William Byrd II

“ One impression only is known to exist. (Life of Byrd, Mus. Ant. Soc.; Cheque-Book of Chapel Royal, Camd. Soc.; Rimbault, Bibl. Madrigaliana.)
[ E. F. R. ]
BYRD, [1] William, is generally said to have been the son of Thomas Byrd, a member of the Chapels Royal of Edward VI. and Mary; but this statement is purely conjectural, the only evidence upon which it rests—viz. that Byrd's second son was named Thomas, as it was supposed, after his grandfather having been disproved by the recent discovery that he was named after his godfather Thomas Tallis. ”

“ Now, there are always men who are constitutionally averse to change, and of these was the great, but not too amiable, Mr. William Byrd. We can, therefore, quite appreciate his feelings on this particular innovation and understand the frame of mind in which he writes, in a preface to his "Songs of Sadness," thus: "There is no music of instruments whatever to be compared to the voyces of men, when they are good, well-sorted and ordered."
Orlando Gibbons was the impersonator of the new spirit; William Byrd was the jealous guardian of the old. ”

“ On 22 Jan. 1596 Byrd's patent expired, and East for the next two years did business on his own account exclusively. On 22 Sept. of that year ‘A brief introduction to the skill of songe concerning the practize sett forth by William Bath, gent.,’ was transferred to East from Abel Jeffes, by whom it had been printed in 1584, and on 24 Nov. he issued George Kirbye's madrigals.
In December 1596 many of the books published by license from Byrd were transferred to East independently. The cessation of the monopoly seems to have given an extraordinary impetus to the publication of music. ”

“ Byrd's death took place (probably at Stondon) on 4 July 1623. It is recorded in the ‘Chapel Royal Cheque Book’ as that of a ‘father of musicke,’ a title which refers as much to his age as to the veneration in which he was held by his contemporaries, a feeling which was expressed by Peacham (Compleat Gentleman, ed. 1622, p. 100) as follows: ‘In Motets, and Musicke of pietie and deuotion, as well for the honour of our Nation, as the merit of the Man, I preferre aboue all other our Phœnix, M. William Byrd, whom in that kind, I know not whether any may equall. ”

“ Altogether the old musician has a remarkable list of varied compositions to his credit. Besides those already mentioned he wrote some excellent Fancies and In Nomines for strings, making a real advance upon the somewhat stilted specimens of Instrumental Music then in vogue, and helping to free the Instrumental form of composition from the vocal. Fancies and In Nomines I shall speak of in detail in a later lecture.
William Byrd had a long and honourable career and contributed in a remarkable degree to the development of the Art of Music in England in the 17th century. ”

“ Dunstan's, or at the Lord Padgette's house at Draighton.’ It was probably on account of his religion that he lived all his life some way out of London, where he would be less likely to attract attention. About 1579 Byrd set a three-part song, ‘Preces Deo fundamus,’ in Thomas Legge's Latin play ‘Richardus III’ (Harl. MS. 2412) . In 1585 Tallis died, and under the terms of the patent the monopoly of printing music became Byrd's sole property. Accordingly, during the next few years he seems to have been unusually active in composition. ”

“ It is not strange that Lord Byron, son of an English father and a Scotch mother, born of a long line of adventurous and warlike sailors and illustrious and loyal knights, with a strain of royalty and madness on one side and eccentricity and immorality on the other, should have fallen heir in an unusual degree to a nature whose virtues and vices were complex and contradictory. ”

“ By the maternal side also Lord Byron had to pride himself on a line of ancestry as illustrious as any that Scotland can boast,—his mother, who was one of the Gordons of Gight, having been a descendant of that Sir William Gordon who was the third son of the Earl of Huntley, by the daughter of James I.
After the eventful period of the Civil Wars, when so many individuals of the house of Byron distinguished themselves,—there having been no less than seven brothers of that family on the field at Edgehill,—the celebrity of the name appears to have died away for near a century. ”

“ The defence which Lord Byron makes, in his reply to that paper, is of a man cornered and fighting for his life. He speaks thus of the state of feeling at the time of his separation from his wife:—
'I was accused of every monstrous vice by public rumour and private rancour; my name, which had been a knightly or a noble one since my fathers helped to conquer the kingdom for William the Norman, was tainted. I felt that, if what was whispered and muttered and murmured was true, I was unfit for England; if false, England was unfit for me. ”

“ In letter after letter we find Byron making inquiries about a passage in a ship of war bound for the Levant. When such a passage is offered to him, however, he declines it on the ground that he is unable to obtain accommodation for as many servants as he desires to take with him; and that explanation inevitably strikes one as a pretext rather than a reason—the pretext of a man who, while he knows that it would be better to go, is looking for an excuse to stay. ”

“ It is probable that Byron knew that there was a "hint of illegitimacy" in his own pedigree. John Byron of Clayton, grandfather of Richard the second Lord Byron, was born, out of wedlock, to Elizabeth, daughter of William Costerden, of Blakesley, in Lancashire, widow to George Halgh of Halgh (sic) , and second wife of Sir John Byron of Clayton, "little Sir John with the great beard." He succeeded to Newstead and the Lancashire estates, not as heir-at-law, but by deed of gift. (See letter to Murray, October 20, 1820, Letters, 1901, v. 99, note 2.) ”

“ With cash extorted from her now severe poverty, he at length luckily departed again for the Continent, and died at Valenciennes in 1791, when Byron was three years old.
Such were the circumstances in which Lord Byron entered the world. If he were the prey of violent passions; if he, too, had a tendency to dissipation; if he, in future years, followed his father's example, though not to so culpable a degree, and married an heiress,
"And spoiled her goodly lands to gild his waste,"
there may be some excuse for him, drawn from hereditary taint. ”

“ The history of Lord Byron's union is too well known to need narration. The errors, and humiliations, and heart-burnings that followed upon it, gave additional effect to the remembrance of his early passion, and tormented him with the idea, that had he been successful in his suit to the lovely heiress of Annesley, they might both have shared a happier destiny. In one of his manuscripts, written long after his marriage, having accidentally mentioned Miss Chaworth as "my M. A. C." "Alas!" ”

“ This poem was received so warmly that Byron remarked that "he awoke one morning to find himself famous." From now till the separation from his wife in 1816, after a year of wedded life, he was the lion of British society, but society took sides on this family difference, and as most of them sympathized with Lady Byron, Byron himself left England. He spent some time on Lake Geneva, where the Castle of Chillon is situated. He then went to Italy, where, amid his usual life of dissipation, he became interested in the Italian Insurrection. ”

“ They were illustrious for their military exploits, and were already nobles in France when they shared the dangers and successes of William the Conqueror; they had followed their kings to Palestine; seven brothers bearing the name of Byron had fought on the same battle-field, and four fell there in defense of their true sovereign and their new country. By his mother he was descended from the kings of Scotland. "Nothing is nobler," says a moralist of our day, "than to add lustre to a great name by our own deeds." ”

“ Byrd's own sense of personal revolt against the man, could not influence him in the discharge of his duty, which was to save another of less interesting and perhaps less valuable traits of character from the consequences of a crime he had never committed. ”

“ I took my way back again to Aberdeen; and lo! at Banchory the inn door still crowded with livery-servants, and poor Sir John Guest still seated at the selfsame window, with long and melancholy face watching the clouds! Truly the sporting, not less than the Christian life, has its crosses and its mortifications.
Lord Byron's first journey in England was with his mother, to see his ancestral abode—his abbey and estate of Newstead. ”

“ Douglass Byrd will be the first one. And besides having the soul of honor and loving-kindness in it, Byrdsville looks like it might be one of the outposts of heaven, where tired souls can come to rest before going up the shining ladder.
All the houses are old-fashioned, with wide doors for welcoming and with vines running over the chimneys and up to the eaves, while blooms and buds tumble over the walls and burst from the gardens into the street. Yes, I think Byrdsville might be called the smile-place on the old earth's round face.
But to return to Father and Tony at the front gate ”

“ Richard Byrd couldn’t have had better ancestors to back him up in his adventures, but every ounce of courage, every bit of perseverance that he inherited, he needed. He was a man who met with hundreds of disappointments, and innumerable obstacles in carrying out the plans that meant so much to him and to the world. But he was never downed by them. Set-backs that would have made other men, men of lesser caliber turn from their paths and give up their plans, were just so much more of a spur to him. ”

“ All things considered, he was perhaps not uncharitable; and a man of less vanity would have felt pretty much as his Lordship appeared to do on the occasion. The whole affair was eminently ridiculous; and what increased the absurdity was a letter she addressed to a friend of mine on the subject, and which he thought too good to be reserved only for his own particular study.
It was in this year that Lord Byron first proposed for Miss Milbanke; having been urged by several of his friends to marry, that lady was specially recommended to him for a wife. ”

“ Sir Ralph is commonly described in Byron’s letters to his intimates as prosy and a bore. “I [Pg 212] can’t stand Lady Noel,” was the reason which he gave Hobhouse for declining to visit her house. A very small spark, in such circumstances, may kindle a fierce conflagration; and it appeared to do so in this case. There was no manœuvring for position, no beating about the bush. Byron received no intimation, direct or indirect, of the plans which were being laid for his confusion. What he did receive—on February 2—was a stiffly worded ultimatum from his father-in-law. ”

“ Byrd perceived that he should not be obliged to speak. Though the music, or possibly the words, struck her like a blow, it likewise served to recall her to herself. Dropping her gaze, which had remained fixed upon his own, she turned her face aside, saying with forced composure:
"This near contact with crime is dreadful." Then slowly, and with a quietness that showed how great was her power of self-control when she was not under the influence of surprise, she inquired: "And who do they think this person is? What name do they presume to associate with the murderer of this woman?" ”

“ It is above the caprices, ennui, and changes which often rule the friendships of our choice.
From his return from his first travels in the East, to the time of his publishing the first two cantos of "Childe Harold," Byron may be said not to have known his sister. The daughter of another mother, and older by several years than himself,—living as she did with relations of her mother, brought up as she was by her grandmother, Lady Carmarthen, and married as she had been at an early age to the Hon. Colonel Leigh, Lord Byron had had very few opportunities of seeing her. ”

“ If he has dearly loved a lord, it must be confessed that it has been with a very disinterested affection. Lord Byron was the most generous to him of his class; but Lord Byron's friends robbed him of that solitary benefit. And so, at the age of sixty-six, the champion of the Whigs, the poet of the loves, the merry wit, and the pungent satirist, the friend of the richest men in England, still sits at his desk, and works for honest bread. ”

“ Remembering the ages and circumstances of the revellers—and remembering also that Moore’s information was derived from some of them—we will try to get as near to the truth as the procurable evidence allows.
Byron, one must always bear in mind, had not yet conquered his place in county society, or in what is now called “smart” society. His mother’s eccentricities and his guardian’s chilly attitude had, as we have seen, kept him out of it. He actually knew no peer who could or would introduce him when he took his seat in the House of Lords. ”

“ Of Lady Byron’s tact we shall discover an instance at the crisis of her married life. In the meantime we must note that they made up their first quarrel—which may very well have been less serious at the time than it appeared to be in retrospect—and, at any rate, kept up appearances sufficiently well to deceive their closest friends. From Halnaby they returned to Seaham, where nothing happened except that Byron discovered his father-in-law to be a bore, addicted to dreary political monologuising over wine and walnuts. ”