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Susannah Harker reads from the story of how, within three generations, the illustrious family of poet Lord Byron disintegrated into adultery, debt, elopement, coercion and murder.

In the early 18th century. the Byron family seat, Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire, was among the most admired aristocratic homes in England. But by the end of the century, the building had become a crumbling, empty ruin. Debt-ridden and friendless, the 5th Lord Byron – known to history as the Wicked Lord – lay on his deathbed, waited on by his one remaining servant and sharing his bed with a thriving population of crickets.

This was the home that a small, bewildered boy of ten from Aberdeen – whom the world would later come to know as Lord Byron, the Romantic poet, soldier, and adventurer – would inherit in 1798. His family, he would come to learn, had in recent decades become infamous for almost unfathomable levels of scandal and impropriety - from elopement, murder, and kidnapping to adultery, coercion, and thrilling near-death experiences at sea.

Just as it had shocked the society of Georgian London, the outlandish and scandalous story of the Byrons – and the myths that began to rise around it – would influence his life and poetry for posterity.

The Fall of the House of Byron follows the fates of Lord Byron’s ancestors over three generations in a drama that begins in rural Nottinghamshire and plays out in the gentlemen’s clubs of Georgian London, amid tempests on far-flung seas, and in the glamour of pre-revolutionary France.

In this second episode, we hear the story of the scandalous life of William, the Wicked Lord. Inheriting his title and estates at the age of 13, he frittered away the Byron fortune – and his wife’s fortune too - on art, gambling, women and a fleet of 25 ton model warships for the lake at Newstead. He finally cemented his place in history’s catalogue of villains by adding to the titles coward, adulterer and debtor, that of murderer.

Written by Emily Brand
Abridged and produced by Jane Greenwood
Read by Susannah Harker
A Loftus Media production for Â鶹ԼÅÄ Radio 4