Lord Byron (1788 - 1824). George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, known simply as Lord Byron, was an English poet, peer, and politician who became a revolutionary in the Greek War of Independence, and is considered one of the historical leading figures of the Romantic movement of his era. He is regarded as one of the greatest English poets and remains widely read and influential. Among his best-known works are the lengthy narrative poems Don Juan and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage; many of his shorter lyrics in Hebrew Melodies also became popular. He travelled extensively across Europe, especially in Italy, where he lived for seven years in the cities of Venice, Ravenna and Pisa. During his stay in Italy he frequently visited his friend and fellow poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Later in life Byron joined the Greek War of Independence fighting the Ottoman Empire and died of disease leading a campaign during that war, for which Greeks revere him as a national hero. He died in 1824 at the age of 36 from a fever contracted after the First and Second Siege of Missolonghi. Often described as the most flamboyant and notorious of the major Romantics, Byron was considered a celebrity in his era both for his success as a Romantic poet and for his aristocratic excesses, which included huge debts and many sex scandals-numerous love affairs with both men and women in a time when bisexuality was considered a crime, as well as rumours of a scandalous, incestuous liaison with his half-sister. One of his lovers, Lady Caroline Lamb, summed him up in the famous phrase mad, bad, and dangerous to know. His only legitimate child, Ada Lovelace, is regarded as a foundational figure in the field of computer programming based on her notes for Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine. Byron's illegitimate children include Allegra Byron, who died in childhood, and possibly Elizabeth Medora Leigh. Further information: Early life of George Gordon Byron Ethel Colburn Mayne states that George Gordon Byron was born on 22 January 1788, in a house on 16 Holles Street in London. His birthplace is now occupied by a branch of the English department store John Lewis. However, Robert Charles Dallas in his Recollections states that Byron was born in Dover. Byron was the son of Captain John Mad Jack Byron and his second wife, the former Catherine Gordon, a descendant of Cardinal Beaton and heiress of the Gight estate in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. Byron's father had previously seduced the married Marchioness of Carmarthen and, after she divorced her husband, he married her. His treatment of her was described as brutal and vicious, and she died after giving birth to two daughters, only one of whom survived, Byron's half-sister, Augusta. To claim his second wife's estate in Scotland, Byron's father took the additional surname Gordon, becoming John Byron Gordon, and he was occasionally styled John Byron Gordon of Gight. Byron himself used this surname for a time and was registered at school in Aberdeen as George Byron Gordon. At the age of 10 he inherited the English Barony of Byron of Rochdale, becoming Lord Byron, and eventually dropped the double surname. Byron's paternal grandparents were Vice-Admiral the Hon. John Foulweather Jack Byron, and Sophia Trevanion. Vice Admiral John Byron had circumnavigated the globe and was the younger brother of the 5th Baron Byron, known as the Wicked Lord. He was christened at St Marylebone Parish Church as George Gordon Byron, after his maternal grandfather George Gordon of Gight, a descendant of James I of Scotland, who had committed suicide in 1779. Mad Jack Byron married his second wife for the same reason that he married his first, her fortune. Byron's mother had to sell her land and title to pay her new husband's debts, and in the space of two years, the large estate, worth some E23,500, had been squandered, leaving the former heiress with an annual income in trust of only E150. In a move to avoid his creditors, Catherine accompanied her profligate husband to France in 1786, but returned to England at the end of 1787 to give birth to her son on English soil. He was born on 22 January in lodgings at Holles Street in London. Catherine moved back to Aberdeenshire in 1790, where Byron spent his childhood. His father soon joined them in their lodgings in Queen Street, but the couple quickly separated. Catherine regularly experienced mood swings and bouts of melancholy, which could be partly explained by her husband's continuingly borrowing money from her.