The call had come. But the call Byron heard was in his own imagination.
No going back
Even now, he hesitated. With one foot over the edge of the precipice, for two whole months he teetered. He knew, really, that he was committed. If his offer were to be taken up by the Committee and the Greek provisional government, he could not honourably go back on it. The alacrity with which both Blaquiere and Louriotis responded made this a foregone conclusion. In London, Hobhouse relayed the news to Bowring. When Bowring wrote to Byron at the end of April, welcoming him as a full member of the Committee, Byron felt honour-bound to repeat formally what he had already said and written to Blaquiere, Hobhouse, and others: ‘My first wish is to go up into the Levant in person.’ When Bowring leaked parts of this letter to the press, on 2 June, Byron was too far over the precipice to draw back.71 But still, until the middle of June, he went on subjecting himself – and his correspondents – to an exquisite agony of indecisiveness.
Blaquiere had promised to write. When no letter had arrived, after just over a week, Byron's excitement turned to petulance: ‘I have heard no more from Blaquiere – who was to have written to me at length – so I suppose that he has either exceeded his powers – or repented him – for some reason or other.’72 Then three days later he did hear from Blaquiere:
I saw the Bishop Ignatius at Pisa. He has begged me to express his gratitude for your generous intentions, and says he is sure G[reece] will be grateful. As to my companion [Louriotis], nothing can exceed his exultation – you would smile if I named the part he has cut out for your Lordship – It would be a novel though unnatural sight to behold the author of Childe Harold molding the energies of G[reece] in the 19th century as a minister.73
This is all that lies behind the supposition, repeated in many biographies, that ‘some of the Greek exiles in Italy had…approached Byron with the offer of the crown of Greece’.74 But it was enough to set off Byron and the Earl of Blessington weaving a tipsy fantasy that has since become part of the Byron legend. ‘What think you’, wrote Blessington, as the preamble to an invitation to dine the next day, ‘of Emperor of the Greeks. You are too lean for a Greek Emperor and would not like to be a little one like Cousin of Austria.’75
What would have flattered Byron far more, in Blaquiere's letter, were the repeated terms, ‘gratitude’ and ‘grateful’. It was this that Christian, in The Island, could never deserve. Whether he knew it or not, Blaquiere had struck exactly the right note. And there was a sombre aspect, too. The letter ends with a brief account of visiting Shelley's grave in Rome. For Blaquiere to have mentioned this, it seems likely that Byron had spoken of Shelley at their meeting. Perhaps he had even told Blaquiere what he would later tell the Scottish Presbyterian medical officer in Cephalonia, Dr James Kennedy: that Shelley, had he lived, would have gone with him to Greece.76 This may be the reason why Byron determined, right at the beginning, that if he did go to Greece, it would be in July. The planned date for his departure (if he went) was always going to be close to the anniversary of Shelley's death.77
As he tried out the idea of Greece in correspondence and conversation, Byron was not above introducing a strain of playful morbidity. Since ‘there is some risk of not returning’, he writes to Kinnaird, ‘my latest works would bear some value merely as such’. By ‘latest’ he means ‘last’.78 To Lord Blessington, he started out robustly: ‘I assure you my notions on that score are limited to getting away with a whole skin’, only to shift into the same lugubrious tone: ‘or sleeping quietly with a broken one in some of my old Glens where I used to dream in my former excursions; – I should prefer a grey Greek stone over me to Westminster Abbey – – but I doubt that I shall have the luck to die so happily’.79 If Byron was dreaming of glory during those months of decision-making in Genoa, he was also thinking of death.
He still had no real idea of what he might do, once in Greece. At first he thought of it as a civilising mission – to teach both sides how to treat their prisoners better, perhaps even to protect lives.80 Soon, he was building on the embryo plan that had been in the background since Pisa. He would put to good use the capital he had been hoarding for the best part of a year.81 Throughout May, he was still equivocating. ‘However I will go…an’ it be possible – or do all I can in the cause, go or not’, he wrote to Hobhouse on the nineteenth. But then, Byron knew something about himself too: ‘What the Hon Dug. [Kinnaird] and his committee may decide I do not know – and still less what I may decide (for I am not famous for decision) for myself.’82 The Blessingtons left Genoa at the beginning of June, before Byron's mind was fully made up. But Lady Blessington had already been struck by the lack of enthusiasm with which he talked of his plans.83 In conversation, to her and others, he confessed something that he never put into a letter. As the time for an irrevocable decision approached, he was wishing he had never got himself into this ‘scrape’.84 But even while he vacillated, he was daily cutting off a little more of his retreat.
He would not yet have known about the leaking of his letter in London, when on 7 June a second letter arrived from Blaquiere. If any single factor decided Byron, surely it was this. Blaquiere, writing from Zante in the Ionian Islands, was about to cross into Greece. He would write again when he reached the seat of government, in Tripolitsa. In the meantime, Blaquiere was determined to hold Byron to the offer that he was now, in some moods at least, regretting:
From all that I have heard here, it would be criminal in me leave this [i.e., Zante], without urging your Lordship to come up as soon as possible: – your presence will operate as a Talisman – and the field is too glorious, – too closely associated with all that you hold dear, to be any longer abandoned.85
To Kinnaird the next day, Byron wrote: ‘if the next communication from the Greek seat of Government – at all resembles the present – I shall proceed to join the cause forthwith’. Two days after that he had begun rather desperately trying to find someone to take care of Teresa during his absence, prefacing his request: ‘My latest news from Greece gives me reason to suppose that I shall be required to go up there – and probably soon.’
Suddenly, on the fifteenth, he turned practical. He wrote to Trelawny, who was then in Florence (this is the whole of the letter):
My dear T. – You must have heard that I am going to Greece. Why do you not come to me? I want your aid, and am exceedingly anxious to see you. Pray come, for I am at last determined to go to Greece; it is the only place I was ever contented in. I am serious, and did not write before, as I might have given you a journey for nothing; they all say I can be of use in Greece. I do not know how, nor do they; but at all events let us go.86
After that, there really was no going back.
The preparations that went on during June and the first half of July have been much written about, at the time and ever since. Most famous is the story of the scarlet and gold uniforms for himself, Pierino, and Trelawny, and the helmets to go with them. These were built to Byron's own design, inspired by the description of Hector's armour in the Iliad. Whether Byron ever wore his helmet is uncertain. But all these accessories did travel with him to Missolonghi. After his death, one of the helmets would find its way, via Boston, Massachusetts, to the Historical Museum in Athens, where it can be seen today.87 A few months later, Mary Shelley, who had been living in the Casa Negrotto with the Hunts at the time, wrote to Leigh from London, ‘the existence of these helmets by the bye is well known here’. No doubt Mary had smiled to herself as she reassured an anxious enquirer about Byron's intentions: ‘Helmets so fine were never made to hack.’88 Only a few weeks had gone by since Lady Blessington had been complaining in her diary that the most famous poet of the age dressed in dingy old clothes far too large for him. The transformation was too extreme to avoid comment. But in truth Byron probably set no more store by his new carapace than he had by the old. In this display there is surely a wry memory of the hunchback Arnold, in The Deformed Transformed, suddenly emerging with the body and armour o
f the slayer of Hector, Achilles.
Another task was to find out what was actually happening in Greece. To Bowring on 12 May Byron had written that he was in touch with Greek exiles in Italy. But it says much for his lack of interest up to now that he had no Greek contacts to draw upon when he needed them. He wrote to Carvelà in Pisa, relying on Hobhouse's acquaintance rather than his own. The result was in any case disappointing. He mobilised the local representative of the banking firm he had used in Tuscany, Charles Barry, to take soundings on his behalf among the Greek community in Livorno. The result would again be inconclusive, but in this way Byron would gain a valued friend and supporter, the recipient of many of his last letters from Greece.89
As a result of these enquiries, the community that Byron had shunned, or at least ignored, during the ten months when he had been living in Pisa the previous year, soon knew all about his plans. The Casa Saluzzo was becoming a magnet for a new kind of visitor. Two German volunteers, returning destitute and disillusioned from Greece, were directed there. Byron sent them on their way with money and new shoes.90 A colonel from Hesse, on his way from Greece with vague schemes to help the cause, asked for and received an introduction to the London Greek Committee.91 A relative of Mavrokordatos, Count Constantin Skilitzy, travelling in the opposite direction, turned up with a letter of introduction and asked for a passage to Greece.92
Then there were preparations of a more practical sort. Blaquiere had advised against bringing ‘the pleasure boat’. Byron now loathed the Bolivar in any case. He sold it to Lord Blessington who subsequently, to his rage, was slow to pay for it: ‘he shan't treat me like a tradesman that I promise him’, he would rant. Byron's aversion to paying tradesmen is one of the least forgivable of his faults, and probably one of the few that he never regarded as one in himself. It was only a couple of months since he had expressly forbidden Kinnaird to settle the coach-builder's bill, now six years overdue, for his Napoleonic coach.93 With the Bolivar disposed of, Byron had now to find a way to convey himself, his companions, horses, and supplies (though not the coach) to Greece.
By 18 June, Barry had found him a ship. On the last day of the month Byron signed a contract to charter the Hercules, a two-masted brig of a type built to carry coal for the English coastal trade.94 Perhaps the name appealed to the owner of the helmets. The travelling party was coming together. Soon Trelawny arrived in response to Byron's summons, and at once set about the modifications necessary to the brig so that it could transport horses. Pierino, of course, would be going. A young Italian doctor, Francesco Bruno, was recruited on the recommendation of Dr Alexander, who had been treating Byron in Genoa. A place was found for Count Skilitzy. The complement would be made up by Byron's secretary, Lega Zambelli, several servants including the ex-gondolier Tita Falcieri and the faithful Fletcher, Trelawny's black American servant Benjamin Lewis, and Byron's two dogs. Money was taken aboard: 10,000 Spanish dollars in silver coins, and bills of exchange for a further 40,000.
Right up to the day of departure, Byron was more troubled than he cared to admit about ‘the absurd womankind’, as he had taken to referring to Teresa, quoting a character in a novel by Walter Scott.95 He delayed even telling her of his plans for Greece. When he could dissemble no longer, he sent Pierino to break the news. There were scenes. Teresa then begged to be allowed to go with him to Greece. His response was a kind of backhanded chivalry, crueller than kind, but perhaps not intentionally so: ‘of course the idea is ridiculous – as every thing must there be sacrificed to seeing her out of harm's way’.96 But his firmness cost him pain. The ‘obstacles’ to his going, he confessed to Lord Blessington, ‘have hampered and put me out of Spirits – and still keep me in a vexatious state of uncertainty’.97 For a time it really did look as though Teresa would have to go into a convent. Byron wrote to at least two lady acquaintances, hopelessly wondering if they could help find an alternative home for her.98 As the day of departure approached, Teresa would sit up at night writing sentimental letters to him, then tear them up. Half a century later, she would recall his promise to her: he would soon be back, ‘and then nothing will be able to part us again’.99
Other partings, though less emotionally charged, were no more happy. The Hunts were to move to Florence. Byron had made financial provision for them, but it was accepted with a poor grace. By a terse agreement, he did not meet Hunt to say goodbye.100 Because of a misunderstanding over money, for which Hunt was probably to blame, Byron behaved high-handedly towards Mary at the last. There was then a mix-up (perhaps) over timing, which meant there were no farewells with Shelley's widow either. When she knew he had gone, she sent a short note after him, instead. But he had asked her to keep Teresa company at the time when the Hercules was due to sail, and this she did.101
It was a wretched end to a relationship that seems to have been like no other, on either side. One biographer has supposed that Mary was ‘one of the very few women who ever wished to be on terms of frank and intimate friendship with [Byron], but no more’.102 On his side, Byron had on occasion been roused to fury by the slander that he had had an affair with Mary, as well as with Claire. Another biographer wonders if this was because he was ‘annoyed at not getting the credit for having resisted trying’.103 Mary herself was most probably thinking of Byron when she wrote in her diary, a few months after his death, ‘I was never a coquette – those who might have become my lovers became my friends & I grew rich – till death the reaper…’104 For all the frictions of those final months at Albaro, Mary's first reaction, when she heard that he was dead, would be to think back to those ‘evening visits to Diodati’ in 1816. But then she would continue (without mentioning the much longer period when Byron and the Shelleys had again been together in Pisa): ‘Can I forget his attentions & consolations to me during my deepest misery? – Never.’105 This can only refer to the time after Shelley's death, at Genoa, that ended when Byron left for Greece, and Mary set out to return to England.
The departure, when it came, was a sadly drawn-out affair. After several delays, the expedition was due to sail on the twelfth, but there was no wind. The next day, Byron and his party were all aboard. But the Hercules lay becalmed in the harbour of Genoa until dawn on the fifteenth. Then twelve hours after putting to sea, a sudden storm forced the ship back to port. The following morning, the whole party went ashore. With Pierino, Byron made a brief melancholy return to the Casa Saluzzo. Perhaps it was as well that Teresa and Ruggero Gamba had already left. ‘Where’, Byron wondered aloud, ‘shall we be in a year?’ To Barry he even confessed that ‘he would not go on the Greek expedition even then but that “Hobhouse and the others would laugh at him”’. The party spent a miserable day on shore, most of them the worse for seasickness and lack of sleep. By evening, everyone was back on board, and the Hercules sailed from Genoa for a second time, late on Wednesday, 16 July.106
Why did he do it?
Byron's letters from these months are fervid with excitement. They convey vividly the crabwise, vacillating, but from the beginning also somehow inevitable movement towards commitment. But they give nothing away about his deeper motivation. Why is he putting himself through all this?
Many reasons have been suggested, both at the time and ever since, some of them originating with Byron himself. He was bored with his life in Genoa. Prematurely ageing, he was obsessed with physical decline and saw a way out in courting a violent death. It was a presentiment: he had always known he would die in Greece. He craved action. He craved glory. He loved liberty (so he told Lady Blessington, and who would doubt it?). He wanted to revisit the forbidden sexual adventures of his youth (perhaps even to regain the youthfulness of that time). He had always wanted to emulate his hero, Napoleon, and now was his chance. Trelawny even thought he did it ‘to be revenged on Nature’ for his deformity.107
On one thing, those who knew him were in no doubt. He was not doing it for the Greeks. Already, before he left Genoa, Byron could ‘calmly talk of the worthlessness of the people he proposes
to make those sacrifices for’.108 This attitude troubled Lady Blessington, as it would trouble others to whom he said the same, and worse, in Greece when he got there. Plenty of philhellenes talked like this on their way home, none on their way out. But Byron had already been to Greece. Unlike so many philhellenes, he knew better than to expect to find himself transported into the company of the ancient heroes familiar from his schoolbooks.
Even more surprising was his attitude towards those ancient heroes themselves, those ‘glorious beings whom the imagination almost refuses to figure to itself as belonging to our kind’, as Shelley had imagined them in the Preface to Hellas. Despite all that he had written on the subject in the second canto of Childe Harold, Byron told Lady Blessington in Genoa that ‘antiquities had no interest for him; nay, he carried this so far, that he disbelieved the possibility of their exciting interest in any one’. This view, too, he would repeat to several others in the months that followed.109
It was now that Byron began to adopt the attitude towards ancient Greece that he had found in William Mitford's History. The five volumes of this work travelled with him aboard the Hercules.110 Far from idealising classical Greek civilisation, Mitford had drawn the attention of his readers to the ‘piratical, thieving and murdering kind of petty war, to which the [ancient] Greeks at all times and in all parts were strongly addicted’.111 It was passages like this that Byron had in mind when he told Trelawny, during the voyage, ‘The Greeks are returned to barbarism; Mitford says the people never were anything better.’ Mitford was his authority. But the opinion was one he had heard in Athens, on his first visit with Hobhouse.112
If it was not for the Greeks, what was it for? ‘Perhaps’, Lady Blessington wondered, ‘Byron wishes to show that his going to Greece is more an affair of principle than feeling.’ To an English lawyer a few months later, in Ithaca, he would confess ‘that his undertaking had more the character of a speculative adventure, in favour of what he conceived to be a glorious principle, than any admiration or enthusiasm for the individual cause’.113 That rings true, so far as it goes. But Byron was not the man to be guided solely by an abstract principle, no matter how ‘glorious’. Feeling surely did come into it. The truth is, he may well not have known, himself, why he did it. Some of the explanations he gave, afterwards, sound almost as though he is trying to explain himself to himself.114
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