Allegra Byron: New information on the fate of Byron’s illegitimate daughter

The mystery that covers the fate of her body Allegra Byron, daughter of Lord Byron and her Claire Claremont, which died in an Italian convent at the age of five, comes back to the news after the revelation of the monastery archive, as presented at the 48th international Byronic conference in Messolonghi.

The unfortunate Allegrina died April 20, 1822 from an unspecified epidemic, probably typhus or malaria, in women monastery of Baniakavalo near Ravenna. Lord Byron had entrusted his daughter, the fruit of his troubled relationship with Clare Claremont, to the convent in order to receive a good upbringing and education, given that the convent also operated for financial reasons as a boarding school. His choice turned out to be fatal.

In a letter to his publisher, John Murray, two days after Allegra’s death, the poet explained that it was his wish to send the remains of the little girl to England to be buried in the churchyard of Harrow School (where she had attended) and “where I once wished mine were”. The child’s body “is embalmed and in pencil” he noted – while in the postscript of his letter, possibly to ensure easier acceptance of his request, he added: “You know that for Protestants, burial in holy ground is not allowed in Catholic countries.”

According to the official account, the coffin with Allegra’s body traveled to England, but the vicar of the temple he was not allowed to be buried in the Christian cemetery the illegitimate daughter of a scandalous poet. The girl was buried near the church, in an unknown location. No tombstone indicates where his body was laid.

Allegra’s mother, he never ceased to accuse Byron for his decision to send her daughter to the convent. The two had separated, their relations already almost hostile, and Byron stubbornly refused to allow her to visit her daughter. As Daisy Hay informs us in her book Young Romantics, Claire Claremont later conceived the paranoid idea that “her daughter had not died in 1822, and that Byron, in an act of utter dishonor, had decided to persuade Claire to her demise, sending to England a goat in a child’s coffin”.

However, according to research presented at the conference of the International Association of Byronic Societies, Fernando Valverde, associate professor of Spanish Literature at the University of Virginia and former journalist of the Spanish El Pais, Allegra is very likely not buried in Britain, but to be buried in a chapel of the Italian monastery.

The Baniakavalo Monastery archive remained inaccessible, despite repeated attempts by the international Byronic community to gain access to it. A few years ago the monastery ceased to function and its property was transferred to a Belgian company. In 2020, during the pandemic that had led to the temporary suspension of the evacuation of the buildings, Mr. Valverde together with his wife, Prof. Nieves García Prados, managed with persistent field research in the area, to gain access to the archive and photograph the material of the period 1820-1822 that concerned the unfortunate girl.

“Due to the epidemic that caused the death of Allegra, the Italian authorities it would have been impossible for them to have let a body travel all the way to England” Prof. Valverde estimates. “Even in the case of Percy Shelley who drowned in the Adriatic, his body after being pulled from the water was burned. I don’t see the reason why an exception would have been made in the case of Allegra”.

A nun of the Baniakavalo Monastery actually notes in her letter that the girl never left the monastery, and that he is buried under an altar in the chapel of the Virgin of Lourdes. On the other hand, however, the abbess of the monastery, in a letter to a teacher of the boarding school, appears to state that Allegra’s body left Livorno for England and that the ship that carried her sank in the waters of the Adriatic. “The paradox in this case is that the area of ​​the supposed wreck is located close to the spot where Shelley also drowned,” notes F. Valverde.

The revelation of the monastery’s documents shows that the mystery that already covers the death of little Allegra is growing and is expected to trigger a new round of discussions in the Byronism field – and not only. Did Allegrina’s body travel to England and where is she buried? If it never arrived, who should we believe? The abbess who appears to claim that the girl’s body was covered by the waters of the Adriatic, or the nun who also indicates her grave. And if one of the two women is lying, what exactly is the reason?

Allegrina was the fruit of a troubled relationship mired in bitterness and hatred. Young people, Byron, Shelley, Mary Shelley, Clare, experimented with ideals and choices – free love, shared parenting, liberalism and political radicalism – that brought them into conflict with the establishment of the time. them, but also with themselves. Through this conflict, they themselves came out wounded.

As Byron noted of his dead child in a letter to Sir Walter Scott on May 4, 1822, “my only consolation beyond time, is the thought that she is either at rest, or happy – for the few years ( just five) of her life, they protected her from falling into any sin outside of that which we inherited from Adam”. He completed his report with a line from Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”: “Whom the gods love, dies young”.

Perhaps the sisters of the Monastery of Saint John the Baptist, in the small village outside Ravenna, had the same thought. Perhaps they finally decided that the grassy place for the rest of an innocent creature, unlucky, but dear to God, to be a crypt under their chapel.

Andreas Makridis