1799 - A Gay Perspective

1799

 

A GAY PERSPECTIVE

 

EUROPE

 

Accompanied by May Gray, his nurse, George Gordon Byron (Lord Byron) lived with the Parkyus family, Nottingham, while the quack Lavender doctored his foot.

 

Under tutelage of “Dummer” Rogers, Byron read parts of Virgil and Cicero.

 

Byron traveled to London with John Hanson (July 12).

 

Catherine Gordon Byron (Lord Byron’s mother) revealed to Hanson that her yearly income had been reduce to 122 pounds.

 

Byron met Frederick Howard, the fifth Earl of Carlisle (1748-1825), distantly related to Byron (the son of Byron’s patenal great aunt) (July 13).

 

Hanson encouraged Lord Carlisle to confer on the young lord’s education and to act as his official guardian.  Carlisle subsequently uses his influence to get Catherine Gordon Byron a yearly provision of 300 pounds out of the Civil List.

 

Drs. Baillie and Laurie examined Byron’s club foot (July 17).  On their recommendations, Mr. T. Sheldrake made a brace (which Byron neglects to wear).

 

Hanson dismissed May Gray after learning that she had been in the habit of coming to bed with Byron and indulging in sexual play (August).

 

Byron also admitted to Gray’s beatings, drunkenness and general neglect of his duties.

 

Lord Byron entered the school of William Glennie, an Aberdonian in Dulwich (September 1).

 

George Gordon Byron (January 22, 1788 – April 19, 1824), commonly known simply as Lord Byron, was a British poet and a leading figure in Romanticism.  Amongst Byron’s best-known works are the brief poems She Walks in Beauty, When We Two Parted, and So, we’ll go no more a roving, in addition to the narrative poems Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Don Juan. Lord Byron is regarded as one of the greatest British poets and remains widely read.

 

Byron was celebrated in life for aristocratic excesses including huge debts, numerous love affairs, and his self-imposed exile.  He traveled to fight against the Ottoman Empire in the Greek War of Independence, for which Greeks revere him as a national hero.  Lord Byron died from a fever contracted while in Missolonghi in Greece.

 

Byron was the son of Captain John “Mad Jack” Byron and his third wife, the former Catherine Gordon (d. 1811), heiress of Gight in Aberdeenshire, Scotland.  Byron’s paternal grandparents were Vice-Admiral John “Foulweather Jack” Byron and Sophia Trevanion.  Vice-Admiral Byron had circumnavigated the globe, and was the younger brother of the 5^th Baron Byron, known as “the wicked Lord”.

 

Byron was christened George Gordon Byron at Saint Marylebone Parish Church and was named after his maternal grandfather, George Gordon of Gight, a descendant of King James I.  His grandfather committed suicide in 1779. 

 

Byron’s mother, Catherine, had to sell her land and title to pay her husband’s debts.  John Byron may have married Catherine for her money.  However, after squandering her fortune and selling her estate, and after having spent very little time with his wife and child in order to avoid creditors, John Byron deserted them both and died a year later. Thereafter, Catherine frequently experienced mood swings and bouts of melancholy. 

 

After John Byron’s death, Catherine and George moved back to Scotland, where Catherine raised her son in Aberdeenshire.  On May 21, 1798, the death of Byron’s great-uncle, the “wicked” Lord Byron, made the ten-year old the 6^th Baron Byron, and the young boy then inherited both title and estate, Newstead Abbey, in Nottinghamshire, England.  Byron’s mother proudly took him to England.  However, Byron rarely lived on his estate because the Abbey was rented to Lord Grey de Ruthy, among others, during Byron’s adolescence.

 

In August 1799, Byron entered the school of William Glennis, an Aberdonian in Dulwich.  Byron would later say that around this time and beginning when he still lived in Scotland, his governess, May Gray, would come to bed with him at night and “play tricks with his person”.  According to Byron, this “caused the anticipated melancholy of my thoughts – having anticipated life.” 

 

May Gray was subsequently dismissed for allegedly beating Byron when he was eleven.

 

Jean-Jacques-Regis de Cambaceres was named Second Consul of the First Empire.

 

Jean-Jacques-Régis de Cambacérès, the first Duke of Parma (and later the first Duke of Cambacérès) (October 18, 1753 – March 8, 1824) was a French lawyer and statesman during the French Revolution and the First Empire, best remembered as the author of the Napoleonic code, which still forms the basis of French civil law.

 

Cambacérès was born in Montpellier, into a family of the legal nobility. In 1774 he graduated in law and succeeded his father as councillor in the Montpellier court of accounts and finances. He was a supporter of the French Revolution of 1789, and was elected as an extra deputy to represent the nobility of Montpellier (in case the government doubled the nobility's delegation) at the meeting of the Estates-General at Versailles.  However, because the delegation was not increased he never took his seat.

 

In 1792, Cambeceres represented the department of Hérault in the National Convention which assembled and proclaimed the First French Republic in September 1792.

 

In revolutionary terms, Cambacérès was a moderate. During the trial of Louis XVI, he protested that the Convention did not have the power to sit as a court and demanded that the king should have due facilities for his defense. Nevertheless, when the trial proceeded, Cambaceres voted with the majority that declared Louis to be guilty, but recommended that the penalty should be postponed until it could be ratified by a legislative body.

 

In 1793, Cambacérès became a member of the Committee of General Defence, but was not a member of its famous successor, the Committee of Public Safety, until the end of 1794, during the Thermidorian Reaction after the Reign of Terror had ended. In the meantime, he worked on much of the legislation of the revolutionary period. During 1795, he was also employed as a diplomat, and negotiated a peace with Spain.

 

Cambacérès was considered too conservative to be one of the five Directors who took power in the coup of 1795.  Finding himself in opposition to the Executive Directory he retired from politics. In 1799, however, as the Revolution entered a more moderate phase, he became Minister of Justice. He supported the coup of 18 Brumaire (in November 1799) that brought Napoleon Bonaparte to power as First Consul in a new regime designed to establish a stable constitutional republic.

 

In December 1799, Cambacérès was appointed Second Consul under Bonaparte. He owed this appointment to his vast legal knowledge and his reputation as a moderate republican. His most important work during this period was the drawing up of a new Civil Law Code, later called the Napoleonic code, France's first modern legal code. The code was promulgated by Bonaparte (as Emperor Napoleon) in 1804. It was the work of Cambacérès and a commission of four lawyers.

 

The Napoleonic Code was a revised form of Roman law, with some modifications drawn from the laws of the Franks still current in northern France (Coutume de Paris). The Code was later extended by Napoleon's conquests to Poland, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, western Germany and Spain, and indirectly to the Spanish colonies in Latin America. Cambacérès' work has thus been enormously influential in European and American legal history. Versions of the Code are still in force in Quebec and Louisiana.

 

The Napoleonic Code dealt with Civil Law. Other codes ensued for penal law, criminal procedure, and civil procedure.

 

It is widely believed that Cambacérès is responsible for decriminalizing homosexuality in France, though this view is disputed.

Before the French Revolution, sodomy had been a capital crime under royal legislation. The penalty was burning at the stake. Very few men, however, were ever actually prosecuted and executed for consensual sodomy (no more than five in the entire eighteenth century). Sodomites arrested by the police were more usually released with a warning or held in prison for (at most) a few weeks or months. The National Constituent Assembly abolished the law against sodomy when it revised French criminal law in 1791 and got rid of a variety of offenses inspired by religion, including blasphemy. Since there was no public debate, we do not know its motives (a similar state of affairs occurred during the early years of the Russian Revolution).

 

Cambacérès was a homosexual, his sexual orientation was well-known, and he does not seem to have made any effort to conceal it. He remained unmarried, and kept to the company of other bachelors. Napoleon is recorded as making a number of jokes on the subject. Robert Badinter once mentioned in a speech to the French National Assembly, during debates on reforming the homosexual age of consent, that Cambacérès was known in the gardens of the Palais-Royal as "tante Urlurette".

 

In fact, however, Cambacérès had nothing at all to do with ending the legal prosecution of homosexuals. He did play a key role in drafting the Code Napoléon, but this was a civil law code. He had nothing to do with the Penal Code of 1810, which covered sexual crimes.

 

The authors of the Penal Code of 1810 had the option of reintroducing a law against male homosexuality (as was eventually done in the Soviet Union), but there is no evidence that they even considered doing so. This had nothing to do with the influence of Cambacérès. However, Napoleonic officials could and did repress public expressions of homosexuality using other laws, such as "offenses against public decency." Nevertheless, despite police surveillance and harassment, the Revolutionary and Napoleonic period was a time of relative freedom and opened the modern era of legal toleration for homosexuality in Europe.

 

Napoleonic conquests imposed the principles of Napoleon's Penal Code (including the decriminalization of homosexuality) on many other parts of Europe, including Belgium, the Dutch Netherlands, the Rhineland, and Italy. Other states freely followed the French example (for example, Bavaria in 1813 and Spain in 1822).

 

Cambacérès disapproved of Bonaparte's accumulation of power into his own hands, culminating in the proclamation of the First French Empire on 18 May 1804. Nevertheless, he retained high office under Napoleon as Arch-Chancellor of the Empire and as President of the House of Peers from June 2, 1815 to 7 July 7, 1815. He also became a prince of the Empire and in 1808 was made Duke of Parma (French: duc de Parme). His duchy was one of the twenty created as duché grand-fief (among 2200 noble titles created by Napoleon)—a rare hereditary honor, extinguished upon Cambacérès's death in 1824.  Even rarer, the title was created in another part of the peninsula than Napoleon's realm.

Under Napoleon, as under the revolutionary regime, Cambaceres was a force for moderation, opposing adventures such as the invasion of Russia in 1812.

 

As Napoleon became increasingly obsessed with military affairs, Cambacérès became the de facto domestic head of government of France, a position which inevitably made him increasingly unpopular as France's economic situation grew worse. His taste for high living attracted hostile comment. However, he was given credit for the justice and moderation of Napoleon’s government, although the enforcement of conscription was increasingly resented towards the end of the Napoleonic Wars.

 

When the Empire fell in 1814 Cambacérès retired to private life, but was recalled during Napoléon's brief return to power in 1815. After the restoration of the monarchy, he was in danger of arrest for his revolutionary activities, and he was exiled from France in 1816. But the fact that he had opposed the execution of Louis XVI counted in his favor, and in May 1818 his civil rights as a citizen of France were restored. From 1815 on, Cambacérès used the title of Duke of Cambacérès (on the fall of the Empire, the Duchy of Parma passed to former Empress Marie Louise). He was a member of the Académie française, and lived quietly in Paris until his death in 1824.