The eldest son of the veteran, John Byron, father of the poet, was born in
1751, educated at Westminster, and, having received a commission, became a
captain in the guards; but his character, fundamentally unprincipled, soon
developed itself in such a manner as to alienate him from his family. In
1778, under circumstances of peculiar effrontery, he seduced Amelia
D'Arcy, the daughter of the Earl of Holdernesse, in her own right Countess
Conyers, then wife of the Marquis of Carmarthen, afterwards Duke of Leeds.
"Mad Jack," as he was called, seems to have boasted of his conquest; but
the marquis, to whom his wife had hitherto been devoted, refused to
believe the rumours that were afloat, till an intercepted letter,
containing a remittance of money, for which Byron, in reverse of the usual
relations, was always clamouring, brought matters to a crisis. The pair
decamped to the continent; and in 1779, after the marquis had obtained a
divorce, they were regularly married. Byron seems to have been not only
profligate but heartless, and he made life wretched to the woman he was
even more than most husbands bound to cherish. She died in 1784, having
given birth to two daughters. One died in infancy; the other was Augusta,
the half sister and good genius of the poet, whose memory remains like a
star on the fringe of a thunder-cloud, only brighter by the passing of the
smoke of calumny. In 1807 she married Colonel Leigh, and had a numerous
family, most of whom died young. Her eldest daughter, Georgiana, married
Mr. Henry Trevanion. The fourth, Medora, had an unfortunate history, the
nucleus of an impertinent and happily ephemeral romance.

The year after the death of his first wife, John Byron, who seems to have
had the fascinations of a Barry Lyndon, succeeded in entrapping a second.
This was Miss Catherine Gordon of Gight, a lady with considerable estates
in Aberdeenshire--which attracted the adventurer--and an overweening
Highland pride in her descent from James I., the greatest of the Stuarts,