Catherine Byron, 13th Lady of Gight

Captain John Byron (1757 – 2 August 1791) was a British Army officer and letter writer, best known as the father of the poet Lord Byron. In 1824, an obituary of his son gave him the nickname "Mad Jack Byron", and though there is no evidence for this in his own lifetime, it has since stuck – certainly he was called "Jack" by his family members and referred to himself as such.[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Byron_(British_Army_officer)

Byron was the sixth child and eldest son of Vice-Admiral Hon. John Byron and Sophia Trevanion[2] and grandson of William Byron, 4th Baron Byron of Rochdale. The earliest record of him is his baptism record, dated 17 March 1757 in Plymouth.[3]

Byron then married Catherine Gordon, heiress of Gight in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, daughter of George Gordon and Catherine Innes, on 17 May 1785. In order to claim his wife's estate in Scotland, Captain Byron took the surname Gordon.[6]

They had one child, born on 22 January 1788: George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron.

Having attempted to live with his wife in Aberdeen and squandered her fortune, Jack eventually left both his wife and son in Scotland and went to France to live with his sister, Frances Leigh (1749-1823). Having never managed to take control of his spending – which continued to go on parties, theatre trips and courtesans - Jack died in August 1791 at Valenciennes, while still in his mid-thirties.

Had he survived, Jack would have been next in line to inherit his uncle's title as Lord Byron. Instead, it fell to his ten-year-old son George in 1798.[8]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Byron

Jack would then marry Catherine Gordon of Gight on 13 May 1785, by all accounts only for her fortune.[23] 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.[22] In a move to avoid his creditors, Catherine accompanied her husband to France in 1786, but returned to England at the end of 1787 to give birth to her son.[24]

Byron was born in January 1788, and christened at St Marylebone Parish Church.[1] His father appears to have wished to call his son 'William', but as he remained absent, Byron's mother named him after her own father, George Gordon of Gight,[25] who was a descendant of James I of Scotland and who had died by suicide some years earlier, in 1779.[26]

Catherine Gordon, Byron's mother, by Thomas Stewardson

Byron's mother moved back to Aberdeenshire in 1790, and Byron spent part of his childhood there.[26] 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,[26] which could be partly explained by her husband's continuously borrowing money from her. As a result, she fell even further into debt to support his demands. One of these loans enabled him to travel to Valenciennes, France, where he died of a "long & suffering illness" – probably tuberculosis – in 1791.[27]

When Byron's great-uncle, who was posthumously labelled the "wicked" Lord Byron, died on 21 May 1798, the 10-year-old became the sixth Baron Byron of Rochdale and inherited the ancestral home, Newstead Abbey, in Nottinghamshire. His mother took him to England, but the Abbey was in a state of disrepair and, rather than live there, she decided to lease it to Lord Grey de Ruthyn, among others, during Byron's adolescence.[28][29]

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".[30] 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.[31]

References

1. https://www.geni.com/discussions?discussion_type=followed
   1. Brand, Emily (2020). The Fall of the House of Byron. John Murray. p. 281.
   2. 6. Eisler, Benita. Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame (Knopf, 1999), pp. 10–11.
   3. Mosley, Charles, ed. (2003), Burke's Peerage, Baronetage & Knightage, vol. 1 (107th, 3 volumes ed.), Wilmington, Delaware, USA: Genealogical Books.
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Byron
3. "Catherine Gordon Byron – a bad mother, or Gothic heroine?" < libertabooks.com > " ... Catherine’s father committed suicide by drowning himself in the River Avon in Bath in 1779. And in 1785, Miss Gordon, an heiress worth around £23,000, entered Bath Society. ... "