Sunday was Malta’s day of rest, and is still well observed, but by now Spiridion Foresti would have been fully informed of Byron’s movements and circumstances and it was time for him to play his first ace. He arranged for his son George, only slightly older than Byron and Hobhouse, to be at the Chabots for dinner that night. George had clearly been taught well as his mixture of salacious gossip and inside knowledge of a wider world clearly had the visitors impressed and intrigued. Hobhouse could not wait to record all the juicy details: the anecdotes of Buonaparte, tales of an assassin and what happened when Napoleon sent Ali Pasha his portrait in a snuff-box, how Napoleon’s brother-in-law demanded a loan from the Hamburgers who spilled the beans on the Danes, how Napoleon said he would overrun Holstein with five hundred French grenadiers, the time when Bonaparte made King Maximilian I of Bavaria and the Viceroy of Italy wait standing behind his chair, of the immense expense of keeping Capri, all the news of Sir William Drummond’s strange behaviour at the court of Sicily, the moment Young Wellesley Pole bullied the Divan and got Wallachia for the Russians, who then got him appointed Secretary of Embassy at Constantinople where he had to do everything, as Arbuthnot did nothing. Then there was the time when Sir George Rumbold disguised himself as a sergeant and tried to seduce Danish soldiers at Altona, and as for Spencer Smith - certainly guilty, and didn’t they know that the famous diva Angelica Catalani was previously a whore in Milan?
We presume that Foresti fils reported back positively to Foresti père because the next night at the theatre the latter not only introduced himself to the visitors but he played his second ace: he introduced Byron to Constance Spencer-Smith. Mrs. Spencer-Smith to be exact, but never mind, she was alone, tall, pretty, well built (‘fat arms, well made’ being Hobspeak for amply breasted) and the most exotic creature Byron had ever met. He, in turn, was the most beautiful man she had ever met, a poet, a peer, charming and courteous, four years younger than herself, and like herself a soul in transit. Soon they were inseparable.
Her story alone was enough captivate him. Her father was Baron Herbert, currently the Austrian Ambassador to Constantinople. Her brother-in-law was the celebrated swashbuckler Sir Sidney Smith, burner of Toulon, hero of Acre, saviour of the Lisbon court, and of whom Napoleon was later to declare ‘that man has cost me my destiny’. Her husband was the British Minister in Stuttgart and while away from her duties there on a cure at a spa near Vicenza in Italy the French army captured the town. She fled to Venice to stay with her sister Countess Attems, but the Grande Armée caught up with her again. She was soon arrested by the gendarmes, trussed up and sent off to prison in Valenciennes. Her fate reached the ears of the young Marquis of Salvo, who having met her determined to rescue her. He intercepted the prison convoy at Brescia, spirited her down a ladder from the top floor of an auberge, whisked her across Lake Garda on a skiff, dressed her as a boy and they made their way perilously through French territory to the safety of her other sister, Countess Strassoldo, in Graz. To add further to her glamour Napoleon personally had paid her the signal honour of placing a reward on her recapture. She was in Malta on a roundabout tour back to the solidity of Stuttgart, skirting the French-held continent, but she seemed to be in no desperate hurry to reunite with an arranged husband old enough to be her father. She was to become his ‘new Calypso’ in the second canto of Childe Harold ‘s Pilgrimage, and remembered in ‘Lines Written in an Album at Malta’, ‘Stanzas Written in Passing the Ambracian Gulf‘, ‘Stanzas Composed During a Thunderstorm’ and ‘To Florence’, from which:
But wheresoe’er I now may roam,
Through scorching clime, and varied sea,
Though Time restore me to my home,
I ne’er shall bend mine eyes on thee:
On thee, in whom at once conspire
All charms which heedless hearts can move,
Whom but to see is to admire,
And, oh! forgive the word - to love.
Byron wrote of her to his mother: ‘Since my arrival here, I have had scarcely any other companion. I have found her very pretty, very accomplished, and extremely eccentric. Buonaparte is even now so incensed against her, that her life would be in some danger if she were taken prisoner a second time.’ To the young and as always passionate Byron a more appealing set of attributes would be hard to imagine.
By their second week in Malta Byron and Hobhouse had settled into a routine. Up late morning, a stroll to some sights, an Arabic lesson in the afternoon, and the theatre in the evening. In between times Hobhouse would browse the library and Byron would browse Constance Spencer-Smith. Either George or Spiridion Foresti was never far away; helping them find La Pietà baths, accompanying them to the theatre, running into them at dinner, dropping in at Constance’s salon, and gossiping about him and her and this and that.
By the end of that second week Foresti played his third ace and took them on a private tour of the island. They went to Mdina, the walled city and oldest part of Malta. The writer’s wife spent years of her childhood there - her father being a latter day Spiridion Foresti - and remembers it as a lively lived-in village, a village but within city walls. In Byron’s time it would have been even more so, but its closed walls, determined moat and squeezed alleys held little allure for the expansively-minded poet, and neither the memorable Mdina nor Malta at large find their way into Childe Harold ‘s Pilgrimage. And he was in love, his mind not on the capitals but on Constance. One has to feel he would like it even less now it is an uninhabited well scrubbed tourist attraction, the grocer’s a gift shop, the butcher’s a pastiche boutique, the post office a glass blowing outlet. Mdina has become a museum, pleasant enough for a thoughtful stroll and expensive lunch if one is lucky enough to find a break in the loud hailed tour groups from the dreaded cruise ships.
After Mdina Foresti took them to visit St. Paul’s catacombs, which Hobhouse found ‘very spacious and tolerably perfect - bats chasing in clusters to the cave’, but they were looted thoroughly later in the nineteenth century and the space is now just a mouldy dungeon, although still ‘tolerably perfect’ for potholing enthusiasts. Nearby they visited St. Paul’s cave. The priest who showed them around assured them that St. Paul had lived there for three months. Our guide was more mutant than priest, but he had shrunk St. Paul’s residence there to a more explicable one month. Perhaps St. Paul was an early potholer himself, otherwise it’s hard to see why he grottied in the grotto at all. Seeking fresh air they visited Buskett Gardens with its ‘large neat palace, gardens of pomegranates, orange and lemon, and fine fountain of clear water where the citizens of Valletta take cold dinners.’ The gardens are still fine, and even more abundant, but the palace has long been closed, but it is a pleasant enough picnic spot - on weekdays.
Foresti had their ears all day and in between sightseeing and gossiping - did they know that Lord Valentia had caught the shitten pox in Egypt? For sure, Foresti had heard it from his own surgeon- this is when he first planted the seed of their going to Albania instead of Arabia. Being Foresti the seed would have been of the subtle variety, planted so that it grew more questions than answers, and ready to sprout within a week. Foresti knew the convoy to Patras and Preveza, within easy reach of Ali Pasha’s fiefdom, was due to leave in eight days and that he could arrange space for the Byron party on board the naval escort Spider. He knew too that his own invasion fleet was to sail for the Ionian Islands three days after that. He needed Byron on board the Spider, and Byron pacifying at Ali Pasha’s court as the Ionian Island invasion was unfolding. By now he might even have had the further idea of passing Byron off as George III’s nephew, for that was the rumour that followed Byron around the less well- informed Ottoman lands; it had the ring of truth, was impossible for Ali Pasha to disprove, and would appeal to the tyrant’s sense of self-aggrandisement. Foresti might even have had the less charitable thought of it appealing to Byron’s sense of self-aggrandisement as well. But all this, and the talk of secr
et missions, would be for later. In the evening he took Hobhouse to the theatre again, ‘Lord Byron gallanting at Mrs Fraser’s’ - Constance Spencer-Smith’s safe house.
***
By now it is time for us to have dinner with Professor Vassallo. We meet at La Borga, a waterfront trattoria near where Vasco da Gama is resting in Malta. With Peter is his equally brainy wife Madeleine. We all have pasta of various distinctions and local Delicata white wine - very crisp it is too, at least in Malta. Thank heavens he quite likes the direction of the early draft but then says:
’I think you have missed out the duel.’
’I have?’ I reply, ‘what duel?’
’Towards the end of his stay a Captain Carey - Alexander Ball’s
aide de camp - made some snide reference to his affair with Constance Spencer-Smith. So Byron challenged him to a duel. He told Carey he would not tolerate the marked insolence of his behaviour.’
’What did Carey actually say, what was the snide remark?’
’It’s not recorded. Byron later wrote that he was a grinning and insolent oaf. Carey appointed a Captain Waddle as his second, and he seems to have gone to see Hobhouse to see if they could talk Byron out of the duel. Hobhouse didn’t need much encouraging,I can tell you.’
’Let’s call the whole thing off.’
’Exactly. Just as they were boarding the ship to leave for Greece,Carey wrote apologising and Byron swore to keep the supposed scandal secret. Of course he did no such thing, far too juicy a story to stay out of his letters.’ After dinner we agree to stay in touch, which indeed we do. Peter is also behind most of the useful information for the chapter on Byron’s return to Malta, ‘Malta, Heading Home’,found later in the book.
Byron and Hobhouse’s routine of Arabic lessons, bathing, dining and theatre - and in Byron’s case consorting with young Constance - took up the next three days. One or both of the Forestis was always close at hand. The next day at dinner Spiridion Foresti played his fourth ace. The talk was now directly of Ali Pasha. A pretty picture was not painted. They discussed his war with the Souliotes, how on their expulsion from Souli five years previously sixty women with their children had thrown themselves over a precipice rather than be captured alive. Six months later a hundred and thirty women, again with their children, threw themselves into the River Achelous. Such was his reputation. The twelve-year-old son of the chief Souliote was captured and taken before the son of Ali Pasha in Ioannina. The young Pasha said, ‘Well, we have got you and we will now burn you alive.’ ‘I know it,’ replied the prisoner, ‘and when my father catches you he will serve you in the same manner.’
These were not pleasant people; barbarous people in a lawless land. No doubt Foresti added weight to the bait with stories of how Ali Pasha enjoyed pleasuring himself on boys as much as girls when he was not murdering their mothers and fathers. But, Foresti explained, however horrific he may be the British government still had to deal with him as a neighbour, as an Ottoman pasha and one not without influence in Constantinople. The British government required a mission of the utmost delicacy. A diplomatic despatch was needed to neutralise any unpleasantness that might soon arise between our countries. A visit by an aristocrat who was, in the Pasha’s eyes, of equal social standing to himself to deliver the despatch would be decidedly advantageous. The invasion of the Ionian Islands had to be seen solely as being to Napoleon’s disadvantage, not a slight against Ali Pasha or his fiefdom. They would not be alone; he had an English consul to Ali Pasha at Ioannina, Captain William Leake, who knew the country and the court. A Royal Navy ship was being readied right now, and discreet arrangements could be made for it to take them to Preveza. Britain would be grateful. Britain expects. He hoped he could count on them serving their country.
It is hard to see Byron putting up even a veil of resistance; it is hard to imagine him not smiling ear to ear. The clandestine mission appealed to Byron on any number of levels: they had no firm destination or travel arrangements from here, and this decided that particular dilemma for them, and at His Majesty’s expense; as an aspiring politician in the House of Lords this would do his future career no harm, might even open many a door he didn’t even know was closed; Ali Pasha might be the mass murderer depicted, and worse, but it wasn’t every day one supped with one of those; boys were clearly not a crime; he had had a full set of regimentals made in Gibraltar in which he would look quite splendid, just the part; it was terra incognita, exotic and dangerous - and none the worse for those - to his friends in London; and it was in the final consideration his duty to serve his country, and if Hobhouse thought that pompous, well then Hobhouse didn’t - couldn’t - understand.
The next day they stopped taking their Arabic lessons, no need of these now, and the Farsi-speaking Friese was dismissed, no need for him either. They started instead making hurried preparations for the voyage. The brig-of-war was HMS Spider under the command of Captain Oliver. The Governor advised them to take extra provisions. Spiridion Foresti was arranging despatches, and unknown to Byron and Hobhouse, arranging for another agent to accompany them with a further despatch to his consul, Captain Leake, advising Leake of the Byron mission and George III nephew cover story. Hobhouse took care of their private provisioning. Byron was in passionate farewells with his amorosa Constance Spencer-Smith; they arranged to meet again right there in exactly a year from then, and in the meantime, no doubt, both agreed to remain devotedly chaste. Luckily Byron didn’t have the last-minute duel with Captain Carey as Peter Vassallo related earlier.
Hobhouse’s last entry from Malta reads: ‘Tuesday September 19th 1809. Got up nine. The Spider and convoy under weigh very early,firing guns.’ And so the Grand Tour moved on; next stop Patras, oneweek later, in what would become Greece.
Chapter Eight
FROM MALTA TO IOANNINA, PRIVATEERS ALL
19 SEPTEMBER - 10 OCTOBER 1809 | 4-10 FEBRUARY 2009
Unfortunately - and most unusually - the actual log of HMS Spider is not to be found at the UK National Archives. From other records there it seems she was built in September 1802 and served in the Baltic until 1808, and so had only recently arrived in the Mediterranean by the time she escorted her convoy from Maltato Patras in September 1809. The last record of her is in October 1817,and the short life and lack of logbook would suggest her eventual capture or shipwreck.
What was she? Well, one hates to engage in pedantry with HMS Hobhouse - one would strike one’s colours at the first puff of his well-considered cannon smoke - but she wasn’t a ship. A ship needs a bowsprit and three masts, each stepped mast carrying a topmast and a topgallant mast, and with yards carrying square sails across those masts. Ships of war were nothing less than floating fortresses,and battle joined by lining up one’s own ships opposite those of the enemy and trading broadsides, pdq. Ships suitable for this strategy were classed from first rater to sixth rater, but in practice only first to fourth raters could muster the firepower needed for this blunderbuss approach to war at sea. They were known as line-in-battle ships, or more easily ‘ships of the line’.
After a sixth rater, which would be a frigate, ships stopped being ships and became barques and barquentines, brigs and brigantines, sloops and cutters, and these latter non-ships made up the quantity of naval vessels. HMS Spider was technically a bark-rigged sloop-of-war, known more conveniently as a brig-of-war. She was near the bottom of the naval hierarchy of vessels, displacing about 250 tonnes, carrying sixteen six-pounder guns on one deck and enjoying a crew of 120 souls; for perspective HMS Victory displaced 2,200 tons, carried one hundred 32-pounders on three decks and enjoyed a crew of 900 souls.
As we have seen before, Hobhouse tended to put his diary away at sea, and Byron makes no specific mention of the voyage on the Spider, and we are hence unsure of how they fared for most of their week on board. At least the entourage was easy to accommodate, being now just the ever-faithful and ever-complaining William Fl
etcher - a dangerously low suite by Byron’s standards - so we can assume the long suffering valet squeezed in below decks with Jack Tar, and Byron and Hobhouse each bought space in an officer’s cabin. It would not have been particularly comfortable, but the voyage appears to have
been leisurely, its progress being dictated by the speed of the slowest member of the convoy. One can imagine keen young Captain Oliver of the speedy Spider cursing the over-laden and ill crewed merchantmen that caused him to take a whole week to voyage the 350 miles in the breezy September winds.
One must put one’s hand up here and declare no such open sea bravery on the part of Vasco da Gama’s crew of two, who took a month to sail from Malta to Gozo to Sicily to Calabria to Corfu and the southern Ionian Islands before re-joining Byron’s route at Preveza; in defence of such abrogation of duty one can only say how pleasant the ambling jaunt across the Mediterranean islands was at the time.
Joy Unconfined Page 10