ionless. He
recovered sufficiently to conduct his business as usual, and to drill the
troops. But he suffered from dizziness in the head and spasms in the chest,
and a few days later he was seized with a second though slighter
convulsion. These attacks may have hastened but they did not cause his
death. For the first week of April the weather confined him to the house,
but on the 9th a letter from his sister raised his spirits and tempted him
to ride out with Gamba. It came on to rain, and though he was drenched to
the skin he insisted on dismounting and returning in an open boat to the
quay in front of his house. Two hours later he was seized with ague and
violent rheumatic pains. On the 11th he rode out once more through the
olive groves, attended by his escort of Suliote guards, but for the last
time. Whether he had got his deathblow, or whether copious blood-letting
made recovery impossible, he gradually grew worse, and on the ninth day of
his illness fell into a comatose sleep. It was reported that in his
delirium he had called out, half in English, half in Italian,
"Forward--forward--courage! follow my example--don't be afraid!" and that
he tried to send a last message to his sister and to his wife. He died at
six o'clock in the evening of the 19th of April 1824, aged thirty-six years
and three months. The Greeks were heartbroken. Mavrocordato gave orders
that thirty-seven minute-guns should be fired at daylight and decreed a
general mourning of twenty-one days. His body was embalmed and lay in
state. On the 25th of May his remains, all but the heart, which is buried
at Missolonghi, were sent back to England, and were finally laid beneath
the chancel of the village church of Hucknall-Torkard on the 16th of July
1824. The authorities would not sanction burial in Westminster Abbey, and
there is neither bust nor statue of Lord Byron in Poets' Corner.

The title passed to his first cousin as 7th baron, from whom the subsequent
barons were descended. The poet's daughter Ada (d. 1852) predeceased her
mother, but the barony of Wentworth went to her heirs. She was the first
wife of Baron King, who in 1838 was created 1st earl of Lovelace, and had
two sons (of whom the younger, b. 1839, d. 1906, was 2nd earl of Lovelace)
and a daughter, Lady Anne, who married Wilfrid S. Blunt (_q.v._). On the
death of the 2nd earl the barony of Wentworth went to his daughter and only
child, and the earldom of Lovelace to his half-brother by