“It was better not to hear … it would be unfair to hear.” (March 28, 1814)

In his superb biography of Beau Brummell (The Ultimate Dandy, London 2005), Ian Kelly writes: “Homosexuality […] was viewed with ambivalence. Though illegal and in theory punishable by death since 1533, buggery or sodomy, as homosexual practice was variously termed, was an acknowledged fact of the London demi-monde” (p. 93). If you’ve been puzzled by Justin’s attitude towards his cousin, remember that sexual acts between men were a hanging offence until 1861. The last executions took place in 1835, but homosexual practices were not decriminalized in England until 1967, and even then there were strict limits with regard to age and place that were not overturned until 2000 – by the European Court of Human Rights. So while it is painful for Justin to know that his cousin is suffering from the pangs of unrequited love, he is also battling with a very strong social prejudice he cannot help but share, and extremely worried lest anyone should become aware of Matthew’s predilection. You may remember from the first chapter that he had hoped Matthew would have “grown out of it” (p. 9). It seems that, like many of his contemporaries, he viewed “homosexuality among adolescent boys […] as a ‘phase’”(Kelly, pp. 93f.).

I wanted to consult Fiona MacCarthy’s Byron: Life and Legend (London 2004) for this context, too, but find that I’ve stupidly left the book in France and can’t get at it now. When I turned to Peter Quennell’s Byron: The Years of Fame (1935) instead, I discovered that homosexuality is mentioned only once in the entire book, although there are some subtly insightful passages about Byron’s relationship to his own sex as well as the other. That in itself says a lot about changing attitudes.