The World's First Sex Symbol | The Scandalous Adventures Of Lord Byron | Absolute History

if you had a time machine where would you go or if you could be a star which one would you be these are the idle questions we sometimes ask ourselves but i think being a modern star is really quite common after all anyone could become one these days i want to be a real star someone whose light shines on for hundreds of years someone whose life and work encapsulates all the glamour of the human condition from the gutter to the gods he must be scandalous and tragic he must be brilliant and tortured above all my heart must stop beating when he comes into the room who else but lord byron byron was the first modern sex symbol this sensual adventurer traveled from his ancestral home on a voyage where his life and art became one igniting unprecedented fame and infamy i want to discover how the extreme experiences of his journey turned an obscure poet into a best-selling phenomenon and the original anti-hero on his exotic adventures byron traveled with an entourage in 17 cabin trucks and travelling light following him across europe to the orient via portuguese hookers albanian bandit country and italian royalty seeking out byron's marbled halls of sodomy and sherbet abusing embassy hospitality and like him ending up at the vd clinic [Music] byron was britain's most successful poet and really her first international celebrity with the vanity and the sexual appetites of a modern rock star even those who adored him were forced to admit that he was mad bad and dangerous to know [Music] in the summer of 1809 lord byron set sail on an extraordinary boy's own adventure accompanied by four servants and a friend from cambridge the 22 year old was hungry for excitement and exoticism byron was funding the entire two-year expedition mostly with borrowed money but that didn't stop him from commissioning this flamboyant portrait of himself to commemorate his departure this was no ordinary grand tour europe was in the grip of the napoleonic wars and few dared travel the byron wanted to go to the edge to discover himself while tasting every danger and delight [Music] unable to disembark in war-torn france byron landed in the loose southern city of lisbon famed for its bars and bordellos well one can only imagine this whole group of english people very eccentric group a kind of swishy aristocrat with his village family retainers all trying to get the baggage together all kind of raising their eyebrows at milord kind of you know flouncing around it must be very festive and really fun byron was no innocent abroad he'd already lost his virginity to his nanny at the age of nine and greedily experimented with actresses servant girls multiple prostitutes and even a 17 year old choir boy he was now ready to taste the forbidden fruits of other lands you wait and see [Music] byron and his cambridge friend john hobhouse hit the stews of lisbon and byron immediately fell for the charms of hispanic women as he wrote they are formed for all the witching arts of love perhaps i should sample those witching arts for myself some things never change elena is a high-class cool girl and she's met a fair few englishmen coming here in byron's footsteps to experience the most intimate kind of latin hospitality byron said um about spanish for me that they were very well performed in the witching arts of love and i suppose they were much more sophisticated and earthy than english girls probably yeah i do i do think so because we have open mind in bed yes and we allow the man do what else they want if it's good for us of course right you know yeah have you had much experience with english guys yeah you have yeah oh lots of experience really yeah and what are english guys like in bed compared to for example germans oh yeah englishmen are more careful quicker yes no they are very kind with me really yeah we have a reputation for not being maybe we got i think we got better recently actually yeah um but we used to have a reputation of being people who kind of had a grope in the back of a taxi and also premature ejaculation yeah but not not with me not in your experience well that's very good who has the biggest penises i don't know i think brazilian ones byron picked his way through the streets of lisbon avoiding soldiers and the odd cuckolded husband this impressive brooding figure blessed with a member by some accounts of brazilian proportion could have almost any woman he pleased yet he hid from them the deformed leg he'd had since birth this british lord abroad was most definitely not all he seemed posh but penniless his father had effectively deserted him and his stocky neurotic mother leaving them with a crumbling estate and mounting debts he was a mass of contradictions with his nose in the gutter and his head in the stars bayern sites were set much further east after spain and malta where he had affairs with married women and collected locks of their hair he headed to the wildest country in the western world it was a blank space on the map that few englishmen had ever visited byron called it terra incognita its real name albania this violent and forbidding land was to have a remarkable effect on byron it would inspire the poem that would change his life here finally in albania byron was lost to his own world and so am i this is one of the last unknown spots in europe and i'm planning to live dangerously the church bells of cambridge must never seem further away the two friends must have had their hearts in their mouths as they climbed these treacherous hills no nation are so detested said byron and dreaded by their neighbours in the albanese their habits are predatory all are armed albania was ruled by the most bloodthirsty despot in europe the ferocious ali pasha not known for his kindness to strangers [Music] byron was determined to meet him not least because of ali pasha's spirited resistance to his ottoman overlords the two boys embarked on a hazardous journey into the heart of bandit country remarkably the brutal warlord sent soldiers to escort them byron was thrilled sadly i've just got my guide and byron expert auron and a couple of donkey bashers more or less 200 years ago today byron was coming down this actual road one of the things byron liked here was um the very bonded male society i think he very much appreciated that and actually even wrote about rather nastily about the women saying that since the weather was so nice it was quite a good job that they were out building the roads and laboring and i guess he was asserting himself in a way as a man as well because remember he had a crippled foot and he was kind of effeminate in a way and i think those guys kind of embraced him in a way yeah they didn't judge him who he was or anything like that it just kind of you know it's part of them [Music] as byron traveled to pasha's castle surrounded by his band of soldiers something clicked he was at the center of an extraordinary unfolding story much of the detail of his journey so far was too scandalous for diary form so he semi-fictionalized it in the most celebrated travel blog in the history of the english language as a poem about a boy called not byron but harold left the primal city of the land and onwards did his further journey take to greet albania's chief whose dread command is lawless law for with a bloody hand he sways a nation turbulent and bold [Music] what do you think it's good stuff matching byron's lust for life was his power to describe it in every lurid detail child harold's pilgrimage would enthrall everyone who could read in regency england and make him as famous as the prince byron reinvented himself as that very modern kind of celebrity someone whose art and life are one he didn't travel just to see but to be seen he had himself painted in this splendid albanian costume two centuries on and i'm expected to model a distinctly tacky copy put this on first yes it feels pretty [ __ ] [Music] putting it on made me wonder where did the real bayern end and the poser begin like the smartest of stars he was too playful too ironic to ever let you know no one could have chosen a more stupid address if they tried i feel like my mother going out to a village hall meeting of the village council she loves red and gold and a nice white skirt byron i don't really feel like i feel like a whirling dervish no and this is what it was meant to look like the thing that's interesting i think about byron here is how self-aware he was how where he was of building his own image up rather like david bowie ziggy stardust or something this child harold who was going to be painted etched he was going to appear in lithographs and this young boy incredibly arrogant at this point uh very into himself he knew exactly in terms of career where he was going to go i think and that's quite extraordinary so i'd love to get out of this costume asap makes you feel a bit of a [ __ ] sometimes i mean i feel like i try most of the time anyway but byron's flamboyant nature was about to meet its match the warlord ali pasha's taste for pretty young men was well known when he did finally meet the young english lord he liked what he saw [Music] as byron wrote to his mother pasha remarked on my small ears curling hair and little white hands and expressed himself pleased with my appearance and garb he sent me almonds and sugared sherbet 20 times a day even asking for me at night when he was more at leisure byron was more than just flattered by the warlord's advances he might have enjoyed sleeping with women but i don't think he was particularly interested in them he even claimed they didn't have souls so the sheer power behind ali pasha's embrace must have made his hair stand up on end if nothing else what was um ali pasha's position uh with women everyone says that he was a screaming old queen basically yeah he's uh he's a is an interesting character what do they think in albania if if i was to say on national television that he had an affair with byron for example would i be would i be put into the pillory uh not at all i mean i i think it did oh really tell me well from what little we know i mean uh there are some kind of uh hints that they might have something when byron finally reached ali pasha's fabulous castle he found a wealth of dramatic material for his alter-ego that would shock and thrill his audience now this is the one of the entrance to the castle right but uh obviously this is not what the castle used to look i mean there is a great description of byron when you walk in with the imam praying and the drums and beating the drums beating the horses around greeks nubians it's a great description in daring to make this pilgrimage byron wasn't only collecting raw data for his epic travelogue child harold but setting the tone for the rest of his life impetuous reckless amoral he lived for the moment and this is the the gate i believe they walked in a lot of rubbish it's very sad the way it is but this is the entrance where they came and you can see the view you can see from miles here and you can you could just hear the kettle bells oh yeah easy so you could hear people coming probably from miles off up here this castle feels like it's it really is kind of hollywood does um the orient well you always see it endlessly in hollywood huge painted castles on the tops of rocks and english travelers kind of going up with a mule up the hill knocking on the boom boom door and opening and you see this kind of orgy of nubian slaves and eunuchs and greek soldiers and tartars all the things that are in here and drums going boom boom boom boom and it really is like that in a way and this mad huge mammoth bisexual man with long fingers covered in jewels fingering our poor lord byron it's all very exciting lord byron was soon to become the first real celebrity and it was in albania that the mutual adoration needed between a star and his audience first blossomed [Applause] word is out that i'm doing a film about him so i've been invited onto albania's biggest talk show byron championed albania in his poetry and remarkably he's still a national [Music] [Applause] hero that's spreading even me a little bit thin i'm gonna kill my bloody direct when i get my hands on it however like byron i'm going to put my best withered foot forward the strange thing is in in albania people seem to know byron much better than they do in england but it was really actually only coming here in a way to albania where i started to discover um really what byron meant in the 19th century to to the rest of the world byron was a flirt and a gossip he detested mealy mouth diplomacy an attitude that i've learned can have a price madonna sex appeal she sweats sex appeal no i said she sweats she swears byron made the albanian warlord ali pasha famous in the west with his flattering portrayal of this brutal yet noble revolutionary and his fight for albanian independence and the albanians returned the favor byron is immortalized across the land what it says is the famous quote about savage nurse to a rugged man no rugged nurse or savage man hi can one of these children please read this to me the albanians cut off from the west for decades have an extraordinary appetite for poetry everyone seems to have heard of byron what does that mean then albania let me ban my eyes on the you rugged nurse of savage man all right what is this place called oh this is square yes yes okay and where is the socialist communist party headquarters [Laughter] but this is yeah because i want to start a revolution and become communist in albania again what do you think is that brother yeah yeah no no no oh okay i won't then cheers lord byron had found himself in albania his passion and pansexuality that had been so at odds with regency england had been fired here surrounded by the 50 soldiers that ali pasha had assigned to him the english lord and his poetic alter ego were in their element [Music] but as the flames along their faces gleamed their gestures nimble dark eyes flashing free the long wild locks that to their girdles streamed while thus in concert they half sang half screamed aspiring prepared to continue his journey he was empowered and emboldened doors kept opening with new possibilities and all these new possibilities were absolutely like stars coming into line uh he'd felt this sexual ambiguity in himself he realized it wasn't accepted in the milia that he came from in the country that he came from and on his travels he suddenly discovered that all the things he was feeling other people were feeling not only other people but the most powerful people around the butcher's warlord actually was fancying him i think it gave him this life's destiny of pushing and pushing and pushing and tennessee williams uh when he writes about lord byron in in the kind of acid trip play uh camino real baron's last line as he leaves camino real is make journeys attempt them there's nothing else [Music] constantinople spanning the bosphorus center of the ottoman empire arriving here byron wrote in child harald nor oft i've seen such sight or heard such song as wooed the eye and thrilled the bosphorus along [Music] but he was always irreverent he said the difference between the british or the english and the turkish were that the vices in fashion in england were whoring and drinking whereas in turkey they were sodomy and sherbet so i'm rather looking forward to a bit of sodomy and sherbet myself while i'm here sorry granny sorry mum [Music] byron had avoided the predictability of standard grand tour destinations in favor of the more exotic he discovered the imaginative possibilities of turkey by going well off the beaten track i think this must be some kind of um catalogue of what first of all is available in the constantinople byron and hobass went to these kind of bars pubs where boy dancers did beastly things according to hob houses hot purses descriptions and he called them um buggery shops and uh they did kind of basic lap dances for guys and then guys would take them off and um have sex with them here's one with the kind of liberty of the barricades hat or father crystal and a tattoo i don't know whether he's been waxing but he's got a little kind of bit of hair down the middle only in one ball seems to be turkish tradition for this beastly sight we paid 55 piastres five to the boys each and five to all the fiddlers half mast bayern excitedly described the hammams as a marble paradise of sherbet and sodomy oh prisoner naked prisoner with a hard on you see you can have fun in prison even in ottoman turkey this is um stories about various bath house boys and they really are quite extraordinary here's a good one hamleki ibrahim was once a young soldier of the sultan's bodyguard division he lies uncovered in bed or on the white marble floor of the halverd he never cares if the penis is too long or too big but takes it in with the power of his youth without any complaint he goes on all night until the sun rises without charge and becomes your fellow lover in bed this much loyalty is more than you would expect from a naked bathmaster his nightly cost was 450 silver coins to get the utmost enjoyment out of these nightly visits he never hesitates to lie under his host and to entertain him with his [ __ ] he's a passionate and valorous man i mean it so there you go [Music] it wasn't just the sex lives of the ottoman empire that fascinated byron but its power and politics he looked on turkish sultan as the ruler of a vast oppressive empire but that didn't stop him from using his title to gain an introduction like him i've wangled an invitation to stay at the british embassy i sometimes thought i should have been an ambassador i could have been an ambassador that'd be very good very regal or vice regal at least good afternoon this building is on the same site as the embassy that byron visited in 1810 it's now the consulate general and our man in istanbul is called jessica and she's rather wonderful let's go up the grand staircase oh my god this is quite grand okay this is a nice bit of furniture you like that i thought you'd like that we have our visitors book participation yes now then i have a feeling somebody's watching me oh it's her majesty in very good shape fine looking woman she does look marvelous but she's quite well hung isn't she i mean what'd you say stacked good for her thank you steve for having me that's why you'll never make it into the diplomatic section no because if i'd gone into a diplomatic i wouldn't be like this now right this is our room and then we've got two guest rooms up here one one that doesn't have a bathroom one that does have a bathroom this is yours good okay see you all later bye thanks a lot okay cup of tea please someone and a couple of belly dancers oh jessica you are naughty you haven't had the winter cleaners in the party baron behaved rather bizarrely in turkey dressing up in strange costumes and generally ruffling local british feathers with his extreme mood swings he found the turks honest but was appalled by their brutality and the sight of human heads on stakes however the timing of his visit couldn't have been better the ambassador was about to have his farewell audience with the fearsome sultan and byron got himself invited along byron arrived in full kind of military regalia not that he was ever in a regiment with epileptics and an extraordinary hat with feathers only to discover the protocol in turkey meant that even though he was a lord he had to go behind this man called canning who was an ordinary person and he had the most amazing hissy fit and stormed off anyway he was obsessed by his position at this point so did he ever ever actually stay in the house or did he stay for two or three nights at first excellent so you really are treading in the footsteps absolutely excellent but you're not going to do the bizarre uniform and not tonight please versace all the way for me excellent i think i'm going to have a bubble bath now [Music] i've always longed to do a striptease with embassy okay 200 years ago more or less now byron would have been spending his first night in the embassy i wonder what he was thinking about it all he's such a conflicted character at this stage it's hard to follow all the mood swings he goes through from ecstasy to irritation again byron's charm and his rudeness are fascinating you know irresistibly charming and incredibly rude uh so enemies and incredibly loyal friends only nothing in the middle um just the way we like it really in byron's day the diplomatic issues were burning hot and he was fascinated by them tonight the biggies are all here i think i'll see what i can do to help when margaret thatcher came here a few years back she did something very funny she quoted lord byron saying there is no difference between the turks and um the english and then some uh journalists looked up in baron see what the end of the quote was and the quote actually was the fashions and vices are that the english love whoring and uh drinking and the turks love sodomy and sherbet so she put her foot here yeah well i mean they don't like that anymore of course he was quite enlightening in a way about um ottoman sexuality as well but he said that the only difference between the english and the turks are the english like pouring and drinking and the turks like sherbet and sodomy wow this is something that he said yes so it's quite a music i'm not sure that byron was quite as inept as a diplomat but he did eventually get to meet the sultan the event made little impression on him still he saw straight through the western cliche of the turk as a base unthinking heathen and was impressed by islamic science education and apparent honesty but in the end there was little here to fire his spirits and within four days of meeting the sultan he moved on [Music] the hellespont the entrance from the mediterranean to the black sea and the junction of europe with asia certainly did fire byron's imagination maybe because he had a withered leg he kept wanting to prove himself physically fencing boxing and above all swimming here he staged one of his most memorable feats swimming from one continent to the other i've been forced against my will to swim this helispond later on today so um yeah i am a bit worried about being run over by a cargo ship or drowning in the wake but it's better than dying during a facelift i suppose [Music] byron had a deep need to prove his manly prowess and he wrote that the feat of swimming between asia and europe here at the hellespont meant more to him than any kind of glory it's a lot longer and more hazardous than it looks so i'm getting some local help as you can see from the arrows that that's our point of travel it's two miles why can't we go quicker in that bit there is boat traffic we're going to perform a swimming from north to south wow it's a long way and these the two boys are going to be swimming with me what's your name daniel dennis and what's your name martin luther amanda hope you don't have to stop me from droning byron swam the hellespont following in the wake of the mythological figure leander who did the same to demonstrate his romantic love of the priestess hero [Music] byron was very consciously echoing classical romance but he also loved to see for its own sake saying i delight in it and come out with a buoyancy of spirits i never feel on any other occasion my hopes of being liberated by the same experience were cruelly dashed forced to stop for each russian tanker that crossed our path we made it more than halfway across before we finally had to give up byron was very courageous in one sense he somehow decided to be a [ __ ] and to be sexy and you know that takes a lot of courage and spunk for wonderful bed of word byron wrote this after um crossing the hellespond for me degenerate modern wretch though in the genial month of may my dripping limbs i faintly stretch and think i've done a feat today sweet degenerate modern wretch was that byron's view of himself two days after swimming the hellespont he wrote to a friend i'm tolerably sick of vice which i have tried in its agreeable varieties and mean on my return to cut all dissolute acquaintance leave off wine and carnal company and take myself to politics and decorum right in turkey he had seen another bloated empire hell bent on dominating and suppressing any weak nation within its reach byron always loved an underdog none more passionately than the ottoman occupied country he was now heading for his beloved greece of course the most exciting thing about a journey is the idea one has of its destination even if you never arrive at the destination even if the destination as in byron's case almost inevitably pisses you off but here the idea of arriving in athens the center of ancient greece must have been like stepping into an acid trip the ancient greece that byron knew and admired from school and whose literature influenced his poetry was in ruins and his countrymen were scavenging the remains he picked a very public fight with lord elgin for carrying off large chunks of antiquity back to england but the larger damage he saw here set him on a crusade that would shape the rest of his life byron made a connection between these ruins and what he saw as this incredible greek submissiveness to hundreds of years of ottoman rule the greek people were ruined and so he connected the two of them and again this for him was a seed that was going to grow and grow and grow over the next years i think everything came into focus for byron in this first 10-week trip to athens he thought he suddenly saw that poetry can in fact be the bellows of revolution it can fan the flames and he saw it as another potential way that he could express himself because he was becoming more and more of an outsider every step he made and of course child harold byron's idealized version of himself took up the cause fair grease sad relic of departed worth immortal though no more though fallen great who now shall lead thy scattered children forth and long accustomed bondage and create this was um a verse uh a copy of which well the original i think is in some university in america and in answer to all these questions who now shall lead thy scattered children forth byron wrote byron and long accustomed bondage uncreate and then he wrote underneath that byron so already he was seeing himself as usual center stage leading greece into the promised land [Music] byron fell for all things greek their sensibilities chimed with his and when he and hob house found themselves watching an erotic puppet show in athens cafe hop house professed loftily that nothing could be more beastly but i'm sure byron loved it [Music] [Applause] byron's sexual appetites were omnivorous one of his worst poems the maid of athens is said to be inspired by his love for a 13 year old girl but actually his interest in athenian youth seemed to lie with a boy nicolo giroud a beautiful 17 year old became language tutor and traveling companion to byron they stayed together in this monastery on a trip with nicolo they passed through here and in a letter to hop house he said he achieved at least two hundred times coitum plainum this phrase plen etoptabil dash coit was the code word or the code phrase among this group of cambridge east eats these puffs really this little puffy posse uh methodist they called each other or situain and um it was their code word it was dangerous to write about these things in those days it was uh you know terrible things happened in england uh you can read about people discovered having sex with other men being put in the pillory they often died in the pillory uh crowds of thousands came to hurl things at them [ __ ] dead cats everything it was a very very dangerous game in england to be a poof so they had to be very careful how they wrote about it there can be no doubt that he not only had sex with nicolo but also that insofar as bayern ever did he fell in love with him and in his original will he left him seven thousand pounds an enormous amount of money then by any standards i can't think of a nicer place for full intercourse to take place really it must have been lovely it's difficult to work out the real byron at this stage the revolutionary hero in waiting the lover of men and women the poet creating a whole new world with himself at its center the public figure or the private man one thing is for certain he was one of the earliest practitioners of modern pr well this is an example of the earliest studio publicity still i think it's having seen it in photographs it's lovely to see it up close and personal this is the albanian outfit that i myself have worn the felt version of a lot of people who painted him noted that while he was talking he was one character and then he put on this kind of moody petulant face which he thought was his public face and people would say to him why can't you just be natural and uh he'd say this is natural we actors do this all the time as well so he really is such a such an actor i think like beautiful lips but he knew exactly what he was doing and um in one sense in another sense this image is the image that's remained with us right until now and and certainly in terms of i think his english reputation the english has never managed really to go any further than this image and the idea that he put forward of himself in child harald and actually it's very clever but in a way if he was interested in posterity he's been hoisted by his own pitard slightly do you like him i adore him yeah he's hysterical i mean he's you know he's a really funny old thing he's mad byron was all charm when he wanted to be and utterly vile um at um other points remind you of anyone you know after two years abroad byron headed home with a time bomb the manuscript of child harold this epic travelogue suffused with sex adventure and danger would have a bigger impact on english readers than any poem that had ever been published facing him on the horizon was fame fame that he wouldn't have imagined happening because it was just bigger than i think anyone's fame had been up to that point it was it was a major international stardom one of the first um and scandal scandal that was going to overwhelm him after two years of travel in 1811 byron returned to london he went straight to his publisher john murray in mayfair to deliver the manuscript of his semi-autobiographical poem child harold's pilgrimage at 24 his life was about to be transformed come up anyhow there's the old boy on his prince john murray's direct descendant john murray vii still runs the place um yehudi menuhin's wife came and with very red lipstick kissed him and i wanted the lovely lips to remain on him but my father insisted that it was taken off but we've had lots of ladies who come and kiss him anyhow this is the uh where baron and murray and walter scott and everybody met in this room and the portrait by phillips went up while baron was still alive and people come from all over the world to see it what byron had brought back with him was to turn john murray's establishment into the hottest literary salon in london it was said that when child harald was published barn wake up to find himself famous and married find himself a gentleman anyway but how successful was it oh tremendously successful the 500 original printing was sold out in three days and then the sales just skyrocketed england had been faced by the napoleonic wars uh the battle of waterloo was still three years ahead people hadn't traveled very much here was someone who came back with these extraordinary stories of the east and the stories of conquest yes no what what do you think happened to byron after um the publication of charles harold everybody want him all society we're inviting him all the girls were after him you know it must have been absolutely appalling period but of course he enjoyed it to begin with and he lived it up uh he whenever he went to draw elaine everybody would say that's byron practically everybody had read the book because they could in those days you know that the society wasn't that large and uh the women just like moths to a light i mean i have to say there's a wonderful letter that you write to my ancestor which says um that last night i had angelina the daughter of my physician and a married woman now he loved explaining that people were married who he was having it off with you know and so he grew into this image that they got i think from child harold now do you have a bit of the child well i'll show you i'll show you an interesting thing yes here's the um the first two cantos the manuscript of child herald and if we look here you'll see what's very interesting is that in the first canto you see it says child baron byron and he crosses out baran and he puts harold which is the evidence that obviously it is fairly autobiographical and that's really why he caught the imagination they saw some of the things that happened in here they see it him as being the person and therefore he was very naughty he was wicked and people loved wicked people and what about do you have any of the hair collection pubic hair evidently was burnt by one of my ancestors but i'm not sure we had a gathering here of the murray staff once and uh not so long ago and we put out the hair and i said now here's byron's girlfriend's pubic fair and one of the girls came forward and said nonsense pubic hair is much coarser well i don't know about that but but anyhow if you're japanese but i'll show you but now wait it's like a curtain here is one of my the most moving bits which was mounted because it was an exhibition of donna josefa spanish lady this always amazes people that you're allowed to do this but this is now what you say to that but the trouble was that baron actually fell in love with her sister and i think that when she discovered this she cut off her hair and this was it this wonderful log and sent it to barn and went into a nunnery she must have been quite unbalanced because they only could have met for two or three days well they were they were all very unbalanced when byron was around right so now byron was famous everyone wanted a piece the invitations piled up and byron chose tonight's lucky hostess with his famous underlook prepared to make the jane austen posh totty's swoon and all the mr darcy's wet with jealousy an inconsequential and crippled country squire without funds had made it right into the very heart of the empire and for a brief moment london society and byron enjoyed a kind of dangerous honeymoon this was a new kind of fame byron was mobbed everywhere he went society ladies rushed to give him patronage and in one case it was rumored that he repaid one of these women by trying to sleep with her 13 year old daughter when a torrid affair with lady caroline lam the first real groupie began to cool she turned into a crazed stalker byron never chased women they chased him now they besieged him and he even pleaded with his publisher to protect him from their advances the modern celebrity culture was born fame blinded byron but unfortunately he was not above the law insanity alcoholism and maybe even a spot of sodomy were perfectly acceptable on their own but add incest to the menu and society slammed the door in the next stage of my journey i'm going to find a man transformed diving to the depths of pussy-hungry depravity soaring to the heights of national heroism before a tragic climactic end i'll be following byron into exile for sex drugs and revolution

Channel: Absolute History

Views: 79,400

Rating: 4.5394802 out of 5

Keywords: history documentaries, quirky history, world history, ridiculous history, lord byron, rupert everett, documentary, royal family, lord byron documentary, lord byron biography, lord byron drunk history, lord byron poems

Id: mjpEAiccugo

Length: 47min 20sec (2840 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 09 2021