Byron's War

by Roderick Beaton

  Mavrokordatos thought this meant ‘yes’. Gamba noted, bluntly, ‘his means did not allow of such an advance’. Byron himself reported to Hancock, ‘I demur for the present’, but then added a couple of lines later: ‘till I receive letters from England which I have reason to expect’.24 Byron was fast learning the art of equivocation, in which the undoubted master was Mavrokordatos. But what he might have been expected to say, and did not, was ‘no’.

  Mavrokordatos, emboldened, pressed home the advantage at once – and with a directness that shows how the relationship had altered since their diplomatic exchanges from a distance. The very next day, he wrote to Byron: ‘Mylord, To conclude the matter of the Souliots today, I absolutely need three thousand dollars.’ This time Byron agreed without equivocation. But the difficulty of raising extra cash and transporting it from Zante remained. Mavrokordatos would have to wait.25

  Byron's determination to expend all his disposable income for the good of the cause must have astonished those around him. By 14 January, he had calculated that with the recent sale of his property in Rochdale thrown in, he would have at his ‘disposition upwards of an hundred thousand dollars’, the equivalent of 25,000 pounds, for use in 1824 alone. The figure he gave to Mavrokordatos at the same time was only slightly lower. Out of an annual income the equivalent of 80,000 dollars, Mavrokordatos reported to the Legislative Body on the eighteenth, his Lordship was prepared to make available everything, bar what was needed for minimal personal wants, ‘for the needs of the fatherland’.26

  On the morning of Monday, 19 January, Byron's party awoke to see ‘the Greek fleet making sail, and the Turkish ships standing out of the mouth of the Gulf’. At first Mavrokordatos tried to make out that the ships had only gone to keep watch on the enemy. But nobody can have been fooled for more than a few hours.27 Gamba reported Byron ‘irritated’. It was another of those instances where Byron's silences could be as expressive as words. Two months would pass before he could even bring himself to allude to what he must have seen as a betrayal, when he tersely expressed the hope that in future his money might be put ‘to better purpose than paying off arrears of fleets that sail away’.28 Instead, his immediate fury was curiously displaced.

  He took it out on Gamba. In the midst of the military frenzy that had taken hold of Byron's household since their arrival, Pierino had ordered from Zante an expensive set of uniforms, to be tailored in Corfu. Two letters written by Byron on the day of the ships’ departure are vituperative with indignation at his lieutenant's extravagance. ‘This accursed Cloth merchandizing of Gamba’, he called it, and raged on: ‘this is what comes of letting boys play the man’. What incensed him about ‘Gamba's d—d nonsense’ was that ‘I have occasion for every dollar I can muster – to keep the Greeks together – and I do not grudge any expence for the Cause.’29

  At the very moment when he must have been asking himself if his previous generosity had not been wholly wasted, and whether he should now reconsider the commitments he had so recently entered into, instead Byron railed against Gamba for throwing away trivial sums that could have been better used for the ‘Cause’. As had often happened in the past, the real target for Byron's anger that day was himself. He needed the anger to conquer his own doubts. In the course of humiliating Pierino and gaining the satisfaction of countermanding these harmless vanities, Byron convinced himself and those around him that the setback of the ships’ defection was not going to change his own policy of giving to the Greeks. Suddenly turning the contentious cloth into a metaphor, he all but reveals what had been in his mind, when the ships sailed away: ‘as for me – I mean to stick by the Greeks to the last rag of canvas or shirt – and not to go snivelling back like all the rest of them’.30

  True, by early February he would claim to be exercising a new caution in the promises he was prepared to make: ‘I do not like to tell the Greeks exactly – what – I could or would advance on an emergency – because otherwise they will double and triple their demands.’ But this was wisdom learned too late. He had already told Mavrokordatos, with only a 20 per cent write-down of what he believed to be the true position. And, on 9 February, a fortnight after the ships had gone, he would urge Kinnaird to speed up the transfer of the sale money from the Rochdale estate, ‘as I shall have occasion for it all – and more – to help on the Greeks’.31

  Byron's rage was soon over. The next day, 20 January, it had a revealing sequel. He took Pierino out riding, as was his habit, and patiently explained to him the nature of his mission and why it mattered so much. Gamba does not claim to reproduce Byron's words exactly, only ‘the substance of what he said’. And of course he omits any mention of the row that had occasioned them. Right at the start, Byron warned that he had ‘not much hope of success’. For a moment, this sounds like the disillusioned, despairing Byron of the biographies. But no, it is because the bar he has set for himself is so extraordinarily high: ‘those principles which are now in action in Greece will gradually produce their effect, both here and in other countries…I am not…come here in search of adventures, but to assist in the regeneration of a nation’.32

  It was the same phrase that he had used to Millingen in Cephalonia – and the fact that it is reported, on different occasions, by both men surely guarantees that it is Byron's. This was why every natural weakness, from Pierino's trifling vanity to his own deepest feelings, and even the ‘lava of the imagination’ that had once made him a poet, had now to be subordinated to the needs of the ‘Cause’.

  There was another reason for Byron to be more than usually reflective on that Tuesday afternoon ride outside Missolonghi. In two days’ time, on 22 January, it would be his birthday. The year before, in Genoa, he had agonised all winter over the watershed of passing thirty-five. The slowly taken decision to come to Greece had been his response. This time, on the threshold of thirty-six, the results of his annual self-examination came out in the form of his sober admonition to Gamba. By comparison with that far-sighted assessment, the mawkish poem that he produced, half-apologetically, before the assembled company of his friends on the morning of his birthday itself, is a mere footnote. The poem represents a self-pitying glance backward just at the moment when, as its very first line acknowledges, ‘’Tis time this heart should be unmoved’. What was good for weak-willed, accident-prone Pierino would in future have to be good for Byron too. This was part of the lecture he had delivered on their ride together. The poem's tawdry, worn-out rhetoric about ‘Glory and Greece’ is beside the point. Only prose, and the rigorous suppression of ‘those reviving passions’, would do, for the ‘regeneration of a nation’.33

  Politics for a new nation

  It was not just the Greeks who were divided among themselves. Leicester Stanhope had arrived at Missolonghi before Byron, and had already begun making himself useful. A project dear to the Colonel's heart was the establishment of a free press in Greece. The initiative to establish the Greek Chronicle in Missolonghi was not necessarily Stanhope's, certainly not his alone. Mavrokordatos had brought a printing press with him from Hydra. The bespectacled young Swiss philhellene from Basle, Johann Jakob Meyer, was already primed to act as editor. A local schoolteacher had been found to translate Meyer's editorials into Greek – and also, as it turned out, to exercise austere control over the language considered acceptable for publication.34 What Stanhope contributed was energy, determination, and at the start a small injection of cash. Byron was sceptical about the project from the beginning. ‘His Lordship…thinks the press will not succeed’, Stanhope wrote to Bowring on 6 January. ‘I think it will.’35

  By the time of Byron's birthday, on the twenty-second, discord between the two men had reached such a point that, as Stanhope reported to Bowring, ‘I am in the habit of putting written questions to Lord Byron for his decision.’36 It began with the press. For Stanhope, the freedom of the press was an article of his liberal faith. For Byron the poet, the liberty to express himself without fear or restriction had surely mattered no less. He had o
ften enough chafed, fumed, or raged whenever he had found his own freedom of expression threatened. Now, Stanhope's doctrinaire principles and unyielding personality forced Byron to rethink his position not just on this issue, but on several other matters of politics on which the two men clashed, during the last days of January.

  It may have been merely his old desire to provoke that prompted Byron to report to Stanhope a conversation he had recently had with Mavrokordatos. If he had been in Mavrokordatos’ place, Byron said, he ‘would have placed the press under a censor’. Mavrokordatos had demurred, objecting that ‘the liberty of the press is guaranteed by the constitution’. This was the Constitution of Epidaurus, of which Mavrokordatos had been the principal architect. Probably, he cited the articles in it that already limited press freedom, explicitly forbidding blasphemy, immorality, and libel.37 Byron may have been echoing – and doubting – some such reassurance from Mavrokordatos when he shared with Stanhope his fear of ‘libels and licentiousness’. This may sound like an astonishing volte-face from the author of The Vision of Judgment and Don Juan. But Byron, ever since his first visit to Greece, had been a relativist, one of the things that makes him still seem so modern today. The values he had espoused in other times and other places were simply, as he tried to convince Stanhope that night, ‘not applicable to this society in its present combustible state’.38

  A few days later the quarrel burst out again. The occasion this time was a visit from the Royal Navy. Before the Spetsiot warships had sailed for home, they had taken as a ‘prize’ a caique flying the Ionian flag. The owner of the caique, a Greek, addressed a plaintive note to Byron, begging for the restitution of his livelihood.39 The British authorities in the Ionian Islands were in no mood to put up with further violations of their neutrality. Whether skipper Louverdos ever got his money back is not recorded. But when Captain Yorke came ashore at Missolonghi from the naval brig Alacrity on Monday, 26 January, he brought with him an ultimatum from the Ionian government: he would not depart without at least 200 dollars, which was half the value of the stolen cargo. Byron treated the naval officers to a courteous reception, and some sardonic humour at his own expense.

  Mavrokordatos was prepared to accept liability in principle, but tried to defer payment. When this was refused, Byron offered to pay himself. But Captain Yorke was not going to accept reparation for a Greek violation from a fellow-Briton. So Byron had to give the 200 dollars quietly to Praidis, who duly handed them over as though from the Greek government.40 That evening, Byron told Stanhope what had happened, probably still laughing at the absurdity of the transaction. But Stanhope was not the person to see the funny side of anything. ‘I said the affair was conducted in a bullying manner’, Stanhope reported indignantly to Bowring two days later, ‘and not according to the principles of equity and the law of nations.’41

  Byron's always-fragile good humour collapsed. He had been touched by the plea of the caique's owner, and horrified that the Greek warships (that he himself had paid for) should have stooped to what he called ‘buccaneering’ against their own people. Quite apart from humanitarian and legal considerations, on which he declared himself disinterested, he warned that it was the height of political folly for the Greeks to put their future relations with foreign powers at risk in this way. Over the next few days, Byron would say as much in a stern circular addressed to ‘the captains of Greek privateers’ and to Bowring in London: ‘I cannot but condemn the want of discipline and authority which has led to the acts of piracy in question (for they are no better).’42

  That evening, with Stanhope, ‘His Lordship started into a passion. He contended, that law, justice, and equity, had nothing to do with politics.’ This was Byron's relativism at its most shockingly radical, and Stanhope recoiled from it. Inevitably, the name of the ‘immortal Bentham’ got dragged in. The quarrel raged fast and furiously. Byron had never read anything by Bentham, but took refuge in casting slurs against the man. Or so Stanhope complained. It was not the first time this had happened. At least, Stanhope raged, ‘Bentham had a truly British heart’, while Byron, ‘after professing liberal principles from his boyhood, had, when called upon to act, proved himself a Turk’. When Byron demanded an instance of this, Stanhope countered with: ‘Your conduct in endeavouring to crush the press, by declaiming against it to Mavrocordato, and your general abuse of liberal principles’. ‘And yet’, retorted Byron, ‘without my money, where would your Greek newspaper be?’43

  Far from being against the press, Byron was actually subsidising it, along with just about everything else that went on at Missolonghi. On the question of Greek actions at sea and the payment of reparations, he could see both sides, was appalled by the behaviour of the Greeks, and had deftly defused diplomatic tension with the representatives of British naval power in the eastern Mediterranean. Immediately after that riposte, he ended the quarrel with Stanhope with a plea for what today would be called pragmatism: ‘Judge me by my actions, not by my words.’44

  Five days later, on 31 January, Stanhope struck back through the columns of the Greek Chronicle. The lead article, unsigned, is headed, ‘Publicity is the soul of justice. On the freedom of the press.’ Whether the words are Stanhope's, or more probably Meyer's, the sentiments could have come straight from the pen of Jeremy Bentham himself: ‘Publicity by means of the press…gives the most accurate measure of all things; the organs of this most beneficial publicity are newspapers.’45 But while Stanhope struck back in words, when the occasion warranted Byron would resort to action as he had promised. Almost two months after the initial quarrel, and a month after Stanhope had left Missolonghi, the Chronicle had become increasingly outspoken on another issue on which the ‘typographical colonel’ felt strongly. This was monarchy, both in principle and as a future form of government for Greece. Editorials in March lashed out against the ‘tyranny’ of the newly restored monarchy in Spain.46 When Meyer found occasion to express solidarity between the Greeks and the Hungarians and Croats, peoples presented as being subjected to the overweening empire of the Habsburgs, Mavrokordatos intervened to suppress the entire issue of the newspaper.

  Byron was eager to enforce this order, confiscating all copies that came into his possession. It was the first of only three occasions in the paper's two-year history when this happened.47 On the same day, 20 March, the first number of the Telegrafo Greco appeared. Written mainly in Italian, the new publication was intended to complement the Chronicle by addressing a foreign readership. This time, Byron had taken the precaution of installing his trusted lieutenant, Gamba, as editor – though not without misgivings about Pierino's propensity to get into ‘scrapes’. Missolonghi now had two regular newspapers, more than all the rest of Greece. But despite the protestations about freedom of the press in the Chronicle, the one was securely controlled by Mavrokordatos, the other by Byron himself.48

  Could this be the same Byron who had championed the constitutionalist revolution in Spain ever since its beginning exactly four years ago – indeed for longer and more consistently than he had the cause of Greece? The same who from Italy had repeatedly denounced the Austrians as ‘barbarians’? Where now was the author of The Age of Bronze – a far more intemperate tirade than anything that ever appeared in the schoolmasterly columns of the Greek Chronicle?

  It is thanks to the long-delayed arrival of the firemaster William Parry that we know the answers to these questions. Parry finally reached Dragomestre on the last day of January, with his artillerymen and a shipload of supplies sent by the London Greek Committee. In another week, he and his stores would have arrived at Missolonghi. Byron, who had been expecting them since September, observed caustically to Bowring, ‘I presume from this retardment that he is the same Parry who attempted the North pole – and is (it may be supposed) now essaying the South.’49

  Parry would quickly prove a controversial figure, and has remained one ever since. It was hardly his fault that a better-qualified specialist in artillery could not be found, on the terms that the Lo
ndon Greek Committee was able to offer. At least one German aristocratic volunteer refused to serve under Parry and departed. Dr Millingen sneered at the pretension of a man who ‘presented himself before the troops with an apron and hammer’. Finlay ‘cared little about the apron and hammer but…was satisfied that a drunken mountebank was not the person to do anything for [the] good of Greece’.50 Fond of his drink Parry certainly was. But his real offence came down to class. Parry was not an officer or a gentleman. The Greeks (except for Mavrokordatos) ignored him because they cared nothing for the new-fangled technologies that he was supposed to have brought. The foreigners, liberals to a man and engaged in fighting a war for a new kind of society, would have nothing to do with someone who had never been to the equivalent of an English public school, who could not quote Latin and ancient Greek, and had no military record that he was willing to talk about.

  All except Byron. Byron took to Parry at once. Parry had no time for humbug, spoke his mind with a blunt directness that Byron seems sorely to have missed among his new acquaintances in Missolonghi, and at once struck a chord with certain of Byron's own recent antipathies. ‘Parry’, declared Byron after their first meeting, ‘seems a fine rough subject.’ Later, he called him ‘a sort of hard-working Hercules’.51 At least until Finlay arrived at Missolonghi at the end of February to displace him, Parry was Byron's chief confidant. During their evenings spent together, Parry listened and took notes. Parry's ghost-written memoir, published the next year, contains the fullest evidence we have for the thinking that lay behind Byron's political choices during his hundred days.

  This was how he accounted for his interventions over the press:

  He knew it had been said that the Greek insurrection was the offspring of the revolutionary principles to which the sovereigns of Europe were so resolutely opposed. He knew that wherever they suspected the existence of these principles, no appeal to honour, to justice, or even to religion, was of any avail, and that they directed all their energies to stifle in every part of the world every germ of popular independence. He therefore saw in this denunciation [of Austria, in the Greek Chronicle], and in most of the political doctrines which were broached in Greece, an invitation to these powers, more particularly to Austria, to take part against the Greeks. It was moreover a justification of their doing so. Lord Byron saw this was hazarding the success of that cause which wholly engrossed his mind, and he was proportionably energetic in his reprobation of what appeared to him both inexpedient in practice, and indefensible in principle.52