his grandfather's marriage with Miss Trevanion of Cærhayes, and his solicitors reported that there was no family record as to where it had taken place, no legal record that it had ever been celebrated. Byron was almost mad with anxiety and dismay. Without that proof he could not take his seat, and himself and his peerage must be alike discredited. And God knows, he reflected bitterly, the Byrons had had discredit enough and to spare, and cursed bad luck as well. To him at times the peerage appeared designed only to draw attention to misfortunes and ill-doings much better forgotten. They haunted him, defacing his pride in it like a smear on the face of a portrait which must catch the eye of all beholders before they have time to appraise the likeness.
Indeed, the family history was far from pleasant reading. There was a highly picturesque "Sir John the Little with the Great Beard," a Byron of Harry the Eighth's time, who had received from that august hand a grant of the Priory of Newstead—no doubt an ancestor to plume oneself upon at the safe distance of three centuries, had it not been that Sir John's morals were unfortunately as picturesque as his beard and his eldest son was, alas, filius naturalis. It could pass no otherwise, and for all time the bar sinister divided the successors from that Norman ancestry with which every well-found peerage should be decorated. That memory was loathsome to Byron.
The peerage itself came later, the reward of devotion to a family as unlucky as the Byrons themselves: the Stuarts. Charles the First granted it, and passed, and then set in an era of poverty and tedium, and no Byron distinguished himself until the fourth baron, and he did so in a way the family could have well dispensed with. He killed his cousin, Mr. Chaworth, in a duel so far outside the line of even the elastic code of the eighteenth
