From the following reign (Charles I.) the nobility of the family date its origin.  In the year 1643, Sir John Byron, great grandson of him who succeeded to the rich domains of Newstead, was created Baron Byron of Rochdale in the county of Lancaster; and seldom has a title been bestowed for such high and honourable services as those by which this nobleman deserved the gratitude of his royal master.  Through almost every page of the History of the Civil Wars, we trace his name in connection with the varying fortunes of the king, and find him faithful, persevering, and disinterested to the last.  “Sir John Biron,” says the writer of Colonel Hutchinson’s Memoirs, “afterwards Lord Biron, and all his brothers, bred up in arms, and valiant men in their own persons, were all passionately the king’s.”  There is also, in the answer which Colonel Hutchinson, when governor of Nottingham, returned, on one occasion, to his cousin-german, Sir Richard Biron, a noble tribute to the valour and fidelity of the family.  Sir Richard having sent to prevail on his relative to surrender the castle, received for answer, that “except he found his own heart prone to such treachery, he might consider there was, if nothing else, so much of a Biron’s blood in him, that he should very much scorn to betray or quit a trust he had undertaken.”

Such are a few of the gallant and distinguished personages, through whom the name and honours of this noble house have been transmitted.  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.  It was about the year 1750, that the shipwreck and sufferings of Mr. Byron[9] (the grandfather of the illustrious subject of these pages) awakened, in no small degree, the attention and sympathy of the public.  Not long after, a less innocent sort of notoriety attached itself to two other members of the family,—­one, the grand-uncle of the poet, and the other, his father.  The former in the year 1765, stood his trial before the House of Peers for killing, in a duel, or rather scuffle, his relation and neighbour Mr. Chaworth; and the latter, having carried off to the Continent the wife of Lord Carmarthen, on the noble marquis obtaining a divorce from the lady, married her.  Of this short union one daughter only was the issue, the Honourable Augusta Byron, now the wife of Colonel Leigh.

In reviewing thus cursorily the ancestors, both near and remote, of Lord Byron, it cannot fail to be remarked how strikingly he combined in his own nature some of the best and, perhaps, worst qualities that lie scattered through the various characters of his predecessors,—­the generosity, the love of enterprise, the high-mindedness of some of the better spirits of his race, with the irregular passions, the eccentricity, and daring recklessness of the world’s opinion, that so much characterised others.