Byron's political stance has in the last twenty years been the subject of some controversy. There are those who would appropriate him to a ‘pure’ radical position, and revisionists who see him as much more attached to checks and balances, a liberal in the eighteenth-century tradition.

In England his actions were essentially those of the Whig party; his talk from time to time sounded as if it came from the radical extreme. Once in exile, but thinking of the English situation, he again from time to time sounded a positively revolutionary note, but that is always tempting from a distance. When his friend Hobhouse was actually imprisoned for his politics, Byron almost violently upbraided him for getting mixed up with the actions of ‘the mob’. There is not much in his considered writing that suggests he was in any sense a modern democrat. On the other hand, the exercise of arbitrary power, whether political or economic, he clearly found obscene.

However, his involvement in politics in Italy and in Greece is easier to evaluate. In both places there was a preliminary task to be done, the morality of which was simple – the removal of an occupying power. Only when he became involved in the succeeding question – ‘then what?’ – did he once again find it difficult to commit himself to one route rather than another, and become tired of the necessary manoeuvring. His commitment to what we would now call self-determination at a national level is unambiguous. But this commitment does not transcend the practical and transform itself into a Utopian faith – Byron was well aware that a nation's freedom was a ‘preliminary’ basis only. He had no faith that freedom would produce a just society by itself. Indeed he was highly sceptical of the Greeks’ ability to participate in the founding of a society without corruption. In the Greek war of independence, he almost fought in spite of his lack of faith in the participants’ morality.

In Italy his connection with the Gamba family, Teresa's relations, drew him directly into clandestine revolutionary activity. He joined a group of the Carboneria (the freedom fighters) known as La Turba – the Mob.