl's inquiry respecting Byron's abilities, replied, " He has talents, my lord, that will add lustre to his rank." "Indeed!" said his lordship, with a degree of surprise that, according to the master's opinion, did not express the satisfaction expected. Byron, in his note-book, records that Sir Robert Peel, the future statesman, and he were form fellows, and on good terms, but that his brother was his more intimate friend. " As a scholar he was greatly my superior ; out of school I was always in scrapes, and he never." While Lord Byron and Mr. Peel were at Harrow together, a tyrant, some few years older, whose name was - , claimed a right to fag little Peel, which claim (whether rightly or wrongly I know not), Peel resisted. His resistance, however, was in vain : - - not only subdued him, but determined also to punish the refractory slave ; and proceeded forthwith to put the determination in practice by inflicting a kind of bastinado on the inner fleshy side of the boy's arm, which, during the operation, was twisted round with some degree of technical skill to render the pain more acute. While the stripes were succeeding each other, and poor Peel was writhing under them, Byron saw and felt for the misery of his friend, and although he knew he was not strong enough to fight - with any hope of success, and that it was dangerous even to approach him, he advanced to the scene of action, and with a blush of rage, tears in his eyes, and a voice trembling with terror and indignation, asked very humbly if would be pleased to tell him how many stripes he meant to inflict. "Why," returned the executioner, "you little rascal, what is that to you?" "Because, if you please," said Byron, holding out his arm, "I would take half!" There is a mixture of simplicity and magnanimity in this little trait which is truly heroic. It is but rarely that the friendship of manhood is capable of anything half so generous. In spite of Byron's lameness his strength of arm made him formidable. While at Harrow he fought Lord Calthorpe for writing " d d atheist " under his name. On leaving Bath, Mrs. Byron took up her abode in lodgings at Nottingham, Newstead Abbey being at that time let to Lord Grey de Ruthyn and during the Harrow vacations of this year she was joined there by her son. So attached was he to Newstead that even to be in its neighbourhood was a delight to him, and there he became acquainted with Lord Grey. An intimacy soon sprang up between him and his noble tenant, and an apartment at the Abbey was from thenceforth always at his service. To the family of Miss Chaworth, of Annesley, in the immediate neighbourhood of Newstead, he had been made known some time before in London, and now renewed his acquaintance with them. The young heiress herself combined with many worldly advantages that encircled her that of personal beauty and a disposition the most amiable. Though already fully alive to her charms, it was at the period of which we are speaking that the young poet seems to have drunk deepest of that fascination whose effects were to be so lasting. The six weeks passed as a dream amongst the beautiful flowers of Annesley. Byron was scarcely sixteen years of age, Mary Chaworth was two years older, but his heart was beyond his age, and his tenderness for her was deep and passionate. His love for Miss Chaworth, to use Lord Byron's own expression, was " the romance of the most romantic period of his life." And with the vacation ended this brief romance. Byron returned to school deeply enamoured, but if he had really made any impression on Miss Chaworth's heart, it was too slight to stand the test of absence. She was at that age when a female soon changes from the girl to the woman, and leaves her boyish lovers far behind her. While Byron was pursuing his school-boy studies, she was mingling with society, and met with a gentleman of the name of Musters, remarkable, it is said, for manly beauty. He wooed and won her, and when Lord Byron next met her, he learned to his dismay that she was the affianced bride of another. With that pride of spirit which always distinguished him, he controlled his feelings and maintained a serene countenance. He even affected to speak calmly of her approaching nuptials. " The next time I see you," said he, " I suppose you will be Mrs. Chaworth?" (she was to retain her family name). Her reply was, " I hope so." Byron took up his abode at Newstead in 1808. The Abbey was in a ruinous state, and his fortune was not sufficient to put the building in order, nor to maintain the house in the state kept by his ancestors. Some of the rooms he restored so as to provide his mother with a comfortable habitation. Still, he felt a pride in the old edifice ; its very dreary and dismantled state addressed itself to his poetical imagination. "Come what may," he said, "Newstead and I stand or fall together. I have now lived on the spot, I have fixed my heart upon it, and no pressure, present or future, shall induce me to barter the last vestige of our inheritance. I have that pride within me which will enable me to support difficulties. Could I obtain in exchange for Newstead Abbey the first fortune in the country, I would reject the proposition." His residence at the Abbey was fitful and uncertain. He left England in 1809, and was abroad two years. In 1810 his pecuniary difficulties came to a crisis. Within a fortnight of his return to England, Mrs. Byron died. In 1812 he was compelled to act on the advice of his men of business, who had repeatedly urged him to sell the Abbey. An agreement was made to dispose of Newstead for ; 140,000. This, however, was not carried out ; two years afterwards, the intending purchaser withdrew, forfeiting .25,000. In November, 1817, the estate was eventually disposed of for ninety thousand guineas, and passed into the hands of Lord Byron's schoolfellow and friend, Colonel Wildman. On his sale of Newstead, Byron wrote in his journal : " It cost me more than words to part with it, and to have parted with it, what I do ? or what becomes of me ? but let me remember Job's saying, and console myself with being a living man." Few men write so charmingly as Washington Irving of such incidents as the life-long love of Lord Byron for the heiress of Annesley. More than a hundred years have gone by since the poet met Mary Chaworth ; and, when Irving, thirty years afterwards, was on a visit to Colonel Wildman at Newstead, he was told that Annesley was shut up, neglected, and almost in a state of desolation, that Mr. Musters rarely visited it, residing with his family in the neighbourhood of Nottingham. Notwithstanding this report, he set out on horseback, along with Colonel Wildman, and the great Newfoundland dog Boatswain, to visit the old hall. The narrative of what he saw and heard there will never cease to interest all who admire the great poet. He says : " In the course of our ride we visited a spot memorable in the love story. It was the scene of the parting interview between Byron and Miss Chaworth prior to her marriage. A long ridge of upland advances into the valley of Newstead like a promontory into a lake, and was formerly crowned by a beautiful grove, a landmark to the neighbouring country. The grove and promontory are graphically described by Lord Byron in his ' Dream,' and an exquisite picture given of himself and the lovely object of his boyish idolatry : " ' I saw two beings in the hues of youth Standing upon a hill, a gentle hill, Green, and of mild declivity, the last As 'twere the cape of a long ridge of such, Save that there was no sea to lave its base, But a most living landscape, and the wave Of woods and cornfields, and the abodes of men Scatter'd at intervals, and wreathing smoke Arising from such rustic roofs ; the hill Was crown'd with a peculiar diadem Of trees, in circular array, so fixed, Not by the sport of nature, but of man : These two, a maiden and a youth, were there Gazing the one on all that was beneath, Fair as herself but the boy gazed on her ; And both were fair, the one was beautiful : And both were young yet not alike in youth. As the sweet moon on the horizon's verge, The maid was on the eve of womanhood : The boy had fewer summers, but his heart Had far outgrown his years, and to his eye There was but one beloved face on earth, And that was shining on him.' " I stood upon the spot consecrated by this memorable interview. Below me extended the 'living landscape,' once contemplated by the loving pair; the gentle valley of Newstead diversified by woods and cornfields, the village spires, and gleams of water, and the distant towers and pinnacles of the venerable Abbey. The diadem of trees, however, was gone. The attention drawn to it by the poet, and the romantic manner in which he had associated it with his early passion for Mary Chaworth, had nettled the irritable feelings of her husband, who had but ill brooked the poetic celebrity conferred on his wife by the enamoured verses of another. The celebrated grove stood on his estate, and in a fit of spleen he ordered it to be levelled with the dust. The hand that laid it low is execrated by every pilgrim !
Mrs. Musters died in 1832. Lord Byron died of fever at Missolonghi, on April 19, 1824.
The Dukeries and Sherwood Forest
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