Byron's War
Page 24
There were other causes of frustration, too. The Ionian bankers to whom he presented his bills of exchange were unable or unwilling to meet his demands. At first, Byron schooled his temper with the supposition that ‘Specie [cash] in these islands is nearly as scarce as on the Main.’25 But he could never bear to think that he was being cheated. The exorbitant rates imposed by the merchant house of Dimitrios Koryalenias (Corgialegno) revived all his old rancour against the Jewish moneylenders in London who had exploited his desperate need for cash in student days. He and Gamba decided, arbitrarily, that ‘Coriolanus’ was a Jew. A text from St Paul, discovered in the course of religious conversations with Dr Kennedy, became the pretext for a tasteless outburst against all those in the island that Byron thought were determined to exploit him: ‘“For there is no difference between a JEW and a GREEK” [ Romans 10:12]. I intend to preach from this text to Carridi and Corgialegno.’ In conversation with Kennedy, concurring with the Apostle, he would add, ‘the character of both is equally vile’.26
Even with his beloved Souliots the same story was repeated. No longer a colourful accessory with which to disembark in free Greece, the ‘Zodiacs’, as an intimidated Captain Scott had taken to calling them, had been caught out by Byron in ‘various attempts at what I thought extortion’. His indulgence evaporated. By the end of August, with a slackening of the Turkish blockade, Byron determined to ship the Souliots to their homeland. Trelawny, increasingly restless after ‘a month [spent] in idleness’, thought he had Byron's agreement to go with them and see some action. As Trelawny explained matters to Mary Shelley, writing a week later: ‘we seemed both to have taken our separate determination, his to return to Italy and mine to go forward with a tribe of Zuliotes to join a brother of Marco Bozzaris, at Missolonghi’.27
Byron's war could have ended then, in lassitude and frustration. But on 1 September the delayed package forwarded from Zante finally arrived. It contained a letter from Hobhouse (now lost) and another from Bowring, written while Byron had been at Livorno, on 22 July. With these were enclosed the minutes of a recent meeting of the London Greek Committee. There were also two letters from Blaquiere.28
From Bowring and Hobhouse, Byron learned that the Committee had resolved to use the money so far raised to send a ship to Greece carrying supplies, artillerymen, and ‘artificers’ with expertise in handling explosives. This was the first mention, although he is not yet named, of William Parry, the ‘firemaster’ who would become a controversial figure at Missolonghi. Bowring was obliged to acknowledge, as he announced these developments, that this was a retrenchment from the Committee's earlier plans. A few months before, it had been expected that Thomas Gordon of Cairness, the only Committee member who had actually taken part in the Revolution, would be returning to Greece to lead a military force on behalf of the Committee. Now it turned out that Gordon had had second thoughts. In the midst of all this, there was at last a role for Byron himself. In the minutes of the Committee's meeting on 7 July, he read:
Resolved – That Lord Byron be requested to become the agent for the application of the funds or supplies, which the Committee may send to Greece in conjunction with Capt Blaquiere.29
He will have groaned to see the name of Blaquiere. Later, in Missolonghi, when he heard Blaquiere called a ‘humbug’, he would pointedly make no comment.30 It can only have been deeply galling to Byron to read, now, what Blaquiere had written to him from Ancona at the end of July, evidently hoping to forestall him before he left Genoa for Greece:
I believe I told your Lordship that such arrangements had been made for your reception, as were likely to prevent unpleasantness or delay. I need not say with how much satisfaction the event was looked forward to, but considering
What was Byron to do? If another of those Highland Gordons, who ‘bruik nae slight’, had backed out of coming to fight for Greece, why should he do more? If even Blaquiere now thought Byron could better serve the cause by staying in Italy than he could in Greece, why go forward? Now that he had specific instructions from the Committee, all he was in honour bound to do was wait for their ship to arrive and oversee the handing over of its cargo to the Greeks. That done, he would be free to head back to Italy, and Teresa. It would be a waste of time, and probably demeaning too, to go any further towards a conflict where nobody, apparently, wanted him.
Within hours of receiving these letters, Byron devised a plan whose coherence has ever since been obscured beneath the bland loyalty of Gamba and the conflicted testimony of Trelawny. The Hercules was abandoned. The ship would soon be departing for England in any case, as the two months’ lease would be up.32 Having already refused the offer of hospitality from Napier, Byron turned to Delladecima instead. From the Count, he rented a two-storey house in the village of Metaxata, five miles from Argostoli in the south of the island.33 It afforded peace and quiet, in a beautiful rustic setting, overlooking the approach by sea to Argostoli and with a long view over the straits to Zante.
The forty Souliots were sent on their way. With them, in a gesture as pointed as it was magnanimous, Byron sent medical supplies for the relief of their more deserving compatriots who had been wounded in the battle in which Botsaris had lost his life.34 Trelawny, who had thought he would be accompanying them, suddenly found himself assigned a quite different role.
While the rest of the party prepared for the move to Metaxata, Trelawny and Browne were hastily briefed for a mission to the Greek Provisional Government, which was still believed to be at Tripolitsa.35 In their later published accounts, both Trelawny and Browne give the impression that this expedition was their initiative, in response to what they saw as Byron's inactivity.36 But the switch in destination from the mountains of Aitolia, where Kostas Botsaris was fighting, to the seat of government in the Morea, can only have been Byron's doing. Trelawny's letter to Leigh Hunt, written on 2 September, makes clear how quickly the plan had been formed, after the receipt of the letters the day before, and what its purpose was. At that point, Trelawny was expecting to leave for the Peloponnese the very next day ‘to commune with the Government[,] and Lord Byron will await here for further instructions from the Committee and the Main[land]. He is resolved to proceed to the Main on the Greeks sending boats, &c., to convey him; in the meantime he makes this his headquarters.’37
When Trelawny and Browne left for Pyrgos, in an open boat, under cover of darkness, on the night of 6 September, they went as Byron's agents.38 They had been given precise instructions. They carried at least one letter, perhaps several. One of Byron's first acts on moving into the house at Metaxata will have been to sit down and compose these letters. It was the first time that he had addressed the government of Greece directly. No such letter now exists. But as Byron informed Hobhouse shortly afterwards, he had ‘written to apprize the Gk Government of the possible approach of the vessel indicated by the Committee – and to prepare them to receive it's Continents [sic]’.39
Also with Trelawny and Browne went an extract from Bowring's letter to Byron, for the benefit of the government, and a hastily scribbled list, in pencil, of eight numbered questions to which they were to seek answers on their travels.40 Both in their tone and purpose, these questions are revealingly different from the ones that Byron had asked Count Delladecima to forward to the government only a month before. His new exasperation is palpable in question 6, which asks: ‘The actual and effective power of the executive Government – so called at least – and how far it is respected & obliged to the people. – –’ Crucially, this time, Byron asks for no advice or instructions for himself. He did, apparently, instruct Trelawny ‘to express his intentions of devoting his fortune in their cause, &c’.41 But this he could have done without coming any closer to Greece than he was already. Unlike his earlier declarations, first to Bowring from Genoa, and then made via Delladecima since arriving in Cephaloni
a, Byron does not place himself at the disposal of the Provisional Government, or commit himself to anything at all.
With Browne and Trelawny on their way, there was once again nothing to do but wait. During the days that followed, he brooded over the letters he had received. If the government in Greece were to respond positively, he was still prepared to follow his emissaries to the Peloponnese, as he had promised Trelawny. But there can have seemed little prospect of this happening. Byron began realistically to take stock.
On 9 September, he wrote to Napier, ‘I believed myself on a fool's errand from the outset…I will at least linger on here or there till I see whether I can be of any service in any way’, though he doubted that he could. This was not, he hastened to add, the same thing as giving up: ‘I like the Cause at least and will stick by it while it is not degraded nor dishonoured.’ But he could ‘stick by it’, honourably enough, without setting foot in independent Greece, just as others were doing.
To Teresa, all this time, he had rarely written more than a few lines scribbled on the end of Pierino's letters. Now he wrote more fulsomely and with something like his old warmth: ‘I shall fulfil the object of my mission from the committee – and then probably return to Italy – for it does not seem likely that…I can be of use to them.’ The same day, 11 September, he wrote more tersely to Hobhouse: ‘I will endeavour to do my duty by the Committee and the Cause.’42
So much, and no more. In between writing these letters, he even started to think about poetry again. This was the moment, rather than later at Missolonghi, when Byron might most aptly have remembered the lines he had put into the mouth of the ‘sad trimmer’, the onstage bard in the third canto of Don Juan:
where art thou,
My country? On thy voiceless shore
The heroic lay is tuneless now –43
And it seems that he did, because on 10 September he echoed them at the start of a short fragment of verse, to which he gave the optimistic title, ‘Aristomenes. Canto First’.
The Gods of old are silent on their shore
Since the great Pan expired…44
After this bold beginning the lines peter out in a rather trite lament for the passing of the ancient Hellenic world. It is a weaker version of the nostalgia for an irrecoverable heroic past that Byron had permitted himself in the lines from 1812 that later found their way into The Siege of Corinth and in the prologue to The Giaour, the following year.45 The hero of the title does not appear in them. Hardly anyone had heard of Aristomenes of Messenia in 1823, any more than they have today. It seems that Byron's eye had been caught by a phrase in Pausanias’ ancient guide to Greece, the book that had been in Hobhouse's hand on their travels together, that he had missed during the Diodati summer of 1816, and that had accompanied him ever since Hobhouse had brought it back to him in Switzerland. Aristomenes was an ancient hero who never made it. According to Pausanias, in the lost work of a forgotten ancient poet, ‘Aristomenes is no less celebrated than Achilles in Homer's Iliad.’ But he hardly deserved it, having lost his war to the superior Spartans. Byron, at this moment of despair on the edge of Greece, saw himself as a latter-day Aristomenes, not a latter-day Achilles. As the poem has it, ‘the dream / Was beautiful’. It would have a been a beautiful thing he had dreamed of doing, in Greece. But it was over.
Maybe if the poem had taken wing, the expedition would have gone no further. ‘Aristomenes’ has had its modern defenders.46 But it never progressed beyond those eleven lines. There was no going back to poetry. A clue buried in Byron's letter to Napier, written the day before the fragmentary poem, gives a better idea of where he now sensed that he was headed. After the confession that he may have been on a ‘fool's errand’ all along, he adds: ‘and must therefore like Dogberry “spare no wisdom”’. Editors of the letters have recognised the allusion to the comic character in Much Ado About Nothing. But the quoted words come not from Shakespeare but from Walter Scott, who misquotes the play in exactly the same way in Waverley.47 The context in the novel is the puzzlement of Scott's hero in his first, baffled attempt to approach and understand the Highland chiefs. Byron, during these September days, was still wavering.
Events would soon show that his first instincts had been right after all. Before his letter to Hobhouse could be despatched, aboard the departing Hercules, a ‘very pressing’ invitation arrived from Missolonghi, signed grandly, in Italian, by the ‘Prefect General in Aetolia and Acarnania’ – provinces that had not existed by those names since ancient times.48 Then, on the evening of Thursday, 18 September, Count Delladecima rode out to Metaxata with a package that had just been delivered. Next day, probably at the Delladecima house in Argostoli, Byron met the man sent to do business with him on behalf of Mavrokordatos.49
A nation – or a faction?
Alexandros Mavrokordatos, in the summer and autumn of 1823, was very different from the ‘turbaned friend’ that the Shelleys had known in Pisa. It was not just that he dressed now in the western manner that had proved such a provocation to Kolokotronis (Plate 7a). Over the past two years, he had expended his considerable personal fortune for the cause. In Tripolitsa, he had been living on his meagre, and probably irregularly paid, salary as Secretary to the Executive. Blaquiere, earlier in the summer, had taken a Boy Scout's delight in sharing the privations of ‘Mavrocordato himself stretched on the floor with nothing more than a great coat surrounded by his attendants in the same plight’, and hoped that Byron would feel equally inspired.50 Now, in Hydra, after the debacle with Kolokotronis in July, Mavrokordatos had no official position and no income.
His faithful friend and confidant, Georgios Praidis, painted a pitiful picture, that was clearly intended to touch the heart, as well as the pocket, of their shared mentor, Metropolitan Ignatios in Pisa: ‘M is staying in Hydra in the utmost destitution, such as I cannot describe to you. Suffice it to say, that he is staying with Orlandos with a single servant while all the rest of our associates, having long ago sold everything we had, have dispersed hither and thither to make ends meet.’51 The discomforts were perhaps only relative. Ioannis Orlandos was the brother-in-law of the richest man in Hydra. Orlandos had already been nominated by Mavrokordatos, while he had been in a position to do so, as one of the three deputies to be sent to London to seek a loan for the government. For the time being, that project was dead. But Mavrokordatos was clearly made welcome by the ‘primates’ of Hydra.
These people were the nearest to a middle class that Greece at the time possessed. They had grown rich from trade, carried on in the ships that, together with those of neighbouring Spetses and Psara across the Aegean, had become the backbone of a fledgling Greek navy since the start of hostilities. Mavrokordatos, with his European ways and modernising ideas, found common ground with these men and worked hard to exploit it.
The first thing he needed was money – not so much for his own comfort as to cut a convincing figure in the eyes of his new hosts. In the peculiar circumstances of the islands at this time, this meant paying the crews of the merchant ships that in time of war would double as a fighting force. Each ship was owned by its captain and crewed by men of the same social class who were bound to him by ties of mutual obligation. Risk was shared, as were the profits from trade or piracy.52 Byron was by no means the only western volunteer to be shocked by these arrangements. But in Greece at this period there was nothing remotely comparable to the strict, military discipline familiar from western navies. If Byron and others found it incomprehensible that men supposed to be fighting for their country would refuse to put to sea without the guarantee of a cash reward, no more could a Greek seaman comprehend how his British counterpart could submit to the humiliation of being flogged.
So, to gain political credibility in his new surroundings, Mavrokordatos had to have resources. He also had to find a way to follow up the negotiations he had begun in the summer, using Blaquiere as his intermediary, with the British government. The most practical way to do this was to persuade the two government bodies, now
precariously united in Salamis, to revive the mission to raise a loan in London. Above all, he needed to regain the political ground he had lost, and soon. From the moment when he had received the letter from Metropolitan Ignatios in Pisa, that had been carried part-way by Vitalis aboard the Hercules, announcing that Byron was on his way, it was clear to Mavrokordatos that the means to achieving all these aims now lay with Byron.
Mavrokordatos lost no time. He had been in Hydra for only two weeks himself. The letter from Delladecima, with information about the new arrivals in Cephalonia, and conveying Byron's questions for the government, had not yet reached him.53 On 27 August, he briefed Praidis for a mission whose first (and, in the event, only) objective was to meet Byron in Cephalonia. Along with Praidis went a bag of diplomatically phrased letters addressed to Byron. Two of these were from Mavrokordatos himself. Another was from the ‘Primates of Hydra’, in florid language inviting him to their island. Louriotis, whom Byron had met with Blaquiere at Genoa, sent his formal respects. A fifth was from the young Spyridon Trikoupis, whose family was among the most prominent citizens of Missolonghi, and who later would deliver the eulogy over Byron's body. Much later still, Trikoupis would become the first Greek historian of the Revolution.54
Mavrokordatos had already written to Byron while he had been at Tripolitsa – evidently as an afterthought in the wake of his letters to more serious political figures in Britain. This letter had been given to Louriotis to deliver on his way to London with Orlandos and Zaimis, the other deputies for the loan. But with that expedition now indefinitely postponed, the letter was still in Hydra. Mavrokordatos now added it to the package, with a brief covering note to introduce Praidis, who could tell Byron more.