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" ‘Ambition was myidol’, Byron wrote, looking back to his ‘hot youth– when George the Third was King’ (Don Juan, i.212.
. That ambition had been political. As an hereditary legislator of the British Empire, he had hoped to sway the destiny of nations by the power of oratory. His classical education offered the examples of men like Demosthenes in Greece and Cicero in Rome. Among his elder contemporaries were figures such as Henry Grattan, a founding father of the Irish ‘patriot’ parliament, and Byron’s friends, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the eloquent manager of the impeachment of Warren Hastings, and Thomas Erskine, the famous advocate of freedom of speech. A greater ambition yet might move a young man called by the duty of rank to public service. The statesman might also be a war leader and a maker of nations. The pre-eminent example for the age was George Washington and, for a European aristocrat, the example of Washington’s ally, the Marquis de la Fayette, was close behind. More dangerously dazzling was the career of the disastrous comet, Napoleon Bonaparte and the meteoric disaster of the Irish revolutionary, Lord Edward Fitzgerald.Byron’s political affiliations were to the Whig party in opposition and began at Cambridge where he was a member of a small and intimate political circle including the Duke of Devonshire, Lord Tavistock, John Cam Hobhouse (the future Lord Broughton), and Douglas Kinnaird. In London he was recruited by the Holland House circle where he was indoctrinated in the hagiography of the great dead Whig leader, Charles James Fox, Lord Holland’s uncle and mentor. It was Lord Holland who was instrumental in promoting Byron’s inaugural speech in the House of Lords. In the circle of Lady Oxford, he moved towards the more radical wing of the party represented by Sir Francis Burdett and John Horne Tooke (who had been tried for high treason and acquitted, 1794). That radicalism was demonstrated by his symbolic action in visiting Leigh Hunt in jail (imprisoned for libelling the Prince Regent). Hunt was to be his future collaborator on the political journal The Liberal (in which The Vision of Judgment was first published).
Byron’s association with the Whigs provided him with both an ideology and a discourse of ‘liberty’. His political position was rooted in the mythology of the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688/9. As a political party, the Whigs had originated in opposition to what was described as Stuart ‘tyranny’. They drew upon a teleological view of history in which the forces of liberty (enshrined in the ‘ancient constitution’ of the free Saxon peoples) were locked in a long struggle with the powers of oppression (now represented by those adherents of ‘passive obedience’ to the Crown nominated as ‘Tories’). Certain great historical landmarks had recorded the advance of the principles of liberty, witness the acceptance by King John of Magna Carta, or John Hampden’s refusal to pay the tax of ship money to Charles I on the emergent principle of no taxation without representation’. The revolution of 1688/9 had guaranteed the rule of law as sanctioned by parliament (with the monarchasthechief ‘magistrate’ in a ‘balanced’ constitution of King, Lords, andCommons). A Bill of Rights guaranteed the life, liberty, and the property of the subject. Among such essential ‘rights’ (it was claimed) were freedom of speech, the freedom of the subject to petition for redress of grievances, freedom from arbitrary arrest (habeas corpus) and trial by jury. In practice many of these rights were to prove extremely fragile (Roman Catholics, for instance, were excluded from the body politic) but the foundational principles of ‘resistance’ to the arbitrary power of the Crown and of the ‘rights’ of the subject continued to shape the Whig thinking during the eighteenth century. The classic formulation of party principle was John Dunning’s motion passed in the House of Commons (1780): ‘The power of the Crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished.’ Famous among Byron’s older contemporaries had been the case of the Whig hero, John Wilkes, imprisoned for criticising the Crown as ‘prostitute’ (The North Briton, 45, 23 April 1763) and the attacks on the abuses of power by George III and his ministers in the ‘Junius’ Letters (1769–72).
Whig principles were internationalised by the revolt of the British colonists in North America. The men of property wholed the revolution (great plantation owners like Washington) used (and applied) the by then well-established discourse of Whig opposition. They drew their examples from the classic authorities of the Glorious Revolution (figures like Hampden and Algernon Sydney) but radically linked with more obviously republican figures such as John Milton and John Harrington. Thomas Jefferson’s vitriolic abuse of the tyranny of George III in the Declaration of Independence is directly in the tradition of Whig polemic, as was his declaration, inscribed in his Memorial in Washington, DC: ‘I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.’ "(pp.44-45)
"The rise of Jacobinism in France, and the consequent ‘radicalisation’ of British politics, fundamentally changed the signification of Whig opposition to ‘the Crown’. There was a substantial gap between the claim of great Whig lords to act as ‘the friends of the people’ (and the defenders of property) and, in France, the execution of the monarch and the aristocracy, the confiscation of property and the proclamation of universal republican war. Meantime, in Britain, the political establishment was challenged by a developing working-class movement, philosophically based on Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man, and, in practical terms, demanding a ‘democracy’ based on universal male suffrage and the delegation of members to annual parliaments. This threatened the established constitution with what the ‘Tories’ called ‘anarchy’.
The dilemma for the Whigs was that the ideology and discourse of the party was potentially republican in its application (as the North American revolution had shown), but, in practice, their power and property was intrinsically interwoven with the maintenance of the so-called ‘balanced’ constitution between King, Lords, and Commons. They were caught, therefore, between the upper and nether millstones of ‘Tory’ reactionism and the Jacobinical‘radicals’ (the political useofthewordoriginatesaboutthistime).
In keeping with the ‘principles’ of 1688/9 the party leader, Charles James Fox, welcomed both the American and the French revolutions. Accordingly, the Foxite wing of the Whigs opposed war with France. Sir James Mack intosh’s defence of the revolution, Vindiciae Gallicae (1791) and Erskine’s criticism of British war policy, On the Causes and Consequences of the War with France (1797), were to become key texts underpinning Byron’s subsequent support for Napoleon. But this theoretical position became increasingly difficult to sustain. The threat from France (militarily and ideologically) caused the overwhelming majority of the Whig opposition to adopte ‘Tory’ position. Eventually, the rump of the Foxite Whigs in 1797 seceded in despair from parliament. Apart from a brief spell in coalition after the death of the great war leader, William Pitt, the Whigs no longer existed as a force." (p.46)
"This was the party which Byron joined in 1812. It seemed an opportune moment. The establishment of the Regency because of the insanity of George III appeared to open a window of opportunity for the Whigs, for the Prince Regent had numerous friends among the opposition. Byron himself had assiduously prepared himself for a political career. Before embarking on his Grand Tour in 1809, he had already attended the House of Lords seven times, andhis list of essential reading had included the parliamentary debates from the heartland of the Whig/Tory struggles of 1688 to 1745. On his return to Britain he attended all the major debates between January and July 1812 and also some of the minor work of committees. His maiden speech was on 27 February 1812, when he was chosen to lead a debate for the opposition on industrial unrest in his home county of Nottinghamshire. Unemployment among the stocking-knitters had provoked major civil disorder (the ‘Luddite’ riots) and the government was in process of introducing a Bill to make the breaking of the new manufacturing machinery a capital offence. The Whig position, as ‘friends of the people’, was that conciliation of grievances would be more effective than hanging workers. They proposed instead a committee of enquiry.
Byron spoke again on two other classic Whig issues. On 21 April 1812, in conjunction with his party, he advocated the removal of the residual constitutional disabilities from Roman Catholic subjects of the United Kingdom (Byron concentrated upon the position of the Catholic majority in Ireland). Finally, on 1 June 1813, he briefly presented a plea for freedom to petition on behalf of the veteran campaigner for parliamentary reform, Major John Cartwright. Cartwright claimed to have been harassed by the authorities during one of his campaigns. Consideration of his petition might have led to debate on the perennial Whig topic of reform of parliament (by a moderate extension of the franchise among men of property). Thereafter Byron’s most significant action was to vote with the forty-four peers, led by Lord Grey, who on 23 May 1815 opposed renewal of war against Napoleon after the emperor’s escape from Elba (the ‘Hundred Days’ which culminated in the battle of Waterloo).
The two major speeches (on the ‘Luddites’ and on the position of Roman Catholics in Ireland) are characterised by deep compassion for the sufferings of the common people and by an eloquent invective against the tyranny of the government. In context of the normal manner of proceeding of the House, however, they are out of kilter. The established mode oftheLordswasformal and proceeded by ‘mutual politeness’ (to adopt Byron’s own description in The Vision of Judgment, line 280). It was not the custom of the House, for instance, to liken Lord Liverpool to ‘that Athenian lawgiver [Draco] whose edicts were said to be written . . . in blood’ (in the Luddite debate), nor to warn the government (in the Catholic debate) that they were traitors to the people whose heads might end up on ‘the greedy niches’ of Temple Bar. This kind of invective in the House was supported by a series of poetical squibs, some anonymous or not written in propria persona. Of the latter kind, the ‘Song for the Luddites’ (1816) is the most violent:
As the Liberty lads o’er the sea
Bought their freedom, and cheaply, with blood,
So we, boys, we
Will die fighting, or live free,
And down with all kings but King Ludd !
This was way off the scale of acceptable Whig polemic and unpublishable. It flirts dangerously with ‘Jacobinism’. The argument, ultimately, is that the ‘anarchy’ which the government seeks to repress was, in fact, justly provoked by the very tyranny of the government.
How seriously did Byron subscribe to the revolutionary tendency of what he said ? Thomas Moore, in his Life of Byron, tells how the poet came to see him ‘in a state of the most humorous exaltation’ after delivering the Cartwright petition.
‘I told them’, he said, ‘that it was a most flagrant violation of the Constitution that, if such things were permitted, there was an end of English freedom, and that– ’– ‘but what was this dreadful grievance ?’ I asked . . . ‘the grievance ?’ he repeated, pausing as if to consider– ‘Oh, that I forget’. (Moore, Life, 1832, ii, 207)
Such flippancy is hard to reconcile with the passion of the parliamentary rhetoric. It suggests that Byron saw his invective as a kind of superheated discourse of ‘English freedom’ easily turned on or off. Alternatively, the self-subversion suggests that by the summer of 1813 Byron was already disenchanted with what he called the ‘mummeries’ of parliamentary government." (pp.46-48)
"There was reason for the disenchantment. Whig reliance on the patronage of the Prince Regent proved unfounded. He continued with his father’s administration. Meantime, Byron had been unsuccessful on every major issue on which he had spoken. Machine-breaking had been made a capital offence ; Catholic emancipation was rejected (and not fully achieved until after Byron’s death); Cartwright’s petition was rejected. In the Luddite debate, Byron was studiously insulted by the administration, which did not deign even to respond to his speech; in the affair of the Cartwright petition, even members of his own party spoke against him. Perhaps most symptomatic of the gap between rhetoric and reality were the results of his one partial success. The Whig proposal for enquiry into the Luddite disturbances was accepted. Consequentially, ‘A Bill for Preventing Fraud and Abuses in the Frame-work Knitting Manufacture, and in the Payment of Persons Employed Therein’ was introduced in the summer of 1812. Itwas totally emasculated. One of the leading opponents of this ‘mistaken and mischievous’ Bill was Lord Holland, Byron’s mentor who had put him up to lead for the Whigs in February. Embarrassing the administration was one thing ; interference in the conditions of trade was something quiet alien to the aristocrats at Holland House." (pp.48-49)
"Although Byron’s role in British party politics was insignificant, yet, as part of the education of a poet’s mind his experiences were fundamental. They provided a schooling in scepticism about idealistic rhetoric and a bitter experience of failure. This experience might be readily generalised as paradigmatic of the age itself. This was a time which Shelley called in the Preface to The Revolt of Islam (1818) the ‘age of despair’, and Shelley, in Julian and Maddalo (written 1818, published 1824), dramatised Byron as the voice of that despair. Byron himself in a late, bitter political satire nominated the epoch, The Age of Bronze (1823). There had been a giant race before the flood, and he names as heroes the American Whigs Patrick Henry (‘give me liberty, or give me death’), Benjamin Franklin, and George Washington. He associated these men with the Continental Congress of the American founding fathers. The American republic was now parodied by the reactionary Congress of the monarchical powers of Europe. Meantime, in Britain, the one preoccupation of the governing caste (the landed self-interest) was the preservation of their rents. Reform was a dead letter." (p.51)
"Byron’s personal attempt to reconstitute his own heroic status is associated with his commitment to direct-action anti-colonial politics in Italy and then in Greece. It is commonplace to describe Byron as a Foxite Whig at home(which is aparty affiliation) and a constitutional nationalist abroad (to which the name ‘Liberal’ was given). The obvious attraction of direct-action politics in Europe was that they were freed (for Byron) from the class and party complexities of Britain. Single-issue demonstrations Austrians ‘out’; Turks ‘out’– are much easier than, for instance, finding a modus vivendi for competing Catholic and Protestant interests in Ireland." (pp.51-52)
"As soon as he was abroad Byron relieved himself of some of the feelings suppressed during the Hundred Days. His account of the battle of Waterloo in Childe Harold iii (1816) laments the fall of the flawed tragic hero, Napoleon, and declines to lend support to the triumphalist celebrations of the Duke of Wellington, represented, for instance, by Walter Scott’s The Field of Waterloo, Robert Southey’s The Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo, or William Wordsworth’s Ode (1815). The poem, accordingly, might be read as a complaint by an anti-war Whig faced with a Tory victory. In Canto IV (1818), Hobhouse’s notes radicalised the historical generalities of Byron’s seemingly remote historical reflections on the fall of the Venetian and Roman republics. Britain’s collusion with the reactionary continental imperial powers, it is claimed, had betrayed the cause of national revival in Italy (as elsewhere in Europe).
Subsequently, the Venetian plays, Marino Faliero and The Two Foscari (1821), were directly applied to British affairs. Byron’s portrayal of the clash between a corrupt Senate and a disaffected populace was seized upon during the anti-monarchical turmoil generated by George IV’s divorce proceedings against Queen Caroline. Domestic politics, and Whig party preoccupations, therefore, remained pervasive. Even the European cantos of Don Juan (1819–23) might be interpreted as loosely veiled allegories of what the original epigraph called in transparent Latin domestica facta. The domestic scene emerges directly in the derisive satire of the subsequent English cantos." (p.52)
"Hence the importance of the Satanic figure in Byron’s verse, for Satan in rebellion against the power of God was the first ‘Whig’ and also, in Goethe’s characterisation, eternally ‘der Geistderstetsverneint’(‘the spirit that always denies’, Faust, Part 1,‘Studierzimmer’).What ever is must always be opposed. This Satanic irony structures Byron’s profoundest political satire, The Vision of Judgment (1822). Here, George III is made to stand as the type of tyranny and the case against him is put by Satan with Jeffersonian fervour: ‘The new world shook him off; the old yet groans / Beneath what he and his prepared’ (The Vision of Judgment, 369–70). Yet it remains essential that Satanic rebellion does not succeed universally, for that would be to substitute the tyranny of the revolutionary ruler of hell for the tyranny of the status quo. Byron’s poem, accordingly, creates a ‘neutral space’ (The Vision of Judgment, 257) between heaven and hell in which the forces of Tory and Whig remain perpetually suspended in unresolvable and necessary opposition.
Hence the irony of Byron’s gloss in Don Juan on his existential dilemma as a man ‘born for opposition’:
But then ’tis mostly on the weaker side:
So that I verily believe if they
Who now are basking in their full-blown pride,
Were shaken down, and ‘dogs had had their day’,
Though at the first I might perchance deride
Their tumble, I should turn the other way,
And wax an Ultra-royalist in loyalty,
Because I hate even democratic royalty.
(Don Juan, xv.23)
The price of liberty is eternal denial of all forms of hegemonic power whether of government or opposition. The aphorism ‘Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely’ applies to Whig as much as to Tory. Ultimately it is not merely a philosophical theory but an existential imperative for the poet:
I wish men to be free
As much from mobs as kings, from you as me.
(Don Juan, ix.25.7–
." (pp.54-55)-Malcolm Kelsall, "Byron’s politics", in Drummond Bone (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Byron, Cambridge University Press, 2004, 305 pages, pp.44-55.
-Drummond Bone (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Byron,
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