Allegra Byron - Death, Burial and A Memorial

Death, Burial and A Memorial

Allegra died on 20 April 1822, attended by three doctors and all of the nuns at the convent, of what some biographers have identified as typhus. Byron biographer Benita Eisler speculated that she died after suffering a recurrence of her malarial-type fevers, which she had also suffered from the previous autumn.

Byron sent her body to England and wrote an inscription for her gravestone that read: "In memory of Allegra, daughter of G.G., Lord Byron, who died at Bagna Cavallo in Italy, 20 April 1822, Aged Five Years and Three Months,-'I shall go to her, but she shall not return to me.'-2 Samuel, xii, 23" Byron felt guilty about his neglect of the child after her death, he told Marguerite, Countess of Blessington, a few months afterwards:

Let the object of affection be snatched away by death, and how is all the pain ever inflicted upon them avenged! The same imagination that led us to slight or overlook their sufferings, now that they are forever lost to us, magnifies their estimable qualities ... How did I feel this when my daughter, Allegra, died! While she lived, her existence never seemed necessary to my happiness; but no sooner did I lose her, than it appeared to me as if I could not live without her.

The memory of Allegra haunted Shelley and her mother. Before his own death by drowning in July 1822, Shelley had a vision of the dead child in which she rose naked from the sea, laughed, clapped her hands, and beckoned to him. Claire Clairmont furiously accused Byron of murdering Allegra. She demanded that Byron send her a portrait of Allegra, a lock of the child's hair, and that she be placed in charge of the funeral arrangements. In the end, though, Claire could not bear to see Allegra's coffin or to hold a funeral service for her daughter. She blamed Byron for the rest of her life for Allegra's death.

Scandalized by Byron's reputation and the child's illegitimacy, the rector of St. Mary's Parish Church in Harrow, Middlesex, England, refused to place a plaque on Allegra's grave and permitted her only to be buried at the entrance of the church without a marker. When Byron died two years later, the rector also refused to bury him at St. Mary's Parish Church in Harrow. He was also denied burial at Westminster. He was ultimately buried at St. Mary Magdalens' Church in Hucknall Torkard, Nottinghamshire, England.

In 1980, The Byron Society placed a memorial plaque for Allegra at Harrow, inscribed with words from a letter Byron wrote to Shelley after her death: "I suppose that Time will do his usual work... - Death has done his."