He is a fine fellow and conceals under the air of a man of the world and partly of a misanthrope, a kind heart and delicate feelings. Most people think him cold-blooded, sarcastic and selfish and I once thought so, but he is not. He despises affectation or parade of feelings, but possesses it in reality.25
This was the man who arrived, on that late-October morning, at Metaxata to find himself ‘fixed’ with an ‘anxious stare’. Byron, as Finlay later remembered, then ‘sat down upon the sofa, still examining me; I felt the reception more poetical than agreeable: but he immediately commenced his fascinating conversation’. It was not until some days later that Finlay learned the cause of this strange reception. ‘The next time we met was out riding. Lord Byron told me he had been struck at first by my resemblance to Shelley. “I thought you were Shelley's ghost,” were his words.’26 ‘Shelley’, Byron went on, evidently warming to this theme, now that the initial shock was beginning to wear off, ‘was really a most extraordinary genius’, even if he had been ‘quite mad with his metaphysics’.27
A few days later, Kennedy and a fellow-officer called at Metaxata. They were on their way to minister to some of the injured workmen from the road-building accident, and probably hoping to be invited for lunch. Byron was in hospitable mood, so they joined the party, which included Finlay. The conversation, according to Kennedy, was at first ‘very general and only desultory’. But soon the earnest young Presbyterian found something to interest him after all. Byron, as Finlay later recalled, ‘asked the Doctor [Kennedy] if he believed in ghosts’. Jumping up from the table, he fetched ‘his sister's Bible’ and from it ‘read the account of the appearance of Samuel's spirit’ to Saul, conjured up by the Witch of Endor. It was, according to Byron, ‘the finest and most finished witch-scene that ever was written or conceived…It beats all the ghost-scenes I ever read.’ Years before, Byron had made it the subject of one of his ‘Hebrew Melodies’.28
Now, the Old Testament story that he read to the company had a terrible resonance with his own situation. Saul, the ancient king of Israel, had forfeited the Lord's pleasure and was beyond forgiveness. Saul's situation was exactly what Lady Byron, when many years later she read Kennedy's book, would be prompted to suggest had been her husband's: ‘he who thinks his transgressions beyond forgiveness (and such was his own deepest feeling) has righteousness beyond that of the self-satisfied sinner’. Saul's sin had been an act of mercy. This was why, in the course of the same conversation, Byron teased Kennedy by asking him to elucidate a passage in one of the religious tracts he had lent him, ‘that in our best actions we sin’. Byron was thinking of himself as Saul, who in the passage he read aloud learns from the ghost that his punishment is upon him: next day, he will die in battle against his people's enemies. It is easy to see how Byron could think of the apparition of Shelley, on the eve of what could well turn out to be his own final battle, in the guise of George Finlay.29
The macabre theme continued: ‘Lord Byron had some jokes against Dr. Bruno, whom he laughed at for having said that the head of a man will dance on the ground, after it has been separated from the body.’30 Kennedy would not have recognised this, but Byron was reliving the ghostly conversations of the Villa Diodati, in which the recently publicised theories of galvanism and electricity had been discussed as the key to creating life. Finlay's arrival and chance resemblance to his dead friend had brought all this, too, vividly back. In Diodati days and after, Byron had thought that to revive Greece would be as dangerous, perhaps as deadly, an enterprise as the one undertaken by Victor Frankenstein in Mary's story.
Now, as he prepared to leave Cephalonia in November 1823, he had been reminded of a deeper reason why he had come. The ‘regeneration’ of a nation was to be the work of a new Prometheus – a project as daring and as transgressive against the established order of things as anything the old Prometheus had done in mythology, or Mary Shelley's ‘modern’ one in her fable. Prometheus had been punished by Zeus, Saul by the God of the Israelites, Frankenstein by Nature itself – implacable, irresistible forces all. Byron could not say he had not been warned.
Cornered by Kennedy, he would concede, in one of their Conversations, ‘there is a chain which binds us all, high and low, and our inclination and will must bend to the circumstances of our situation’.31 Beneath the surface, it must have seemed to Byron that the implacable destiny of the ‘byronic’ hero was running parallel to his every attempt to confound it, in Greece.
Taking sides
By the time the contract for the loan was signed, Napier was becoming apprehensive that so much philhellenic activity on his watch was starting to attract unwelcome attention from his superiors in Corfu. Two days after the signing, on 15 November, and despite atrocious weather, he hustled the deputies off on the next stage of their journey, to complete their quarantine in Corfu. The Greek boat that had brought them from Pyrgos was sent back. With it went Finlay, a group of newly arrived German volunteers, and the envoy Anargyros Petrakis, who had brought the invitation to Byron.32
But still the philhellenes kept arriving. Julius Millingen, newly qualified as a doctor, with his assistant Tindall, landed at Assos in the north of the island and reached Argostoli on the eleventh. Both had travelled under the auspices of the London Greek Committee, and were counting on being paid for their services, as they had no other means of support.33 Then, on 22 November, came the most high-ranking, after Byron, of all the Committee's members who were prepared to risk their lives in Greece. This was Colonel Leicester Stanhope, who brought with him a cargo of supplies for Greece, including a printing press. The ‘typographical colonel’, as Byron would later dub him when their relations became strained at Missolonghi, had seen service in India. Sincere and ardent liberal though he was, Stanhope could never see the Greeks as anything other than ‘natives’, to be treated as recalcitrant children, according to the prejudices then prevailing in the colonial service. Stanhope's liberalism was apt to be doctrinaire, and he had recently fallen under the spell of Jeremy Bentham. At first, Byron was disposed to humour Stanhope's naivety. Undoubtedly, too, he was encouraged to have at his side ‘a member of one of the oldest and most noble families of the British Empire’ – as he rather quaintly wrote to introduce his new friend to the warlords of the Peloponnese.34
Not even these new arrivals, sent by the London Committee, were encouraged to linger. Napier made an exception only for Byron and his immediate entourage. Millingen stayed just long enough to volunteer to join the Greek fleet when it arrived at Missolonghi. Stanhope would be despatched after a fortnight as Byron's emissary to the Greek government, which was now supposed to be at Nafplio. Napier's policy in this was motivated by more than caution. By this time, the philhellenic fever that swept through the small world of Argostoli and Metaxata that autumn had even the official representative of His Majesty's Government in its grip. Napier himself had just been granted leave to travel to London. His superiors in Corfu were not to know that his purpose there was to offer his services to the Greek Committee as Commander-in-Chief of the Greek revolutionary forces. In this scheme Napier had the enthusiastic backing of Byron.35
While all this was going on, Byron's two prime concerns were to follow up the intelligence that Orlandos, Louriotis, and Browne had brought from the mainland and to get his bills of exchange cashed as quickly as possible. On the day the deputies left, 15 November, Gamba wrote on his behalf to ask for information from Count Skilitzy, who had gone ahead to forewarn the government of his intended arrival. In a long reply, Skilitzy more than repaid the debt he owed for his passage aboard the Hercules. Writing from Pyrgos on the twenty-second, Skilitzy urged his ‘cher ami’ to do all he could to dissuade Byron from coming to the Peloponnese. Conditions there were already very different from what Browne had apparently described (in a letter from Salamis that does not survive). The two government bodies, Gamba was now to tell Byron, had left that island and were attempting to face one another down from the neighbouring fortresses of Nafplio and Argos in the
Peloponnese. ‘This would not matter if they were separated only by distance’, added Skilitzy, ‘but in their interests and their opinions they are as much enemies the one to the other as the Turks to the Greeks.’
Harold Nicolson, who published the greater part of this letter, found Skilitzy's analysis ‘both involved and unconvincing’. But every detail is fully borne out by the Greek sources. ‘I announce to you’, wrote Skilitzy, ‘that there is a civil war.’ Indeed, in the western Peloponnese, the region from which Skilitzy was writing, the first armed skirmishes had already taken place. Byron would have been less than impressed to learn, from a postscript not reproduced by Nicolson, that the President of the Executive, Petrobey Mavromichalis, wanted to borrow 100,000 dollars from him on his own account.36 This was the equivalent of 20,000 pounds, five times the amount of the loan that had just been concluded to pay for the fleet.
By the end of the month, Byron's information was for the first time as up-to-date as it was possible to be from the distance of Cephalonia. Mixed with the bad was some good. On 7 November, the surrender of the Turkish garrison that had been holding out in the fortress of Acrocorinth had been accepted on behalf of the government by Kolokotronis. News of a naval success in the eastern Aegean back in September had slowly found its way to Cephalonia. All of this Byron reported to Bowring for the London Greek Committee on 29 November.37
By this time, Byron had made the acquaintance of a British merchant in Argostoli, Charles Hancock. Hancock's business partner in Zante, Samuel Barff, was offering to make the financial transaction there. This would save time. But until he had the money in his hands Byron could still not think of leaving Cephalonia. This was the moment for Stanhope to set out in his stead, carrying a letter to be delivered, in copies, to the two opposed government bodies. After delivering these to Argos and Nafplio, the Colonel was to take a second letter to Mavrokordatos in Hydra, should he still be there. Informed as he now was about the political situation, and with definite news to impart about the arrival of the funds he was himself contributing to the cause, Byron was ready once again to address the highest authorities in revolutionary Greece.
On the last day of November, he wrote, in Italian, to the ‘Governo Greco’. It was a diplomatic pretence that such a thing existed. But, beyond that nicety, Byron did not mince his words. He lambasted the ‘rumours of new dissensions in the Greek Government, or rather of the start of a civil war’. As he had done before, in his first letter to Mavrokordatos, he warned sternly that anything of the sort would have disastrous consequences for the fortunes of Greece. Any hopes of raising loans abroad would be cancelled out. For the first time, Byron also showed that he had begun to think in terms that today would be called geopolitical:
the great Powers of Europe, of which none was an enemy of Greece, and which seemed favourably inclined to agree with the establishment of an independent Greek state, will be persuaded that the Greeks are not capable of governing themselves and will arrange some means for putting an end to your disorder which will cut short all your most noble hopes[.]38
This was rather to exaggerate the benevolence of the Powers of the day, as the author of The Age of Bronze perfectly well knew. But Byron had learnt a great deal since writing that intemperate poem, and had really begun to believe that his own country, at least, might come round. To Mavrokordatos he wrote more briefly, two days later. In this letter, the voice rings out, even more clearly, of the statesman that Byron was in the process of becoming. Greece, he wrote, must now choose one of three possible courses: ‘either to win her liberty – or to become a dependency of the European sovereigns or a Turkish Province…But civil war cannot lead to anything but the last two.’ As an example of the second, Byron cited Italy, effectively under Austrian control; of the third, Wallachia and the Crimea. ‘But if Greece wishes to become for ever free, truly Independent[,] it is advisable to determine this now or there will be no more time – never again –.’39
Evidently Byron had discussed with Delladecima and Praidis what he was going to say in these letters. The latter may have even been employed to copy or translate them. The Count was thoroughly alarmed that the Greeks risked losing their noble benefactor altogether, unless their dissensions ceased immediately.40 This was undoubtedly the message that Byron wished to convey. But Praidis had caught a different tone:
His Lordship's letter is written in such a way as to make one suppose that it is now his purpose to come to the aid of Greece, not once he has seen in place a Government and laws that are respected, but in order to secure the position of the Government and respect for its laws, and in that case you can imagine which side he must come down on [emphases added].41
The distinction may seem a small one, particularly when couched in Praidis’ rather scholastic style. What Praidis was saying was that a viable government and respect for the law were no longer necessary preconditions for Byron to act. Now, he would be prepared to act in order to bring these conditions about.
Byron would never abandon his determination to ‘mitigate or extinguish’ the internal divisions among the Greeks, as he had expressed it to Bowring on 29 November. But there was more than one way to achieve this. Back in October, his emissaries had reported to him from Tripolitsa the opinion of Mavrokordatos’ representatives that they had met there: ‘They hope that Lord Byron will act in the differences between the Prince and Colocotroni not as a simple mediator, but in a decisive manner “avec une main de fer” [with a hand of iron] was the expression, as they are convinced the former character would be useless.’42 Napier thought the same. Orlandos and Louriotis, in the lazaretto, seem to have been more persuasive advocates than the dogged Praidis. As Byron confessed to Bowring on 7 December, three days after Praidis had reported to Mavrokordatos: ‘there is not only dissention in the Morea but civil war – by the latest accounts, to what extent we do not yet know…Had I gone sooner they would have forced me into one party or the other – and I doubt as much now.’43 This was the hardest of all the lessons that he had to learn during his time in Cephalonia: that if he really wanted to benefit what he called the ‘Cause’, he could not do it by trying to be even-handed or simply to mediate among the factions. Byron's political conception, now that he had one, as Praidis correctly divined, was in all essentials that of Mavrokordatos.44
Even as Byron still talked of going to the Peloponnese, the logic of his new position was fast making this impossible. In his letter to the government he confessed frankly, ‘I cannot see how my presence in the Morea might be of benefit in the present state of affairs.’ With Mavrokordatos and the fleet heading for Missolonghi, where his own money would shortly be needed to pay for it, it could be only a matter of time.
Mavrokordatos went aboard the corvette Athena off Hydra on the evening of Sunday, 30 November, the same day that Byron wrote his letter to the Greek government. Two days later, after a rendezvous at sea, eight warships and two fire ships from Hydra, with six more ships from Spetses, under the overall command of Admiral Miaoulis, set out to round the southern tip of Greece and reach Missolonghi.45
At exactly the same time, during the first week of December, all the Ottoman land forces were suddenly withdrawn from the vicinity of Missolonghi and Anatoliko, and the naval squadron based at Patras was cut back to a token presence. It had taken so long for the Greek fleet to put to sea that by the time it did, in the eyes of most observers at the time and ever since, there was no longer any need for it. So thought Byron, for one. As he sardonically observed, on 7 December, while news of the Greek ships’ arrival was still awaited in Cephalonia: ‘By the special Providence of the Deity the Mussulmans were seized with a Panic and fled – but no thanks to the fleet which ought to have been here months ago[.]’46
No more convincing reason has ever been put forward for the coordinated tactical retreat by the pashas of Ioannina and Skodra on land and the greater part of the naval force at Patras. Had the Turks and Albanians chosen to confront the Greek fleet in the Gulf and oppose a landing at Missolon
ghi, a significant engagement could have resulted, with consequences for the whole of the rest of the war. That this did not happen may well have been the result of what a later age would have termed effective propaganda. Rumours of a force on its way, manned by the much-feared seafarers of the islands, and supplied by the incalculable resources of a foreign milord – all no doubt much magnified in the telling – would certainly have had time to cross the water and circulate among the troops. With no reinforcements from Constantinople in prospect, and no sign of a concerted response from the Ottoman high command, the local pashas may well have decided to cut their losses. If this was so, then Byron's loan that launched the ships was his single, but not inconsiderable, contribution to the military course of the Revolution.47
The withdrawal of enemy forces, though, did lend a sense of anticlimax to the arrival of the fleet. The ships entered the lagoon of Missolonghi on Thursday, 11 December. The day before, an action had been fought off the island of Ithaca that Byron at first thought, when he heard of it, ‘will make a very good puff – and be of some advantage besides’. He had written too soon. The Greeks, he would discover before long, had infringed the neutrality of the British protectorate, and with horrific violence too. His own diplomatic skills would be called into play to deal with the consequences. And the seizure of a large bounty in cash from the stricken Turkish vessel would prove an even more serious cause of contention.48
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