Byron’s diaries reveal ‘pervert who set his mind to evil’

LORD BYRON was a “most perverted” man who “set his mind to evil”, according to a letter by an artist who read his memoirs before they were destroyed.

The Romantic poet recorded details of his life in diaries which were to be published after his death, but his friends destroyed the documents in order to keep his private life secret.

A newly unearthed letter has now shed light on their mysterious contents.

The letter, found in a Cambridge University library, was written by Elizabeth Palgrave, a 19th-century society lady and artist who was given a glimpse of Byron’s memoirs before they were destroyed.

She was so shocked that she wrote to her father to describe the moral failings of the celebrated poet, who died 200 years ago, on April 19 1824, aged 36.

In the letter Palgrave writes that “Lord Byron evidently set his mind to evil – he takes delight in recording his own wickedness, and in the most perverted of all feelings”.

She adds that “all the power of his mind seems forcibly turned to do evil only” and that by writing down the account of his evil, “he must have been actuated by motives so perverted as to be really unaccountable”.

Palgrave read the memoirs in 1823, a year before Bryon died and the diaries were burnt. Her main concern was his treatment of his wife Anne Milbanke. She writes that Byron took every opportunity to insult her and her family, and expressed his “indifference” to his wife, who he only married because, during a snowstorm in which they were trapped, he was “without another creature to whom he could make love in his way”.

The letter, found by curators at Trinity College’s Wren Library earlier this year, offers an unprecedented glimpse into the content of the memoirs.

Byron had achieved international fame with works like Childe Harold’s

Pilgrimage and Don Juan, and rumours of homosexuality and incest in his private life added to his reputation.

Lady Caroline Lamb, a one-time lover, called him “mad, bad, and dangerous to know”.

He began writing a memoir in 1818, and handed it to his friend Thomas Moore, who passed it to Byron’s publisher John Murray, on the proviso that it only be made public after his death.

When he died in the Greek War of Independence in 1824, his friends debated whether to keep the memoir and in the end opted to burn it.