Where the earlier letter was effusive but very general in its thanks to the great man for the interest he has begun to take in Greek affairs, the second reflects the urgency of the new circumstances. Mavrokordatos now professed himself convinced, he wrote to Byron, that ‘You have an essential contribution to make to the salvation of Greece.’ The note concludes with a studied vagueness that Byron interpreted, correctly but with a touch of exasperation, as ‘hinting that he should like to meet me there [in Hydra] or elsewhere’.55 A preserved draft reveals that Mavrokordatos had hesitated whether to reveal his hopes of leaving Hydra with a fleet and coming to meet Byron in western Greece, before deciding not to risk it.56
Exactly what form Byron's ‘contribution’ was supposed to take is hardly spelled out in these letters. Mavrokordatos’ longer letter of July gives most space to the financial needs of the Revolution, and Praidis’ unwritten instructions seem primarily to have been to use all possible persuasion to raise cash from the distinguished visitor.57 Neither of Mavrokordatos’ first two letters to Byron contains any hint of the subtle geopolitical assessment of the potential for a British alliance that he had set out in his letters to Canning, or in his secret instructions to Louriotis and Orlandos for their mission. At this stage, Mavrokordatos was still looking to Byron as a source of revenue, not as a political ally.
That would change, but not immediately.
Before Praidis reached Argostoli, Byron was already well disposed towards Mavrokordatos. Napier thought highly of his abilities, and Delladecima, a fellow-aristocrat, approved his politics. Byron would not have forgotten, either, what Shelley, and perhaps also Mary, had told him about Mavrokordatos in Pisa. ‘[H]e is the only civilized person (on dit [it is said]) amongst the liberators’, Byron wrote to Hobhouse on 11 September, clearly echoing these opinions, before he had yet received any communication from him.58 Rumours arriving in Cephalonia were still contradictory. Byron had been dismayed by the evidence that reached him of ‘division’ within the government and the increasing likelihood that Mavrokordatos had left office. Praidis, when he met Byron just over a week later, on 19 September, should have been pushing at an open door.
But something went badly wrong. Byron in his surviving correspondence and recorded conversations barely mentions Praidis, and seems not even to have troubled to remember his name correctly.59 Immediately after that first meeting in Argostoli, Praidis reported back to his master a ‘long conversation’ with Byron. He had had an uphill struggle, he said, to mitigate the unfavourable impression created by the rumours from the Peloponnese. Many of them, he had been obliged to concede, were of course true. Byron listened, ‘sullen’ and ‘moody’. Rousing himself, he declared that his mind was already made up: ‘he was not going either to the Peloponnese, or any further than the Peloponnese’ (meaning, to Salamis). ‘Curtly’, he refused to go to Hydra either.60 This was a very recognisable Byron, to those who knew him. Temperamentally, he was more than capable of shooting the messenger.
For this particular task, the messenger had probably not been well chosen. Praidis was a teacher by education and background. Fiercely loyal to his master, he would remain one of the most indefatigable and biddable of the small band of intellectuals who had gravitated towards Mavrokordatos from the beginning and would serve as his staff officers throughout the Revolution. But Praidis had no aristocratic credentials to his name. He lacked the flair, or warmth, or sheer cheek that could have won Byron over. In a long life devoted to public service, Praidis would go on to fill a series of administrative posts in the Greek state, but never achieved political office, as most did who been active during the Revolution.61 The meeting ended, from Praidis’ point of view, on a slightly brighter note. Byron explained about the emissaries he had already sent to the government in the Peloponnese. He reserved his final answer until he had heard back from them.
Browne and Trelawny, at least at this early stage of their mission, were assiduous in following their master's orders. It had taken them three days on rough mountain roads, that Browne warned Byron would not be suitable for his horses, to reach Tripolitsa. They had found the town still in ruins, after the siege and destruction in 1821, and in the grip of an epidemic of typhus. Mavrokordatos, whom they had been expecting to meet, was of course not there, but they interviewed his ‘officers’ who remained. The only man of any influence left in Tripolitsa was Kolokotronis. Although they kept this detail from Byron, Kolokotronis effectively had them kidnapped and taken to attend him in his ‘palace’, where he was laid up with fever. They heard, in detail, the warlord's complaints against Mavrokordatos and his ‘intrigues’, and were greatly impressed by the force with which he delivered them, ill though he was. ‘I trust sincerely’, wrote Browne to Byron, ‘that a reconciliation may be effected, but from the warmth evinced by Colocotroni, I fear that it will be difficult.’ A final nail in Mavrokordatos’ coffin, in the eyes of these English radical spirits, was his willingness, not denied by his own supporters, to see a foreign monarch installed eventually on the throne of Greece.
Both interviews were written up at length by Browne, with an even longer letter to Byron, on 13 September. The next day, Trelawny added a blunt message of his own, summing up the situation as both men saw it. One of the Souliots who had accompanied them was despatched at once to deliver the package to Byron in Argostoli. By the same messenger went hasty warnings for Praidis, from Mavrokordatos’ men, alerting him to what had happened.62
In their summing-up, both Browne and Trelawny concluded that Mavrokordatos had overreached himself and as a result had lost not only office but also ‘the confidence of the people of the Morea’. As there was no one in Tripolitsa with the authority to receive Byron's letter on behalf of the government, they had now to press on to Salamis. There, Kolokotronis had assured them, a summit meeting of the Legislative and Executive Bodies would shortly be convened. Arrangements would be made for Byron to attend if he wished. Apparently speaking on behalf of the Government, Kolokotronis further ‘recommended the ship with the [London Greek] Committee stores to proceed to Napoli di Romania [Nafplio] – and placed at the disposal of the government’.63 Byron was not to know that the ‘Congress’ in Salamis would never amount to more than the fractious and short-lived coexistence of the two governing bodies in the same place, and that Kolokotronis had no more intention than Mavrokordatos of going there himself.
By 21 September, two days after his meeting with Praidis, Byron had received these letters, hard on the heels of the ones from Hydra. His immediate response was to hand over both sets to Napier for an opinion. Napier's advice was categorical, but evidently not what Byron wanted to hear, either. To give his money to the Greeks would be disastrous, Napier warned him. ‘Having done so they will pay no attention to a word you say.’ The solution that Napier proposed was drastic. Byron should use the available money, instead, to raise a foreign force, seize Nafplio, and ‘open the gates to all the people of Greece, but exclude all the warlike chiefs’. The ‘few enlightened men’ in the country, such as Mavrokordatos and Trikoupis, would ‘stick to you and support you’. ‘This scheme’, Napier conceded, ‘may appear at first a wild one’ – not least because he foresaw the likelihood ‘of being assassinated by the warlike chiefs the moment they perceived what you were at’. On one point Napier was sound, although it seems he was unable to convince Byron of this immediately: ‘it is evident’, he added in a postscript, ‘that Prince Mavrocordato dares not trust himself in the power of Colocotroni, and not at all that he has become really unpopular’.64
But Byron was not convinced. According to Praidis, these letters ‘instead of encouraging him, made him more hostile’.65 Six days later, Byron bundled up the whole package and sent it with a covering note to Hobhouse in London, to pass on to the Committee. His perplexity is palpable. He had been in Cephalonia for a month and a half, and no one on the mainland had taken the slightest interest (except for Botsaris, who had immediately afterwards got himself killed). Now, within the space of a w
eek, he had received one invitation from Metaxas to cross over to Missolonghi, another from the Primates of Hydra, ambiguously backed by Mavrokordatos, and now, according to Browne and Trelawny, the Provisional Government wanted him to go to Salamis. As he summed it up, exasperated, ‘No less than three parties…a few steps further and a civil war may ensue. – – On all sides they are…trying to enlist me as a partizan.’
The legitimacy of his actions had been paramount in Byron's mind from the start. This was what would differentiate his own foray into the world of action from that of so many of his fictional heroes, most recent among them the Bounty mutineer, Christian. To Hobhouse he spelt it out, as he would shortly do, regretfully, to Mavrokordatos too: ‘I can recognize only the Greek Government – without reference to the persons who may compose it…[A]s a foreigner I have nothing to do with factions or private preferences of individuals.’66 This quest for legitimacy must be the reason for one of the most surprising aspects of Byron's behaviour in Greece. Why was Byron, of all people, immune to the charisma of the ‘warlike chiefs’, to which Trelawny was at that very moment beginning to lose his heart, and whose spell would fall on so many of his close associates over the coming months? Men like Kolokotronis and Trelawny's future brother-in-law Odysseus Andritzou (later known as Androutsos) came straight out of Byron's own ‘Turkish tales’. The very character of the ‘byronic’ hero owed his existence to the warlike traditions of the klefts, out of which these people had emerged in real life. But, having lived imaginatively with them through the years of his fame, Byron knew better than anyone how that kind of enterprise was bound to end. It is yet another indication of how far he had travelled. From the reckless lawlessness of his own fictional rebels Byron was now in full retreat. ‘’[T]is the cause makes all’, he had written, only six months ago, in The Island. How to explain that to the warring parties?
Praidis, probably through Delladecima, was pressing him for a reply to Mavrokordatos and the Hydriots. The bewildering ‘mass of papers’ went to Hobhouse on 27 September. Over the next three days, as he wrestled with the problem of how to respond, Byron tried to make sense of what had happened so far by writing it up in the form of a short-lived diary. It was one of the few moments in his life when he addressed no reader. The ‘Journal in Cephalonia’ is yet another testimony to Byron's newfound seriousness. It is more than likely that in these pages Byron was trying to explain himself to posterity. And what he wished posterity to know was that he had ‘not come here to join a faction but a nation’.67
It was the concept of the nation, that essentially new and potent convergence between the collective identity of a people and the self-determination enjoyed by the governments of states, that must confer legitimacy on Byron's enterprise.
This decision now taken, it had to be conveyed to Mavrokordatos and the Primates who had invited him to Hydra. The letter to the Hydriots does not survive.68 To Mavrokordatos he wrote on 1 October, with the help of Gamba, in courteous diplomatic Italian. He could not, he said, ‘conceal his displeasure’ at the extent of division among the Greeks, and warned that their hopes of raising a loan in London were bound to be dented by these reports. While things remained as they were, he declared, ‘It is very likely that I may decide to remain here watching until a better opportunity is offered to me.’ He did, though, hold out the prospect of a meeting, and offered to correspond ‘with the frankest sincerity that is known to me and which you so much deserve’. The door was not quite closed.69
There matters rested for the next three weeks. Then, once again, everything happened at once. On 21 October, a Tuesday, Byron rode into Argostoli, intending to call on Colonel Duffie. Laconically, two days later, he apologised to the colonel: he had been ‘detained by business until too late’.70 The business will once again have taken place at the house of Count Delladecima. An agent of the Provisional Government had arrived from Salamis. With him came an invitation signed on behalf of the Executive Body and glowing reports of conditions there from Browne and Trelawny. Anargyros Petrakis had been chosen and briefed for this mission by the Legislature more than a month ago, at the time when Byron's initial queries for the Government had reached Salamis.71 But it was clear to Praidis, who was present when Byron opened the letters, that all was not well. The letter that Petrakis carried had been signed by the Executive, not the Legislature. In it, Byron was invited to present himself before the Provisional Government of Greece, which might by that time be either at Nafplio (in Kolokotronis’ sphere of influence) or Salamis. Byron's generous offer to fund a corps of Souliots for the defence of Western Greece, made during his first week in Cephalonia, was politely refused. The supplies on their way from the London Greek Committee should be disembarked at Nafplio. This had been Kolokotronis’ demand to Browne and Trelawny. To Praidis it was self-evident that this meant, ‘into the hands of Kolokotronis’.72
Praidis drew his own conclusions. He spoke privately to Petrakis and got only ‘evasive replies’. He was convinced that Browne and Trelawny had been cosseted and flattered by the Executive in Salamis ‘until they described to him [Byron] the joys of the isle of the Blessed’.73 Praidis’ conclusion was shrewd and also substantially correct, as surviving documents and later events would show: ‘one can conclude that the two Bodies are still at variance and suspect that the factional spirit [i.e., the opposing faction] is endeavouring to reap the benefit from his Lordship's resources’. Delladecima evidently saw this too. But Byron would not hear a word spoken against ‘what he thinks the Government has written to him’, backed by the reassuring accounts of Browne and Trelawny.74 None of these letters survives, and neither Browne nor Trelawny would later elaborate on their reception at Salamis. But it was there that Trelawny first met the warlord Odysseus, to whom he would soon transfer his allegiance from Byron. The lost letters will have confirmed, and probably strengthened, the conclusion that both men had already begun to draw while at Tripolitsa, that legitimacy and popular opinion were now firmly on the side of Kolokotronis and the Executive.
Byron's own references to these letters at the time are cautious. ‘Brown [sic] and Trelawny, having been better treated than others, probably give a much more favourable account than we have yet had, from other quarters’, he wrote two days after receiving them. ‘The Opposition [i.e., Delladecima and Praidis] say they [i.e., the Executive] want to cajole me – and the party in power say the others want to seduce me – so between the two I have a difficult part to play.’75 Byron understood the situation better than Praidis supposed. But despite these misgivings, his mind was made up. Before the day was out, Byron had detailed Constantin Skilitzy (Mavrokordatos’ relative who had been given a passage aboard the Hercules) to leave at once for Salamis. Skilitzy was to give notice to the government of Byron's imminent arrival there. Byron himself would make first for Nafplio, as the letter requested. As soon as Skilitzy could oversee the necessary arrangements and return to Pyrgos, the nearest point in the Peloponnese to Cephalonia, Byron would be on his way. He had been waiting only for this. Now, at last, he had instructions from a legitimately constituted body in Greece. The decision was taken on the instant, and no argument would change it.
Praidis was outraged. ‘You know how vain the English are’, he wrote the same day to Mavrokordatos,
with the result that what honest people could not persuade him to do, with all their efforts…he has been moved to do by those people's letters and even more, to cross to the Peloponnese and go to Salamis, something he wouldn't make up his mind to before, when he turned down the invitation to Hydra.76
Mavrokordatos’ envoy now mobilised all the resources he could think of. To Andreas Zaimis, the primate of Kalavryta and an ally against Kolokotronis, he wrote a convoluted letter begging him to have Byron intercepted the moment he landed at Pyrgos. Zaimis himself must explain to him that the Executive that had written to him was in the hands of a faction and did not truly represent the will of the Government. At the same time, Delladecima urged Mavrokordatos to find a way to re
turn to office – for no other reason, it would seem, than to meet Byron's insistence on dealing only with a legitimate authority. At the very least, could not Mavrokordatos contrive to be in Salamis when Byron arrived? These letters were carried by the same Skilitzy who also carried Byron's reply to the Executive.77
It now looked as though Mavrokordatos’ party had lost – not because Byron preferred the warlords, as he might well have done, but because the opponents of a centralised authority had, ironically, been more successful in presenting themselves as that authority. Preparations went ahead rapidly for Byron's journey, with Gamba and the rest of his party, to Nafplio and Salamis. By 6 November, it was known that they would be departing for Pyrgos ‘within five days at the most’.78
Commentators at the time, and biographers since, have been misled by the sometimes languid tone of Byron's letters and conversation while he was in Cephalonia. The evidence from the Greek sources explodes the myth that he settled easily into his old indolent ways and was reluctant to move on. Byron was in reality desperate to move on, and committed himself to do so at the earliest opportunity that was compatible with his principles. The time for wavering was over. He was not an adventurer. He had not come here to strike a pose, for death or glory. He would go only at the behest of a legitimate Greek government. Not for a faction, but a nation.
Chapter 9 The new statesman
Mavrokordatos fights back
During the very days when Byron was preparing himself to embark for the Peloponnese, on the other side of Greece, on the island of Hydra, three things came together that would decisively alter the balance of political forces on the mainland. One was news of the worsening situation at Missolonghi. Another was the arrival of Byron's emissaries, Browne and Trelawny. Third was Byron's response to Mavrokordatos’ first letters, which reached him hard on their heels.
Byron's War Page 25