Lord Byron additional surname "Gordon", becoming "John Byron Gordon", and he was occasionally styled "John Byron Gordon of Gight." Byron himself used this surname for a time and was registered at school in Aberdeen as "George Byron Gordon." At the age of 10 he inherited the English Barony of Byron of Rochdale, becoming "Lord Byron", and eventually dropped the double surname. Byron's paternal grandparents were Vice-Admiral the Hon. John "Foulweather Jack" Byron, and Sophia Trevanion. Vice Admiral John Byron had circumnavigated the globe and was the younger brother of the 5th Baron Byron, known as "the Wicked Lord". He was christened at
Lord Byron demands. It was one of these importunate loans that allowed him to travel to Valenciennes, France, where he died in 1791. When Byron's great-uncle, the "wicked" Lord Byron, died on 21 May 1798, the 10-year-old boy became the 6th Baron Byron of Rochdale and inherited the ancestral home, Newstead Abbey, in Nottinghamshire. His mother proudly took him to England, but the Abbey was in an embarrassing state of disrepair and, rather than living there, she decided to lease it to Lord Grey de Ruthyn, among others, during Byron's adolescence. Described as "a woman without judgment or self-command," Catherine either spoiled