England’s Greatest Romantic Poet Was Into Incest With His Sister
One of Britain’s greatest poets was George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron (1788 – 1824). A prominent figure in the Romantic Movement, Byron became famous for his brilliant use of the English language. He also became famous, or infamous, for his lifestyle. The aristocratic poet shocked contemporaries with his flamboyance, sexually deviant practices, the notoriety of his romantic liaisons with members of both sexes, and incest with his sister.
Of Byron’s numerous affairs, his most famous was with the married Lady Caroline Lamb. She rejected him at first, describing him as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know“. She eventually had a change of heart, however, and had a torrid affair with the poet that scandalized Britain. When Byron dumped her, a besotted Lady Lamb became a stalker, and pursued him relentlessly. She stopped at his house one time too many, and scribbled in a book on his desk “Remember me”. The exasperated Byron responded as only a poet could, with a poem entitled Remember Thee! Remember Thee!
Remember thee! remember thee!
Till Lethe quench life’s burning stream
Remorse and shame shall cling to thee,
And haunt thee like a feverish dream!
Remember thee! Aye, doubt it not.
Thy husband too shall think of thee:
By neither shalt thou be forgot,
Thou false to him, thou fiend to me!
However, the affair with Lady Lamb was not Byron’s most controversial. Even more scandalous was an incestuous affair with his own sister, Augusta Leigh. Raised separately, Byron had seen little of his sister during childhood. The siblings more than made up for it in adulthood, forming an extremely close relationship. In 1814, the incestuous affair produced a daughter, an illegitimate child on multiple levels, for whom the poet was both uncle and father.
Befitting for a major figure of the Romantic Movement, Byron was the sentimental type, and he liked to keep mementos of his lovers. Back then, such mementos were usually a lock of hair from one’s beloved, tied with a ribbon. But that was for normal people. For Byron, being Britain’s most flamboyant poet, eccentric aristocrat, and all around pervert, a simple lock of hair tied with a ribbon would simply not do. Instead, he snipped pubic hair from his lovers’ crotches, and kept them, catalogued and labeled, in envelopes at his publishing house.
Mounting scandals eventually made Britain too hot for Bryon. So he hit the road, and started roaming Europe for years at a stretch, including a seven year stint in Italy. Restlessness eventually led him to join the Greeks in their war of independence from the Ottoman Turks. However, he was disappointed with the Greeks of his day, because they differed greatly from the heroic Hellenes described by Homer. While moping about that discrepancy, he caught a fever and died in a Greek backwater at the age of 36.
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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Sources & Further Reading
Army History – The M28/ M29 Davy Crockett Nuclear Weapon System
Asian Conference on Asian Studies – Buddhist Terrorism?
Atomic Heritage Foundation – Curtis LeMay
Cracked – Real Life Stories Way Crazier Than Any Movie
Cracked – 6 Flat Out Crazy Conspiracy Theories That Really Happened
Encyclopedia Britannica – Saint Lawrence, Christian Saint
FBI Archives – A Byte Out of History: The Case of the Harvey’s Casino Bomb
Guardian, The, June 8th, 2007 – The Lockheed Scandal
New York Times, October 13th, 1985 – Colonel Redl: The Man Behind the Screen Myth
