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 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