Byron's War

by Roderick Beaton

  Since the summer, the threat to Missolonghi had greatly increased. The pashas Omer Vryonis of Ioannina and Mustai of Skodra (today's Shkodër) had reached the outskirts of the town at the end of September. A sizeable army of Albanian Muslims, loyal to the Sultan, was now laying siege to the fortified island of Anatoliko nearby, with the support of a renewed naval blockade. If only the islanders of Hydra and Spetses could be persuaded to put to sea, Mavrokordatos would at once secure his own return to western Greece and a chance to repeat his strategic feat of the previous year, in defending Missolonghi.

  This made the need for money more acute than ever. The impasse over the deputation to raise a loan from London still dragged on, as the Executive continued to block Mavrokordatos’ nominees. The secret negotiations that Mavrokordatos had initiated in the summer, with political figures in Great Britain, depended on the trusted agents he had already briefed, Orlandos and Louriotis. So these, too, were in abeyance. Mavrokordatos has generally been credited with inexhaustible (if sometimes self-defeating) political energy, not least by those observers who thought this a vice. But his behaviour at this crucial point in his career makes one wonder if there was not something of the ‘melancholy’ temperament of the Romantic poet about this close associate of first the Shelleys and then Byron. Periods of frenetic and highly effective politicking seem to have alternated with intervals of lassitude and inactivity, as happened during those months in Hydra. If true, this guess about his temperament might help to explain why Mavrokordatos was never quite able to consolidate his most significant achievements – either in his association with Byron or later in a long political career.

  Browne and Trelawny reached Hydra on 14 October and were put up in the house of Orlandos, where Mavrokordatos was also staying. Trelawny had conceived a strong dislike for the ‘prince’ before he even met him. Living under the same roof did nothing to change his mind. To Mary Shelley he wrote at length from Hydra, taking a not-disinterested delight in listing the failings of her former admirer from Pisa days. At the same time, the explosive, larger-than-life personality of ‘Byron's jackal’ seems to have had a tonic effect on his host. It may well have been Trelawny's own idea, as he would claim in the same letter, written before he left Hydra, to put Byron's professed generosity to the test. If money was urgently needed for a fleet to come to the defence of Missolonghi, then why not apply to Byron for a personal loan, repayable out of the much larger one to be raised in London? Trelawny cynically thought this would call his patron's bluff.1 But Mavrokordatos was not to know that. And, in any case, Trelawny would be proved wrong.

  It was at this point that Byron's letter came. Within days of receiving it, Mavrokordatos had swung into action, with a series of interlocking and far-reaching manoeuvres. On the twenty-first, a week after the arrival of Browne and Trelawny at Hydra, he replied to Byron. (This was the same day that Anargyros Petrakis reached Cephalonia, and Byron committed himself to going to the Peloponnese.) The tone of Mavrokordatos’ reply is as courteous as before. But this time he matches Byron's offer of a frank exchange between intellectual and social equals. The reason he had resigned from the government, he explains, had nothing to do with any factional interest, as Byron had implied. He had done it precisely so as to avoid greater dissent:

  No one is more assured than I, that you have come with the firm intention of aiding Greece: this Greece is already before you, under your eyes, you can see at a glance which is the part of the country endangered, that Missolonghi is blockaded by sea and besieged by land; that the town is short of provisions, and sure to fall to the Turks…To bring aid to this place, to save it, to save in consequence the whole of Greece, is that to declare oneself for a faction? I do not think so.2

  Mavrokordatos was not so tactless as to spell out the manner in which he and his new English friends hoped that Byron would ‘save’ Missolonghi. It was left to the Legislature in Salamis to mention money, and to name a sum. But the sum was named, in a draft in Mavrokordatos’ handwriting of a letter to be sent over the signatures of the Primates of Hydra to the Legislative Body in Salamis. That body was requested to make a formal approach to Byron for an advance of 30,000 dollars, the equivalent of 6,000 pounds sterling, repayable out of the loan to be raised in London. This would cover part of the needs of the fleet, the rest to be made up from friendly sources nearer home, for the immediate and urgent defence of Missolonghi.3 The letter is to be written in Greek, ‘which language his Lordship understands perfectly’. The exaggeration can only be due to Browne or Trelawny. But it was a deft diplomatic touch.4 Not content with that, Mavrokordatos arranged for a similar request on behalf of the Primates to be conveyed to his political rivals, the Executive in Nafplio. That body obliged, one supposes through gritted teeth, since the Executive, too, wanted the money, but not for this purpose. The application by the Executive to Byron for the same sum, 30,000 dollars, signed by its President, Petrobey Mavromichalis, with the names of the other Executive members following, is the only surviving document addressed to Byron that bears the name of Kolokotronis.5

  At the same time, and again using the Primates as his proxy, Mavrokordatos was finally able to persuade the Legislature to authorise the immediate departure of his chosen deputies for the loan from London. After all, Byron could hardly be expected to offer his own money up front, without at least the prospect of collateral from the much larger sum to be raised in England. In a brilliant piece of strategy, the Legislative was further to charge Orlandos and Louriotis with calling in at Cephalonia on their way to London, to put the request on behalf of the government to Byron in person. In this way the two loans would be inextricably linked, both contractually and in public perception. The smaller loan was to be repaid out of the larger, and the individuals responsible for negotiating both were Mavrokordatos’ men.

  The keystone of Mavrokordatos’ strategy was an official position for himself. On 26 October, the Legislative Body signed the decree instructing Mavrokordatos to proceed to Missolonghi with the fleet. No official title went with this new role, an omission that would lead to trouble later. But, in the eyes of the Legislature, Mavrokordatos was still its President. A second letter addressed to Byron, dated 27 October, spelt this out, and would thereby resolve the issue of legitimacy that had deterred him from cooperating with Mavrokordatos in the first place. But this second letter would travel with Mavrokordatos to Missolonghi and would not reach Byron until the eve of his departure from Cephalonia, by which time he would no longer need its reassurance.6

  Louriotis and Orlandos left Hydra on 29 October. The third deputy, Ioannis Zaimis, who had also been nominated by Mavrokordatos, would join them later. With them went the secret orders that Mavrokordatos had drawn up for them in July. As an added insurance for Byron's compliance, they were accompanied by Browne, who had now come over to Mavrokordatos’ and the Primates’ position.7 (This was when Trelawny cut loose, and went off to Athens with the warlord Odysseus Andritzou.) Kolokotronis and the Executive had been comprehensively outmanoeuvred. Disgusted, and having no further use for the appearance of legitimacy it gave him, Kolokotronis resigned his position as Vice-President of the Executive, the more freely to embark upon an open campaign against the Legislature.8 Once again, a political step forward by the modernisers was about to raise the stakes still higher in the simmering civil conflict.

  The deputies, with Browne, reached Pyrgos on 6 November. There they learned that Byron was expected to arrive in a matter of days, on his way to Nafplio. There was a local argument in progress about who should receive him and take care of the next stage of his journey. Louriotis and Orlandos knew how much was stake. If Byron were once to disembark at Pyrgos, any money he advanced in response to the appeal by the two government bodies would end up in the hands of the Executive. So, instead of recovering from the rigours of their overland journey as they had planned, and drying out their clothes and possessions that had been soaked by the rains in the mountains, they pressed on at once to Argostoli, to forestall Byron's dep
arture.9

  Anyone entering the United States of the Ionian Islands from the Ottoman empire was required to spend a statutory period of twenty-one days in quarantine. Byron visited the new-arrivals in the offshore lazaretto on Wednesday, 8 November. During the next few days the number of visitors and the flurry of business they conducted must have alarmed the health authorities, whose vigilance even Napier would have been powerless to overrule. Byron was there every day, talking over their mission with the deputies, showering them with advice about how to proceed with their mission in London. Before they left, he would give them several personal letters of introduction to take with them. He was also, he assured them, anxious to meet Mavrokordatos in person.

  At their first meeting, Byron was apparently willing ‘to give the full amount of 30 thousand dollars’. But the deputies stayed long enough in the lazaretto, and met Byron enough times, to observe the ‘instability and fickleness of his character’. ‘His noble lordship’, Orlandos concluded, ‘is a philhellene’ and ‘perhaps himself wishes to benefit Greece, but others have influence over his will’.10 The ‘others’ in this case can only have been Napier. Although a strong supporter of Mavrokordatos, Napier was as resolute as ever against giving any money into the hands of the Greeks.11 At their second or third meeting in the lazaretto, Byron haggled the sum down from 30,000 to 20,000 dollars, the equivalent of 4,000 pounds.

  The documents were formally witnessed by James Hamilton Browne, Pietro Gamba, and Demetrio Delladecima.12 Byron had made over a considerable sum from his personal fortune, as requested by the Provisional Government of Greece, ‘for the sole purpose of providing prompt assistance for the needs of western Greece’. At a stroke he had proved wrong the cynical speculations of Trelawny, and perhaps others. As cash was scarce in the islands and the Corgialegno brothers with whom he had so far done business courteous but extortionate, Byron determined to send Browne to Malta to raise the money. This meant a delay of about a month, as Browne's quarantine still had a fortnight to run, and the voyage would take a week in each direction.13 In the meantime, Byron would try to find a quicker way of cashing his bills – as eventually he did. But until the money was in his hands he would have to put off all thought of moving to the Peloponnese. This, too, was a victory for Mavrokordatos and his agents.

  Shelley's ghost

  All that he was now learning of the true magnitude of the political crisis in Greece did nothing to improve Byron's estimation of the people he had come here to help. After he had sent off his first letters to Mavrokordatos and the Primates of Hydra, at the beginning of October, and before Petrakis arrived with his invitation from the Government, he still doubted whether there was any good he could do. ‘I was a fool to come here but being here I must see what is to be done’, he wrote to Teresa on 7 October. A few days later, to his half-sister Augusta, who had put him on the spot by asking why he had come ‘up amongst the Greeks’, he was blandly evasive: ‘it was stated to me that my so doing might tend to their advantage in some measure in their present struggle for independence…How far this may be realized I cannot pretend to anticipate – but I am willing to do what I can.’ Pietro Gamba, answering the same question from his sister, Teresa, was more patient: ‘the Greek situation has not yet given us any opportunity in which one could believe B's help to be truly efficacious and useful’, he explained on 8 October. ‘Byron has confirmed his original opinion of these people, but has not therefore changed his intentions.’14

  Teresa would have been in no doubt as to what that opinion was. She would have heard him say the same things that had shocked Lady Blessington in Genoa. ‘The worst of them is – that…they are such d—d liars’, he expostulated in the privacy of his diary at the end of September; ‘there never was such an incapacity for veracity shown since Eve lived in Paradise’. A couple of months later he told the newly arrived Dr Millingen: ‘The Greeks are perhaps the most depraved and degraded people under the sun uniting to their original vices both those of their oppressors, and those inherent in slaves.’15

  Two incidents are revealing of Byron's response to living among Greeks in day-to-day situations. In October, not far from Metaxata, there was a landslip on one of the roads that was being built by Napier's corvée. A dozen workers, conscripted from the nearby villages, were buried. Alerted by Napier, who had been summoned from Argostoli, Byron at once rode to the scene. With him went Gamba, Dr Bruno, and Fletcher. There they found a large crowd gathered, including the wives and children of the stricken men. Some had been dug out of the landslip alive. Others might still be trapped, nobody seemed to know. But the men declared it would be too dangerous to dig any further into the unstable earth. According to one eyewitness, Byron at this point ‘ordered his valet to get off his horse and thrash them soundly, if they did not immediately commence their work’. Not content with that, ‘enraged’, he then ‘seized a spade himself, and began to work as hard as he could’.16 The witnesses all dwell on the well-known traits of Byron's character on display in this behaviour: his instinctive philanthropy and propensity towards impulsive action. But more significant is his comment immediately afterwards:

  he said that he came out to the Islands prejudiced against Sir T. Maitland's tight government of the Greeks, ‘but I have now changed my opinion. They are such barbarians, that if I had the government of them, I would pave these very roads with them.’17

  Later, towards the end of November, Byron received visitors from the mainland at Metaxata. Notis Botsaris, the uncle of Markos who had been killed in August, and his young son were accompanied by Delladecima, who interpreted for them. Dr Kennedy, who was present, noticed that Byron spoke only two words of Greek during the whole of the afternoon – at the beginning, when he invited the visitors to sit down. The uncle, later a hero in his own right, after the part he would play in leading the Exodus from besieged Missolonghi, two years after Byron's death, cut a fine figure, ‘richly dressed’ in the traditional kilt and capote of the Souliots. Byron may have looked tenderly on the son, ‘a smart-looking boy of fourteen’, who on his father's orders was banished to the kitchen and the care of Fletcher. As the visitors prepared to leave, the elder Botsaris drew himself up and delivered a dignified speech of thanks for all that Byron was doing in the ‘sacred cause’ of Greece. Byron responded more briefly in the same style. But while Delladecima was interpreting his words for Botsaris, and good manners would have dictated that he should continue to give all his attention to the person addressed, Byron turned aside to Kennedy and said: ‘These Greeks are excellent flatterers. I do not believe they care one farthing about me personally, though they would be very glad to get my money.’18

  Reading Byron's letters from Cephalonia, and the narratives of those who were with him, it is hard to escape the conclusion drawn by Iris Origo in a different context: ‘when, in 1823, he turned his back on “poeshie”, he had come to an end, at the same time, of the stuff of which a large part of poetry is made: human tenderness, passion, attachment’.19 Origo was referring to the change in his relationship with Teresa after his departure from Genoa. But the insight is equally applicable to Byron's whole life while he was in Cephalonia. The young doctor, Julius Millingen, probably understood best what was going on: ‘Divesting himself of every preconceived opinion, he calmly sought to discover, amidst so many contradictory and unfavourable statements, the path that would best lead him to the attainment of his wish, which was the welfare of his newly-adopted country.’20

  Byron would have remembered, even if he seems never to have quoted them directly, the words spoken by Othello shortly before he murders Desdemona: ‘It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul.’ His own heart must be no less hardened. As he reiterated for the benefit of Hobhouse on 6 October, underlining the word and insisting on the capital letter he had first given it in Genoa, he was determined ‘to serve the Cause if the patriots will permit me – but it must be the Cause – and not individuals or parties’.21

  The Greeks themselves (‘patriots’, ‘individ
uals or parties’) had become just another of the many obstacles standing in the way of the ‘Cause’. And what was this ‘Cause’? Nothing less, as Byron expressed it in conversation with Millingen, than the ‘regeneration of a nation’.22

  Hand in hand with the clear-sighted, even ruthless, forging of this new political Byron, went something darker and more introverted. The poet within him had not entirely been extinguished. In Cephalonia, Byron continued to think of Shelley, who he declared on at least one occasion should have been with him on this expedition, and whose example and early death had spurred him to it. In the earnest young medical officer, James Kennedy, he saw a physical resemblance to his dead friend. It was perhaps for that reason that he submitted good-naturedly, though not uncritically, to being proselytised by this devout adherent of the Church of Scotland, just as he had once responded to the barrage of Shelley's metaphysical atheism. Kennedy knew of Shelley, without of course having read anything he had written, and would hear nothing good about him. It was one of the few categorical disagreements they had.23 Then, when the thirty-one-year-old George Finlay arrived at Metaxata, fresh from studying law in Germany, during the last week of October, Byron experienced a profound shock.

  Finlay had been born and brought up in Glasgow, in the same strict traditions of Scottish Presbyterianism as Byron in his early years. Finlay's rational scepticism, the inheritance of the Scottish Enlightenment, evidently appealed at once to Byron, and shines through the seven volumes of Greek history, from the Roman empire down to his own time, that would become his life's work. He had come to Greece to observe, rather than to fight, as he would explain many years later.24 After the Revolution, Finlay would make his home in Athens. In the course of a long life, he would keep the secrets of Byron's last months better than anyone else who had shared them. In some respects a parody of the ‘canny’ Scot, Finlay would later have a bookplate engraved with his personal motto: ‘I’ll be wary.’ The American philhellene Samuel Gridley Howe summed up their acquaintance during the Revolution: