Byron's War
Page 11
Written during January and February 1821, ‘Epipsychidion’ ends with a fantasy of fulfilment in which ‘Emilia’ is transported to Greece, to an idyllic shore in the island group, the Sporades.14 The landscape Shelley evokes is one of an earthly paradise, inhabited by only a few ‘pastoral people’ who ‘Draw the last spirit of the age of gold’.15 There is no sign, here, of Shelley's revered ancient Greeks. No ruined temples obtrude upon the lovers’ solitude. In his own way, Shelley has re-imagined Haidee's island and the beginning of her idyll with Don Juan, from Canto II of Byron's epic (he had not yet read the continuation of the story in the next two cantos). If Byron had met Shelley half-way in bringing his epic hero into the classical world that Shelley so admired, the younger poet was now returning the compliment, in decamping with his beloved Emilia to a Greece that is recognisably Byron's from that canto. Shelley had always idealised Greece, but only in relation to the remote past. Now, while Mavrokordatos became an ever more frequent visitor to their house, for both the Shelleys the idea of Greece was becoming grounded in the present and beginning to open towards the future.
This was how matters stood with the Shelleys when news reached Pisa that the Greek Revolution had begun. Their response could not have been more different from Byron's.
Echoes of revolution
It was the first of April. But this was no April Fool. The day was Sunday, the first day of fine weather after a week of rain and gales, brought by the libeccio blowing in from the sea. The Shelleys at the time were living in the centre of town, on the Lung’Arno. It was there that Mavrokordatos called, as Mary's diary recorded: ‘with news about Greece – he is as gay as a caged eagle just free’.16 He was back the next day with the text, in Greek, of the declaration of his country's independence. Mary, certainly, and probably also Shelley, would have needed his help to translate it. No sooner had Mavrokordatos left again, than Mary wrote to him, considerately offering to suspend her Greek lessons. He agreed at once. (This is the first of his letters that Mary preserved.) In the event, the lessons would continue sporadically, and their meetings would become more frequent than ever. In a postscript to the same letter, Mavrokordatos added, ‘I am preparing a small task for Mr Shelley. He has promised me to have it inserted in an English publication, and I am counting on him to fulfil his promise.’17
Two days later, on 5 April, the Shelleys dispatched their translation of the declaration of independence, together with two short letters summarising the news from Greece. One of these went to the Examiner, the radical journal edited by their friend Leigh Hunt, the other to one of the most widely circulating British newspapers of the day, the Morning Chronicle. The declaration of independence had already appeared in the British press, but the Shelleys’ letters were duly published. These letters have been assumed by modern scholars to be the Shelleys’ own work. But this is to overlook the guiding role of their ‘turbaned friend’ – and also the fact that most of the ‘news’ reported in these letters had either not yet happened by the day they were posted from Pisa, or was not yet known in Italy. Already on that April day, the Shelleys had become willing agents of what today would be called a propaganda campaign, whose author was Mavrokordatos.
In all probability the text published in the Examiner represents a faithful translation of the ‘task’ that Mavrokordatos had prepared for Shelley. His original text, which has not survived, would have been in French, the language in which he wrote to Mary. Mary, or Shelley, or both, will have done little more than put this into English:
An express from Wallachia informs us that the Prince [Alexander] YPSILANTI, a Greek General in the Russian service, who has been aid-de-camp to the Emperor ALEXANDER, has entered Wallachia, declaring the liberty of Greece, with a force of 10,000 Greeks, collected from those serving under the Russians, and has now already advanced to Bucharest, his army increasing every hour…His proclamation, which I enclose, has been the signal for a simultaneous insurrection throughout Greece. The Servians, the Epirotes, and the Sulliotes have revolted…The Turks are completely driven from the Morea[.]18
Ypsilantis had crossed from Russia into Ottoman territory, in what is today Romania, on 6 March. The more general insurrection in the Peloponnese (or Morea) had in fact only just begun, on 2 April. News of its success would not reach Pisa for another two weeks.19 Ypsilantis’ troops were not yet at Bucharest. The other revolts announced were still no more than wishful thinking. When Mavrokordatos wrote to unnamed Greek friends in Paris on 2 April, he did not include these inflated claims that he had passed to the Shelleys.20 That this is Mavrokordatos speaking, and not a Shelley, is further proved by a sentence that begins, ‘The war of the Cross against the Crescent, for which our fathers bled…’. Mary repeats this, with the rest, in a private letter to her friend Maria Gisborne of the same day. But this is simply a more informal version of what she would have received from Mavrokordatos.21
The version of this communiqué that reached the Morning Chronicle, and was published on 23 April, has been touched up with the addition of opinions that are recognisably Shelley's.22 Shorn of the tell-tale reference to religion, it subtly qualifies the announcement that Ypsilantis’ action has already provoked sympathetic revolts throughout Greece: ‘or rather it has been the signal before determined on of that measure’.23 Shelley knew, in other words, that this was what was supposed to happen. Thanks to Shelley's connivance, Mavrokordatos was later jubilant that the Morning Chronicle had been the first newspaper to announce the uprising in the Peloponnese – in effect, before it had happened. But he was annoyed, too, that Shelley by a careless, or perhaps a face-saving, opening sentence had all but given away the source of his information. To Mary, Mavrokordatos would complain, ‘This declaration has caused me some pain, for you know that I am already sufficiently watched by the enemies of our cause.’24
Medwin, who had left Pisa at the end of February, was no doubt correct in remembering:
There was at that time little prospect of a Greek revolution, though the subject frequently formed part of our conversation. It was a favourite speculation of Shelley's, and with a prophetic spirit he anticipated the emancipation of that oppressed race; and Mavrocordato…half resolved to believe, almost against reason, that an insurrection in Greece was possible; but had no idea it was so near at hand.25
Mavrokordatos knew more than Medwin realised. At some point between Medwin's departure and the beginning of April, it seems that he had taken the Shelleys part way, at least, into his confidence.
The Philiki Etairia (Friendly Society, or Society of Friends) was a clandestine organisation, very similar in its rituals, codes, and secrecy to the Italian Carbonari, and like them based ultimately on Freemasonry. Often supposed to have been founded in the Ukrainian city of Odessa in 1814, the Society effectively began its operations between two and three years later.26 Its nucleus was made up of expatriate Greek traders and businessmen with interests and connections in Russia, a country long seen by many Greeks as their future liberator and protector, because of their shared Orthodox religion. The chief political objective of the conspirators was to win over highly placed Greeks in the ruling elite of the Russian empire, in the hope that in this way Russia could be induced to support a revolution in Greece, if necessary by making war against Turkey. To this end they had tried, and failed, to recruit the Corfiot nobleman Ioannis Kapodistrias (Capodistria), who at the time had risen to become foreign minister to Tsar Alexander. Instead, they had only recently persuaded another high-ranking officer in the Russian imperial service to lead them. This was the Alexander Ypsilantis named in the communiqué that the Shelleys had transmitted to England.
By early in 1821, the conspirators had come up with a plan for action: a universal uprising of the Greeks on the symbolically chosen feast of the Annunciation, 25 March (6 April in the western calendar). A meeting of leading ‘Friends’ in the Peloponnese at Vostitsa (where Byron's former host, Andreas Londos, was now primate), debated whether this might not be too soon. Letters, of seemingly
anxious content, were despatched on 10 February to Ypsilantis in Russia and Metropolitan Ignatios in Pisa. The conspirators agreed to stay their hand until they should receive replies.27 It is not known for certain how Ignatios responded. According to Mavrokordatos, later, both he and the bishop had tried to persuade the conspirators to abandon their plans, believing that ‘in a few years’ the nation would have progressed to the point where liberty could be won without bloodshed.28
The messengers from the Vostitsa meeting would have reached Pisa by the end of February. Mavrokordatos, living in the same house as Ignatios, would certainly have been in the bishop's confidence. Throughout March, Mavrokordatos will have known that revolution was imminent, even if he was actually exerting himself, along with Ignatios, to postpone it. So the news he brought to the Shelleys that April day was not entirely unexpected. As Shelley confided to Claire the next day, ‘Prince Mavrocordato has made us expect this event for some weeks past.’29
Ten days earlier, he had written to his friend Thomas Love Peacock in England to commission a gem with the head of Alexander the Great and two seals with the words engraved, in Greek, from Sophocles’ play Oedipus at Colonus, ‘I am the prophet of a glorious contest.’30 These must have been intended as presents from both the Shelleys to Mavrokordatos, who shared his name with the conqueror of old, and in this way was to become emblematically the new Alexander the Great. Mary had just finished reading Sophocles’ play, with his help.31 Evidently, in the minds of all three, the resonant Greek phrase had become a touchstone for discussion of imminent revolution in Greece. When Mavrokordatos wrote to break the news to his Greek friends in Paris, on the same day that he brought Ypsilantis’ proclamation to the Shelleys, he would quote the same phrase from the play as an epigraph or heading.32 And Shelley would quote it again, also in the original Greek, as the epigraph of his verse drama, Hellas, that he would write later in the year and dedicate to Mavrokordatos.
Mavrokordatos may have had reservations about the timing of the revolution beforehand. But, once hostilities had broken out, his enthusiasm was wholehearted from the beginning. There was never any doubt in his mind that he would be departing for Greece at the earliest opportunity.33 For the remainder of his time in Pisa, Mavrokordatos would loyally maintain his promise to keep Mary abreast of every development that was reported to him from Greece, both in person and by letter. Although he wrote only to her, it is clear that he expected the news he reported from Greece to be shared with Shelley, and perhaps also with others.34
The first news was not good. On Saturday, 7 April, when reports of the outbreak were less than a week old, Mavrokordatos wrote to Mary:
I am in despair. The Russians, the Austrians, perhaps even England, are making common cause against the unhappy Greeks, offering them their mediation, and threatening them should they not accept. You can well imagine that at such a moment I am not master of myself. The only thing I beg of you is to speak of this to no one, unless to Mr Shelley. I may come to see you this evening to seek your consolation.35
It was worse than that. News of Ypsilantis’ action had reached the assembled sovereigns of Europe and their diplomatic retinues at a summit in the Austrian town of Laibach (today's Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia). The occasion was one of a series of such high-level meetings which served to consolidate the conservative policies that had been ushered in by the Congress of Vienna at the end of the Napoleonic wars. In the company of other heads of state, not only had the tsar refused to the insurgent Greeks the support on which the Philiki Etairia had been counting, he had publicly dismissed Ypsilantis from his service and disowned his actions, even going so far as to make common cause with the Turks to ensure the defeat of the rebels.36 From that moment, the revolution in the Danubian principalities was doomed. And there was as yet no news that the conspirators had been any more successful with the second prong to their plan than the first, in raising sympathetic revolts in Greece itself.
Soon this would change. In the Peloponnese, where Turkish-speaking Muslims were few outside the towns, the revolt spread quickly during the first half of April. Within weeks, much of the country was in the hands of the insurgents, while the Turks took refuge in the fortresses and fortified towns. Mary's journal for 24 April records, ‘αμ [Mavrokordatos] calls in the evening with good news from Greece – The Morea free.’37 This time it was true. Soon there would be confirmed news from further afield. In northwest Greece, there was a revolt of the Souliots, the warlike mountaineers whose spirit had so impressed Byron. The islands of Hydra, Spetses, and Psara had joined in, contributing a combined fleet of merchantmen and privateers to begin enforcing a naval blockade in the Aegean.
All this Mavrokordatos reported throughout April and May. While news was slow to arrive from Wallachia, he continued to express anxiety that Ypsilantis had not yet crossed the Danube, on his way south to relieve his countrymen in Greece. He confessed to Mary that no one seemed to know what the Prince's plans were.38 Even while the fate of Ypsilantis’ venture hung in the balance, Mavrokordatos seems to have been remarkably candid in what he told Mary about its prospects:
I believe that I have told you more than once that the Greeks’ efforts are not for Wallachia and Moldavia, which are two provinces quite foreign to Greece, and I foresaw that immediately upon the departure of Ypsillanti [sic] these two countries would have either to pass under the power of Russia, or else come to an accommodation with the Porte [the Ottoman government].39
Meantime, disturbing news was arriving from Constantinople. From the outset, the Greeks had been braced for savage reprisals by the Ottoman authorities.40 On 21 May, Mavrokordatos wrote to Mary that he feared the Patriarch of the Orthodox Church had been put to death, as well as several of the higher clergy and ‘a Prince Mavrocordato (who must be either my cousin, or my uncle)’.41 Three days later he was able to confirm the execution of the Patriarch. Gregory V had been hanged from the gate of his own palace on Orthodox Easter Sunday, 21 April, along with three archbishops. The fate of Mavrokordatos’ relative remained unknown. In time it would be confirmed. A Mavrokordatos is included in the list of high-ranking citizens beheaded on 16 April.42
If Mavrokordatos had initially hoped to leave for Greece in a matter of days, he was to be disappointed. On 27 May, in a passage marked ‘Secret’, he announced to Mary that a ship had been sent for him from Greece, but would not be departing immediately. At the same time, he was unable to resist scoring a point against her husband: ‘If Mr Shelley was full of pride at being able to have at his disposal a barque and two cannons, you may imagine how proud must I be now to have at mine a brigantine with eighteen.’43 He also asked her to burn this letter after reading it. Whether this element of melodrama was aimed at Shelley or at the Tuscan authorities is not clear.44
By now the Shelleys had moved some five miles outside Pisa, to the spa resort of Bagni di San Giuliano. Prince Karatzas was a frequent visitor to the baths. This made it easy for Mavrokordatos to send letters by a family servant, or to call on the Shelleys while accompanying his uncle.45 With the tempo of preparations speeding up during June, there were fewer meetings. To compensate for this, on Wednesday, 13 June, Mavrokordatos wrote to Mary promising to ‘come to see you on Friday at 7 and stay until five, perhaps a little later’. Mary's journal duly reports that the visit took place, though not its duration.46 A week later, having met her unexpectedly in Pisa, he wrote to her immediately afterwards to announce that his departure from Livorno had been fixed for the following Monday. He would make every effort to see her on Sunday. At the same time he passed on a report, admittedly unconfirmed, that Ypsilantis had won a great victory over the Turks. The reality, though Mavrokordatos could not have known of this before he left Italy, was that Ypsilantis’ forces had been routed at the battle of Dragashan on 19 June.47
From Sunday to Monday, when Mavrokordatos was expected, Shelley absented himself from Bagni di San Giuliano, perhaps tactfully.48 But there was no sign of Mavrokordatos. On Monday, the day she expected
that he would sail, Mary wrote to him in what must have been considerable distress, to judge from her covering note to Maria Gisborne: ‘Would you have the kindness to get the enclosed delivered immediately to its address? Pardon me for troubling you with this, and pray let it be sent without any delay – You will hear of the Prince at M. Constantin Argyropoli, a merchant at Leghorn. If he has sailed, then let the letter be sent back to me[.]’49
This probably crossed with Mavrokordatos’ letter to her. Events had kept him in Pisa. He would be leaving in all probability today. ‘If I cannot come [to visit you] I count greatly on your indulgence. I have no doubt at all of the interest that you take in our cause, and in me in particular, and I thank you with all my heart.’50 This is more formal than most of what he had written to her over the last few months. It does not sound as though he was in fact planning to visit, and Mary's journal does not record that he did. After promising, at the end of the same letter, that he would write to her ‘as often as possible’, Mavrokordatos sailed from Livorno aboard a Hydriot ship flying the Russian flag on Tuesday, 26 June, bound for Marseille. There he would pick up military supplies, a printing press, his future right-hand man Georgios Praidis, and a score of French and Piedmontese volunteers, before sailing for Missolonghi in Greece.51
Mavrokordatos never wrote to Mary again, except once, almost twenty years later, when he was serving as his country's ambassador in London. Politely declining her invitation, he did promise to visit on another occasion and to introduce her to Madame Mavrocordato.52 But if their friendship during these seven months in 1820 and 1821 left little detectable mark on the private life of either, the same cannot be said of Mavrokordatos’ future political career in Greece. Between the outbreak of the Revolution and, at the latest, 1823, both Mavrokordatos and his political mentor Ignatios had withdrawn their principal foreign allegiance from Russia and turned, with careful qualifications, to Britain instead. During the exact same period, Mavrokordatos, the former privileged minister of an enlightened despot in Wallachia, would re-emerge into the political limelight as a constitutional nationalist with liberal leanings. It has been suggested that these developments may owe much to the influence of the Shelleys during those months at Pisa.53