Agricultural History Review, Volume 51 Part 1 (2003), p. 123

When Sir John Byron managed to secure the grant of the dissolved Augustinian abbey of Newstead in 1540 he probably thought that he had provided a solid landed platform for his ancient family to rise steadily in wealth, status and power. For a couple of centuries, matters progressed smoothly as successive life tenants husbanded their resources, developed the estate, remodelled the house and managed to hand to the fifth Lord Byron (1743–98) a property unencumbered with debt. Thereafter followed a sad tale of profligacy and woe. Although John Beckett manages in his meticulously-detailed study to rescue this particular Byron from the miasma of myth surrounding his seemingly picaresque life, the fact remains that in his penchant for overspend-ing lay the foundations for later financial difficulties. Beckett’s workmanlike, dusty legal detective work reveals that the fifth Lord Byron (among whose attributes included running a neighbour through the stomach in a duel following an argument over the preservation of game), though attentive to many aspects of the management of the estate and ingenious in his ability to sidestep his creditors, lived for long beyond his means. Estranged from his son following the latter’s elopement to Gretna Green with his cousin, and deserted by his wife, Byron lived in a virtually denuded Newstead for the closing years of his life, in the hope that his grandson William John Byron would eventually inherit. But fate was to take a curious turn when that unfortunate gallant succumbed to a cannon ball at the siege of Calvi in 1794 and Newstead and the remaining family property descended to the fifth Lord’s ten-year old great-nephew George Gordon Byron, the future poet, whom the former had never met. Due to various quirks in the family settlement, and the fifth Lord’s numerous land sales, which Buckett explores in some detail, Byron inherited the estate both debt-free and in fee simple. The subsequent history of Newstead offers an exemplary case of precisely why the device of strict settlement was such an important means of restricting the ambitions of an heir for whom a sense of family responsibility and trusteeship remained forever on the back burner.

Byron, of course, in addition to having a towering ego and a libido to match, was a major poet of enduring genius. Following his return from Europe and the publication of Childe Harold in 1811, his dizzy literary career was launched, and with the appearance of the Bride of Abydos and The Corsair two years later he had become the toast of London and the possessor of debts of some £20,000. Whatever his qualities as a poet, his concern for business was vestigial and (for all his protestations in Don Juan and other works) his interest in the management of Newstead limited. Indeed, he seems to have regarded his landed property as little more than a milch cow from which his various agents (to a greater or lesser degree corrupt) could raise the wherewithal to enable him to pursue his epicurean life-style and operate the legerdemain required to keep his creditors at bay. In 1815 Byron left for Europe (under a haze of suspicion of all manner of salacious scandals) on a journey which was to take him to Italy and finally to his romantic apotheosis in Greece in 1824. As his creditors bayed and his finances descended further into 124 the agricultural turmoil, so his love affairs flourished and the poetry poured from him. Meanwhile he bombarded his lawyers and agents with a mass of letters, in turns demanding and accusatory, but all with the ultimate objective of securing funds. His correspondence over the sale of property to secure cash emphasizes the point that however worthy the virtues of patrimony, matrimony and parsimony in underpinning the financial bona fides of an estate, an owner prone to profligacy can readily overturn the steadfastness of generations. After several abortive attempts to dispose of the property, Newstead and its 3200 acres was finally sold in 1817 to one of Byron’s old school friends, Colonel Thomas Wildman, who subsequently spent lavishly in restoring the house and land. Ironically, especially since Byron cynically sold off portraits and heirlooms in addition to real estate, Newstead survives today largely because Wildman and subsequent owners developed the property as a shrine to the poet. The house eventually passed into the care of Nottingham City Council in 1931 through the good offices of that extraordinary philanthropist, Sir Julian Cahn, something of an unsung hero whose many financial contributions to the national good included the refurbishing of Trent Bridge cricket ground and the facilitating of Sir George Stapledon’s remarkable land reclamation works in Cardiganshire.

John Beckett has produced in this book not only a vital source work for future Byron scholars, but a significant addition to the literature of eighteenth-century estate finances, more especially insofar as Byron’s experience highlights the absolute importance of the owner’s personal attention to his patrimony. Beckett’s text is based on a rich variety of primary sources and is constructed on a massive reading of accounts, perusal of business letters and pouring-over of legal documents. It is a worthy work and a testament to the assiduous scholarship of the author and his assistant Sheila Aley. Despite the occasional irritating Americanisms, the mis-spellings of place and personal names and the longueurs almost inevitable in a book crammed with financial detail, it will prove an invaluable text for all interested in the economic and socio-cultural history of the later eighteenth century. Readers will, of course, realize that George Gordon, Lord Byron was different from other men. If, like the character in the Book of Ecclesiastes, he had been yoked to the plough and his talk was of bullocks, he would probably not have enriched the canon of English literature with such felicity. After all, as he noted in Don Juan with respect to marital fidelity:

Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch’s wife, He would have written sonnets all his life?