Location: Church of St. Mary Magdalene, Hucknall, Nottinghamshire, England
Cause of death: Fever
Photo taken by: Andrewrabbott
Buy books by Lord Byron
English poet, peer, politician, and a leading figure in the Romantic movement. Among his best-known works are the lengthy narrative poems, Don Juan and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, and the short lyric poem, She Walks in Beauty. He has been described as the most flamboyant and notorious of the major Romantics, Byron was both celebrated and castigated in life for his aristocratic excesses, including huge debts, numerous love affairs – with men as well as women, and self-imposed exile.
Byron travelled extensively across Europe, especially in Italy, where he lived for seven years with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Later in his brief life, Byron joined the Greek War of Independence fighting the Ottoman Empire, for which Greeks revere him as a national hero.
Byron died in Missolonghi, Greece from a fever; he was 36 years old. His body was embalmed, but the Greeks wanted some part of their hero to stay with them. According to some sources, his heart remained at Missolonghi. His other remains were sent to England for burial in Westminster Abbey, but the Abbey refused for reason of "questionable morality". In 1969, 145 years after Byron's death, a memorial to him was finally placed in Westminster Abbey.
Comments