Byron's decision to go to Greece was at once the culmination and the negation of his entire career as a poet. The negation: because from the moment he left Genoa, his writing career was over. Even if he was still imagining future projects before he left, the reality was that he would write only a handful of lines thereafter.115 The barely begun seventeenth canto of Don Juan travelled with him, and would be found among his effects at Missolonghi. But he never touched it again. The play, The Deformed Transformed, he had sent to England to be published as it was, unfinished. ‘I doubt if I shall go on with it’, he had written to John Hunt, now his publisher, on 21 May.116 He never did. He had no need to. The transformation was happening to him in life, and this was part of it. The last poetry Byron wrote in Italy is a short fragment begun a month before he sailed, and at once abandoned. It begins:
The Dead have been awakened – shall I sleep?117
But it was also a culmination. The momentum that was now carrying Byron to Greece had been building up ever since the ‘Frankenstein’ summer with the Shelleys, in 1816. In the persona of her fictional narrator, Mary had written, then: ‘Those events which materially influence our future destinies often derive their origin from a trivial occurrence’ – a sentence that would be dropped before the novel saw print.118 It could hardly have been truer of the real-life story that included the writing of Frankenstein. At every turn, the trivial and the accidental could have turned that momentum into any one of many possible channels. It was never a foregone conclusion that Byron would go to Greece. Often, during those years, it looked as if the chosen channel would be a quite different one. But accidental and trivial occurrences also combined, in the end, to make Greece the chosen destination. The momentum had to go somewhere.
There were several strands to this. There was Byron's war against mortality, that he had declared while completing the second canto of Childe Harold. There had been his early ambition, later eclipsed by the success of the ‘Turkish tales’, to distinguish himself in the world of action or politics. Then there had been the solipsistic rebellion of the ‘byronic’ heroes of those tales, that had spilled over into his own life and public reputation. Later still, there had been the tentative, never wholehearted, attempts to yoke those rebel instincts to a common, political cause. Byron had only very recently, in the aftermath of Shelley's death, begun to articulate a more nuanced position that could be called political: against tyranny and ‘all who war / With Thought’. Hovering in the background, but never consistently espoused, was the new cause of nations, that still-emerging political concept of a different sort of collective freedom. To bring that about would require a ‘new Prometheus of new men’, as he had written in The Prophecy of Dante, back in 1819. Where Victor Frankenstein, the ‘modern Prometheus’ of Mary's fiction, had failed, he, Byron, would restore life to an entire nation.
Byron can never literally have believed the rhetoric of the Greek revival, that in the actions of the modern Greeks ‘The Dead have been awakened.’ But Greece, unlike North or South America, or even Spain, did lend itself to that rhetoric. It was not the revival of Greece that moved him, so much as the idea that went back to his meditation below the Acropolis of Athens, in the first days of 1810, of reviving something – anything – that had gone. Somewhere at the back of all this, perhaps, lay the Christian idea of salvation through sacrifice, of life's ultimate victory over death – with the difference that Byron's victory would have to be won in the real, visible world, not in the hereafter.
Above all, there was Shelley. Often understated, frequently conflicted, the relationship between the two poets had brought out something in Byron that few others did, unless perhaps his youthful idealising of male beauty in the Cambridge choirboy John Edleston or the sexual liberation he had experienced with Giraud in Athens. Shelley's presence and the life-affirming brilliance of his conversation had brought Byron to believe, even if only for a moment, ‘That goodness is no name, and happiness no dream’. At Clarens, on Lake Geneva, he had been infected by the younger man's platonic vision of universal love. Over the years, the persuasive ‘Snake’ had become his conscience, inverting the biblical role of the evil tempter. If Byron was the ‘satanic’ fallen angel, Shelley's was the voice of the good that he had denied in himself and in his many fictional creations. While Shelley lived, even his persuasive powers had had their limits. It was Shelley's death that catapulted Byron into commitment of a kind he might never otherwise have made. Byron's war, as it entered its final phase, was to be above all a tribute to everything that Shelley had come to represent in his imagination.
Byron's departure for Greece, that July evening in 1823, was the very essence of Romantic poetry translated into politics. No longer the ‘poetry of politics’ from his Italian days – that had been no more than game-playing – this would be the politics inherent in the Romantic poetry that had been his life up to now, that was also the legacy of Shelley and many others: Romanticism in action, ‘words’ turned at last into ‘things’.
Part III Greece: ‘’Tis the cause makes all’ (July–December 1823)
Chapter 7 Preparations for battle
Last farewell
Byron's plan after leaving Genoa was to make for Zante (Zakynthos) in the Ionian Islands. The British authorities who ruled these islands under the terms of a Protectorate established in 1815 were known to be hostile to the revolution in neighbouring Greece. Under the rule of ‘King Tom’ Maitland, Lord High Commissioner in the capital, Corfu, official British policy of neutrality in the conflict was strictly enforced. Despite this, the islands were a natural jumping-off point for British and other European philhellenes intent on finding a route into revolutionary Greece. Blaquiere had gone this way. Byron was counting on Blaquiere to contact him in Zante and take charge of the final stage of his journey to the seat of the Greek Provisional Government.
But it turned out that he was not quite ready to leave Italian waters. Charles Barry's efforts on his behalf, to extract information from the Greek community of Pisa and Livorno, had begun to produce results after all. These were not quite the results that Byron had been hoping for, and they came while he was in the final stages of preparing for his departure. A florid epistle from Metropolitan Ignatios, Mavrokordatos’ mentor and the spiritual leader of the Greek community in Tuscany, written on 3 July, reached Byron four days later. The bishop praised his mission to Greece but withheld all hint of the kind of up-to-date factual information that Byron was seeking. Ignatios did give one piece of advice: to place his trust, among the leaders of the armed bands in Greece, in the Souliot chieftain, Markos Botsaris, who was leading resistance to a Turkish counter-attack in the hinterland above Missolonghi.1 Enclosed were six more letters of introduction for Byron, addressed in Greek to Botsaris, Mavrokordatos, and the unnamed leaders of Mainland Greece, Psara, Hydra, and Aitolia. Botsaris would be killed in battle before Byron got there. But Byron seems to have made no use of the other letters either – since they are today among his papers in the John Murray archive in the National Library of Scotland.2
Byron was determined to be cautious in his dealings with Ignatios. To add to his general mistrust of ecclesiastical authorities in any shape or form, he had recently been warned by Bowring: ‘Ignatius (the Bishop) may perhaps be considered too closely connected with Russia.’ This was a view shared by most British philhellenes as well as by the Foreign Office.3 In reality, Ignatios and his political allies in Greece had despaired of help arriving from Russia and were increasingly turning their attention to seeking support from Great Britain. The shrewd bishop had already begun to calculate the advantages to Greece of a British alliance.4 Ignatios could turn on the purple prose when he needed to. But writing to Mavrokordatos in Greece, in a very different style, he showed that he had the measure of his man:
The nobleman Lord Byron is on his way to see the state of affairs in Greece and to lend a helping hand. He has means. He is a member of the committee established in London in favour of the Greeks; he has important frien
ds and can bring benefit, provided he is pleased and our compatriots can win him over with their good offices towards him.5
This letter, unknown to Byron, would travel with him aboard the Hercules. A month later, Ignatios would write again, more urgently this time, to Mavrokordatos: ‘Do what you can to please him, not so much because he can provide money and material help, but most of all, because if he is displeased, he will do such damage as you cannot imagine.’6
The distrust was mutual. Byron, once he had decided to call at Livorno, declined a meeting with the Metropolitan, though he did receive his secretary, Dimitrios Mostras, aboard the Hercules.7
As he was about to leave Genoa, more advice began to arrive. Barry's enquiries had belatedly recruited two new supporters of Byron's mission, the merchants Giorgio and C. (probably Constantine) Mavrogordato. They would have been only very distantly related, if at all, to Mavrokordatos. The latter reinforced the recommendation of Botsaris among the military leaders, and was probably the first to suggest to Byron that once in Greece, he should make his headquarters at Missolonghi. It was from this source, too, that Byron first learned that the government in Greece had resolved to send deputies to England to negotiate a loan, a move with which he would soon become closely associated.8 But it was not advice that Byron was looking for. He needed hard information. He had gleaned precious little by the time he left Genoa. The stop in Livorno only exasperated him still further. ‘I find the Greeks here somewhat divided amongst themselves’, he would write to Bowring while at anchor, on 24 July. ‘What they most seem to want or desire is – Money – Money – Money.’9 Byron would soon grow used to both these circumstances.
In the event, the decision to call at Livorno had a number of consequences, from the bizarre to the far-reaching. Before leaving Genoa, Byron had agreed to pick up two new passengers, in addition to Count Skilitzy who was already aboard. Georgios Vitalis claimed to have fought in Napoleon's infantry and was now in the seafaring business. His brother had just arrived from Greece bringing despatches for Ignatios.10 When the Hercules sailed into the harbour of Livorno, the Vitalis ship fired off a thirteen-gun salute – a gesture that may not have been appreciated by the Tuscan port authorities, who had taken such exception to the cannon aboard the Bolivar the year before. On the voyage, the unfortunate Vitalis would become first the object of suspicion, and then the butt of rather crude pranks at the hands of Byron and Trelawny. He seems to have been a harmless enough character – but his apparent attempt to smuggle into the Ionian Islands a badly decomposed roast pig, wrapped in an expensive cloak, would earn him the contempt and scorn of his fellow-passengers.11
The second passenger was James Hamilton Browne. Born in Edinburgh in the same year as Shelley, Browne had recently been living outside Pisa, by coincidence in one of the many houses where the Shelleys had once lived, with a Greek mistress from whom he seemed now to have parted. Before that he had served the British administration of the Ionian Islands but had left or been dismissed over his pro-Greek sympathies.12 Some years later, Browne would publish a lively account of his brief visit to Greece with Byron and Trelawny, but never seems to have explained his motive in going there. In his rather straight-faced way he had a good eye for detail. This is Browne's recollection of Byron's appearance, when he first set eyes on him on the deck of the Hercules:
The contour of his countenance was noble and striking; the forehead, particularly so, was nearly white as alabaster. His delicately formed features were cast rather in an effeminate mould, but their soft expression was in some degree relieved by the mustaches of a light chestnut, and small tuft ‘à la houssard’, which he at that time sported. His eyes were rather prominent and full, of a dark blue, having that melting character which I have frequently observed in females…The texture of his skin was so fine and transparent, that the blue veins, rising like small threads around his temples, were clearly discernible…Lord Byron was habited in a round nankeen embroidered jacket, white Marseilles vest, buttoned a very little way up; he wore extremely fine linen, and his shirt-collar was thrown over in such a way as almost to uncover his neck; very long wide nankeen trowsers, fastened below, short buff laced boots…with a chip Tuscan straw hat, completed his personal equipment.13
It was Browne, not long after they had left Livorno, who persuaded Byron to change his destination in the Ionian Islands from Zante to Cephalonia.14 Each island under the British administration was ruled by a Resident, with powers delegated from the Lord High Commissioner. The Resident in Cephalonia, Colonel Charles James Napier, was not only known personally to Browne, but also, within the limits prescribed by his duties, a serious philhellene. Had it not been for Browne's inside information and advice, Byron's trajectory from this point on might have been very different. Had he persevered with the original plan for Zante, he would certainly not have been encouraged to linger there, as he was by Napier in Cephalonia.
A final consequence of the stop at Livorno was that Byron took delivery of a package forwarded from Genoa. It contained a glowing personal tribute from no less a person than Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. This was the ultimate accolade, setting the final seal on Byron's international reputation as a poet – just at the moment when he was turning his back on it. In a hasty and effusive response, Byron announced his new resolve for Greece, and promised to visit the great man at his home in Weimar, ‘if ever I come back’.15
Byron's mood at Livorno and on the voyage that followed is hard to gauge. According to Gamba, he ‘enjoyed excellent health, and was always in good spirits’, allegedly throughout. Trelawny echoes this, adding anecdotal evidence that seems to bear it out. But Trelawny also notes that in the course of the voyage Byron had ‘improved amazingly’ – suggesting that things had not been so rosy at the start. In his later, but not his earlier, published recollections, Trelawny adds a conversation that he claims took place not long after leaving Livorno, in which Byron seems to presage his own death and expresses a wish to be buried in Greece. Browne also described Byron's ‘hilarity and enjoyment’ but was puzzled and disturbed by what sound, in today's terms, like abrupt mood swings: ‘A cloud would instantaneously come over him, as if arising from some painful and appalling recollection; the tears would bedew his eyes, when he would arise and quit the company, averting his face, in order to conceal his emotion.’16
The stop at Livorno was part of Byron's programme. But even before leaving Genoa he seems to have been in two minds about it. As the delays mounted, he warned his two intended passengers that the Hercules might not even anchor in the port. They must be ready to be brought aboard by boat, on receiving Byron's signal.17 In the event, the ship remained off Livorno for some seventy-two hours. Trelawny and the others were glad to stretch their legs ashore. Byron landed only once, to pay a courtesy call on Barry's business partner and to buy additional supplies from Henry Dunn's store on the harbour front.18 Even this experience will have been painful. The last time Byron had been here, almost exactly a year ago, on emerging from the shop he had run into Shelley, Williams, and Leigh Hunt. It had been the day the Gambas had learnt of their final exile from Tuscany. Byron had been in a towering temper. A week later, Shelley and Williams had drowned, sailing out of this same harbour. This new voyage, undertaken almost on the anniversary, was in part, at some level, Byron's homage to Shelley. The interlude at Livorno was a form of leave-taking. Whether or not he would ever return from Greece, Byron surely sensed the profound change that was taking place in himself.
This is not at all to say, with Harold Nicolson, that on leaving Livorno Byron ‘knew that the only positive action of which he was still capable was death’.19 The conflict that awaited Byron in Greece was far from being the ‘glorious contest’ that Shelley, translating the two-and-a-half-thousand-year-old words of Sophocles, had prophesied. Byron's war would have, in reality, very little to do with battles between Greek and Turk, or between freedom and tyranny. To that struggle, there was nothing that Byron, for all his wits and his wealth, could possibly have co
ntributed. There was a different struggle beginning in Greece, that summer of 1823. This was the political struggle, among the leaders of the Greeks themselves, to determine what kind of freedom they were in the process of winning from their former masters. It was a conflict between rival liberators, between bitterly contested assumptions of what it meant to be free. This was a struggle that was only now emerging into the open, as Byron sailed for Greece. On its outcome would depend the fate of the Revolution and the future shape of what we know, today, as ‘Modern Greece’.
Byron would not learn this until much later. But while the Hercules was sailing down the coast of Italy, events were taking place in Greece that would set the stage for the new struggle in which he would become a key player.
Much more remained for Byron to do, in Greece, than to die.
Modernisers and warlords
From the point of view of the insurgents, the war against the Ottoman empire had gone better, by the summer of 1823, than anyone might have dared to hope. All of the southern Greek mainland and many of the islands of the Aegean (including at this time even Crete) were in Greek hands, although many vital fortifications were still held by Turkish garrisons. At sea the balance of power remained uncertain, with partial blockades in force both by the Ottoman navy, which continued to supply its outposts in the Peloponnese, and by ad hoc Greek fleets based upon the island communities of Hydra and Spetses (Spezzia) off the northeast coast of the Peloponnese, and Psara (Ipsara) in the eastern Aegean. During the previous year, 1822, the Turks had hit back in force, with separate land expeditions launched through eastern and western Greece. The eastern force had been annihilated by a daring guerrilla action in the pass of Dervenakia, between Corinth and Nafplio. In the west, it was the Greeks and their philhellene supporters (mainly, at this time, from Germany and France) who were annihilated at the battle of Peta. The survivors had fallen back upon the main town in the region, Missolonghi, facing the Gulf of Patras. Against all expectation, Missolonghi had held out against a siege that lasted until Christmas Day, when the attackers had finally been driven back.
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