Joy Unconfined

by Ian Strathcarron

  The procession was now joined by the sultan’s own janissaries and officers, and after some time spent reshuffling the pack of Porte officials and Frank guests in strict order of hierarchy, the vice-sultan led the way from the Divan. Byron had by now been relegated to the top of the third division. On either side of the vice-sultan were two officers of state carrying silver staffs which they banged on the ground with every step. The vice-sultan then entered the inner sanctum to be alone with the sultan; Adair along with Byron and the rest of the suite had to wait outside in their fur coats, closely surrounded by the sultan’s and vice-sultan’s janissaries.

  After ten minutes they were summoned forth. Byron, like all the others, was assigned a white eunuch, and the eunuchs walked and then stood behind them, a strong hand on each shoulder, for the duration of the audience. Byron’s became Baba in Don Juan. They proceeded in crocodile file through two more chambers, the first lined with pageboys wearing gilt caps and white dresses, another piquant image for Byron to absorb, the second chamber decorated with the most magnificent carpets. Opulence dripped from every pore of the chambers, but these were just appetisers for the audience room which was further adorned with pearls and silver and gold and precious stones along the walls, and the most exquisite inlaid mosaics on the ceiling. The room was packed with Porte dignitaries, attended by eunuchs and protected by janissaries, as were the chambers all around it. ‘Baba’ pushed Byron to the front row of the guests, only five or so metres from the sultan. His throne was, and still is, as long and deep as a king size double bed and the canopy made entirely of silver and pearls. He reposed on cushions of silk embroidered with gold and pearls. On his one side stood the vice-sultan and on the other an elaborately inlaid desk - a gift from the Moghuls - on which was a silver inkstand decorated with more precious stones and the prepared letter to King George III. All these, except the letter of course, are now in the adjacent museum, and it is staggering to think of them once being just everyday items.

  Sultan Mahmoud II himself wore a yellow satin cloak with black fur borders, a diamond studded dagger across his chest, an elaborate white and blue silk turban with an enormous diamond star at his forehead topped by a tall straight bird of paradise plume. Etiquette demanded that the sultan not demean himself by looking at a Christian, and a Christian was not allowed the honour of looking at the sultan. The latter rolled his eyes, keeping both hands on his knees, occasionally stroking his beard, in a display of deliberate disinterest. However he did notice Byron, and years later when told that Byron was plotting against his rule in Greece remarked that he remembered the beautiful young Frank, and assumed he was a woman in disguise.

  The business of the day was then conducted, but neither Byron nor Hobhouse could follow the whispered translations. According to protocol, the translating dragomen had to talk as softly as possible in front of the sultan, so not to offend his ears with any Frank words that might escape. Adair could only address the sultan through the vice-sultan, and he could only address the vice-sultan through the embassy dragoman whispering to the vice-sultan’s dragoman. Should the sultan reply the tortuous exercise was repeated in reverse; this time he did reply with some words of respect to King George, and these were repeated and translated back down the line in reverse.

  Adair then made the mistake of replying - one can almost hear the internal groans of all concerned - and as a Frank could not have the final word the whispered process started another cycle. At a given signal the eunuchs, all the time with their hands on the guests’ shoulders, pulled the Franks up to stand and forwards to bow, and then with some haste led them back out through the antechambers and though the courts and chambers, and then with more than a little shove, out into the street - and considering what had taken place in the last four hours - all with remarkably little ceremony.

  I am interested to find out what happened to the sultan’s family after the republic was established in 1923. As expected John Scott knows it all. The heir to the sultanate, His Imperial Highness Şehzade Bayezid Osman Efendi, is now ninety-four and living in New York. He married an Afghan princess and reinvented himself as a businessman. Other brothers also married well: two to Hyderabads, which restored the family fortunes, another to an Egyptian princess, two more to American heiresses, one of whom rejoiced in the self-styled name Princess Adeline-Mae Osman Efendi. But as the generations passed so the House of Osman’s fortunes dwindled and their collective spine buckled. The current generation can’t even raise a smile in the Istanbul gossip columns. There is no monarchist movement at all, but then they were never really cuddly kings and queens in the first place, but arrogant despots, and at the end weak ones too. Nothing so demeans a despot as weakness.

  That evening there was a full-scale embassy ball, and then all thoughts were turned to leaving as quickly as possible, and leaving only Canning behind. Byron and Hobhouse spent the next three days packing and settling accounts, and boarded the Salsette on the evening of 14 July. Byron and later Adair both received seventeen-gun salutes. With wind and current behind them they sailed quickly to the island of Kea, an important shipping terminus then but rather run down now, not pretty enough for the tourists and not near enough to Athens for commuting.

  After a year and a month it was time for Byron, and now it’s time for us, to say goodbye to Hobby. The Salsette would continue to Malta with Sir Robert and Hobhouse, while Byron, Fletcher, Vassily, Dervish Tahiri and Andreas Zantakis all took a ferry the thirty miles to Athens. Our friend’s last diary entry reads: ‘Went on shore with Lord Byron and suite. Took leave, non sine lacrymis of this singular young person on a little stone terrace near some paltry magazines at the end of the bay, dividing with him a little nosegay of flowers, the last thing perhaps I shall ever divide with him.’ A month later he wrote to Byron: ‘I kept the half of your little nosegay till it withered entirely and even then I could not bear to throw it away. I can’t account for this, nor can you either, I dare say.’

  Coincidentally it is also at Kea that we part from Theo. Like Byron we are heading back to Piraeus, and he is resuming his seaborne hitchhiking quest to Tahiti. There are no nosegays or tears, and I resist the temptation of giving him a six-pack of Red Bull, but a week later I find I’m missing our sleeping passenger rather as one would miss a rescue pet one has been house-sitting, and of which one had grown rather fond.

  Chapter Fifteen

  ATHENS, SATING THE INSATIABLE

  18 JULY 1810 - 22 APRIL 1811 | 9-31 MAY 2009

  Byron and his entourage, now without Hobhouse and so reduced to our old friend the long suffering Fletcher, the loyal Albanian bodyguards Vassily and Dervish Tahiri and the reasonably honest translator Andreas Zantakis, arrived back in Athens on 18 July 1810.The next day Byron wrote to his mother:

  Dear Mother,

  I have arrived here in four days from Constantinople, which is considered as singularly quick, particularly for the season of the year. I left Constantinople with (British Ambassador) Adair, at whose adieux of leave I saw Sultan Mahmoud... Your northern gentry can have no conception of a Greek summer; which, however, is a perfect frost compared with Malta and Gibraltar, where I reposed myself in the shade last year, after a gentle gallop of four hundred miles, without intermission, through Portugal and Spain. You see, by my date, that I am at Athens again, a place which I think I prefer, upon the whole, to any I have seen.

  Malta is my perpetual post-office, from which my letters are forwarded to all parts of the habitable globe: - by the bye, I have now been in Asia, Africa, and the east of Europe, and, indeed, made the most of my time, without hurrying over the most interesting scenes of the ancient world. Fletcher, after having been toasted and roasted, and baked, and grilled, and eaten by all sorts of creeping things, begins to philosophise, is grown a refined as well as a resigned character, and promises at his return to become an ornament to his own parish, and a very prominent person in the future family pedigree of the Fletchers, who I t
ake to be Goths by their accomplishments, Greeks by their acuteness, and ancient Saxons by their appetite. He (Fletcher) begs leave to send half-a-dozen sighs to Sally his spouse, and wonders (though I do not) that his ill-written and worse spelt letters have never come to hand; as for that matter, there is no great loss in either of our letters, saving and except that I wish you to know we are well, and warm enough at this present writing, God knows.

  Yours, etc., etc.,

  BYR ON.

  Byron initially lodged back with the Macri family, but now there was a slight awkwardness in the air. The time for buying the childe bride had flown, and there was nothing much more to be said. No doubt the three-daughtered Mrs. Macri, like an Athenian Mrs. Bennett, was already looking for other suitors, and having the uncooperative English m’lord in residence merely clogged up the machinery. Whether Byron jumped or was pushed we will never know, but after a week with the Macris he left their lodgings and made for Patras, no doubt to see whether Strané had received any more remittances from the recalcitrant Hanson, as well as letters from friends.

  A month later, in late August, Byron was back in Athens. His excursion to Patras had not been fruitful. Apart from the lack of fresh funds or letters, he had just about survived a nasty fever, which sounds a bit malarial, and endured some unwelcome openly sexual overtures from Ali Pasha’s son, Veli Pasha, made worse for having Strané as a wide-eyed witness. Back in Athens Byron now found space in the Capuchin Monastery on the southern flanks of the Acropolis, in what is now the Plaka quarter.

  Only the base of the monastery and the adjoining Monument of Lysicrates - a fourth-century bc patron of the theatre of Dionysius - remain, the building having been sacked by the Egyptian Ottoman Omar Pasha in 1824 as part of the reprisals for the Athenian uprising in the War of Independence. Byron and the monastery were to die within five days of each other fourteen years hence. The Capuchins themselves had spun off from the Franciscans in the sixteenth century because they felt the followers of St. Francis had become too comfortable in their practice. But in Athens, having built the monastery, they had struggled to fill it, hence its changed use as a boys’ school-cum-hostelry two hundred years later. (Incidentally,the Capuchin monks’ distinctive hooded habit gives us the word cappuccino.)

  The monastery, where Byron was to spend the winter of 1810/11,was the ultimate Byronic haunt, the very opposite to the Capuchin ideal, the scene of what he described as his ‘fantastical adventures’.Apart from his group the monastery held a friar who taught six boy students from the resident Christian families, and for the want of anything resembling a hotel, it served as a hostelry of sorts for visiting Franks. In the absence of monks the work was done by fallen Albanian women, whose ‘favourite pastime was sticking pins into Fletcher’s backside’. The combination of boys and fallen women, a nominal friar and revolving guests suited all of Byron’s appetites perfectly. To Hodgson he wrote gloatingly:

  I am living in the Capuchin Convent, Hymettus before me, the Acropolis behind, the Temple of Jove to my right, the Stadium in front, the town to the left; eh, Sir, there’s a situation, there’s your picturesque! Nothing like that, Sir, in Lunnun, no not even the Mansion House. And I feed upon Woodcocks and Red Mullet every day.

  To Hobhouse he wrote that: ‘What with the women, and the boys, and the suite, we are very disorderly.’ He was learning Italian from Lusieri’s nephew, Nicolo Giraud. Byron was ‘his padrone and his amico and Lord knows what besides. We are already very philosophical.’ The Italian lessons included ‘spending the greater part of the day in conjugating the verb embrace’, but ‘the lessons are sadly interrupted by scampering, eating fruit, pelting and playing; and I am in fact in school again, and make as little improvement now as I did then, my time being wasted in the same way. I wish you were here to partake of a number of wiggeries, which you can hardly find in the gun-room or in Grub Street.’

  In the code Byron’s Cambridge set used for sexual encounters, Byron noted that ‘he had obtained over two hundred pl&optCs and am almost tired of them.’ Pl&optC is an abbreviated form of ‘Coitum plenum et optabilem’, a quotation from Petronius’s Satyricon, meaning ‘complete intercourse without limits’, or ‘no end of leg-over’, as you prefer.

  There is also no doubt that he found freedom in not having his bulldog Hobhouse in tow. In fact there was no one from his past, and he could safely reckon from his future, to witness the licentious scenes which took up where London in 1808 left off. In himself he couldn’t decide whether he wanted Hobhouse to witness the shenanigans or not, and wrote: ‘After all, I do love thee, Hobby, thou hast so many good qualities, and so many bad ones, it is impossible to live with or without thee.’

  ***

  It is the intention of this book to follow in Byron’s footsteps wherever possible, but in the instance of the Capuchin Monastery, and the goings-on within, one will have to ask to be excused. The monastery was razed and never recovered, so time spent inside is not possible. As for the goings-on therein, ‘over two hundred pl&optCs’ would put a severe strain on the writer’s resources, would certainly raise the prospect of marital excommunication, a visit to the chiropractor and the mass depression of thousands of expectant Athenian virgins. In the spirit of forgiveness, I hope the reader will understand my position vis-à-vis the monastery cannot, in this instance, be missionary.

  There is an excellent engraving of the Capuchin Monastery in the early nineteenth century to be found in the Finden edition of Byron’s Travels mentioned in Acknowledgments. The site on which the monastery stood is now public space in the heart of Plaka; the Monument of Lysicrates alongside it still stands after nearly two thousand five hundred years. If one wanders up to the north end of Vyronus (Byron) Street one just falls upon it. The drawing was done from what is now the slightly elegant Café and Bar Daphne, looking directly up at the Acropolis. The public space in front of Daphne’s is the yard in the foreground of the engraving and the monastery was where you can now see the benches and olive trees of a small park, into whose shady grove the Diogenes Restaurant has evolved. From Galt’s memoir of his visit there we can deduce that Byron’s apartment was behind and to the right of the monument looking at it from Daphne’s.

  Among his notable visitors was The Hon. Frederick North, who founded the Ionian University in Corfu. He insisted, as chancellor, that he and his students parade around in classical costumes. He failed to impress Byron who called him ‘the most illustrious humbug of his age and country.’ I’m sure Byron would have been more impressed by his direct descendant, Lord North, of the famous cricketing family, who when told that his sixth born was also a daughter rounded himself up and declared to the great umpire in the sky: ‘My God, I’ve bowled a maiden over.’

  He also met the wilful Lady Hester Stanhope, the younger Pitt’s niece and political hostess. Now in her mid-thirties, she was on her way East with her lover Michael Bruce. It was not a meeting of minds. Byron knew his way around men, he knew his way around women, but this odd crossover had him on the defensive and he told Hobhouse that he ‘did not admire that dangerous thing a female wit.’ Hobhouse had met her himself in Malta on his way back and her way out, and found her masculinity most disagreeable: ‘a violent, peremptory person.’

  She did not rate Byron too kindly either: ‘I think he was a strange character: his generosity was for a motive, his avarice for a motive; one time he was mopish, and nobody was to speak to him; another, he was for being jocular with everybody. Then he was a sort of Don Quixote, fighting with the police for a woman of the town. He had a great deal of vice in his looks.’

  She wasn’t mad about poets either: ‘As for poetry, it is easy enough to write verses; and as for the thoughts, who knows where he got them?’ Byron had the last laugh though, as the night before they sailed for Cairo, Bruce propositioned Byron after they had dined together. Byron declined.

  Apart from amusing himself with the visitors to the monastery, and
the ‘Ragazzi’ in its boys’ school, Byron found that, especially in winter, the Christian families in Athens had a surprisingly active social life into which he was always welcomed. The leader, both by personality and Turkish approval, was the highly sophisticated French consul Louis François Sebastien Fauvel, and it was with Fauvel and his friend from his first visit to Athens, Giovanni Lusieri, that Byron spent most of his time. The three were, at first sight, an unlikely trio of friends. Byron was a generation younger than Lusieri who was a generation younger than Fauvel. The fact that England and France were at war was unlikely to worry either the French consul or the member of the House of Lords, matters of war and peace between nations being an inconvenience which need not bother them here. The fact that Fauvel had been sent from his previous post in Constantinople to try to outbid Elgin for the Marbles might have been of more concern, as Lusieri was Elgin’s agent - and so working against Fauvel - and Byron was fiercely opposed to the destruction of the sites and the removal of the Marbles to London or the Louvre or anywhere else. But these practical differences were set aside as all three were each other’s best company, sophisticated, erudite and creative (Fauvel was an artist too), and all this in common was too much to resist among the small Frank setting of Athens, 1810.

  Byron had of course long objected to the very thought of removing antiquities from their surroundings. In 1807 the first collection of Elgin Marbles had been shown at Elgin’s own Park Lane House. Byron had mocked Elgin in his satirical English Bards & Scotch Reviewers:

  Let Aberdeen and Elgin still pursue

  The shade of fame through regions of Virtu;

  Waste useless thousands on their Phidian freaks,

  Mis-shapen monuments, and maimed antiques;