(3 of 4)
"I Am Surely in Hell!". In 1812 he proposed to Anne Isabella Milbanke, a pretty heiress. She turned him down. Two years later he tried again, and she accepted him. "They had not been an hour in the carriage which conveyed them from the church, when breaking into a malignant sneer, [Byron said]: 'Oh! what a dupe you have been . . .! Many are the tears you will have to shed . . . It is enough for me that you are my wife for me to hate you. If you were the wife of any other man, I own you might have charms.' " He told her he had "plotted to avenge her [first] refusal of him." He asked her, "with every appearance of aversion," if "she meant to sleep in the same bed with him": and during their wedding night, observing a candle "casting a ruddy glare through the crimson curtains of the bed," he cried in a loud voice: "Good God, I am surely in hell!"
He liked to hint to her that he had once committed murder, that his life was already ruined by a secret, mysterious depravity. He said roundly that he had married only to beget an heir to his title. "I mean to live, like a worm of the earth, to propagate my kind, and then I shall put an end to my existence." After one year of this satanic bliss, Lady Byron extricated herself from the monster's clutches. Byron sailed away to Europe; he never saw England again.
Were this the sum total of Byron's character, it would present no puzzle: any zoo attendant could tumble to it. In fact the monster was a mere segment of it. Women rarely saw the better side of Byron, but to his men friends, the devilish Byron seemed an absurd joke, a mere poetic fantasy. They sat at his feet, bowed to his charm, reveled in the humor and radiance he shed. Their descriptions of him are mostly levelheaded and carry a ring of conviction. Wrote Sir Walter Scott: "I found Lord Byron in the highest degree courteous, and even kind . . . He was devoid of selfishness . . . generous, humane and noble-minded when passion did not blind him." Wrote Stendhal: "The profile of an angel, the gentlest of manners . . . the most amiable monster that I have ever seen . . . There was much petty vanity, a continual and puerile fear of appearing ridiculous . . . But his genius once awakened, his faults were shaken off as a garment that would have incommoded the flight of his imagination . . ."
"Speedey Deselution." Byron made Italy his home for seven years before proceeding to Greece with the little army of men whom he paid out of his own pocket to fight against the Turks for Greek independence. There, at swampy Missolonghi, he died of fever at the age of 36, attended to the last by his devoted valet, William Fletcher. All others when they wrote of Byron rose to the occasion with polished words and well-turned phrases, but it was the blunt, semiliterate Fletcher who had the privilege of recording what he called that "fatal day which deprived England of its greatest ornament and me of the best of Masters."