by Giles Milton
Edward lifted his finger to his nose and gently tapped the dome over the bridge. ‘A king of noses,’ he said quietly, ‘Yes, a veritable king among noses.’
25 FEBRUARY 1824
It has been raining for almost twenty hours – raining so hard that the two figures at the prow of the ship are drenched to the marrow. Their capes hang heavy and water-logged; their felt-brimmed toppers are drip-drip-dripping. Yet neither man shows the remotest concern about the inclement weather, for both are preoccupied with staring at the misty, opaque-grey horizon. They are looking for land – hoping that soon they will reach their goal.
The taller of the two men leans forward on the ship’s rail and extinguishes the feeble lanthorn. ‘Yes, yes – I think, by God’s grace, that I see the cherished land. O Greece!’ he declaims with great theatricality. ‘O ye land of the gods! Our mission, our destiny, now awaits us. We must perform our duties with the courage, with the heroism, of the Ancients.’
The man who has uttered these words is none other than George Gordon Noel, the sixth Lord Byron, who declared just two days earlier that he would end his life on Greek soil. He intends to offer himself as a sacrifice to the cause of the Greeks and his resolution seems to have given a new purpose to his existence.
The person to whom he is speaking is a rather less imposing figure, yet one who has nevertheless a most arresting and distinguishing feature. Charles Trencom (of Trencoms in London) has a nose that even his lordship has conceded to be extraordinarily noble. Long and aquiline, it is marked by a curiously shaped bump over the bridge.
Charles can scarcely believe that he is standing on board the Hercules, next to the Lord Byron, the dilettante, the debauched, the most famous poet of the age. ‘Pom-pom!’ he thinks. ‘What a strange twist of fate!’
Just a few months earlier, Charles had been working behind the marble counters of Trencoms, selling cheeses to the tavern owners and grocers of Georgian London. The exact date – which he would never forget – was 7 November. He had just sold an exceptionally fine round of laguiole when two men with unfamiliar faces entered the shop and asked if, begging his pardon, they could have a word. A perplexed Charles had agreed and within a few minutes he found that his life was about to be transformed in a most unexpected way. The men introduced themselves as Sir Francis Burdett and John Hobhouse, founder members of the Greek Committee, which had been established just a few weeks earlier in order to promote the cause of Greek independence. They were helping to finance Byron’s military expedition to the Peloponnese and had already sent munitions to help further his cause.
‘But,’ they told Charles, ‘we have our fears about his noble lordship. He is so …’ The two men glanced towards each other, unsure as to how indiscreet they could be. Hobhouse stared intently at his walking cane (as if that held some answers) while Sir Francis pressed on with the unfinished sentence.
‘The fact is,’ he said, dropping his voice to a whisper, in spite of the fact that there was no one in the shop, ‘the fact is, we do not know if we can trust his lordship. He is so – unpredictable. At times so – irrational. He tells us he wishes to attack the Turkish fortresses of Lepanto and Patras – which has the full support of the committee – but what then? In short, we want to know whom he intends to establish as the ruler of Greece – presupposing that he manages to overcome the Turks.’
Charles was utterly bewildered as to why these two strangers were confiding such matters to him. He shrugged his shoulders, not knowing if he was supposed to answer their question or take it as one of those rhetorical turns of phrase that had become so fashionable of late. He was, if the truth be known, quite taken aback by the forwardness of his two visitors, both of whom were unknown to him even though they had introduced themselves. Why, he wondered, were they confessing such matters to him? Of course, he had his suspicions – oh yes, he had his ideas as to why. But how, in heaven’s name, had they come to know about him? How had they found their way to his particular door?
As he thought these thoughts, he noticed that Boy Cowper, the street-lighter, was in the process of sparking the gas lamps outside. ‘Great heavens,’ he said to himself, ‘is it really that late? I should be packing up, closing for the evening.’
‘The question is this,’ said the second man, John Hobhouse, interrupting Charles’s train of thought, ‘will Lord Byron try to establish himself as ruler of Greece? That’s what we want to know. You see, Trencom, there are three pretenders to the Greek throne – perhaps you have read about them in the pages of The Times? There is Prince Alexander Mavrocordato – yes – a friend of His Lordship, who is currently in control of the western Peloponnese. There is the despot, Koloktronis – a veritable satyr – who rules the Morea. And there is the most untrustworthy Odysseus, who controls much of eastern Greece. But is any of these men fit to rule an independent Greece?’
Charles shrugged his shoulders for a second time. He did not take The Times and knew nothing whatsoever about the three men of whom they spoke.
‘No, sirrah, they are not at all fit to rule,’ thundered Hobhouse. ‘They are most certainly not worthy heirs of the land that brought us Freedom and Democracy.’ He paused for a moment to gather his breath and ponder the weighty matters of which he had just spoken. In the silence that followed, Charles offered the man a thin slice of milky tarentais, which his interlocutor graciously accepted and popped into his mouth.
‘And that leaves only Lord Byron,’ continued Sir Francis, ‘who is, we fear, not worthy either. You see, sirrah, he suits our purpose very well for the moment. He garners attention to our cause – yes, you only have to regard the news-sheets to see that. But Lord Byron as ruler of Greece? No, sirrah!’
At this point in their conversation, the two men’s voices dropped in volume. ‘Does the science of genealogy interest you?’ asked one of them in an inquisitorial manner. ‘Do you care much for bloodlines and the like?’
‘I must confess,’ responded an increasingly perplexed Charles Trencom, ‘it’s not something that has preyed heavily on my mind. Us Trencoms are of west country stock. Yes, sir. Pure Dorset.’
‘The science of genealogy,’ interrupted Hobhouse, who had scarcely listened to a word that Trencom said, ‘has been known to offer surprises of import and magnitude. Consider, sir, your great-great-great-grandmother, Zoe Trencom—’
‘Why – what – how?’ Charles was so taken aback by the fact that these two strangers should know the name of his great-great-great-grandmother – someone he knew absolutely nothing about – that he involuntarily spluttered into the cheeses arrayed before him.
‘I have to admit,’ he said when he had collected his thoughts, ‘that I have never considered her.’
‘Well, consider her you should,’ rejoined Hobhouse and Burdett. ‘And you should most particularly consider her nose. Yes, indeed. For she had a nose every bit as extraordinary as yours.’
Both men moved closer to Charles and spoke so low that he had some difficulty in hearing them. But he listened carefully and attentively – and grasped at every word they said. And as he listened, he found himself involuntarily reaching for his nose. Yes, he began rubbing it with his thumb and index finger, as if he was trying to polish it to a sheen. After a hushed conversation that lasted upwards of twenty minutes, perhaps more, Charles found himself standing straight-backed, looking at the two men directly in the eyes and saying in the most imperious voice he could muster, ‘Yes, good sirs, yes! By God, the answer is yes!’ And within a week of uttering these words, Charles Trencom of Trencoms in London found himself sailing for Leghorn and Argostoli, in order to join the irascible and untrustworthy Lord Byron.
As a weak dawn struggles to break through the drizzle, it slowly becomes apparent that the faint smudge on the horizon is indeed the coastline of Greece. Charles watches with some bemusement as His Lordship spreads his arms wide, as if to embrace the wind and rain, and declaims to the elements:
‘The sword, the banner, and the field
Glory an
d Greece, around me see!
The Spartan, borne upon his shield,
Was not more free.’
He pauses for a moment. ‘Did you catch those lines?’ he asks Charles. ‘Did you note them down?’
‘No, Your Lordship, my most sincere apologies. Could you repeat them for me?’
‘Write, you fool, write. It is my poem in honour of this noble, this illustrious land:
Awake (not Greece – she is awake!)
Awake, my spirit! Think through whom
Thy life-blood tracks its parent lake,
And then strike home!’
‘Very fine words indeed,’ says Charles. ‘Very fine. Do you have a title for your poem?’
‘I shall call it,’ roars Byron, who is once again addressing the elements, ‘I shall call it, “On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year”.’
‘Why, is it your birthday, sir?’ asks Charles.
‘Not yet – not yet. But today, I feel as if I have been reborn. Ah, Greece! How dost thou fill our souls with youthful dreams! .’
‘Begging your pardon, but what exactly does that mean?’
Lord Byron looks suddenly sheepish. ‘Er, well, it’s Sophocles. Oedipus Tyrannus. Or is it Medea?’
He furrows his brow as he tries to remember. No, it has gone clean from his mind. Indeed, he wonders if he’s even got the right tenses.
‘Forgive me,’ says a pensive Charles. ‘But I thought Your Lordship was one of England’s greatest classical scholars. I thought Your Lordship had attained a remarkable level of fluency in the Ancients. Didn’t you say you had translated …’
Byron coughs and emits what can only be described as a nervous noble giggle. ‘Well – I had some help, of course. Only a little, you understand. The gilded guinea can buy half a lifetime of knowledge. And – you see – I forget so easily these days. It’s the laudanum. But it will all come back to me soon enough.’
He stops for a second and, in the pause, realizes that the coastline is drawing close. ‘Quick – quick! We must change our vestments. Away with this cloak. Off with these nankeen trousers. Away with my befrogged jacket. The crowds must see us as heroes worthy of the cause and of our lineage. Come, come with me! I have created costumes for us both.’
The two men descend into the cabin at the fore of the ship, where two uniforms designed by His Lordship lie spread out on the portmanteau. Charles takes one look at them and blanches. ‘You – you really expect us to wear these?’
‘Oh, indeed,’ says Byron. ‘Impression is everything. Let us never forget that the Souliots who will greet us are a most ignorant and foolhardy people. More than that, they are liars, Trencom, yes, damned liars. Never was there such a capacity for inveracity since Eve lived in Paradise.’
‘Yes,’ interrupts Charles, ‘but that still doesn’t explain the costumes, sirrah.’
‘Ah,’ says Byron, ‘the Souliots, this burglarious and larcenous people, are impressed by the smallest trifles. Yes, they are awed by pomp and spectacle. So we must create a little circumstance on landing to show them, well, that we are worthy of their devotion.’
The costumes of which his lordship is speaking are extravagant in design, cut and cost. Byron himself is to wear a hussar’s scarlet jacket that is fringed with gold lace and jewel drops. Charles has a camlet-caped surtout with an ox-fur collar – it makes him look quite the dandy. Both men are to wear huge plumed helmets made of beaten bronze. Byron’s is adorned with his family crest while Charles’s is topped by an antique Greek crucifix.
‘They will fall at our feet,’ says Byron, ‘they will follow us to the furthest corners of Greece.’
It is almost noon by the time the Hercules drops anchor in the dilapidated harbour of Missolonghi. It is still raining – although the rain has by now turned to drizzle – and a dirt-coloured mist is rising from the surrounding marshes. This half-abandoned port, built on rotten piles and mudbanks, resembles a squalid slum.
‘Good grief,’ thinks Charles as he sniffs at the air. ‘The very place stinks of death.’ The odours that his nose has detected are most unpleasant: marsh gas, foetid water and putrifying bodies. A pestilence has only recently drifted across Missolonghi and scores of dead remain to be buried.
‘Have I really left Trencoms for this?’ thinks Charles. ‘Is it for this that I left my lovely Caroline and my eldest son, Henry?’
The harbour front is lined with Souliot irregulars who fire their guns in salute as the two men land. This fearsome band have heard much about the ‘General Veeron’ who has come to save them, but they are unfamiliar with the figure that accompanies him. Charles Trencom’s role in Byron’s schema – or rather the schema of the Greek Committee in London – has yet to be revealed to the Greeks themselves.
The enthusiastic crowd sweeps Byron and Trencom to the only imposing villa in town, the residence of Prince Alexander Mavrocordato. He embraces Byron with warmth and affection and encourages the Souliots to let off another salvo into the air. He appears rather less enthusiastic about receiving Charles Trencom, whom Byron introduces (rather begrudgingly) as ‘Greece’s friend’.
‘Let us hope,’ says Mavrocordato, ‘that on this occasion, Greece’s “friends” do not betray her.’
A week passes. And then another. And Byron begins to realize that his magnificent campaign has started to go spectacularly wrong. His Souliot mercenaries are lawless and argumentative – ‘an unreliable band of avaricious rogues’, is how His Lordship describes them. Their only concern is to relieve him of as many gold coins as possible.
Byron discovers that his European mercenaries are no less troublesome. Of a force of sixty who landed with him, all but a handful have refused to join the artillery attack on the Turkish-held port of Lepanto. Nor is the Greek navy willing to join the fight, claiming that their vessels are no longer sea-worthy. To cap it all, both Byron and Charles are seriously, debilitatingly ill.
It started with a severe chill and lumbago in their loins and back. Next, both men were violently sick, vomiting a mixture of bile and blood. Byron’s physician, the knavish Dr Milligen, gave both men fifteen grains of antimony powders before applying leeches to their temples. But this only served to weaken them still further.
Now, on the evening of 16 April, Charles has taken a dramatic turn for the worse. His frame seems to have shrunk in on itself; his face is deathly pale; his eyes are languid and fixed on the ceiling. Even his nose seems to have shrunk in stature. Pallid and clammy, it has been twitching uncontrollably for more than an hour. He moans and screams as he is seized by violent spasms in the stomach and liver. His brain is so excited that he shouts wild imprecations at both the physician and Byron himself. ‘Leave me! Go from here! Friends, bring me release from this hell! Help me – I am poisoned. Help me! Save me!’
Charles’s downward turn seems to cause Byron to rally somewhat. He claims to be much recovered and even rouses himself from his portmanteau bed and struggles outside into the enclosed courtyard. He calls for a wench and, when a local village girl finally arrives with a curtsey, he charms her with sweet ditties, all in his abominable Greek. He wishes to endear himself to her by calling her ‘my frog’, but he forgets the word and calls her ‘my wart’ instead.
‘My wart, my darling little wart,’ he soothes. ‘Sing of love to your own George Gordon.’
His little wart is clearly unsure how to respond to such extraordinary behaviour but she’s already been informed of what she is expected to do. She gurgles with delight (earning one gold coin), wipes the sweat from His Lordship’s forehead (another gold coin) and then earns the rest of the bagful by performing a Greek speciality of hers that takes even his lordship by surprise.
‘Goodness,’ he thinks. ‘Not even my sister would consider such an act.’
Twenty minutes of wartish pleasure are followed by an attack of coughing. All the exertion has caused a relapse and leads to a renewed bout of vomiting and spasms. Charles, too, is feeling even worse and languishing in his own private hell.
Dr Milligen applies leeches to both men for a second time, yet this seems to weaken them still further.
Unbeknown to anyone in the household – least of all Byron – is this secret fact: Milligen is in the pay of the Turks. No one knows that his orders are coming directly from Sultan Mahmut II. No one is aware that he is under the strictest instructions to kill both men. With an air of clinical efficiency, Milligen goes about his business quietly but ruthlessly, administering poisonous cocktails and bleeding both men when he knows it will do them most harm.
‘He is killing me,’ shouts Trencom in a deranged and dislocated tone. ‘He is the source of my misfortune.’ But before he can say anything more – or even lift himself up from his couch – he falls back into a semi-conscious state. Byron, too, has been growing weaker with every day that passes and Dr Milligen knows that the end is very near.
On Easter Sunday, at a little after noon, Milligen feels both men’s pulses. ‘Thank God,’ he mutters. ‘Today – today will be the day.’
He administers leeches to their temples and is pleased to note that when he finally removes them, their blood is no longer coagulating. ‘It’s at long last working,’ he thinks. ‘The poison is doing its job.’
At a little after six o’clock in the evening, both Byron and Trencom suffer a violent, excruciatingly painful spasm.
‘Oh, for my wart!’ shouts Byron in his dying breath.
‘Oh, for my cheese!’ cries Charles.
‘What poetry,’ thinks Milligen. ‘Better than anything he has ever written – and my most perfect deaths to date.’ A few minutes later, the chests of both men cease to rise and fall.
‘Our Greek heroes are dead,’ announces Milligen to Prince Mavrocordato, ‘and Greece’s noble cause has suffered its greatest setback.’
Mavrocordato nods slowly as he turns his gaze on Dr Milligen. ‘It’s most strange,’ he says. ‘Do you think, Doctor, that they could have been poisoned?’