XXXI. DEPARTURE FOR GREECE 356 XXXII. DEATH IN A GREAT CAUSE 369 APPENDIX 375 INDEX 377 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS LORD BYRON _Frontispiece_ THE MAID OF ATHENS _To face page_ 88 LADY CAROLINE LAMB " 128 MARY CHAWORTH " 174 LADY BYRON " 222 COUNTESS GUICCIOLI " 302 CHAPTER I ANCESTORS, PARENTS, AND HEREDITARY INFLUENCES The Byrons came over with the Conqueror, helped him to conquer, and were rewarded with a grant of landed estates in Lancashire. Hundreds of years elapsed before they distinguished themselves either for good or evil, or emerged from the ruck of the landed gentry. There were Byrons at Crecy, and at the siege of Calais; and there probably were Byrons among the Crusaders. There is even a legend of a Byron Crusader rescuing a Christian maiden from the Saracens; but neither the maiden nor the Crusader can be identified. The authentic history of the family only begins with the grant of Newstead Abbey, at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries, to Sir John Byron of Clayton, in Lancashire--a reward, apparently, for services rendered by his father at the Battle of Bosworth Field. Even so, however, the Byrons remained comparatively inconspicuous[1]; and their records only begin to be full and interesting at the time of the war between Charles I. and his Parliament. Seven Byrons, all brothers, then fought on the King's side; and the most distinguished of the seven was the eldest, another Sir John Byron of Clayton--a loyal, valiant, and impetuous soldier, with more zeal than discretion. It was his charge that broke Haslerig's cuirassiers at Roundway Down. It was in his regiment that Falkland was fighting when he fell at Newbury. On the other hand he helped to lose the battle of Marston Moor by charging without orders. "By Lord Byron's improper charge," Prince Rupert reported, "much harm hath been done." He had been given his peerage--with limitations in default of issue male to his six surviving brothers and the issue male of their bodies--in the midst of the war. After Naseby, he went to Paris, and spent the rest of his life in exile. His first wife being dead, he married a second--a lady concerning whom there is a piquant note in Pepys' Diary. She was, Pepys tells us, one of Charles II.'s mistresses--his "seventeenth mistress aboard," who, as the diarist proceeds, "did not leave him till she got him to give her an order for £4000 worth of plate; but, by delays, thanks be to God! she died before she got it."