text: On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, "The Return of the King" holds an approval rating of 93% based on 275 reviews, with an average rating of 8.70/10. The website's critics consensus reads, "Visually breathtaking and emotionally powerful, "The Lord of the Rings - The Return of the King" is a moving and satisfying conclusion to a great trilogy." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, gives the film a score of 94 out of 100 based on 41 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film a rare average grade of "A+" on an A+ to F scale, the highest grade in the trilogy.


title: The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

text: Like its two predecessors, "The Return of the King" was released to universal critical acclaim. Alan Morrison of "Empire" gave the film a perfect score of five stars. In his review, he called the film "the resounding climax to a landmark in cinema history" and praised how Peter Jackson had "kept the momentum of the series rolling on and on through the traditionally 'difficult' middle part and 'weak' finale, delivering a climax to the story that's neater and more affecting than what Tolkien managed on the printed page." Morrison also mentioned how fans of the films "who have walked beside these heroes every step of the way on such a long journey deserve the emotional pay-off as well as the action peaks, and they will be genuinely touched as the final credits roll." Elvis Mitchell for "The New York Times" lauded the acting, the craft of the technical crew, and Jackson's direction, describing "The Return of the King" as "a meticulous and prodigious vision made by a director who was not hamstrung by heavy use of computer special-effects imagery." Roger Ebert of the "Chicago Sun-Times" gave the film three and a half stars out of four, saying that it is "such a crowning achievement, such a visionary use of all the tools of special effects, such a pure spectacle, that it can be enjoyed even by those who have not seen the first two films." Talking about the whole trilogy, Ebert said that he admired it "more as a whole than in its parts", and that "The Return of the King" certified "The Lord of the Rings" as "a work of bold ambition in a time of cinematic timidity". In his review for "The Times", James Christopher praised "The Return of the King" as "everything a Ring fan could possibly wish for, and much more", and described "The Lord of the Rings" as "the greatest film trilogy ever mounted, with some of the most amazing action sequences committed to celluloid". Nev Pierce for the BBC gave the film five stars out of five, judging it to be the best chapter of the trilogy, since it combined "the 'ooh' factor of "Fellowship" with the zippy action of "Towers"". Pierce described "The Return of the King" as "Majestic, moving, and immense", and "an astonishing piece of storytelling." Philip French, reviewing it for "The Observer", lauded the narrative force, the battle scenes, the language, and the visual style of the film, which he related to "the swirling battle paintings of Albrecht Altdorfer" and "Claude Lorraine's elegiac paintings of maritime departures inspired by classical poets." French wrote about the whole trilogy "Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" is indeed a very fine achievement, moving, involving and, to many people, even inspiring. It redeems the debased cinematic notion of the epic."


text: In her review for "Entertainment Weekly", Lisa Schwarzbaum gave the film an A grade, and wrote "The conclusion of Peter Jackson’s masterwork is passionate and literate, detailed and expansive, and it’s conceived with a risk-taking flair for old-fashioned movie magic at its most precious ... as he has done throughout, the director paces scenes of action, intimacy, and even panoramic, geographical grandeur ... with the control of a superb choreographer.". Schwarzbaum also said of the whole series "I can’t think of another film trilogy that ends in such glory, or another monumental work of sustained storytelling that surges ahead with so much inventiveness and ardor." Richard Corliss of "Time" named "The Return of the King" the best film of the year and described the whole trilogy as "The film event of the millennium". Joe Morgenstern, for "The Wall Street Journal", wrote "Never has a filmmaker aimed higher, or achieved more. The third and last installment of the screen epic based on J.R.R. Tolkien's literary classic redefines -- steeply upward -- the very notion of a major motion picture." Peter Bradshaw, who had been less enthusiastic about the first two chapters of the trilogy, gave "The Return of the King" four stars out of five in his review for "The Guardian", commenting "I started the series an atheist and finished an agnostic". Bradshaw wrote of the film "Technically it really is superb", and commented "Hours after watching the film, I can close my eyes and see those incredible battle scenes pulsing and throbbing in my skull ... Maybe Kurosawa's battles will one day be described as proto-Jacksonian".


text: The most common criticism of "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" was its running time, particularly the epilogue; even rave reviews for the film commented on its length. Joel Siegel of "Good Morning America" said in his review for the film (which he gave an 'A'): "If it didn't take forty-five minutes to end, it'd be my best picture of the year. As it is, it's just one of the great achievements in film history."


text: In February 2004, a few months following release, the film was voted eighth on "Empire"s "100 Greatest Movies of All Time", compiled from readers' top ten lists. This forced the magazine to abandon its policy of only allowing films being older than a year to be eligible. In 2007, "Total Film" named "The Return of the King" the third best film of the past decade ("Total Film"s publication time), behind "The Matrix" and "Fight Club".


text: The film was nominated for eleven Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Original Score, Best Original Song, Best Visual Effects, Best Art Direction, Best Costume Design, Best Make-up, Best Sound Mixing and Best Film Editing. At the 76th Academy Awards in 2004, the film won all the categories for which it was nominated and it holds the record for highest Academy Award totals along with "Titanic" and "Ben-Hur", and also holding the record for the highest clean sweep at the Oscars, surpassing the nine awards earned by both "Gigi" and "The Last Emperor". It was the first fantasy film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. It also was the last movie for 14 years to win the Academy Award for Best Picture without being chosen as one of the top ten films of the year by the National Board of Review, until the release of "The Shape of Water" in 2017.


text: The film also won four Golden Globes (including Best Picture for Drama and Best Director), five BAFTAs, two MTV Movie Awards, two Grammy Awards, nine Saturn Awards, the New York Film Critics Circle award for Best Picture, the Nebula Award for Best Script, and the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form.


title: Lord Byron

text: George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron (22 January 1788 – 19 April 1824), known simply as Lord Byron, was an English romantic poet and peer. He was one of the leading figures of the Romantic movement, and as been regarded as among the greatest of English poets. Among his best-known works are the lengthy narratives "Don Juan" and "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage"; many of his shorter lyrics in "Hebrew Melodies" also became popular.


title: Lord Byron

text: Byron was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, later traveling extensively across Europe to places such as Italy, where he lived for seven years in Venice, Ravenna, and Pisa after he was forced to flee England due to lynching threats. During his stay in Italy, he frequently visited his friend and fellow poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Later in life Byron joined the Greek War of Independence fighting the Ottoman Empire and died leading a campaign during that war, for which Greeks revere him as a folk hero. He died in 1824 at the age of 36 from a fever contracted after the First and Second Sieges of Missolonghi.


title: Lord Byron

text: His only legitimate child, Ada Lovelace, was a founding figure in the field of computer programming based on her notes for Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine. Byron's extramarital children include Allegra Byron, who died in childhood, and possibly Elizabeth Medora Leigh, daughter of his half-sister Augusta Leigh.


title: Lord Byron

text: George Gordon Byron was born on 22 January 1788, on Holles Street in London, England – his birthplace is now supposedly occupied by a branch of the department store John Lewis.


title: Lord Byron

text: Byron was the only child of Captain John Byron (known as 'Jack') and his second wife Catherine Gordon, heiress of the Gight estate in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. Byron's paternal grandparents were Vice-Admiral John Byron and Sophia Trevanion. Having survived a shipwreck as a teenage midshipman, Vice Admiral John Byron set a new speed record for circumnavigating the globe. After he became embroiled in a tempestuous voyage during the American Revolutionary War, John was nicknamed 'Foul-Weather Jack' Byron by the press.


title: Lord Byron

text: Byron's father had previously been somewhat scandalously married to Amelia, Marchioness of Carmarthen, with whom he had been having an affair – the wedding took place just weeks after her divorce from her husband, and she was around eight months pregnant. The marriage was not a happy one, and their first two children – Sophia Georgina, and an unnamed boy – died in infancy. Amelia herself died in 1784 almost exactly a year after the birth of their third child, the poet's half-sister Augusta Mary. Though Amelia succumbed to a wasting illness, probably tuberculosis, the press reported that her heart had been broken out of remorse for leaving her husband. Much later, 19th-century sources blamed Jack's own "brutal and vicious" treatment of her.


title: Lord Byron

text: Jack then married Catherine Gordon of Gight on 13 May 1785, by all accounts only for her fortune. To claim his second wife's estate in Scotland, Byron's father took the additional surname "Gordon", becoming "John Byron Gordon", and occasionally styled himself "John Byron Gordon of Gight". Byron's mother had to sell her land and title to pay her new husband's debts, and in the space of two years, the large estate, worth some £23,500, had been squandered, leaving the former heiress with an annual income in trust of only £150. In a move to avoid his creditors, Catherine accompanied her profligate husband to France in 1786, but returned to England at the end of 1787 to give birth to her son.


title: Lord Byron

text: The boy was born on 22 January in lodgings at Holles Street in London, and christened at St Marylebone Parish Church as "George Gordon Byron". His father appears to have wished to call his son 'William', but as her husband remained absent, the young Byron's mother named him after her own father George Gordon of Gight, who was a descendant of James I of Scotland, and died by suicide in 1779.


title: Lord Byron

text: Catherine moved back to Aberdeenshire in 1790, where Byron spent part of his childhood. His father soon joined them in their lodgings in Queen Street, but the couple quickly separated. Catherine regularly experienced mood swings and bouts of melancholy, which could be partly explained by her husband's continuingly borrowing money from her. As a result, she fell even further into debt to support his demands. It was one of these importunate loans that allowed him to travel to Valenciennes, France, where he died of a "long & suffering illness" – probably tuberculosis – in 1791.


title: Lord Byron

text: When Byron's great-uncle, who was posthumously labelled the "wicked" Lord Byron, died on 21 May 1798, the 10-year-old boy became the sixth Baron Byron of Rochdale and inherited the ancestral home, Newstead Abbey, in Nottinghamshire. His mother proudly took him to England, but the Abbey was in an embarrassing state of disrepair and, rather than living there, she decided to lease it to Lord Grey de Ruthyn, among others, during Byron's adolescence.


title: Lord Byron

text: Described as "a woman without judgment or self-command", Catherine either spoiled and indulged her son or vexed him with her capricious stubbornness. Her drinking disgusted him and he often mocked her for being short and corpulent, which made it difficult for her to catch him to discipline him. Byron had been born with a deformed right foot; his mother once retaliated and, in a fit of temper, referred to him as "a lame brat". However, Byron's biographer, Doris Langley-Moore, in her 1974 book, "Accounts Rendered", paints a more sympathetic view of Mrs Byron, showing how she was a staunch supporter of her son and sacrificed her own precarious finances to keep him in luxury at Harrow and Cambridge. Langley-Moore questions 19th-century biographer John Galt's claim that she over-indulged in alcohol.


title: Lord Byron

text: Upon the death of Byron's mother-in-law Judith Noel, the Hon. Lady Milbanke, in 1822, her will required that he change his surname to "Noel" so as to inherit half of her estate. He obtained a Royal Warrant, allowing him to "take and use the surname of Noel only" and to "subscribe the said surname of Noel before all titles of honour". From that point he signed himself "Noel Byron" (the usual signature of a peer being merely the peerage, in this case simply "Byron"). It is speculated that this was so that his initials would read "N.B.", mimicking those of his hero, Napoleon Bonaparte. Lady Byron eventually succeeded to the Barony of Wentworth, becoming "Lady Wentworth".


title: Lord Byron

text: Byron received his early formal education at Aberdeen Grammar School in 1798 until his move back to England as a 10 year old. In August 1799 he entered the school of Dr. William Glennie, in Dulwich. Placed under the care of a Dr. Bailey, he was encouraged to exercise in moderation but could not restrain himself from "violent" bouts in an attempt to overcompensate for his deformed foot. His mother interfered with his studies, often withdrawing him from school, with the result that he lacked discipline and his classical studies were neglected.


title: Lord Byron

text: In 1801, he was sent to Harrow School, where he remained until July 1805. An undistinguished student and an unskilled cricketer, he did represent the school during the very first Eton v Harrow cricket match at Lord's in 1805.


title: Lord Byron

text: His lack of moderation was not restricted to physical exercise. Byron fell in love with Mary Chaworth, whom he met while at school, and she was the reason he refused to return to Harrow in September 1803. His mother wrote, "He has no indisposition that I know of but love, desperate love, the worst of all maladies in my opinion. In short, the boy is distractedly in love with Miss Chaworth." In Byron's later memoirs, "Mary Chaworth is portrayed as the first object of his adult sexual feelings."


title: Lord Byron

text: Byron finally returned in January 1804, to a more settled period, which saw the formation of a circle of emotional involvements with other Harrow boys, which he recalled with great vividness: "My school friendships were with (for I was always violent)". The most enduring of those was with John FitzGibbon, 2nd Earl of Clare—four years Byron's junior—whom he was to meet unexpectedly many years later in Italy (1821). His nostalgic poems about his Harrow friendships, "Childish Recollections" (1806), express a prescient "consciousness of sexual differences that may in the end make England untenable to him." Letters to Byron in the John Murray archive contain evidence of a previously unremarked if short-lived romantic relationship with a younger boy at Harrow, John Thomas Claridge.


title: Lord Byron

text: The following autumn, he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where he met and formed a close friendship with the younger John Edleston. About his "protégé" he wrote, "He has been my almost constant associate since October, 1805, when I entered Trinity College. His voice first attracted my attention, his countenance fixed it, and his manners attached me to him for ever." Byron composed "Thyrza", a series of elegies, in his memory. In later years, he described the affair as "a violent, though love and passion". This statement, however, needs to be read in the context of hardening public attitudes toward homosexuality in England and the severe sanctions (including public hanging) against convicted or even suspected offenders. The liaison, on the other hand, may well have been "pure" out of respect for Edleston's innocence, in contrast to the (probably) more sexually overt relations experienced at Harrow School. The poem "The Cornelian" was written about the cornelian that Byron received from Edleston.


title: Lord Byron

text: Byron spent three years at Trinity College, engaging in sexual escapades, boxing, horse riding, and gambling. While at Cambridge, he also formed lifelong friendships with men such as John Cam Hobhouse, who initiated him into the Cambridge Whig Club, which endorsed liberal politics, and Francis Hodgson, a Fellow at King's College, with whom he corresponded on literary and other matters until the end of his life.


title: Lord Byron

text: While not at school or college, Byron dwelt at his mother's residence Burgage Manor in Southwell, Nottinghamshire. While there, he cultivated friendships with Elizabeth Bridget Pigot and her brother John, with whom he staged two plays for the entertainment of the community. During this time, with the help of Elizabeth Pigot, who copied many of his rough drafts, he was encouraged to write his first volumes of poetry. "Fugitive Pieces" was printed by Ridge of Newark, which contained poems written when Byron was only 17. However, it was promptly recalled and burned on the advice of his friend the Reverend J. T. Becher, on account of its more amorous verses, particularly the poem "To Mary".


title: Lord Byron

text: "Hours of Idleness", which collected many of the previous poems, along with more recent compositions, was the culminating book. The savage, anonymous criticism this received (now known to be the work of Henry Peter Brougham) in the "Edinburgh Review" prompted his first major satire, "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" (1809). It was put into the hands of his relation R. C. Dallas, requesting him to "...get it published without his name." Alexander Dallas gave a large series of changes and alterations, as well as the reasoning for some of them. He also stated that Byron had originally intended to prefix an argument to this poem, and Dallas quoted it. Although published anonymously, by April, R. C. Dallas wrote that "you are already pretty generally known to be the author". The work so upset some of his critics they challenged Byron to a duel; over time, in subsequent editions, it became a mark of prestige to be the target of Byron's pen.


title: Lord Byron

text: After his return from travels he again entrusted R. C. Dallas as his literary agent to publish his poem "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage", which Byron thought to be of little account. The first two cantos of "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" were published in 1812 and were received with acclaim. In his own words, "I awoke one morning and found myself famous." He followed up his success with the poem's last two cantos, as well as four equally celebrated "Oriental Tales": "The Giaour", "The Bride of Abydos", "The Corsair", and "Lara". About the same time, he began his intimacy with his future biographer, Thomas Moore.


title: Lord Byron

text: Byron racked up numerous debts as a young man, owing to what his mother termed a "reckless disregard for money". She lived at Newstead during this time, in fear of her son's creditors. He had planned to spend early 1808 cruising with his cousin George Bettesworth, who was captain of the 32-gun frigate HMS "Tartar". Bettesworth's death at the Battle of Alvøen in May 1808 made that impossible.


title: Lord Byron

text: From 1809 to 1811, Byron went on the Grand Tour, then customary for a young nobleman. He travelled with Hobhouse for the first year and his entourage of servants included Byron's trustworthy valet, William Fletcher. Fletcher was often the butt of Hobhouse and Byron’s humour. The Napoleonic Wars forced him to avoid most of Europe, and he instead turned to the Mediterranean. The journey provided the opportunity to flee creditors, as well as to meet a former love, Mary Chaworth (the subject of his poem "To a Lady: On Being Asked My Reason for Quitting England in the Spring"). Letters to Byron from his friend Charles Skinner Matthews reveal that a key motive was also the hope of homosexual experiences. Attraction to the Levant was probably also a reason; he had read about the Ottoman and Persian lands as a child, was attracted to Islam (especially Sufi mysticism), and later wrote, "With these countries, and events connected with them, all my really poetical feelings begin and end."


title: Lord Byron

text: Byron began his trip in Portugal from where he wrote a letter to his friend Mr Hodgson in which he describes his mastery of the Portuguese language, consisting mainly of swearing and insults. Byron particularly enjoyed his stay in Sintra that is described in "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" as "glorious Eden". From Lisbon he travelled overland to Seville, Jerez de la Frontera, Cádiz, and Gibraltar, and from there by sea on to Sardinia, Malta, and Greece.


title: Lord Byron

text: While in Athens, Byron met 14-year-old Nicolo Giraud, with whom he became quite close and who taught him Italian. It has been suggested that the two had an intimate relationship, including a sexual affair. Byron sent Giraud to school at a monastery in Malta and bequeathed him the sizeable sum of £7,000. The will, however, was later cancelled. Byron wrote to Hobhouse from Athens, "I am tired of pl & opt Cs, the last thing I could be tired of." Opt Cs refers to a quote from "Petronius' Satyricon," "," "complete intercourse to one's heart's desire," their shared code for homosexual experiences.


title: Lord Byron

text: In 1810 in Athens, Byron wrote "Maid of Athens, ere we part" for a 12-year-old girl, Teresa Makri (1798–1875).


title: Lord Byron

text: Byron and Hobhouse made their way to Smyrna, where they cadged a ride to Constantinople on HMS "Salsette". On May 3rd, 1810, while "Salsette" was anchored awaiting Ottoman permission to dock at the city, Byron and Lieutenant Ekenhead, of "Salsette"s Marines, swam the Hellespont. Byron commemorated this feat in the second canto of "Don Juan". He returned to England from Malta in July 1811 aboard .


title: Lord Byron

text: After the publication of the first two cantos of "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" (1812), Byron became a celebrity. "He rapidly became the most brilliant star in the dazzling world of Regency London. He was sought after at every society venue, elected to several exclusive clubs, and frequented the most fashionable London drawing-rooms." During this period in England he produced many works, including "The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos" (1813), "Parisina", and "The Siege of Corinth" (1815). On the initiative of the composer Isaac Nathan, he produced in 1814–1815 the "Hebrew Melodies" (including what became some of his best-known lyrics, such as "She Walks in Beauty" and "The Destruction of Sennacherib"). Involved at first in an affair with Lady Caroline Lamb (who called him "mad, bad and dangerous to know") and with other lovers and also pressed by debt, he began to seek a suitable marriage, considering – amongst others – Annabella Millbanke. However, in 1813 he met for the first time in four years his half-sister, Augusta Leigh. Rumours of incest surrounded the pair; Augusta's daughter Medora (b. 1814) was suspected to have been Byron's child. To escape from growing debts and rumours, Byron pressed in his determination to marry Annabella, who was said to be the likely heiress of a rich uncle. They married on January 2nd, 1815, and their daughter, Ada, was born in December of that year. However, Byron's continuing obsession with Augusta Leigh (and his continuing sexual escapades with actresses such as Charlotte Mardyn and others) made their marital life a misery. Annabella considered Byron insane, and in January 1816 she left him, taking their daughter, and began proceedings for a legal separation. Their separation was made legal in a private settlement in March 1816. The scandal of the separation, the rumours about Augusta, and ever-increasing debts forced him to leave England in April 1816, never to return.


title: Lord Byron

text: After this break-up of his domestic life, and by pressure on the part of his creditors, which led to the sale of his library, Byron left England, and never returned. (Despite his dying wishes, however, his body was returned for burial in England.) He journeyed through Belgium and continued up the Rhine river. In the summer of 1816 he settled at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva, Switzerland, with his personal physician, John William Polidori. There Byron befriended the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and Shelley's future wife, Mary Godwin. He was also joined by Mary's stepsister, Claire Clairmont, with whom he'd had an affair in London. Several times Byron went to see Germaine de Staël and her Coppet group, which turned out to be a valid intellectual and emotional support to Byron at the time.


title: Lord Byron

text: Kept indoors at the Villa Diodati by the "incessant rain" of "that wet, ungenial summer" over three days in June, the five turned to reading fantastical stories, including "Fantasmagoriana", and then devising their own tales. Mary Shelley produced what would become "Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus", and Polidori produced "The Vampyre", the progenitor of the Romantic vampire genre. "The Vampyre" was the inspiration for a fragmentary story of Byron's, "A Fragment".


title: Lord Byron

text: Byron's story fragment was published as a postscript to "Mazeppa"; he also wrote the third canto of "Childe Harold".


title: Lord Byron

text: Byron wintered in Venice, pausing in his travels when he fell in love with Marianna Segati, in whose Venice house he was lodging, and who was soon replaced by 22 year-old Margarita Cogni; both women were married. Cogni could not read or write, and she left her husband to move in with Byron. Their fighting often caused Byron to spend the night in his gondola; when he asked her to leave the house, she threw herself into the Venetian canal.


title: Lord Byron

text: In 1816, Byron visited San Lazzaro degli Armeni in Venice, where he acquainted himself with Armenian culture with the help of the monks belonging to the Mechitarist Order. With the help of Father Pascal Aucher (Harutiun Avkerian), he learned the Armenian language and attended many seminars about language and history. He co-authored "Grammar English and Armenian" in 1817, an English textbook written by Aucher and corrected by Byron, and "A Grammar Armenian and English" in 1819, a project he initiated of a grammar of Classical Armenian for English speakers, where he included quotations from classical and modern Armenian.


title: Lord Byron

text: Byron later helped to compile the "English Armenian Dictionary" ("Barraran angleren yev hayeren", 1821) and wrote the preface, in which he explained Armenian oppression by the Turkish pashas and the Persian satraps and the Armenian struggle of liberation. His two main translations are the "Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians", two chapters of Movses Khorenatsi's "History of Armenia", and sections of Nerses of Lambron's "Orations".


title: Lord Byron

text: His fascination was so great that he even considered a replacement of the Cain story of the Bible with that of the legend of Armenian patriarch Haik. He may be credited with the birth of Armenology and its propagation. His profound lyricism and ideological courage has inspired many Armenian poets, the likes of Ghevond Alishan, Smbat Shahaziz, Hovhannes Tumanyan, Ruben Vorberian, and others.


title: Lord Byron

text: In 1817, he journeyed to Rome. On returning to Venice, he wrote the fourth canto of "Childe Harold". About the same time, he sold Newstead Abby and published "Manfred", "Cain", and "The Deformed Transformed". The first five cantos of "Don Juan" were written between 1818 and 1820. During this period he met the 18-year-old Countess Guiccioli, who found her first love in Byron; he asked her to elope with him.


title: Lord Byron

text: Because of his love for the local aristocratic, young, newly married Teresa Guiccioli, Byron lived in Ravenna from 1819 to 1821. Here he continued "Don Juan" and wrote the "Ravenna Diary" and "My Dictionary and Recollections". Around this time he received visits from Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as from Thomas Moore, to whom he confided his autobiography or "life and adventures", which Moore, Hobhouse, and Byron's publisher, John Murray, burned in 1824, a month after Byron's death. Of Byron's lifestyle in Ravenna we know more from Shelley, who documented some of its more colourful aspects in a letter: "Lord Byron gets up at two. I get up, quite contrary to my usual custom … at 12. After breakfast we sit talking till six. From six to eight we gallop through the pine forest which divide Ravenna from the sea; we then come home and dine, and sit up gossiping till six in the morning. I don’t suppose this will kill me in a week or fortnight, but I shall not try it longer. Lord B.'s establishment consists, besides servants, of ten horses, eight enormous dogs, three monkeys, five cats, an eagle, a crow, and a falcon; and all these, except the horses, walk about the house, which every now and then resounds with their unarbitrated quarrels, as if they were the masters of it… . [P.S.] I find that my enumeration of the animals in this Circean Palace was defective … . I have just met on the grand staircase five peacocks, two guinea hens, and an Egyptian crane. I wonder who all these animals were before they were changed into these shapes."


title: Lord Byron

text: In 1821, Byron left Ravenna and went to live in the Tuscan city of Pisa, to which Teresa had also relocated. From 1821 to 1822, Byron finished Cantos 6–12 of "Don Juan" at Pisa, and in the same year he joined with Leigh Hunt and Shelley in starting a short-lived newspaper, "The Liberal", in whose first number "The Vision of Judgment" appeared. For the first time since his arrival in Italy, Byron found himself tempted to give dinner parties; his guests included the Shelleys, Edward Ellerker Williams, Thomas Medwin, John Taaffe, and Edward John Trelawny; and "never", as Shelley said, "did he display himself to more advantage than on these occasions; being at once polite and cordial, full of social hilarity and the most perfect good humour; never diverging into ungraceful merriment, and yet keeping up the spirit of liveliness throughout the evening."


title: Lord Byron

text: Shelley and Williams rented a house on the coast and had a schooner built. Byron decided to have his own yacht, and engaged Trelawny's friend, Captain Daniel Roberts, to design and construct the boat. Named the "Bolivar", it was later sold to Charles John Gardiner, 1st Earl of Blessington, and Marguerite, Countess of Blessington, when Byron left for Greece in 1823.


title: Lord Byron

text: Byron attended the beachside cremation of Shelley, which was orchestrated by Trelawny after Williams and Shelley drowned in a boating accident on 8 July 1822. His last Italian home was in Genoa. While living there he was accompanied by the Countess Guiccioli, and the Blessingtons. Lady Blessington based much of the material in her book, "Conversations with Lord Byron", on the time spent together there. This book became an important biographical text about Byron’s life just prior to his death.


title: Lord Byron

text: Byron was living in Genoa in 1823, when, growing bored with his life there, he accepted overtures for his support from representatives of the Greek independence movement from the Ottoman Empire. At first, Byron did not wish to leave his 22-year-old mistress, Countess Teresa Guiccioli, who had abandoned her husband to live with him. But ultimately Guiccioli's father, Count Gamba, was allowed to leave his exile in the Romagna under the condition that his daughter return to him, without Byron. At the same time that the philhellene, Edward Blaquiere, was attempting to recruit him, Byron was confused as to what he was supposed to do in Greece, writing: "Blaquiere seemed to think that I might be of some use-even "here";—though "what" he did not exactly specify". With the assistance of his banker and Captain Daniel Roberts, Byron chartered the brig "Hercules" to take him to Greece. When Byron left Genoa, it caused "passionate grief" from Guiccioli, who wept openly as he sailed away. The "Hercules" was forced to return to port shortly afterwards. When it set sail for the final time, Guiccioli had already left Genoa. On July 16th, Byron left Genoa, arriving at Kefalonia in the Ionian Islands on August 4th.


title: Lord Byron

text: His voyage is covered in detail in Donald Prell's "Sailing with Byron from Genoa to Cephalonia". Prell also wrote of a coincidence in Byron's chartering the "Hercules". The vessel was launched only a few miles south of Seaham Hall, where in 1815 Byron married Annabella Milbanke. Between 1815 and 1823 the vessel was in service between England and Canada. Suddenly in 1823, the ship's Captain decided to sail to Genoa and offer the "Hercules" for charter. After taking Byron to Greece, the ship returned to England, never again to venture into the Mediterranean. The "Hercules" was aged 37 when, on September 21,1852, she went aground near Hartlepool, 25 miles south of Sunderland, the place where her keel had been laid in 1815. Byron's "keel was laid" nine months before his official birth date, January 22, 1788. Therefore in ship-years, he was also 37 when he died in Missolonghi.


title: Lord Byron

text: Byron initially stayed on the island of Kefalonia, where he was besieged by agents of the rival Greek factions, all of whom wanted to recruit Byron to their own cause. The Ionian islands, of which Kefalonia is one, were under British rule until 1864. Byron spent £4,000 of his own money to refit the Greek fleet. When Byron travelled to the mainland of Greece on the night of December 28, 1823, Byron's ship was surprised by an Ottoman warship, which did not attack his ship, as the Ottoman captain mistook Byron's boat for a fireship. To avoid the Ottoman Navy, which he encountered several times on his voyage, Byron was forced to take a roundabout route and only reached Missolonghi on 5 January 1824.


title: Lord Byron

text: After arriving in Missolonghi, Byron joined forces with Alexandros Mavrokordatos, a Greek politician with military power. Byron moved to the second floor of a two-story house and was forced to spend much of his time dealing with unruly Souliotes who demanded that Byron pay them the back-pay owed to them by the Greek government. Byron gave the Souliotes some £6,000. Byron was supposed to lead an attack on the Ottoman fortress of Navpaktos, whose Albanian garrison were unhappy due to arrears in pay, and who offered to put up only token resistance if Byron was willing to bribe them into surrendering. However, Ottoman commander Yussuf Pasha executed the mutinous Albanian officers who were offering to surrender Navpaktos to Byron and arranged to have some of the arrears paid out to the rest of the garrison. Byron never led the attack on Navpaktos because the Souliotes kept demanding that Byron pay them more and more money before they would march; Byron grew tired of their blackmail and sent them all home on 15 February 1824. Byron wrote in a note to himself: "Having tried in vain at every expence-considerable trouble—and some danger to unite the Suliotes for the good of Greece-and their own—I have come to the following resolution—I will have nothing more to do with the Suliotes-they may go to the Turks or the devil...they may cut me into more pieces than they have dissensions among them, sooner than change my resolution". At the same time, Guiccioli's brother, Pietro Gamba, who had followed Byron to Greece, exasperated Byron with his incompetence as he continually made expensive mistakes. For example, when asked to buy some cloth from Corfu, Gamba ordered the wrong cloth in excess, causing the bill to be 10 times higher than what Byron wanted. Byron wrote about his right-hand man: "Gamba—who is anything but "lucky"—had something to do with it—and as usual—the moment he had—matters went wrong".


title: Lord Byron

text: To help raise money for the revolution, Byron sold his estate in England, Rochdale Manor, which raised some £11,250. This led Byron to estimate that he now had some £20,000 at his disposal, all of which he planned to spend on the Greek cause. In today's money Byron would have been a millionaire many times over. News that a fabulously wealthy British aristocrat, known for his financial generosity, had arrived in Greece made Byron the object of much solicitation in that desperately poor country. Byron wrote to his business agent in England, "I should not like to give the Greeks but a "half helping" hand", saying he would have wanted to spend his entire fortune on Greek freedom. Byron found himself besieged by various people, both Greek and foreign, who tried to persuade him to open his pocketbook for support. By the end of March 1824, the so-called "Byron brigade" of 30 philhellene officers and about 200 men had been formed, paid for entirely by Byron. Leadership of the Greek cause in the Roumeli region was divided between two rival leaders: a former "Klepht" (bandit), Odysseas Androutsos; and a wealthy Phanariot Prince, Alexandros Mavrokordatos. Byron used his prestige to attempt to persuade the two rival leaders to come together to focus on defeating the Ottomans. At same time, other leaders of the Greek factions like Petrobey Mavromichalis and Theodoros Kolokotronis wrote letters to Byron telling him to disregard all of the Roumeliot leaders and to come to their respective areas in the Peloponnese. This drove Byron to distraction; he complained that the Greeks were hopelessly disunited and spent more time feuding with each other than trying to win independence. Byron's friend Edward John Trelawny had aligned himself with Androutsos, who ruled Athens, and was now pressing for Byron to break with Mavrokordatos in favour of backing the rival Androutsos. Androutsos, having won over Trelawny to his cause, was now anxious to persuade Byron to put his wealth behind his claim to be the leader of Greece. Byron wrote with disgust about how one of the Greek captains, former "Klepht" Georgios Karaiskakis, attacked Missolonghi on April 3, 1824 with some 150 men supported by the Souliotes as he was unhappy with Mavrokordatos's leadership, which led to a brief bout of inter-Greek fighting before Karaiskakis was chased away by April 6th.


title: Lord Byron

text: Byron adopted a nine-year-old Turkish Muslim girl called Hato, whose parents had been killed by the Greeks. He ultimately sent her to safety in Kefalonia, knowing well that religious hatred between the Orthodox Greeks and Muslim Turks was running high and that any Muslim in Greece, even a child, was in serious danger. Until 1934, most Turks did not have surnames; Hato's lack of a surname was quite typical for a Turkish family at this time.


title: Lord Byron

text: Byron pursued his Greek page, Lukas Chalandritsanos, with whom he had fallen madly in love, but the affections went unrequited. Byron spoiled the teenage Chalandritsanos outrageously, spending some £600 (the equivalent to about £24,600 in today's money) catering to his every whim over the course of 6 months and writing his last poems about his passion for the Greek boy. Chalandritsanos was only interested in Byron's money. When the famous Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen heard about Byron's heroics in Greece, he voluntarily resculpted his earlier bust of Byron in Greek marble.


title: Lord Byron

text: Mavrokordatos and Byron planned to attack the Turkish-held fortress of Lepanto, at the mouth of the Gulf of Corinth. Byron employed a fire-master to prepare artillery, and he took part of the rebel army under his own command despite his lack of military experience. Before the expedition could sail, on February 15, 1824, he fell ill, and bloodletting weakened him further. He made a partial recovery, but in early April he caught a violent cold; the therapeutic bleeding insisted on by his doctors, exacerbated it. He contracted a violent fever and died in Missolonghi on 19 April.


title: Lord Byron

text: His physician at the time, Julius van Millingen, son of Dutch–English archaeologist James Millingen, was unable to prevent his death. It has been said that if Byron had lived and had gone on to defeat the Ottomans, he might have been declared King of Greece. However, modern scholars have found such an outcome unlikely. The British historian David Brewer wrote that in one sense, Byron failed to persuade the rival Greek factions to unite, won no victories and was successful only in the humanitarian sphere, using his great wealth to help the victims of the war, Christian and Muslim, but this did not affect the outcome of the Greek war of independence.


title: Lord Byron

text: Brewer went on to argue, In another sense, though, Byron achieved everything he could have wished. His presence in Greece, and in particular his death there, drew to the Greek cause not just the attention of sympathetic nations, but their increasing active participation ... Despite the critics, Byron is primarily remembered with admiration as a poet of genius, with something approaching veneration as a symbol of high ideals, and with great affection as a man: for his courage and his ironic slant on life, for his generosity to the grandest of causes and to the humblest of individuals, for the constant interplay of judgment and sympathy. In Greece he is still revered as no other foreigner, and as very few Greeks are, and like a Homeric hero he is accorded an honorific standard epithet, "megalos kai kalos", a great and good man.


title: Lord Byron

text: Alfred Tennyson would later recall the shocked reaction in Britain when word was received of Byron's death. The Greeks mourned Lord Byron deeply, and he became a hero. The national poet of Greece, Dionysios Solomos, wrote a poem about the unexpected loss, named "To the Death of Lord Byron". Βύρων, the Greek form of "Byron", continues in popularity as a masculine name in Greece, and a suburb of Athens is called Vyronas in his honour.


title: Lord Byron

text: Byron's body was embalmed, but the Greeks wanted some part of their hero to stay with them. According to some sources, his heart remained at Missolonghi. His other remains were sent to England (accompanied by his faithful manservant, "Tita") for burial in Westminster Abbey, but the Abbey refused for reason of "questionable morality". Huge crowds viewed his coffin as he lay in state for two days at number 25 Great George Street, Westminster. He is buried at the Church of St. Mary Magdalene in Hucknall, Nottinghamshire. A marble slab given by the King of Greece is laid directly above Byron's grave. His daughter Ada Lovelace was later buried beside him.


title: Lord Byron

text: Byron's friends raised £1,000 to commission a statue of the writer; Thorvaldsen offered to sculpt it for that amount. However, after the statue was completed in 1834, for ten years, British institutions turned it down and it remained in storage. It was refused by the British Museum, St. Paul's Cathedral, Westminster Abbey and the National Gallery before Trinity College, Cambridge finally placed the statue of Byron in its library.


title: Lord Byron

text: In 1969, 145 years after Byron's death, a memorial to him was finally placed in Westminster Abbey. The memorial had been lobbied for since 1907: "The New York Times" wrote, "People are beginning to ask whether this ignoring of Byron is not a thing of which England should be ashamed ... a bust or a tablet might be put in the Poets' Corner and England be relieved of ingratitude toward one of her really great sons."


title: Lord Byron

text: Robert Ripley had drawn a picture of Boatswain's grave with the caption "Lord Byron's dog has a magnificent tomb while Lord Byron himself has none". This came as a shock to the English, particularly schoolchildren, who, Ripley said, raised funds of their own accord to provide the poet with a suitable memorial.


title: Lord Byron

text: Close to the centre of Athens, Greece, outside the National Garden, is a statue depicting Greece in the form of a woman crowning Byron. The statue is by the French sculptors Henri-Michel Chapu and Alexandre Falguière. Since 2008, the anniversary of Byron's death, 19 April, has been honoured in Greece as "Byron Day".


title: Lord Byron

text: My mother used always to rally me about this childish amour, and at last, many years after, when I was sixteen, she told me one day, 'O Byron, I have had a letter from Edinburgh, and your old sweetheart, Mary Duff, is married to Mr. C***.' And what was my answer? I really cannot explain or account for my feelings at that moment, but they nearly threw me into convulsions... How the deuce did all this occur so early? Where could it originate? I certainly had no sexual ideas for years afterwards; and yet my misery, my love for that girl were so violent, that I sometimes doubt if I have ever been really attached since. Be that as it may, hearing of her marriage several years after was like a thunder-stroke – it nearly choked me – to the horror of my mother and the astonishment and almost incredulity of every body. And it is a phenomenon in my existence (for I was not eight years old) which has puzzled, and will puzzle me to the latest hour of it; and lately, I know not why, the recollection (not the attachment) has recurred as forcibly as ever...But, the more I reflect, the more I am bewildered to assign any cause for this precocity of affection.


title: Lord Byron

text: Byron also became attached to Margaret Parker, another distant cousin. While his recollection of his love for Mary Duff is that he was ignorant of adult sexuality during this time and was bewildered as to the source of the intensity of his feelings, he would later confess that:


title: Lord Byron

text: My passions were developed very early – so early, that few would believe me – if I were to state the period – and the facts which accompanied it. Perhaps this was one of the reasons that caused the anticipated melancholy of my thoughts – having anticipated life. This is the only reference Byron himself makes to the event, and he is ambiguous as to how old he was when it occurred. After his death, his lawyer wrote to a mutual friend telling him a "singular fact" about Byron's life which was "scarcely fit for narration". But he disclosed it nonetheless, thinking it might explain Byron's sexual "propensities":


title: Lord Byron

text: When nine years old at his mother's house a Free Scotch girl [May - sometimes called Mary - Gray, one of his first caretakers] used to come to bed to him and play tricks with his person. Gray later used this knowledge as a means of ensuring his silence if he were to be tempted to disclose the "low company" she kept during drinking binges. She was later dismissed, supposedly for beating Byron when he was 11.


title: Lord Byron

text: A few years later, while he was still a child, Lord Grey De Ruthyn (unrelated to May Gray), a suitor of his mother's, also made sexual advances on him. Byron's personality has been characterised as exceptionally proud and sensitive, especially when it came to his deformity. His extreme reaction to seeing his mother flirting outrageously with Lord Grey De Ruthyn after the incident suggests he did not tell her of Grey's conduct toward him; he simply refused to speak to him again and ignored his mother's commands to be reconciled. Leslie A. Marchand, one of Byron's biographers, theorises that Lord Grey De Ruthyn's advances prompted Byron's later sexual liaisons with young men at Harrow and Cambridge.


title: Lord Byron

text: Scholars acknowledge a more or less important bisexual component in Byron's very complex sentimental and sexual life. Bernhard Jackson asserts that "Byron's sexual orientation has long been a difficult, not to say contentious, topic, and anyone who seeks to discuss it must to some degree speculate, since the evidence is nebulous, contradictory and scanty... it is not so simple to define Byron as homosexual or heterosexual: he seems rather to have been both, and either." Crompton states: "What was not understood in Byron's own century (except by a tiny circle of his associates) was that Byron was bisexual". Another biographer, Fiona MacCarthy, has posited that Byron's true sexual yearnings were for adolescent males. Byron used a code by which he communicated his homosexual Greek adventures to John Hobhouse in England: Bernhard Jackson recalls that "Byron's early code for sex with a boy" was "Plen(um). and optabil(em). -Coit(um)" Bullough summarises:


title: Lord Byron

text: In 1812, Byron embarked on a well-publicised affair with the married Lady Caroline Lamb that shocked the British public. She had spurned the attention of the poet on their first meeting, subsequently giving Byron what became his lasting epitaph when she famously described him as "mad, bad and dangerous to know". This did not prevent her from pursuing him. Byron eventually broke off the relationship and moved swiftly on to others (such as Lady Oxford), but Lamb never entirely recovered, pursuing him even after he tired of her. She was emotionally disturbed and lost so much weight that Byron sarcastically commented to her mother-in-law, his friend Lady Melbourne, that he was "haunted by a skeleton".


title: Lord Byron

text: She began to stalk him, calling on him at home, sometimes dressed in disguise as a pageboy, at a time when such an act could ruin both of them socially. Once, during such a visit, she wrote on a book at his desk, "Remember me!" As a retort, Byron wrote a poem entitled "Remember Thee! Remember Thee!" which concludes with the line "Thou false to him, thou fiend to me".


title: Lord Byron

text: As a child, Byron had seen little of his half-sister Augusta Leigh; in adulthood, he formed a close relationship with her that has been interpreted by some as incestuous, and by others as innocent. Augusta (who was married) gave birth on 15 April 1814 to her third daughter, Elizabeth Medora Leigh, rumoured by some to be Byron's.


title: Lord Byron

text: Eventually Byron began to court Lady Caroline's cousin Anne Isabella Milbanke ("Annabella"), who refused his first proposal of marriage but later accepted him. Milbanke was a highly moral woman, intelligent and mathematically gifted; she was also an heiress. They married at Seaham Hall, County Durham, on 2 January 1815. The marriage proved unhappy. They had a daughter, Augusta Ada. On 16 January 1816, Lady Byron left him, taking Ada with her. That same year on April 21st, Byron signed the Deed of Separation. Rumours of marital violence, adultery with actresses, incest with Augusta Leigh, and sodomy were circulated, assisted by a jealous Lady Caroline. In a letter, Augusta quoted him as saying: "Even to have such a thing said is utter destruction and ruin to a man from which he can never recover." That same year Lady Caroline published her popular novel "Glenarvon", in which Lord Byron was portrayed as the seedy title character.


title: Lord Byron

text: Byron wrote a letter to John Hanson from Newstead Abbey, dated 17 January 1809, that includes "You will discharge my Cook, & Laundry Maid, the other two I shall retain to take care of the house, more especially as the youngest is pregnant (I need not tell you by whom) and I cannot have the girl on the parish." His reference to "The youngest" is understood to have been to a maid, Lucy, and the parenthesised remark to indicate himself as siring a son born that year. In 2010 part of a baptismal record was uncovered which apparently said: "September 24 George illegitimate son of Lucy Monk, illegitimate son of Baron Byron, of Newstead, Nottingham, Newstead Abbey."


title: Lord Byron

text: Augusta Leigh's child, Elizabeth Medora Leigh, born 1814, was possibly fathered by Byron, who was Augusta's half-brother.


title: Lord Byron

text: Byron had a child, The Hon. Augusta Ada Byron ("Ada", later Countess of Lovelace), in 1815, by his wife Annabella Byron, Lady Byron ("née" Anne Isabella Milbanke, or "Annabella"), later Lady Wentworth. Ada Lovelace, notable in her own right, collaborated with Charles Babbage on the analytical engine, a predecessor to modern computers. She is recognised as one of the world's first computer programmers.


title: Lord Byron

text: He also had an extramarital child in 1817, Clara Allegra Byron, with Claire Clairmont, stepsister of Mary Shelley and stepdaughter of William Godwin, writer of "Political Justice" and "Caleb Williams". Allegra is not entitled to the style "The Hon." as is usually given to the daughter of barons, since she was born outside of his marriage. Born in Bath in 1817, Allegra lived with Byron for a few months in Venice; he refused to allow an Englishwoman caring for the girl to adopt her and objected to her being raised in the Shelleys' household. He wished for her to be brought up Catholic and not marry an Englishman, and he made arrangements for her to inherit 5,000 lira upon marriage or when she reached the age of 21, provided she did not marry a native of Britain. However, the girl died aged five of a fever in Bagnacavallo, Italy, while Byron was in Pisa; he was deeply upset by the news. He had Allegra's body sent back to England to be buried at his old school, Harrow, because Protestants could not be buried in consecrated ground in Catholic countries. At one time he himself had wanted to be buried at Harrow. Byron was antagonistic towards Allegra's mother, Claire Clairmont, and prevented her from seeing the child.


title: Lord Byron

text: Although neglected by traditional historiography, Byron had a complex identity and strong ties to Scotland. His maternal family, the Gordons, had its roots in Aberdeenshire and Byron was educated at Aberdeen Grammar School between 1794 and 1798. In terms of his own identity, he described himself as "half a Scot by birth, and bred/A whole one" and he reportedly spoke with a faint Scottish accent throughout his life.


title: Lord Byron

text: Byron was regarded as a Scot by a number of his contemporaries, including his lover Lady Caroline Lamb and by his first biographer Sir Cosmo Gordon, who described him as a "Highlander".


title: Lord Byron

text: Byron's links to Scotland were demonstrated "in his campaign for the liberation of Greece, where a disproportionate number of his closest friends and associates had strong Scottish connexions, particularly with regard to north-eastern Scotland, which through his Gordon links remained central to the Byronic network throughout his life".


title: Lord Byron

text: The first recorded notable example of open water swimming took place on 3 May 1810 when Lord Byron swam from Europe to Asia across the Hellespont Strait. This is often seen as the birth of the sport and pastime, and to commemorate it, the event is recreated every year as an open water swimming event.


title: Lord Byron

text: Whilst sailing from Genoa to Cephalonia in 1823, every day at noon, Byron and Trelawny, in calm weather, jumped overboard for a swim without fear of sharks, which were not unknown in those waters. Once, according to Trelawny, they let the geese and ducks loose and followed them and the dogs into the water, each with an arm in the ship Captain’s new scarlet waistcoat, to the annoyance of the Captain and the amusement of the crew.


title: Lord Byron

text: Byron had a great love of animals, most notably for a Newfoundland dog named Boatswain. When the animal contracted rabies, Byron nursed him, albeit unsuccessfully, without any thought or fear of becoming bitten and infected.


title: Lord Byron

text: Although deeply in debt at the time, Byron commissioned an impressive marble funerary monument for Boatswain at Newstead Abbey, larger than his own, and the only building work that he ever carried out on his estate. In his 1811 will, Byron requested that he be buried with him. The 26‐line poem "Epitaph to a Dog" has become one of his best-known works. But a draft of an 1830 letter by Hobhouse shows him to be the author; Byron decided to use Hobhouse's lengthy epitaph instead of his own, which read: "To mark a friend's remains these stones arise/I never knew but one – and here he lies."


title: Lord Byron

text: Byron also kept a tame bear while he was a student at Trinity out of resentment for rules forbidding pet dogs like his beloved Boatswain. There being no mention of bears in their statutes, the college authorities had no legal basis for complaining; Byron even suggested that he would apply for a college fellowship for the bear.


title: Lord Byron

text: During his lifetime, in addition to numerous cats, dogs, and horses, Byron kept a fox, monkeys, an eagle, a crow, a falcon, peacocks, guinea hens, an Egyptian crane, a badger, geese, a heron, and a goat. Except for the horses, they all resided indoors at his homes in England, Switzerland, Italy, and Greece.


title: Lord Byron

text: As a boy, Byron's character is described as a "mixture of affectionate sweetness and playfulness, by which it was impossible not to be attached", although he also exhibited "silent rages, moody sullenness and revenge" with a precocious bent for attachment and obsession.


title: Lord Byron

text: From birth, Byron had a deformity of his right foot. Although it has generally been referred to as a "club foot", some modern medical authors maintain that it was a consequence of infantile paralysis (poliomyelitis), and others that it was a dysplasia, a failure of the bones to form properly. Whatever the cause, he was afflicted with a limp that caused him lifelong psychological and physical misery, aggravated by painful and pointless "medical treatment" in his childhood and the nagging suspicion that with proper care it might have been cured.


title: Lord Byron

text: He was extremely self-conscious about this from a young age, nicknaming himself "" (French for "the limping devil", after the nickname given to Asmodeus by Alain-René Lesage in his 1707 novel of the same name). Although he often wore specially-made shoes in an attempt to hide the deformed foot, he refused to wear any type of brace that might improve the limp.


title: Lord Byron

text: Scottish novelist John Galt felt his oversensitivity to the "innocent fault in his foot was unmanly and excessive" because the limp was "not greatly conspicuous". He first met Byron on a voyage to Sardinia and did not realise he had any deficiency for several days, and still could not tell at first if the lameness was a temporary injury or not. At the time Galt met him he was an adult and had worked to develop "a mode of walking across a room by which it was scarcely at all perceptible". The motion of the ship at sea may also have helped to create a favourable first impression and hide any deficiencies in his gait, but Galt's biography is also described as being "rather well-meant than well-written", so Galt may be guilty of minimising a defect that was actually still noticeable.


title: Lord Byron

text: Byron's adult height was , his weight fluctuating between and . He was renowned for his personal beauty, which he enhanced by wearing curl-papers in his hair at night. He was athletic, being a competent boxer and horse-rider and an excellent swimmer. He attended pugilistic tuition at the Bond Street rooms of former prizefighting champion 'Gentleman' John Jackson, whom Byron called 'the Emperor of Pugilism', and recorded these sparring sessions in his letters and journals.


title: Lord Byron

text: Byron and other writers, such as his friend Hobhouse, described his eating habits in detail. At the time he entered Cambridge, he went on a strict diet to control his weight. He also exercised a great deal, and at that time wore a great many clothes to cause himself to perspire. For most of his life he was a vegetarian and often lived for days on dry biscuits and white wine. Occasionally he would eat large helpings of meat and desserts, after which he would purge himself. Although he is described by Galt and others as having a predilection for "violent" exercise, Hobhouse suggests that the pain in his deformed foot made physical activity difficult and that his weight problem was the result.


title: Lord Byron

text: Trelawny, who observed Byron's eating habits, noted that he lived on a diet of biscuits and soda water for days at a time and then would eat a "horrid mess of cold potatoes, rice, fish, or greens, deluged in vinegar, and gobble it up like a famished dog".


title: Lord Byron

text: Byron first took his seat in the House of Lords on 13 March 1809 but left London on 11 June 1809 for the Continent. Byron's association with the Holland House Whigs provided him with a discourse of liberty rooted in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. A strong advocate of social reform, he received particular praise as one of the few Parliamentary defenders of the Luddites: specifically, he was against a death penalty for Luddite "frame breakers" in Nottinghamshire, who destroyed textile machines that were putting them out of work. His first speech before the Lords, on 27 February 1812, was loaded with sarcastic references to the "benefits" of automation, which he saw as producing inferior material as well as putting people out of work, and concluded the proposed law was only missing two things to be effective: "Twelve Butchers for a Jury and a Jeffries for a Judge!". Byron's speech was officially recorded and printed in Hansard. He said later that he "spoke very violent sentences with a sort of modest impudence" and thought he came across as "a bit theatrical". The full text of the speech, which he had previously written out, was presented to Dallas in manuscript form and he quotes it in his work.


title: Lord Byron

text: Two months later, in conjunction with the other Whigs, Byron made another impassioned speech before the House of Lords in support of Catholic emancipation. Byron expressed opposition to the established religion because it was unfair to people of other faiths.


title: Lord Byron

text: These experiences inspired Byron to write political poems such as "Song for the Luddites" (1816) and "The Landlords' Interest", Canto XIV of "The Age of Bronze".


title: Lord Byron

text: Examples of poems in which he attacked his political opponents include "Wellington: The Best of the Cut-Throats" (1819) and "The Intellectual Eunuch Castlereagh" (1818).


title: Lord Byron

text: Byron wrote prolifically. In 1832 his publisher, John Murray, released the complete works in 14 duodecimo volumes, including a life by Thomas Moore. Subsequent editions were released in 17 volumes, first published a year later, in 1833. An extensive collection of his works, including early editions and annotated manuscripts, is held within the John Murray Archive at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh.


title: Lord Byron

text: Byron's magnum opus, "Don Juan", a poem spanning 17 cantos, ranks as one of the most important long poems published in England since John Milton's "Paradise Lost". Byron published the first two cantos anonymously in 1819 after disputes with his regular publisher over the shocking nature of the poetry. By this time, he had been a famous poet for seven years, and when he self-published the beginning cantos, they were well received in some quarters. The poem was then released volume by volume through his regular publishing house. By 1822, cautious acceptance by the public had turned to outrage, and Byron's publisher refused to continue to publish the work. In Canto III of "Don Juan", Byron expresses his detestation for poets such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In letters to Francis Hodgson, Byron referred to Wordsworth as "Turdsworth".


title: Lord Byron

text: Byron wrote the satirical pamphlet "Irish Avatar" after the royal visit by King George IV to Ireland. Byron criticised the attitudes displayed by the Irish people towards the Crown, an institution he perceived as oppressing them, and was dismayed by the positive reception George IV received during his visit. In the pamphlet, Byron lambasted Irish unionists and voiced muted support towards nationalistic sentiments in Ireland.


title: Lord Byron

text: Byron was a bitter opponent of Lord Elgin's removal of the Parthenon marbles from Athens and "reacted with fury" when Elgin's agent gave him a tour of the Parthenon, during which he saw the spaces left by the missing friezes and metopes. He denounced Elgin's actions in his poem "" and in Canto II (stanzas XI–XV) of "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage".


title: Lord Byron

text: Byron is considered to be the first modern-style celebrity. His image as the personification of the Byronic hero fascinated the public, and his wife Annabella coined the term "Byromania" to refer to the commotion surrounding him. His self-awareness and personal promotion are seen as a beginning of what would become the modern rock star; he would instruct artists painting portraits of him not to paint him with pen or book in hand, but as a "man of action." While Byron first welcomed fame, he later turned from it by going into voluntary exile from Britain.


title: Lord Byron

text: Biographies were distorted by the burning of Byron's memoir in the offices of his publisher, John Murray, a month after his death and the suppression of details of Byron's bisexuality by subsequent heads of the firm (which held the richest Byron archive). As late as the 1950s, scholar Leslie Marchand was expressly forbidden by the Murray company to reveal details of Byron's same-sex passions.


title: Lord Byron

text: The re-founding of the Byron Society in 1971 reflected the fascination that many people had with Byron and his work. This society became very active, publishing an annual journal. Thirty-six Byron Societies function throughout the world, and an International Conference takes place annually.


title: Lord Byron

text: Byron exercised a marked influence on Continental literature and art, and his reputation as a poet is higher in many European countries than in Britain, or America, although not as high as in his time, when he was widely thought to be the greatest poet in the world. Byron's writings also inspired many composers. Over forty operas have been based on his works, in addition to three operas about Byron himself (including Virgil Thomson's "Lord Byron"). His poetry was set to music by many Romantic composers, including Beethoven, Schubert, Rossini, Mendelssohn, Schumann and Carl Loewe. Among his greatest admirers was Hector Berlioz, whose operas and "Mémoires" reveal Byron's influence.


title: Lord Byron

text: In April 2020, Byron featured in a series of UK postage stamps issued by the Royal Mail to commemorate the Romantic poets on the 250th anniversary of the birth of William Wordsworth. Ten 1st class stamps were issued of all the major British romantic poets, and each stamp included an extract from one of their most popular and enduring works, with Byron's "She Walks in Beauty" selected for the poet.


title: Lord Byron

text: The figure of the Byronic hero pervades much of his work, and Byron himself is considered to epitomise many of the characteristics of this literary figure. The use of a Byronic hero by many authors and artists of the Romantic movement show Byron's influence during the 19th century and beyond, including the Brontë sisters. His philosophy was more durably influential in continental Europe than in England; Friedrich Nietzsche admired him, and the Byronic hero was echoed in Nietzsche's "Übermensch", or superman.


title: Lord Byron

text: The Byronic hero presents an idealised, but flawed character whose attributes include: great talent; great passion; a distaste for society and social institutions; a lack of respect for rank and privilege (although possessing both); being thwarted in love by social constraint or death; rebellion; exile; an unsavory secret past; arrogance; overconfidence or lack of foresight; and, ultimately, a self-destructive manner. These types of characters have since become ubiquitous in literature and politics.


title: Cain and Abel

text: In the biblical Book of Genesis, Cain and Abel are the first two sons of Adam and Eve. Cain, the firstborn, was a farmer, and his brother Abel was a shepherd. The brothers made sacrifices to God, but God favored Abel's sacrifice instead of Cain's. Cain then murdered Abel, whereupon God punished Cain by condemning him to a life of wandering. Cain then dwelt in the land of Nod (), where he built a city and fathered the line of descendants beginning with Enoch.


title: Cain and Abel

text: Cain and Abel are traditional English renderings of the Hebrew names. It has been proposed that the etymology of their names may be a direct pun on the roles they take in the Genesis narrative. "Abel" ("hbl") is thought to derive from a reconstructed word meaning 'herdsman', with the modern Arabic cognate "ibil" now specifically referring only to 'camels'. "Cain" ("qyn") is thought to be cognate to the mid-1st millennium BCE South Arabian word "qyn", meaning 'metalsmith'. This theory would make the names descriptive of their roles, where Abel works with livestock, and Cain with agriculture—and would parallel the names Adam () and Eve ().


title: Cain and Abel

text: The oldest known copy of the biblical narrative is from the Dead Sea Scrolls, and dates to the first century BCE. Cain and Abel also appear in a number of other texts, and the story is the subject of various interpretations. Abel, the first murder victim, is sometimes seen as the first martyr; while Cain, the first murderer, is sometimes seen as an ancestor of evil. Some scholars suggest the pericope may have been based on a Sumerian story representing the conflict between nomadic shepherds and settled farmers. Modern scholars typically view the stories of Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel to be about the development of civilization during the age of agriculture; not the beginnings of man, but when people first learned agriculture, replacing the ways of the hunter-gatherer. It has also been seen as a depiction of nomadic conflict, the struggle for land and resources (and divine favour) between nomadic herders and sedentary farmers.


title: Cain and Abel

text: Academic theologian Joseph Blenkinsopp holds that Cain and Abel are symbolic rather than real. Like almost all of the persons, places and stories in the Primeval history (the first eleven chapters of Genesis), they are mentioned nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible, a fact that suggests that the History is a late composition attached to Genesis to serve as an introduction. Just how late is a matter for dispute: the history may be as late as the Hellenistic period (first decades of the 4th century BCE), but the high level of Babylonian myth behind its stories has led others to date it to the Babylonian exile (6th century BCE). A prominent Mesopotamian parallel to Cain and Abel is the Sumerian myth of the "Courtship of Inanna and Dumuzid", in which the shepherd Dumuzid and the farmer Enkimdu compete for the affection of the goddess Inanna, with Dumuzid (the shepherd) winning out. Another parallel is "Enlil Chooses the Farmer-God", in which the shepherd-god Emesh and the farmer-god Enten bring their dispute over which of them is better to the chief god Enlil, who rules in favor of Enten (the farmer).


title: Cain and Abel

text: The story of Cain and Abel has always been used as a deterrent from murder in Islamic tradition. Abdullah ibn Mas'ud reported that Muhammad said in a "hadith":


title: Cain and Abel

text: Muslim scholars were divided on the motives behind Cain's murder of Abel, and further why the two brothers were obliged to offer sacrifices to God. Some scholars believed that Cain's motives were plain jealousy and lust. Both Cain and Abel desired to marry Adam's beautiful daughter, Aclima (Arabic: "Aqlimia"). Seeking to end the dispute between them, Adam suggested that each present an offering before God. The one whose offering God accepted would marry Aclima. Abel, a generous shepherd, offered the fattest of his sheep as an oblation to God. But Cain, a miserly farmer, offered only a bunch of grass and some worthless seeds to him. God accepted Abel's offering and rejected Cain's—an indication that Abel was more righteous than Cain, and thus worthier of Aclima. As a result, it was decided that Abel would marry Aclima. Cain, on the other hand, would marry her less beautiful sister. Blinded by anger and lust for Aclima, Cain sought to get revenge on Abel and escape with Aclima.


title: Cain and Abel

text: According to another tradition, the devil appeared to Cain and instructed him how to exact revenge on Abel. "Hit Abel's head with a stone and kill him," whispered the devil to Cain. After the murder, the devil hurried to Eve shouting: "Eve! Cain has murdered Abel!". Eve did not know what murder was or how death felt like. She asked, bewildered and horrified, "Woe to you! What is murder?". "He [Abel] does not eat. He does not drink. He does not move [That's what murder and death are]," answered the Devil. Eve burst out into tears and started to wail madly. She ran to Adam and tried to tell him what happened. However, she could not speak because she could not stop wailing. Since then, women wail broken-heartedly when a loved one dies. A different tradition narrates that while Cain was quarreling with Abel, the devil killed an animal with a stone in Cain's sight to show him how to murder Abel.


title: Cain and Abel

text: After burying Abel and escaping from his family, Cain got married and had children. They died in Noah's flood among other tyrants and unbelievers.


title: Cain and Abel

text: Some Muslim scholars puzzled over the mention of offerings in the narrative of Cain and Abel. Offerings and sacrifices were ordained only after the revelation of Tawrat to Musa. This led some scholars, such as Sa'id ibn al-Musayyib, to think that the sons of Adam mentioned in the Quran are actually two Israelites, not Cain and Abel.


title: Cain and Abel

text: In the Apocryphon of John, a work used in Gnosticism, Cain and Abel are Archons, being the offspring of the lesser god or Demiurge called Yaldabaoth, placed over the elements of fire, wind, water and earth. In this narrative their true names are Yahweh and Elohim, but they are given their earthly names as a form of deception.


title: Cain and Abel

text: Allusions to Cain and Abel as an archetype of fratricide appear in numerous references and retellings, through medieval art and Shakespearean works up to present day fiction.


title: Cain and Abel

text: A millennia-old explanation for Cain being capable of murder is that he may have been the offspring of a fallen angel or Satan himself, rather than being from Adam.


title: Cain and Abel

text: A treatise on Christian Hermeticism, "Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism", describes the biblical account of Cain and Abel as a myth, in that it expresses, in a form narrated for a particular case, an "eternal" idea. It argues that brothers can become mortal enemies through the very fact that they worship the same God in the same way. According to the author, the source of religious wars is revealed. It is not the difference in dogma or ritual which is the cause, but the "pretention to equality" or "the negation of hierarchy."


title: Cain and Abel

text: There were other, minor traditions concerning Cain and Abel, of both older and newer date. The apocryphal "Life of Adam and Eve" tells of Eve having a dream in which Cain drank his brother's blood. In an attempt to prevent the prophecy from happening the two young men are separated and given different jobs.


title: Cain and Abel

text: Like other prominent biblical figures, Cain and Abel appear in many works of art, including works by Titian, Peter Paul Rubens and William Blake.


title: Cain and Abel

text: Multiple plays also showcase similar stories. In William Shakespeare's "Hamlet", the characters King Claudius and King Hamlet are parallels of Cain and Abel. Lord Byron also rewrote and dramatized the story in his own play "Cain" (1821), viewing Cain as symbolic of a sanguine temperament, provoked by Abel's hypocrisy and sanctimony. The 2008 Danish stage play "Biblen" discusses and reenacts various Biblical stories, including Abel's murder by Cain.


title: Cain and Abel

text: Many novels feature the characters, or are closely based on them. Miguel de Unamuno's 1917 novel "" is a re-telling of the Cain and Abel story. John Steinbeck's 1952 novel "East of Eden" (also a 1955 film) refers in its title to Cain's exile and contains discussions of the Cain and Abel story which then play out in the plot. James Baldwin's 1957 short story, "Sonny's Blues", has been seen as alluding to the Cain and Abel story. Author Daniel Quinn, first in his novel "Ishmael" (1992) and later in "The Story of B" (1996), proposes that the story of Cain and Abel is an account of early Semitic herdsmen observing the beginnings of what he calls totalitarian agriculture, with Cain representing the first 'modern' agriculturists and Abel the pastoralists.


title: Cain and Abel

text: They have also featured in TV series and, if allegorically, on the big screen. In "Dallas" (1978), Bobby and J.R. Ewing have been described as variations of Cain and Abel. More direct references include the appearance of Cain and Abel as characters in DC Comics since the 1950s. In 1989, Neil Gaiman made the two recurring characters in his comic series "The Sandman". In Darren Aronofsky's allegorical film "Mother!" (2017), the characters "oldest son" and "younger brother" represent Cain and Abel.


title: Guy Fawkes

text: Guy Fawkes (; 13 April 1570 – 31 January 1606), also known as Guido Fawkes while fighting for the Spanish, was a member of a group of provincial English Catholics involved in the failed Gunpowder Plot of 1605. He was born and educated in York; his father died when Fawkes was eight years old, after which his mother married a recusant Catholic.


title: Guy Fawkes

text: Fawkes converted to Catholicism and left for mainland Europe, where he fought for Catholic Spain in the Eighty Years' War against Protestant Dutch reformers in the Low Countries. He travelled to Spain to seek support for a Catholic rebellion in England without success. He later met Thomas Wintour, with whom he returned to England. Wintour introduced him to Robert Catesby, who planned to assassinate and restore a Catholic monarch to the throne. The plotters leased an undercroft beneath the House of Lords; Fawkes was placed in charge of the gunpowder that they stockpiled there. The authorities were prompted by an anonymous letter to search Westminster Palace during the early hours of 5 November, and they found Fawkes guarding the explosives. He was questioned and tortured over the next few days and confessed to wanting to blow up the House of Lords.


title: Guy Fawkes

text: Fawkes was sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered. However, at his execution on 31 January, he died when his neck was broken as he was hanged, with some sources claiming that he deliberately jumped to make this happen; he thus avoided the agony of his sentence. He became synonymous with the Gunpowder Plot, the failure of which has been commemorated in the UK as Guy Fawkes Night since 5 November 1605, when his effigy is traditionally burned on a bonfire, commonly accompanied by fireworks.


title: Guy Fawkes

text: Guy Fawkes was born in 1570 in Stonegate, York. He was the second of four children born to Edward Fawkes, a proctor and an advocate of the consistory court at York, and his wife, Edith. Guy's parents were regular communicants of the Church of England, as were his paternal grandparents; his grandmother, born Ellen Harrington, was the daughter of a prominent merchant, who served as Lord Mayor of York in 1536. Guy's mother's family were recusant Catholics, and his cousin, Richard Cowling, became a Jesuit priest. "Guy" was an uncommon name in England, but may have been popular in York on account of a local notable, Sir Guy Fairfax of Steeton.


title: Guy Fawkes

text: The date of Fawkes's birth is unknown, but he was baptised in the church of St Michael le Belfrey, York on 16 April. As the customary gap between birth and baptism was three days, he was probably born about 13 April. In 1568, Edith had given birth to a daughter named Anne, but the child died aged about seven weeks, in November that year. She bore two more children after Guy: Anne (b. 1572), and Elizabeth (b. 1575). Both were married, in 1599 and 1594 respectively.


title: Guy Fawkes

text: In 1579, when Guy was eight years old, his father died. His mother remarried several years later, to the Catholic Dionis Baynbrigge (or Denis Bainbridge) of Scotton, Harrogate. Fawkes may have become a Catholic through the Baynbrigge family's recusant tendencies, and also the Catholic branches of the Pulleyn and Percy families of Scotton, but also from his time at St. Peter's School in York. A governor of the school had spent about 20 years in prison for recusancy, and its headmaster, John Pulleyn, came from a family of noted Yorkshire recusants, the Pulleyns of Blubberhouses. In her 1915 work "The Pulleynes of Yorkshire", author Catharine Pullein suggested that Fawkes's Catholic education came from his Harrington relatives, who were known for harbouring priests, one of whom later accompanied Fawkes to Flanders in 1592–1593. Fawkes's fellow students included John Wright and his brother Christopher (both later involved with Fawkes in the Gunpowder Plot) and Oswald Tesimond, Edward Oldcorne and Robert Middleton, who became priests (the latter executed in 1601).


title: Guy Fawkes

text: After leaving school Fawkes entered the service of Anthony Browne, 1st Viscount Montagu. The Viscount took a dislike to Fawkes and after a short time dismissed him; he was subsequently employed by Anthony-Maria Browne, 2nd Viscount Montagu, who succeeded his grandfather at the age of 18. At least one source claims that Fawkes married and had a son, but no known contemporary accounts confirm this.


title: Guy Fawkes

text: In October 1591 Fawkes sold the estate in Clifton in York that he had inherited from his father. He travelled to the continent to fight in the Eighty Years War for Catholic Spain against the new Dutch Republic and, from 1595 until the Peace of Vervins in 1598, France. Although England was not by then engaged in land operations against Spain, the two countries were still at war, and the Spanish Armada of 1588 was only five years in the past. He joined Sir William Stanley, an English Catholic and veteran commander in his mid-forties who had raised an army in Ireland to fight in Leicester's expedition to the Netherlands. Stanley had been held in high regard by Elizabeth I, but following his surrender of Deventer to the Spanish in 1587 he, and most of his troops, had switched sides to serve Spain. Fawkes became an alférez or junior officer, fought well at the siege of Calais in 1596, and by 1603 had been recommended for a captaincy. That year, he travelled to Spain to seek support for a Catholic rebellion in England. He used the occasion to adopt the Italian version of his name, Guido, and in his memorandum described James I (who became king of England that year) as "a heretic", who intended "to have all of the Papist sect driven out of England." He denounced Scotland, and the King's favourites among the Scottish nobles, writing "it will not be possible to reconcile these two nations, as they are, for very long". Although he was received politely, the court of Philip III was unwilling to offer him any support.


title: Guy Fawkes

text: In 1604 Fawkes became involved with a small group of English Catholics, led by Robert Catesby, who planned to assassinate the Protestant King James and replace him with his daughter, third in the line of succession, Princess Elizabeth. Fawkes was described by the Jesuit priest and former school friend Oswald Tesimond as "pleasant of approach and cheerful of manner, opposed to quarrels and strife ... loyal to his friends". Tesimond also claimed Fawkes was "a man highly skilled in matters of war", and that it was this mixture of piety and professionalism that endeared him to his fellow conspirators. The author Antonia Fraser describes Fawkes as "a tall, powerfully built man, with thick reddish-brown hair, a flowing moustache in the tradition of the time, and a bushy reddish-brown beard", and that he was "a man of action ... capable of intelligent argument as well as physical endurance, somewhat to the surprise of his enemies."


title: Guy Fawkes

text: The first meeting of the five central conspirators took place on Sunday 20 May 1604, at an inn called the Duck and Drake, in the fashionable Strand district of London. Catesby had already proposed at an earlier meeting with Thomas Wintour and John Wright to kill the King and his government by blowing up "the Parliament House with gunpowder". Wintour, who at first objected to the plan, was convinced by Catesby to travel to the continent to seek help. Wintour met with the Constable of Castile, the exiled Welsh spy Hugh Owen, and Sir William Stanley, who said that Catesby would receive no support from Spain. Owen did, however, introduce Wintour to Fawkes, who had by then been away from England for many years, and thus was largely unknown in the country. Wintour and Fawkes were contemporaries; each was militant, and had first-hand experience of the unwillingness of the Spaniards to help. Wintour told Fawkes of their plan to "doe some whatt in Ingland if the pece with Spaine healped us nott", and thus in April 1604 the two men returned to England. Wintour's news did not surprise Catesby; despite positive noises from the Spanish authorities, he feared that "the deeds would nott answere".


title: Guy Fawkes

text: One of the conspirators, Thomas Percy, was appointed a Gentleman Pensioner in June 1604, gaining access to a house in London that belonged to John Whynniard, Keeper of the King's Wardrobe. Fawkes was installed as a caretaker and began using the pseudonym John Johnson, servant to Percy. The contemporaneous account of the prosecution (taken from Thomas Wintour's confession) claimed that the conspirators attempted to dig a tunnel from beneath Whynniard's house to Parliament, although this story may have been a government fabrication; no evidence for the existence of a tunnel was presented by the prosecution, and no trace of one has ever been found; Fawkes himself did not admit the existence of such a scheme until his fifth interrogation, but even then he could not locate the tunnel. If the story is true, however, by December 1604 the conspirators were busy tunnelling from their rented house to the House of Lords. They ceased their efforts when, during tunnelling, they heard a noise from above. Fawkes was sent out to investigate, and returned with the news that the tenant's widow was clearing out a nearby undercroft, directly beneath the House of Lords.


title: Guy Fawkes

text: The plotters purchased the lease to the room, which also belonged to John Whynniard. Unused and filthy, it was considered an ideal hiding place for the gunpowder the plotters planned to store. According to Fawkes, 20 barrels of gunpowder were brought in at first, followed by 16 more on 20 July. On 28 July however, the ever-present threat of the plague delayed the opening of Parliament until Tuesday, 5 November.


title: Guy Fawkes

text: In an attempt to gain foreign support, in May 1605 Fawkes travelled overseas and informed Hugh Owen of the plotters' plan. At some point during this trip his name made its way into the files of Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury, who employed a network of spies across Europe. One of these spies, Captain William Turner, may have been responsible. Although the information he provided to Salisbury usually amounted to no more than a vague pattern of invasion reports, and included nothing which regarded the Gunpowder Plot, on 21 April he told how Fawkes was to be brought by Tesimond to England. Fawkes was a well-known Flemish mercenary, and would be introduced to "Mr Catesby" and "honourable friends of the nobility and others who would have arms and horses in readiness". Turner's report did not, however, mention Fawkes's pseudonym in England, John Johnson, and did not reach Cecil until late in November, well after the plot had been discovered.


title: Guy Fawkes

text: It is uncertain when Fawkes returned to England, but he was back in London by late August 1605, when he and Wintour discovered that the gunpowder stored in the undercroft had decayed. More gunpowder was brought into the room, along with firewood to conceal it. Fawkes's final role in the plot was settled during a series of meetings in October. He was to light the fuse and then escape across the Thames. Simultaneously, a revolt in the Midlands would help to ensure the capture of Princess Elizabeth. Acts of regicide were frowned upon, and Fawkes would therefore head to the continent, where he would explain to the Catholic powers his holy duty to kill the King and his retinue.


title: Guy Fawkes

text: A few of the conspirators were concerned about fellow Catholics who would be present at Parliament during the opening. On the evening of 26 October, Lord Monteagle received an anonymous letter warning him to stay away, and to "retyre youre self into yowre contee whence yow maye expect the event in safti for ... they shall receyve a terrible blowe this parleament". Despite quickly becoming aware of the letterinformed by one of Monteagle's servantsthe conspirators resolved to continue with their plans, as it appeared that it "was clearly thought to be a hoax". Fawkes checked the undercroft on 30 October, and reported that nothing had been disturbed. Monteagle's suspicions had been aroused, however, and the letter was shown to King James. The King ordered Sir Thomas Knyvet to conduct a search of the cellars underneath Parliament, which he did in the early hours of 5 November. Fawkes had taken up his station late on the previous night, armed with a slow match and a watch given to him by Percy "becaus he should knowe howe the time went away". He was found leaving the cellar, shortly after midnight, and arrested. Inside, the barrels of gunpowder were discovered hidden under piles of firewood and coal.


title: Guy Fawkes

text: Fawkes gave his name as John Johnson and was first interrogated by members of the King's Privy chamber, where he remained defiant. When asked by one of the lords what he was doing in possession of so much gunpowder, Fawkes answered that his intention was "to blow you Scotch beggars back to your native mountains." He identified himself as a 36-year-old Catholic from Netherdale in Yorkshire, and gave his father's name as Thomas and his mother's as Edith Jackson. Wounds on his body noted by his questioners he explained as the effects of pleurisy. Fawkes admitted his intention to blow up the House of Lords, and expressed regret at his failure to do so. His steadfast manner earned him the admiration of King James, who described Fawkes as possessing "a Roman resolution".


title: Guy Fawkes

text: James's admiration did not, however, prevent him from ordering on 6 November that "John Johnson" be tortured, to reveal the names of his co-conspirators. He directed that the torture be light at first, referring to the use of manacles, but more severe if necessary, authorising the use of the rack: "the gentler Tortures are to be first used unto him "et sic per gradus ad ima tenditur" [and so by degrees proceeding to the worst]". Fawkes was transferred to the Tower of London. The King composed a list of questions to be put to "Johnson", such as ""as to what he is", For I can never yet hear of any man that knows him", "When and where he learned to speak French?", and "If he was a Papist, who brought him up in it?" The room in which Fawkes was interrogated subsequently became known as the Guy Fawkes Room.


title: Guy Fawkes

text: Sir William Waad, Lieutenant of the Tower, supervised the torture and obtained Fawkes's confession. He searched his prisoner, and found a letter addressed to Guy Fawkes. To Waad's surprise, "Johnson" remained silent, revealing nothing about the plot or its authors. On the night of 6 November he spoke with Waad, who reported to Salisbury "He [Johnson] told us that since he undertook this action he did every day pray to God he might perform that which might be for the advancement of the Catholic Faith and saving his own soul". According to Waad, Fawkes managed to rest through the night, despite his being warned that he would be interrogated until "I had gotton the inwards secret of his thoughts and all his complices". His composure was broken at some point during the following day.


title: Guy Fawkes

text: The observer Sir Edward Hoby remarked "Since Johnson's being in the Tower, he beginneth to speak English". Fawkes revealed his true identity on 7 November, and told his interrogators that there were five people involved in the plot to kill the King. He began to reveal their names on 8 November, and told how they intended to place Princess Elizabeth on the throne. His third confession, on 9 November, implicated Francis Tresham. Following the Ridolfi plot of 1571, prisoners were made to dictate their confessions, before copying and signing them, if they still could. Although it is uncertain if he was tortured on the rack, Fawkes's scrawled signature suggests the suffering he endured at the hands of his interrogators.


title: Guy Fawkes

text: The trial of eight of the plotters began on Monday 27 January 1606. Fawkes shared the barge from the Tower to Westminster Hall with seven of his co-conspirators. They were kept in the Star Chamber before being taken to Westminster Hall, where they were displayed on a purpose-built scaffold. The King and his close family, watching in secret, were among the spectators as the Lords Commissioners read out the list of charges. Fawkes was identified as Guido Fawkes, "otherwise called Guido Johnson". He pleaded not guilty, despite his apparent acceptance of guilt from the moment he was captured.


title: Guy Fawkes

text: The jury found all the defendants guilty, and the Lord Chief Justice Sir John Popham pronounced them guilty of high treason. The Attorney General Sir Edward Coke told the court that each of the condemned would be drawn backwards to his death, by a horse, his head near the ground. They were to be "put to death halfway between heaven and earth as unworthy of both". Their genitals would be cut off and burnt before their eyes, and their bowels and hearts removed. They would then be decapitated, and the dismembered parts of their bodies displayed so that they might become "prey for the fowls of the air". Fawkes's and Tresham's testimony regarding the Spanish treason was read aloud, as well as confessions related specifically to the Gunpowder Plot. The last piece of evidence offered was a conversation between Fawkes and Wintour, who had been kept in adjacent cells. The two men apparently thought they had been speaking in private, but their conversation was intercepted by a government spy. When the prisoners were allowed to speak, Fawkes explained his not guilty plea as ignorance of certain aspects of the indictment.


title: Guy Fawkes

text: On 31 January 1606, Fawkes and three others – Thomas Wintour, Ambrose Rookwood, and Robert Keyes – were dragged from the Tower on wattled hurdles to the Old Palace Yard at Westminster, opposite the building they had attempted to destroy. His fellow plotters were then hanged and quartered. Fawkes was the last to stand on the scaffold. He asked for forgiveness of the King and state, while keeping up his "crosses and idle ceremonies" (Catholic practices). Weakened by torture and aided by the hangman, Fawkes began to climb the ladder to the noose, but either through jumping to his death or climbing too high so the rope was incorrectly set, he managed to avoid the agony of the latter part of his execution by breaking his neck. His lifeless body was nevertheless quartered and, as was the custom, his body parts were then distributed to "the four corners of the kingdom", to be displayed as a warning to other would-be traitors.


title: Guy Fawkes

text: On 5 November 1605, Londoners were encouraged to celebrate the King's escape from assassination by lighting bonfires, provided that "this testemonye of joy be carefull done without any danger or disorder". An Act of Parliament designated each 5 November as a day of thanksgiving for "the joyful day of deliverance", and remained in force until 1859. Fawkes was one of 13 conspirators, but he is the individual most associated with the plot.


title: Guy Fawkes

text: In Britain, 5 November has variously been called Guy Fawkes Night, Guy Fawkes Day, Plot Night, and Bonfire Night (which can be traced directly back to the original celebration of 5 November 1605). Bonfires were accompanied by fireworks from the 1650s onwards, and it became the custom after 1673 to burn an effigy (usually of the pope) when heir presumptive James, Duke of York, converted to Catholicism. Effigies of other notable figures have found their way onto the bonfires, such as Paul Kruger, Margaret Thatcher, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak and Vladimir Putin. The "guy" is normally created by children from old clothes, newspapers, and a mask. During the 19th century, "guy" came to mean an oddly dressed person, while in many places it has lost any pejorative connotation and instead refers to any male person and the plural form can refer to people of any gender (as in "you guys").