A Female Genius: How Ada Lovelace Started the Computer Age (2 page)

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The little boy fated to become Lord Byron the poet, Ada’s father, was the son of John Byron, who had been born on February 7 1756.

John’s older brother William – known as the ‘Wicked Lord’, whose crimes included stabbing a neighbour to death during a ferocious argument over the best way to hang game – held the title of Lord Byron, which was awarded the previous century to the Byron family by King Charles I. The Wicked Lord managed to escape the hangman’s noose by persuading his peers in the House of Lords that the crime was manslaughter rather than murder. He was absolved from his crime on the condition he paid a fine and retired to Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire, the ancestral home of the Byron family. Founded in the late twelfth century, its priory status had come to an end in 1539, when it was closed by King Henry VIII due to his falling-out with the Roman Catholic church over his marriage to Anne Boleyn; he granted it to the Byron family.

John Byron, Ada’s grandfather, was nominally a British army officer, but he spent as much time as he could philandering and spending money that wasn’t his. These two pastimes had always been popular among the Byrons, who traced their ancestry back to a Ralph du Biron, who came to England in 1066 with William the Conqueror and his horde of fortune-hunters and land-robbers. John Byron soon acquired the nickname of ‘Mad Jack’. Mad he might have been, but he was a handsome fellow. Before long he lost interest in his profession and in the family tradition devoted himself to dissipation.

John Byron’s first wife, Amelia, had an annual income of £4,000 – worth £7 million today – which was presumably one reason why Mad Jack married her. Their daughter, Augusta Mary, was born in Paris on January 26 1784. She is an important character in Ada’s story. Amelia Byron did not survive Augusta’s birth, and the girl was cared for, most probably, by an uncle. The causes of Amelia’s actual death remain a sinister mystery: sources vary between saying she died of consumption (this usually meant tuberculosis), of a fever contracted when she went hunting too soon after giving birth, or even of ‘ill-usage’ at her husband’s hands. Some reports hold that her death took place in Paris, but her death certificate states that she died in London.

Whatever the true cause of Amelia’s demise, her income died with her, and as Mad Jack had by now abandoned his military career, such as it had been, he needed cash badly.

In the traditional way of handsome aristocratic rakes who did not want to do anything so tedious as earn a living, Mad Jack ventured to Bath, a famous west-of-England spa town whose very name proclaims its primary historical function. The Romans had pioneered bathing in the supposedly healthy water. By the eighteenth century, Bath was still famous for its waters, and also for the opportunities it offered impoverished noblemen for finding a wealthy heiress.

Before long, Jack’s good looks and easy charm had enabled him to do precisely that. The lady he successfully wooed ticked all his boxes of youth, wealth and vulnerability.

The lady, Catherine Gordon, was Scottish, a big girl and rather ungainly in her manner, though she liked dancing and was good-natured. Catherine was the oldest and by that time the only living daughter of George Gordon, twelfth Laird of Gight, Ada’s grandfather. Catherine was born in the County of Aberdeen in 1764, and brought up in the Castle of Gight, which is in the parish of Fyvie in the Formatine district of Aberdeenshire, Scotland.

The exact date of Catherine’s birth does not appear to be known, but she was christened on April 22 1764, and so she was probably born about a week before that.

Catherine had plenty of money due to her family inheritance. Mad Jack was as interested in Catherine’s money as in Catherine, and indeed probably more so. The Byrons were not famous for the longevity of their virtue, or of their marriages. Soon after the happy couple were united, Mad Jack – relishing the prospect of living in a castle, and even more delighted at the juicy prospect of gaining comprehensive access to Catherine’s money – began an orgy of spending.

Married women had few legal rights at the time and were not even regarded as a separate legal entity from their husband. Any money a woman had automatically became her husband’s once they were married.

Poor Catherine – she would be poor soon – fell head over heels for Mad Jack, but only because in the classic fashion of rakes, he’d been careful to disguise his true nature until after the wedding.

Within a year of the marriage being solemnised, John Byron had spent most of his wife’s fortune. Before she met him, she had about £22,000 (£35 million today). The inheritance rapidly disappeared, even to the extent of forests on Gight land being felled in order for the timber to be sold and the money to line Mad Jack’s pockets for the brief tenure it had in them before being expended on some insane frivolity.

Within eighteen months of the marriage, there was almost no money left in the estate, and what was still there was paid to Mad Jack’s new creditors because, in common with many of his Byron forebears, he wasn’t only content to spend money he had, but also money he didn’t. Catherine remained not only in love with her husband but infatuated with him. The scale of his financial extravagance, however, upset her profoundly. She was left only with the income from about £4,200 that her trustees had managed to sequester from her husband.

Before long, the threat of jail for debt induced Mad Jack to flee to Paris. Flitting off to the Continent was the usual Byron technique for dealing with debt. By the end of 1787, Catherine – unwilling, despite her persisting love for her husband, to spend any more time in Paris living in straitened circumstances – came back to London. Mad Jack couldn’t join her in London because if he had, he would have been jailed for debt right away. By now, she was pregnant, and on January 22 1788, her son and only child came into this world. Catherine named him George Gordon, after her father.

The future poet Lord Byron was born with a caul, a harmless membrane, over his head. In medieval times a caul had been seen as a mark that a child born with one would be destined for greatness. Dried, cauls were believed to prevent their owner from drowning. Some were sold for significant sums to sailors. There is a reference to this practice in the opening paragraphs of Charles Dickens’s novel
David Copperfield
(1850). There were no takers for David’s caul, but baby George’s was given to a professional sailor Catherine knew.

George was also born with a deformed right foot, which was to cause him both physical and psychological pain throughout his life. The deformity was at the time referred to as a club foot. Today, the condition is known medically as dysplasia and is characterised by the very problems that Byron suffered: his right leg was thinner than it should have been, and his long narrow foot curved inwards and was stiff so that it affected to some extent the movement of the ankle. Byron’s walk, throughout his life, had a certain sliding gait to it which everyone noticed. All the same, this was a time when many people had something more or less wrong with them, so Byron’s problem would not have been as conspicuous as it would have been today.

Catherine was deeply (and, based on his track record, most likely accurately) concerned that even now her husband, living in Paris, was accruing more debts. Certainly, the pressure on what money Catherine still had was apparently endless. Mad Jack was unable to get credit and was reduced to living only on bread. He was by now also dangerously ill with tuberculosis. On June 21 1791, he made his will, thoughtfully making his penniless son (four years old at the time) responsible for his, the father’s, debts. Six weeks later, on August 2 1791, John Byron died at the age of thirty-five.

Catherine bravely contrived to manage on what money she had left. She sent George to a variety of schools in London. Finally she returned to Scotland and there, in 1794, when George Byron was six years old, he was enrolled at Aberdeen Grammar School.

Mad Jack’s demented older brother, the Wicked Lord, was still alive at this point, but when he died four years later the ten-year-old George became the sixth Lord Byron. On hearing the news, the headmaster of Aberdeen Grammar School called George into his office, informed the boy of his momentous social elevation, and gave him a glass of port, as if determined to welcome the boy symbolically into the bibulous world of the aristocracy.

In 1798, becoming a peer was seen as becoming a new kind of being. Early in August of that year, Catherine and the ten-year-old Lord Byron, accompanied by his nanny Mary Gray, whom he called May, journeyed to Newstead Abbey, where he took possession of his estate. The boy was delighted with Newstead Abbey, and spent a month or so roaming the grounds.

Newstead Abbey, the ancestral home Lord Byron inherited at the age of ten.

Nanny May was woman of considerably loose virtue; she had regular romantic adventures with young men of about her own age, seventeen or eighteen.
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According to Byron’s friend John Hobhouse – who later in Byron’s life was told about these events by the poet himself – during this time when May Gray was Byron’s nursemaid, she started taking the boy into her bed and masturbating him. Her interest in Byron, though, was not only that of a sexual initiator. She liked to alternate the masturbation with beatings; for which actual or imagined offences is not clear. May even enjoyed showing off to her male companions the power she had over Byron and she enjoyed beating the boy while they looked on. Very likely, the young Byron also witnessed the drunken copulations of May and her friends.

It was the beatings, not the masturbation, that young George Byron finally reported to his mother. When Catherine heard from her son that May was flogging him, Catherine dismissed May and removed Byron from Newstead Abbey. His education continued in London. At the age of thirteen, Byron entered Harrow School, at that time, with Eton, one of the two most renowned schools in Britain.

Life at Harrow was tough. You had to get up at six o’clock, and lessons continued for twelve hours, with some breaks for mealtimes. Floggings administered on younger boys by senior boys and by masters were commonplace; for the floggers, they were a high point of the school routine.

Academic standards could be high, but the syllabus was fairly unvaried. This was 1801, and the syllabus of Britain’s public schools was mostly classical, with the intention of turning young men (there were very few schools that gave much of a classical education to young women) into proxy citizens of the great Roman Empire that had collapsed due to Barbarian predations about 1,400 years ago, but which still had an enormous cultural hold on the Anglo-Saxon mentality. This was partly at least because the Britons admired the way the Romans had built up their empire: with violence, yes, but also with a genuine concern for the welfare of the governed.

One of Byron’s school fellows was to become important in the life of Ada. This was the young Robert Peel, also born in 1788, though Peel was born on February 5 and so was Byron’s junior by exactly two weeks. Byron was later in his life to be generous about Peel’s talents.

Byron was prone to bouts of depression, and may even have suffered from a form of manic depression (nowadays known as bipolar syndrome). Byron himself often seems to have used sex more as a diversion and as a way of forgetting his own low spirits than necessarily always as a supreme physical and spiritual pleasure. He was in addition often curiously passive in courtship; when he reached adulthood and had many female (and male) admirers, they often found it frustrating that they themselves had to initiate things.

Indeed, Byron was also sometimes as intensely taken with chastity as with sexuality. His life’s work fills a closely-printed book of almost 900 pages, and a man who spends most of his life indulging himself sexually and who dies at the age of thirty-six, is not likely to produce such a vast body of work – maybe around one million words in total. So while certainly Byron had bouts of energetic indulgence in sex, he wasn’t always, so to speak, in the mood.

He was certainly bisexual. While at Harrow, he fell ardently in love with a younger boy called John Edelston. The social and moral atmosphere of Harrow was much of the time literally a hotbed of homosexual activity. The poet and critic John Addington Symons (1840 – 1893), himself bisexual, was one of the first to write explicitly about homosexuality in nineteenth-century Britain, when homosexual practices were still an imprisonable offence. Addington Symons wrote this in his memoirs of Harrow, which he started attending in 1854:

Every boy of good looks had a female name, and was recognised either as a public prostitute or as some bigger fellow’s bitch. Bitch was the word in common usage to indicate a boy who yielded his person to a lover. The talk of the dormitories and the studies was incredibly obscene. Here and there, one could not avoid seeing acts of onanism, mutual masturbation, the sports of naked boys in bed together. There was no refinement, no sentiment, no passion; nothing but animal lust in these occurrences.