Baron Byron Baron, killed his cousin and neighbour William Chaworth in a duel on 26 January 1765. He was brought before his peers in the House of Lords but under the statute of Edward VI he was found guilty only of manslaughter and forced to pay a small fine. Byron henceforth became known as "the Wicked Lord" and "the Devil Byron". He was succeeded by his great-nephew, George Gordon Byron, the sixth Baron, the famous Romantic poet. He was the son of John "Mad Jack" Byron, son of Vice-Admiral the Hon. John "Foulweather Jack" Byron, second son of the fourth Baron and
Lord Byron in England.) He journeyed through Belgium and continued up the Rhine river. In the summer of 1816 he settled at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva, Switzerland, with his personal physician, the young, brilliant and handsome John William Polidori. There Byron befriended the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Shelley's future wife Mary Godwin. He was also joined by Mary's stepsister, Claire Clairmont, with whom he had had an affair in London. Several times Byron went to see Germaine de Staël and her Coppet group, which turned out to be a valid intellectual and emotional support to Byron at the time.