Lord Byron, the popular English poet, politician, and freedom fighter, often considered “the world’s first celebrity,” was laid to rest in relative obscurity. Owing to his scandalous private and romantic life, the much-loved yet controversial poet was denied burial with his peers in the “Poet’s Corner” of London’s Westminster Abbey. He had died in Missolonghi while fighting for Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire.
The clergy of the tiny church of St. Mary Magdalene in Hucknall, England, were less discerning in their interring than their London counterparts. So, after the poet’s embalmed body finally returned to English shores, many notable and wealthy mourners surprised this unsuspecting Nottinghamshire backwater by showing up for the funeral of the century.
The vault of this tiny 12th-century sandstone church had been the final resting place for generations of the Byron family, who had owned nearby Newstead Abbey since 1540, when it was gifted to them by Henry VIII. Within the serene interior of the church, an old plaque set into the church floor lies close to the entrance to the Byron family vault.
The vault was last opened in 1938 by Cannon Thomas Barber, who reported that the poet’s body had been so well preserved after his death that his features were still clearly discernible. There is a small museum corner in the church with a few artifacts from the poet’s life and death, including a lock of hair and part of his shroud.
Tributes to Lord Byron are speckled across the church grounds as well. Perched high in an alcove overlooking the Church and Market is a statue of the poet. Out in the leafy squirrel-packed graveyard next to the town’s marketplace is a memorial garden dedicated to the heroic bard, complete with a faded black monument representing an open book bearing a simple epitaph.
Byron’s estranged daughter was also interred in the church vault, according to her wishes. A Victorian mathematician of exquisite mind, Ada Lovelace is credited as being the world’s first computer programmer, having created the algorithm used in Charles Babbage’s analytical difference engine in 1843.
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