[In the excerpt that follows, Roberts traces some of the egregiously “fabulous” features of Trelawny's accounts of his early life and his viewing of Byron's corpse, an incident which provoked a great deal of controversy in Victorian society.]

[Edward John Trelawny] was a light liar, an embroiderer of facts. He wrote two accounts of his life with Shelley and Byron. The first appeared in 1858, written after he was sixty, entitled Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron. Then, twenty years later, when an old man of eighty-five, he brought out another version, entitled Records of Shelley, Byron and the Author in which his story of Byron's lameness is changed. It is this volume which Mr David Wright has edited with great thoroughness and clarity, together with an excellent Introduction, and Notes. He holds the balance firmly, his deductions are sound, his judgement acute, his documentation of the text excellent.

Trelawny's life was bizarre enough without having to embroider it with lies. At the age of thirty, he arrived in Pisa and attached himself to Shelley and Byron, living there. He was present at the cremation of Shelley on the beach at Viareggio, and he ensured his immortality by buying a plot of land in the Protestant Cemetery at Rome, in order to lie beside the remains of the poet in his simple grave under the old city wall. It is a gruesome fact that neither of these poets, Byron and Shelley, was allowed to retain his heart. Byron's went into the box in the Hucknall vault, Trelawny fished Shelley's out of the flames of the cremation. Shelley's wife squeamishly refused to take it and told him to give it to Leigh Hunt, also present at the cremation, if Trelawny's written account is accurate. We know that Byron failed to pursuade Hunt to give it to Mary but Jane Williams at length succeeded, and so the heart went to England. Trelawny's bid for immortality succeeded. He lies next to Shelley in the Protestant Cemetery at Rome.

Trelawny must have been an impressive character, tall, with a mass of black curls. Shelley took to him, Byron never wholly. The latter angered him by laughing at the stories of his exploits. This added acid to Trelawny's ink when he came to reminisce about his friendship with Byron. He was the scion of an old Cornish family, with a private income of £500 a year—which today would equal £5,000. Obstinate, rebellious from boyhood, he had scenes with his father. After being expelled from various schools he was placed in the navy as a midshipman at thirteen and just failed to be present at the Battle of Trafalgar. He went in his ship to South America and, according to his Adventures of a Younger Son, an amazing and very successful early autobiography, he deserted ship and joined up with a half-pirate, De Ruyter, who gave him, aged seventeen, command of a vessel in which he roamed the Indian Ocean and China seas, fighting with junks and pirate ships. He married Zella, a high-born Arab girl of thirteen. Her early death stunned him. He made a funeral pyre on the beach and tried to end himself in its flames. It is all very lurid and exciting, but actually Trelawny never left the British navy ship. He described how he went to France with De Ruyter, who carried despatches to the Emperor, and then, a twenty-year-old midshipman-widower, ex-pirate, Trelawny slipped across the Channel to England. The privateer-runner, De Ruyter, never existed. No wonder he astonished the little group at Pisa, Shelley, Byron, Williams. He had married again at twenty, fathered a child and then divorced his wife and taken to travelling on the continent. He had a passion for contemporary poetry, Byron and Shelley his stars. So to Pisa he went. Never out of the Byron circle, he followed the poet to Greece where he experienced more incredible adventures, living in a cave with Greek revolutionaries and marrying the daughter of Odysseus, a famous Greek brigand, who had trained in the school of the notorious Ali Pasha, the Lion, whose head was finally cut off and sent to Constantinople for public exhibition as an enemy of the Sultan.

It is where Trelawny comes upon the scene immediately after Byron's death in Missolonghi that we receive the most interesting and controversial story from his pen, twice told and altered, and acutely analysed in this Penguin reprint by the editor, David Wright. Trelawny wrote that he arrived at Missolonghi on April 24th or 25th 1824, in time to view Byron's body before the coffin was sealed and shipped for England on the Florida. Doris Langley Moore, who has devoted her life to studying Byron, does not believe that Trelawny arrived at Missolonghi in time to view the body. An official document stated that it was hermetically sealed in the presence of witnesses on April the 25th, which knocks out Trelawny's claim. It is odd that in all his contemporary letters to friends he never mentioned having viewed Byron's body. He did not publish his story of having viewed it until thirty-four years later, and when he did claim to have seen it he made an appalling error. He got Fletcher, the valet, out of the death chamber, he says, by sending him for a glass of water.

On his leaving the room, to confirm or remove my doubts as to the exact cause of his lameness, I uncovered the Pilgrim's feet and was answered—it was caused by the contraction of the back sinews, which the doctors call ‘Tendon Achilles', that prevented his heels resting on the ground, and compelled him to walk on the forepart of his feet; except for this defect, his feet were perfect.

Twenty years earlier in his Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron he had given quite a different account. He wrote—‘The great mystery was solved! Both his feet were clubbed, and his legs withered to the knee—the form and features of an Apollo, with the feet and legs of a sylvan satyr.’ Against this account we must put the statement of Dr Millingen who wrote: ‘We could not but admire the perfect symmetry of his body … which might have vied with Apollo himself … its only blemish was the congenital malformation of his left foot and leg. The foot was deformed and turned inwards, and the leg was much smaller and shorter than the sound one … there can be little or no doubt that he was born club-footed.’ Millingen was wrong, it was Byron's right and not his left foot that was deformed.

It is a fair assumption that Trelawny never saw Byron's body, or tricked the valet into leaving the room so that he could lift the shroud. The coffin had been sealed and screwed down, in the presence of witnesses, before Trelawny arrived in Missolonghi. The club-feet he claims to have seen were dropped from the later and second version of his book. He probably was, as Mr Wright suggests, playing up to what the public expected him to see, to support the kind of legend it wanted. Trelawny was not alone in his romanticising of facts. It has been said of T E Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom that it is less history than ‘imaginative construction’. Harold Nicolson saw a parallel between Trelawny and Lawrence, dismissing the latter as ‘a pathological fibber’. ‘Doris Langley Moore has done just that,’ observes Mr Wright, ‘written Trelawny off as a bit of a mounte-bank, a bit of a fraud, a bit of a ruffian, even a bit of a clown.’ If only Canon Barber had told us in detail what he saw, or had had a surgeon of standing present in the vault that day! The fair assumption is that Byron had a right clubbed-foot, which haunted him all his life and throughout his work. To just miss being an absolute Apollo must have seemed like a curse to him.

Fact or fiction, there is no doubt that Trelawny could write. His account of his life is enthralling, and even if reduced to rock-bottom truth it is still a fabulous story. …