At eleven o'clock on Monday morning, 5 January, Byron went ashore. According to the Greek calendar, it was Christmas Eve. The symbolism would not have been lost on him. The whole town had been prepared to receive its saviour. He had dressed for the occasion in a scarlet regimental uniform.79 If one of the three helmets that he had had made in Genoa was upon his head, nobody present was ever so tactless afterwards as to mention it. He had himself outgrown that gesture. Most probably, the helmets remained in a trunk. Gamba describes the scene: ‘Lord Byron's arrival was welcomed with salvos of artillery, firing of muskets, and wild music. Crowds of soldiery, and citizens of every rank, sex, and age, were assembled on the shore to testify their delight. Hope and content were pictured in every countenance.’80
Many years later, the painter Theodoros Vryzakis would depict the moment, with a ruined minaret and the silhouette of Varasova, the mountain that dominates this side of the gulf, in the background (frontispiece). The painter was not quite five years old when Byron landed, and of course not an eyewitness. Despite a fair amount of licence in the composition, Vryzakis would faithfully reproduce the portraits of many of those who had been there. Byron himself is noticeable for his short stature, but has been turned into a civilian. In this iconic representation, it is the poet of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage that steps ashore, bringing courage and confidence to the Greeks.
That was not how Byron saw himself. He was here to stand shoulder to shoulder with Mavrokordatos, as a leader – a military leader, should ‘chance so happen’, but at all events a political leader. As Trelawny, not an eyewitness either, rightly divined, ‘The poet had now laid down his pen – and mounted the warrior's plume.’81 It was the greatest moment of Byron's life. His transformation was complete. The ‘new Prometheus’ of the Romantic imagination had turned himself into the new statesman.
Part IV Missolonghi: the hundred days (January–April 1824)
Chapter 10 ‘Political economy’
A working relationship
The irony would not have escaped Byron, had he been in a position to appreciate it. His whole active life in revolutionary Greece would last only as long as the brief restoration of his hero Napoleon, between escape from Elba and defeat at Waterloo. At the time, though, and in the eyes of all who were there, those first three months of 1824 were meant to be a beginning, not an end. We will do better to think of Byron's hundred days at Missolonghi in terms of the political language of today, as the initial testing time that defines a new leader in office and lays the foundations for what is to follow.
The underlying pattern of those hundred days is as much obscured as illuminated by the many testimonies to the day-to-day tribulations that Byron endured at Missolonghi, the main material on which his biographers have been able to draw up to now. Well-known incidents, reported not long afterwards by Gamba, Millingen, Parry, Stanhope, and others, and reproduced in biographies ever since, either fall into place, or seem less significant, when these accounts are set alongside the primary sources in Greek. The daily accumulation of misery and frustration that emerges from most of these narratives (though not, strikingly, from Byron's own letters) was the result of causes that were often relatively trivial. The very richness of the standard narrative, with its vivid detail on those aspects of lived experience that happened to be recorded, tends to cast Byron in the role of helpless sufferer, observing and enduring, the victim of forces he barely understood and had no chance of controlling.
The truth is that during all but the very last of those hundred days, Byron knew perfectly well what he was doing, and why. He pursued his aims with remarkable consistency of purpose. From start to finish, everything hinged on the new working relationship that he struck up with the man he had come here to support, Alexandros Mavrokordatos.
There is no record of their first meeting, that January morning at Missolonghi. For first impressions, we have to rely on inference and the word of others. A British naval officer, who called on Mavrokordatos not long afterwards, described his own reception:
We found the great man surrounded by thirty or forty men, armed after the manner of the country, with richly chased pistols and ataghans, while he, on the contrary, was in a French dress – blue coat, drab waistcoat, wide blue pantaloons, and boots, all much worn and badly brushed. His complexion is swarthy, his face rather broad, an aquiline nose, eyes large, black and expressive; and his countenance displays intelligence and shrewdness; but from wearing his hair turned back, in bushy profusion about his shoulders (he has no neck) and a huge pair of ugly mustachios, he has a singular, and not very prepossessing appearance; his height may be five feet six or seven.
This accords closely with the likeness drawn from life, three years later, by the Bavarian volunteer Karl Krazeisen (Plate 7a). Byron's own stature was estimated by the same observer at just two to three inches more.1
Byron was expecting to meet the Washington or Kosciusko of Greece. Mavrokordatos had never forgotten the warning from his mentor back in Pisa, the shrewd Bishop Ignatios: this was a man who could do incalculable harm, as well as good. The two men had similar conceptions of the cause that each was here to serve. Both saw far beyond the small cockpit in which they found themselves, and understood how the struggle to establish an independent Greece could be played out on the wider stage of European geopolitics. It should have been an instant meeting of minds. Some degree of disappointment on both sides was perhaps inevitable.
Byron, probably for the first time in his life, was entering upon a working relationship, and one between social equals. It mattered to him, surely, that among the westerners at Missolonghi, Mavrokordatos was still regularly styled ‘Prince’. With Murray, his publisher, Byron had been far more intimate than he ever became with Mavrokordatos. But Murray he could bully, and often did, until eventually the relationship had broken down. Something of the kind had been envisaged again, in Ravenna and Pisa, when he and Shelley had planned to work with the Hunts to produce The Liberal. But tempers and temperaments had made that a highly fissile project from the start. If Shelley had lived, Byron might have stuck with The Liberal a little longer. Now, in Greece, far more was at stake. These two had to work together, for the higher good. There was no place at Missolonghi for the kind of posturing and tantrums for which Byron was famous. There was plenty of that already, among the picturesque ‘byronic’ heroes who strutted and fired off their guns day and night in the streets. The new Byron had to be different.
So it is not necessarily a surprise to discover that Byron was consistently muted in what he said about Mavrokordatos, not only in his letters, but in the conversations that others recorded. After meeting the man himself, Byron never again repeated the comparison with George Washington. Indeed, he would have been in Missolonghi for almost two months, and meeting him almost daily, before he so much as mentions Mavrokordatos in a surviving letter: ‘Prince Mavrocordato is an excellent person and does all in his power – but his situation is perplexing in the extreme’, he would write to Murray at the end of February.2 Often, what Byron does not say in his letters can be as revealing as what he does.
What Mavrokordatos thought of Byron is no less hard to gauge, from correspondence that is always more or less official. Perhaps the writer feels the need to convince the recipients of his letters of what he finds hard to believe, himself:
He [Byron] desires to be of service in whatever way the Government orders him; ‘no danger’, he says, ‘and no obstacle will prevent me from hastening wherever the Government orders me to go’.
On the subject of his Lordship, this much only I tell you, that the man has the greatest disposition to appear useful in our affairs; he is ready to do anything, so long as he knows it to be of use.3
Many years later, George Finlay would sum up what he had seen of Byron and Mavrokordatos at work: their ‘intercourse was not intimate. Business and ceremony alone brought them together. Their social and mental characteristics were not of a nature to create reciprocal confidence, and they felt no mutual e
steem.’4 But Finlay did not arrive in Missolonghi until the hundred days were more than half over. Other accounts suggest that from the beginning there was an informal, social side to the relationship. Mavrokordatos was in the habit of dropping in on Byron and spending an hour or two with him most evenings, ‘like one of his private friends’. Gamba records that they shared an interest in Turkish history.5 There was perhaps an element of one-upmanship in these conversations, reminiscent of Medwin's account of Mavrokordatos sparring with Shelley over the pronunciation of Greek. But, for most of the hundred days, these occasions seem to have been uniformly amicable and easy-going (no small feat for the Byron of old).
Business there was in plenty. And it is remarkable just how much business these two concluded, right from the very first day. One of their first joint actions was a diplomatic one. The administration of Sir Thomas Maitland, High Commissioner of the Ionian Islands in Corfu, had issued a proclamation denouncing violations of the islands’ neutrality during Mavrokordatos’ voyage from Hydra. The main issue was the fate of the Turkish brig, whose sailors had been hunted down by the Greeks on shore and whose cargo of silver dollars had been taken while the ship was beached on the coast of Ithaca. Mavrokordatos addressed a personal letter to the High Commissioner, according to Byron ‘rather calculated to conciliate – than to irritate’. This was enclosed with another from Byron to his friend Lord Sydney Osborne, who was on Maitland's staff, and whom he asked to intercede. The personal touch would ensure a degree of access that would never have been granted to a leader of the Greeks. Byron's personal assurance would have carried some weight as well, the more so for the offhand informality with which it was given: ‘I am doing all I can to convince them [the Greeks] of the necessity of the strictest observance of the regulations of the Islands – and I trust with some effect.’ Writing to his government, shortly afterwards, Mavrokordatos would represent this joint diplomatic initiative as having been his own idea.6 But Byron had been insisting on the need for the Greeks to conciliate the Great Powers, and particularly Britain, since at least the time of his meetings with Orlandos and Louriotis in the lazaretto of Argostoli.7 He and Mavrokordatos were acting in perfect accord.
The power of money
Everything else at this time had to do with money. When Byron landed, twenty barrels of silver coin had been carried ashore and distributed among the crews of the ships from Spetses, fulfilling the contract for his personal loan that had been drawn up in November. This was not the only demand upon him. Two days later, as he informed Osborne, he had already ‘engaged to maintain a certain number of troops’.8 It was not that Missolonghi at this time needed defending. Since the hasty lifting of the siege at the beginning of December, no further threat from the north could be expected until late spring, at the earliest. The greatest difficulty facing Mavrokordatos was what to do with the warlike tribesmen of his own side, who had fallen back during the autumn on the town and the neighbouring fortified island of Anatoliko (today's Aitoliko). Missolonghi was crowded with up to 5,000 armed men, about half of them more or less credibly describing themselves as ‘Souliots’, most with families to maintain and no means of subsistence.9
The day before Byron arrived had seen the inauguration of a ten-day assembly of all the military and civilian chiefs of the region, under the chairmanship of Mavrokordatos.10 Its twin purposes were to secure a formal vote of confidence in his own leadership and to raise money for the upkeep of these soldiers. The first was achieved. The second resulted in a finely worded resolution addressed to the Provisional Government. But everybody knew the Provisional Government had no money to give. All attention therefore turned towards Byron.11
There seems to have been some realistic haggling about numbers and back pay (which the Souliots were demanding and Byron refused).12 This was probably still going on when Byron wrote to Osborne on the seventh. Within a week, terms had been hammered out. Byron would put up the money to pay 500 men in arms, for a year. This was out of his own resources. It was not a loan, as the money for the ships had been. He estimated the total cost for the first year at 20,000 dollars.13
Byron's weakness for the Souliots was well known – ‘the best and bravest of the present combatants’, as he had described them while still in Cephalonia.14 During his very first week there, he had proposed to the Greek government, via Delladecima, that he might employ a troop of these men. This proposal had been turned down, while the government had been in Salamis and divided. Now, Mavrokordatos was more than happy to accept it on his own authority, here in Western Greece. In return, he offered to put Byron in command and proposed an immediate target for attack – and all this within forty-eight hours of Byron landing.15
The target was to be the fortress of Lepanto (Nafpaktos in Greek). Built several centuries before by the Venetians, at the entrance to the Gulf of Corinth, on a cliff with a town and harbour at its base, the castle has ever since commanded the sea and land routes eastwards into central Greece. In 1571, the Battle of Lepanto had been fought in these waters between the combined navies of western Christendom and the Ottoman empire. Victory for ‘Don John of Austria’, as G. K. Chesterton's poem has it, had checked the westward expansion of Islam into Europe for a century. Now, Lepanto was garrisoned by Albanians who were ‘discontented and mutinous…because they have not been paid for fourteen months’, as Mavrokordatos had written to explain to Byron before his arrival.16 Conditions in the enemy camp, in other words, were the mirror-image of those in Missolonghi. Before long, Mavrokordatos would ask the government to assign the supreme command of the expedition to Byron.17 No military skill and very little physical risk would be involved. Everybody knew that the attack Byron was being asked to lead would be a token affair only. The fortress would be surrendered for silver.
At the same time, demands for money kept coming from further afield. In the Peloponnese, tension between the Legislative and Executive bodies had erupted into violence. On 8 December, soldiers under the command of Kolokotronis’ son Panos had gone from Nafplio, seat of the Executive, to Argos and broken up the meeting of the Legislature, seizing its archive at the same time. News of the debacle had not long since broken in Missolonghi when Byron arrived. Mavrokordatos reported him ‘horrified’ and ‘shocked’.18 Since then the Legislative Body had reconstituted itself in the fortified village of Kranidi, in the northeast corner of the Peloponnese – about as close as it was possible to be to the ships and guns of Hydra and Spetses while still being on the mainland. From there, the members of the Executive had been one by one proscribed. While Byron had been in transit and during his first days at Missolonghi, a new Executive was in process of being appointed, and appeared prepared to overrule the rebels by force if necessary.19 Byron, according to Mavrokordatos, was ‘pleased’ by these signs of decisiveness on the part of the legislators. His own letters and reported statements studiously avoid any appearance of taking sides. But Gamba's diary for 15 January must reflect his attitude at this time: ‘The legislative body were pursuing the same energetic measures as before; and public opinion was daily more pronounced in their favour.’20
On the same day, Mavrokordatos received letters from the Legislature, that had been written while the new Executive was still being formed. Enclosed were two more for Byron. Of these, one was an effusion of thanks for all that he had done for the cause so far. The second, more businesslike but equally courteous, explained that, for the protection of the large islands of Euboea and Crete, a further loan of between 20,000 and 30,000 dollars was urgently required, and begged his Lordship to put up the money. As before, it would be repaid out of the larger loan now being negotiated in London.21 The second of these letters Mavrokordatos was instructed to forward only ‘if you think it reasonable and success probable’.22
Mavrokordatos could have been forgiven, in the circumstances, for seizing upon the let-out clause and suppressing this second substantial demand on Byron's resources. He had already just agreed to maintain the Souliots. Only ten days had passed since the p
revious loan, also of 20,000 dollars, had been paid out to the crews of the ships from Spetses. Mavrokordatos knew, although Byron did not, that the Spetsiots had only remained in Missolonghi, after the departure of the larger contingent from Hydra with their captured bounty, to secure this largesse by way of compensation. In a matter of days they too would be gone. Then, there would be no concealing from Byron the truth of how his previous generosity had been abused.
It is surprising enough that Mavrokordatos, knowing all this, handed over the letter. Even more surprising is how Byron responded. Although he was meeting Mavrokordatos daily, he replied to this request in writing the next day:
1. It would take at least two months before the best rates could be raised on the London or Genoa exchange…
2. We shall have had an answer from London, via the deputies, in less time than that, and then the twenty or thirty thousand dollars would be superfluous. If the deputies do not succeed, I shall do everything in my power to satisfy the request of the government of the Morea.
3. The commitment I have made to maintain the Suliot corps, &c. (without seeking any reimbursement) will cost just under twenty thousand dollars…
4. I expect some special letters from England on my private affairs, and then I shall be able to say precisely what I can and cannot do with my own resources during the current year. Meanwhile I shall not go back on the promise I have made already.
5. P. S. Therefore, if the Prince and the Government believe it necessary, we could dispatch an agent to Cephalonia to negotiate in my name and in the name of the Greek Government the amount requested by the Legislative Body.23
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