David Crane: Lord Byron’s Jackal: A Life of Trelawny

One day I had a little girl for my companion, whom I had enticed from the nursery to go with me to get some fruit clandestinely. We slunk out, and entered the garden unobserved. Just as we were congratulating ourselves under a cherry-tree, up comes the accursed monster of a raven. It was no longer to be endured. He seized hold of the little girl’s frock; she was too frightened to scream; I did not hesitate an instant. I told her not to be afraid, and threw myself upon him. He let her go, and attacked me with bill and talon. I got hold of him by the neck, and heavily lifting him up, struck his body against the tree and the ground …

His look was now most terrifying: one eye was hanging out of his head, the blood coming from his mouth, his wings flapping the earth in disorder, and with a ragged tail, which I had half plucked by pulling at him during his first execution. He made a horrid struggle for existence, and I was bleeding all over. Now, with the aid of my brother, and as the raven was exhausted by exertion and wounds, we succeeded in gibbeting him again; and then with sticks we cudgelled him to death, beating his head to pieces. Afterwards we tied a stone to him, and sunk him in the duck-pond. 5

Trelawny was five at the time of this incident, but there is no record of where it might have taken place. Judging from Adventures and the baptismal records of the successive children born to his increasingly gloomy parents, the Trelawny family lived a peripatetic life during his early years, moving between rented houses in the country, his maternal uncle John Hawkins’s seat at Bignor in Sussex and the family house of his grandfather, General Trelawny, at 9 Soho Square. When Trelawny was six his father had taken on the name of Brereton and with it a large fortune. Yet even with this new wealth there seems to have been no thought of an education for Trelawny and he grew up by his own account an intractable and surly boy, unloved and unloving, as large, bony and awkward as his mother and as violent in his moods as his father.

It was one of his father’s outbursts of temper that led, when he was about nine or ten, to his being literally frog-marched with his older brother Henry, to a private establishment in Bristol for his first experience of school. It was a bleakly forbidding building, enclosed within high walls and, to a child’s eyes, more like a prison. ‘He is savage, incorrigible! Sir, he will come to the gallows, if you do not scourge the devil out of him,’ 6 was his father’s parting injunction to the headmaster. The Reverend Samuel Seyer, incongruously small, dapper and powdered for a man who was a savage disciplinarian even by the standards of the day, eagerly embraced the advice. As a pupil of his, Trelawny later recalled with a nice discrimination, he was caned most hours and flogged most days. It was when he finally turned on his attackers, half-strangling the under master and assaulting Seyer himself, that he was sent home, as ignorant as the day he arrived two years earlier. ‘Come, Sir, what have you learnt,’ his father demanded of him.

‘Learnt!’ I ejaculated, speaking in a hesitant voice, for my mind misgave me as to what was to follow.

‘Is that the way to address me? Speak out, you dunce! and say, Sir! Do you take me for a foot-boy?’ raising his voice to a roar, which utterly drove out of my head what little the school-master had, with incredible toil and punishment, driven into it. ‘What have you learnt, you ragamuffin? What do you know?’

‘Not much, Sir!’

‘What do you know in Latin?’

‘Latin, Sir? I don’t know Latin, Sir!’

‘Not Latin, you idiot! Why, I thought they taught nothing but Latin.’

‘Yes, Sir; – cyphering.’

‘Well, how far did you proceed in arithmetic?’

‘No, Sir! – they taught me cyphering and writing.’

My father looked grave. ‘Can you work the rule of three, you dunce?’

‘Rule of three, Sir?’

‘Do you know subtraction? Come, you blockhead, answer me! Can you tell me, if five are taken from fifteen, how many remain?’

‘Five and fifteen, Sir, are – ’counting on my fingers, but missing my thumb, ‘are – are – nineteen, Sir!’

‘What! you incorrigible fool! – Can you repeat your multiplication table?’

‘What table, Sir?’

Then turning to my mother, he said: ‘Your son is a downright idiot, Madam, – perhaps knows not his own name. Write your name, you dolt!’

‘Write, Sir? I can’t write with that pen, Sir; it is not my pen.’

‘Then spell your name, you ignorant savage!’

‘Spell, Sir?’ I was so confounded that I misplaced the vowels. He arose in wrath, overturned the table, and bruised his shins in attempting to kick me, as I dodged him, and rushed out of the room. 7

As the poet James Michie once remarked, the fact that a man lies most of the time does not mean he lies all of the time, but with Trelawny it is as well to be sceptical. There is no way of knowing whether this exchange, any more than the duel with the raven, actually occurred, and yet what is perhaps more important is that even as a history of Trelawny’s inner life Adventures needs to be treated with a caution that has not always been shown.

There is an obvious sense in which this same wariness has to be extended to all autobiographies, consciously or unconsciously shaping and selecting material as they inevitably do, but with Trelawny the timing of his Adventures makes it of particular relevance. There seems no doubt that the miseries he describes in its pages were real enough, and yet by the time that he came to put them in written form in 1831, the friendships of Byron and Shelley had armed him with a self-dramatizing language of alienation and revolt that enabled him to invest his infant battles with a stature and significance which seem curiously remote from the prosaic reality of childhood unhappiness.

For all that, though, it is clear that the young Trelawny felt and resented these indignities with an unusual intensity. There was an innate physical and mental toughness about him which equipped him for survival in even the most alien of worlds, and yet beneath a hardening carapace of indifference that sense of injustice and emotional betrayal which would fuel his whole life was festering dangerously. On his first night at school, as he lay on a beggarly pallet of a bed, the rush-lights extinguished, he had listened to the snores of his fellow pupils and stifled the sobs that would have betrayed his misery. The child who two years later escaped Seyer’s joyless and savage regime would allow no such weakness in his makeup, no vulnerability. Deprived of affection, he had learned the power of brute strength and domination, the virtue of self-reliance. He had become, he says in his richest Romantic strain, ‘callous’, ‘sullen’, ‘Vindictive’, ‘insensible’ and ‘indifferent to shame and fear’. 8 ‘The spirit in me was gathering strength,’ he proudly recalled, ‘in despite of every endeavour to destroy it, like a young pine flourishing in the cleft of a bed of granite.’ 9

For a younger son of Trelawny’s class and educational inadequacy the options in life were strictly limited, but one of the more intriguing schemes for his future after this failure at school was Oxford and a career in the church. With a boy of thirteen who was still plainly gallows-bound, however, the navy offered a more traditional solution, and soon after leaving Seyer’s academy he was taken by his father down to Portsmouth and placed as a gentleman volunteer on the Superb under the command of a Captain Keates.

The treatment a volunteer of Trelawny’s age could expect in the Royal Navy during the time of the Napoleonic Wars would have varied with the personality of the ship’s captain, but even under the most enlightened and humane regime the life in the midshipman’s cockpit of a man-of-war was harsh and brutalizing. In the light of his fixed hatred of the service in later life, however, it is interesting that Trelawny’s first feelings for his new profession were ones of delight, and he soon had an unforgettable glimpse of the excitement and prize-money which made the wartime navy such a dangerous but attractive option to indigent younger sons. After a few days at sea, his ship crossed with the Pickle on its way back from Trafalgar, bringing to the stunned crew of the Superb the news of Nelson’s victory and death. The next morning they fell in with a part of the triumphant fleet, and Trelawny was transferred first to the Temeraire and then across to the stricken Colossus for its journey back to Portsmouth.