When it came to his actions over reparations to the Ionian authorities on 26 January, that had also offended Stanhope, Byron explained himself with the exact same logic. Greece was not yet recognised as ‘an independent power’, by Great Britain or by any other state. ‘Whatever may be my opinions as to this part of the conduct of our government,’ he explained patiently to Parry, ‘these are things I cannot alter; I must take them as I find them.’ There was a very simple reason for caving in to the demands of the Royal Navy. The colonial British government that ruled the Ionian Islands had the power to cut off supplies to Greece or even to intervene in the war on the side of Turkey. ‘Knowing this’, Byron went on, ‘I counselled restitution, not because it was just, for as I say justice has nothing to do with politics, but because it was expedient for us to do so.’53 Byron had by this time gained a firm grasp of the realities of the political situation he was trying to influence. He was not only a relativist. He was also, at this time in his life, a clear-sighted realist.
On the future form of government that he wished to see in independent Greece, Byron was similarly pragmatic and open-minded. Mavrokordatos was known to favour monarchy as the best solution to the constitutional question that was bound to arise sooner or later if the Greeks succeeded in their aims. Many philhellenes, notably Stanhope and Trelawny, were viscerally hostile to the idea – hence Meyer's editorials in the Chronicle and the suppression of its offending issue.54 The author of Don Juan, who had only three years before declared, ‘The king-times are fast finishing…the peoples will conquer in the end’, might have been expected to be similarly opposed. But not even this principle would Byron allow to stand in the way of the ‘regeneration of a nation’.55 Instead, as he explained it to Parry:
A system of government must and will arise suitable to the knowledge and the wants of the people, and the relations which now exist among the different classes of them…[The Greeks] cannot for ages have that knowledge and that equality amongst them which are found in Europe, and therefore I would not recommend them to follow implicitly any system of government now established in the world, or to square their institutions by the theoretical forms of any constitution…There is no abstract form of government which we can call good…[E]very government derives its efficiency as well as its power from the people.
It was a neat reversal of what Byron had written in his journal ten years before. What had once looked like ‘political nihilism’ re-emerges as creative openness. As he also expressed it to Parry, ‘Time will bring such a system; for a whole nation can profit by no other teacher.’ History itself would have to evolve a new system of government that would work in the new circumstances.56
Within a few weeks of Parry's arrival, Byron had hammered out a set of principles that built upon the lessons of his rapid apprenticeship in Greek politics while he had been in Cephalonia, and now at Missolonghi. It was typical of his distrust of any sort of abstract theorising that he never set down these ideas in any systematic form. He barely touches on them in letters. It was in conversation, particularly with Parry and with Gamba, that he elaborated his thinking most fully – and, as a result, tantalisingly, we are forced to rely for our knowledge on the notes and later written-up recollections of these two very different witnesses. Essentially, Byron's policies for Greece, while he was at Missolonghi, come down to three fundamental principles. The first was the paramount need for a ‘strong national government’ with centralised functions.57 This made Byron unequivocally a ‘moderniser’, in the terms in which the civil conflict within Greece at the time is understood today. This first principle was a necessary precondition for the other two.
Secondly, Byron recognised, as many others did not, that it was not just money the new state needed, but what today would be called an economic policy. Already he was looking beyond the immediate goal of the arrival of the expected loan from London. There had to be mechanisms for the proper disbursement of the funds, and also to ensure that eventually they would be repaid. On this, Byron was punctilious.58 He saw that the future viability of the Greek state would depend on its financial probity. (Had he lived longer, he might have been able to mitigate the reputational damage that would begin with the scandals over the two British loans to Greece of 1824 and 1825, and has returned to haunt the country since the economic crisis of 2010.)
Since an economic policy, in the short term, hinged upon the raising of loans abroad, this second principle led seamlessly into the third: the need for a developed and coherent foreign policy. Full independence and prosperity would only ever be possible with the blessing of those Great Powers of Europe that Byron, as poet, had heartily loathed. This meant persuading the hard-headed representatives of those Powers that their own geopolitical interests would be better served by supporting the fledgling Greek nation than by allowing the status quo to remain. To Gamba, a little later, he would spell it out: ‘The English government deceived itself at first in thinking it possible to maintain the Turkish empire in its integrity: but it cannot be done; that unwieldy mass is already putrefied, and must dissolve. If any thing like an equilibrium is to be upheld, Greece must be supported.’59
Here Byron was invoking what in a few years would come to be called the ‘Eastern Question’, which would preoccupy the courts and governments of Europe for a century. A new independent Greece, on this way of thinking, would succeed to the mantle of Turkey (not yet dubbed the ‘sick man of Europe’) as a bulwark against Russia for the powers of the West. It was a bold and far-reaching view of the future of Greece. And it was not only Byron's. It may well be, as some commentators have thought, that he had already foreseen the dissolution of the Ottoman empire at the time when he embarked on the ‘Turkish tales’. But all of those principles, and especially the last, had for some time been central to the political thinking of Mavrokordatos too.60
Byron and Mavrokordatos, together, were determined to tie the fortunes of the revolution into the economic and geopolitical future of the entire continent. Revolution in Greece was not just a local affair. Every one of the Great Powers must be obliged to take notice of what was happening, must be dragged into involvement – for their own self-interest. Loans of money raised from private speculators in Great Britain were part of that. So was the establishment of good diplomatic relations, so that eventually the powers would have to recognise Greece, if only out of the fear that their rivals would do so first. The Greek Revolution must become, as one modern study has it, a ‘European event’.61 Whether Byron himself ever quite believed this or not, he certainly saw the benefits of presenting the struggle as being fought ‘between barbarism and civilization…and in behalf of the descendants of those to whom we are indebted for the first principles of science, and the most perfect models of literature and of art’.62 It was a less grandiose version of what Shelley had written in the preface to Hellas.
Finally, there remained the issue of how to resolve the simmering civil conflict within Greece, that stood most immediately in the way of realising those aims. This was about to prove the most intractable of all the political challenges that Byron faced. In the meantime, as January gave way to February, all heads at Missolonghi were turned by the preparations going forward for the assault on the Turkish outpost of Lepanto – with Byron himself as commander-in-chief.
Chapter 11 Confronting the warlords
Lepanto: the first round
By early February, news was reaching Missolonghi that the members of the deposed Executive had regrouped at Tripolitsa. Kolokotronis was on his way there to provide them with military backing. From Tripolitsa, a lengthy proclamation signed by Petrobey Mavromichalis as President of the Executive was put out on 5 February. In it, the deposed president denounced the actions of the rival government at Kranidi and systematically set out to rebut all the accusations that had been used to justify the proscription of himself and his fellow-officers. When it came to laying blame for the breakdown of civil order, the proclamation became strident. All was ‘due to the illegal, unjust and a
bsurd presidency of the shamelessly so-called “prince” Mavrokordatos’, who was further accused of ‘power-lust’ and of still harbouring designs to sell out ‘this sacred soil’ to unspecified foreign interests.1
Rumours were being put about the Peloponnese. Mavrokordatos’ allies there, the primates-turned-warlords Zaimis and Londos, who were also the main channel through which communications passed between Missolonghi and Kranidi, were becoming edgy. They wrote to him, warning of the rumours that were reaching them from Tripolitsa. According to one of these, Mavrokordatos and some of the merchants from the islands had concluded an alliance with the Catholic Knights of Malta. This was playing on the religious sensitivities of the Peloponnesian population, which was solidly Orthodox. Another story had it that ‘your Excellency, either in agreement with us or treacherously over our heads, is going to hand over Greece to the British, and we should wake up to the fact’. How were these rumours to be countered? What was the truth of the matter?2
With this letter came a second, dated a day later, and containing a more specific warning. Nikolos Tzavellas at the head of twenty Souliots had just passed through Vostitsa (where Londos had once entertained Byron and Hobhouse). They had previously been at Gastouni, in the northwest Peloponnese, where the local primate, Georgios Sisinis, was under the protection of Kolokotronis. Now they were heading for Missolonghi. While at Gastouni, Tzavellas had been keeping bad company and had ‘become considerably imbued with the corrupting aims of the tyrant-lovers’ (an allusion to Kolokotronis). Other troublemakers were independently on their way too. But Tzavellas, the writers warned, was determined to ‘do as much as damage as he can’ at Missolonghi. The damage could be considerable. Zaimis and Londos did not need to remind Mavrokordatos that the Tzavellas clan was one of the most powerful among the Souliots who were even now being drilled by Byron and Gamba in anticipation of the campaign against Lepanto. Kitsos Tzavellas was a key figure in all Mavrokordatos’ dealings with the Souliots. Nikolos, the writers of the letter warned, was plotting ‘to gather together all those Souliots [at Missolonghi] who will follow him, and others, to bring them over to the Peloponnese to unite with Kolokotronis’.3 And this just at the time when the deposed Executive was issuing its message of defiance from Tripolitsa. By the time Mavrokordatos read these letters, on Saturday, 14 February, and conveyed their contents to Byron and Gamba, the damage had already been done.
Preparations for the assault on Lepanto had been going on for six weeks. From the beginning, there had been an air of make-believe about them. Byron was fully aware of the deal that had been struck with the defenders. The Albanian garrison would give up the fortress after only token resistance, in return for the pay they were owed by their own side. He had even sent to Zante for the money to pay them off.4 But this did not prevent him from acting out the fantasy to the full. Millingen paints a vivid picture of the walls of Byron's apartment at this time: ‘decorated with swords, pistols, Turkish sabres, dirks, rifles, guns, blunderbusses, bayonets, helmets, and trumpets, fantastically suspended, so as to form various figures’. According to Stanhope, already on his third day at Missolonghi, Byron had become ‘soldier-mad’. A week after that, Stanhope was reporting to Bowring, ‘He burns with military ardour and chivalry, and will proceed with the expedition to Lepanto.’5
Byron enjoyed drilling and exercising his Souliot troops, whenever the rains let up for long enough. But, revealingly, when it was all over, he would confess to Gamba that ‘this enterprise of mine was only a secondary object; my first aim was to know something of those soldiers’. Gamba must have been thirsting to get his own first taste of soldiering, and certainly took those plans seriously. But he understood from the start that, for Byron, Lepanto was never more than a ‘secondary interest’. Beyond his lingering fascination with the Souliot warriors, Byron's real and overriding object, as Gamba well knew, was to boost the political and economic strength of the Greek government by every means in his power.6 A propaganda coup at Lepanto, that would heighten Mavrokordatos’ prestige, was one such means. For all the excitement of playing at soldiers, in Byron's mind it was never more than that – a means to a political end.
During the first half of February, the preparations gathered momentum. That the expedition was imminent was taken for granted by almost everyone in Missolonghi. Mavrokordatos in his letters repeatedly said so. It was even announced in the Greek Chronicle, though, for all his high words about press freedom, Meyer held back from naming the target in print – though of course it was on everyone's lips. From Cephalonia, where the news had already reached, Byron's friends expressed themselves
very anxious you should not expose yourself in the expedition to Lepanto, which we hear you are determined to join. I, for one, do not think your Lordship ought to go a fighting at all, your Lordship's niche in the Temple of Fame is already secured, and fight as you will I…think your Lordship's life too great a stake to risk, and would willingly save it over at the expence of Grecian liberty.7
On Friday, 13 February, it was announced that the whole regiment of Souliots would parade the next day. The agreement for their terms of service would be read out, and the troops would receive a month's pay in advance. The day after that, Gamba ‘was to march with the vanguard of 300 of them, and take up a position under Lepanto’. The expedition would be on its way.8
It was on the morning of the day fixed for the parade, Saturday the fourteenth, that Mavrokordatos received the letters that had come from the Peloponnese. A few hours later, he and Gamba met the Souliot chiefs, without Byron. According to Gamba, ‘after a tedious discussion, these persons withdrew, and promised to send me their definitive answer in three hours’. The mood of the troops had changed overnight. Tzavellas and his fellow-travellers had arrived. When the answer came, at five in the afternoon, it took the form of a new set of demands. There was no more talk of a parade, or an advance guard setting out for Lepanto. Byron ‘burst into a violent passion, and protested that he would have no more to do with these people’.
All next day, the fifteenth, it was left to Gamba and Mavrokordatos to renew negotiations, with the mediation of Kostas Botsaris, the most loyal of the Souliot leaders. Byron refused to attend. Instead, he sent a curt note:
Having tried in vain at every expence – considerable trouble – and some danger to unite the Suliotes for the good of Greece – and their own – I have come to the following resolution. –
I will have nothing more to do with the Suliotes – they may go to the Turks or – the devil but if they cut me into more pieces than they have dissensions among them, they will not change my resolution –9
A facing-saving deal was struck: ‘a new corps should be raised, no matter from what tribe, composed of six hundred, as before agreed upon’. This was the body that Byron had agreed to pay, at the beginning. Nothing was said about the remainder of the 3,000, that two days before had been ready to set out for Lepanto. With the loyalty of the greater part of the troops uncertain at best, even a token assault was now out of the question. At seven in the evening, Gamba reported this news to Byron.10
Not long after eight, Byron had the violent seizure that has often been described, and some have thought was an advance warning of his fatal illness two months later. He himself, in its immediate aftermath, described it as ‘a strong shock of a Convulsive description’, such that several strong men present were unable to hold him.11 Back in August, he had experienced something similar, in Ithaca, though this attack was much more severe and its effects longer-lasting. Then, Byron had been reliving the cremation of Shelley on the same day the year before. All the associated feelings had combined with more immediate contributory causes: exposure to the sun, extreme fatigue, and perhaps recent heavy drinking. This time, Parry's fondness for a vat of cider would at once and ever after be blamed by almost everyone. Byron had certainly been drinking with Parry, Stanhope, and Gamba immediately before it happened. Various manifestations of what today would be called stress have also been invoked, ever since th
e event itself, and these are plausible enough. The defection of the Souliots and the puncturing of the make-believe surrounding the Lepanto campaign clearly affected Byron greatly. But, just as before, in Cephalonia, there was a specific emotional cause that may better account for the extreme physical reaction that followed.
Gamba was aware of this, but either failed to recognise its significance, or more likely preferred to play it down. In his long account of the events of the previous day, Gamba reports that the Souliots had been urged to defect by a ‘messenger sent by Colocotroni…What was still more distressing to us was the discovery that this very spy of Colocotroni had been one of those whom Lord Byron had relieved in Cephalonia’.12 Nikolos Tzavellas, of whom Mavrokordatos had been warned in the letter from Zaimis and Londos, was none other than the ‘Giavella’ who along with Fotomaras and Drakos had led the band of forty Souliots to mob Byron when he first arrived aboard the Hercules off Argostoli. When the other Souliots had been packed off to Missolonghi at the end of August, Byron had retained Tzavellas and the brothers Georgios and Anastasios Drakos in his service. It was he who had sent all three of them, with the twenty men who had now turned up at Missolonghi, to the northwest Peloponnese at the end of October. At the time when he had been intending to accept the government's invitation and go to Nafplio, these Souliots had been deputed to arrange with Sisinis, the local primate, for his reception when he landed at Pyrgos. Thereafter, presumably, they would have formed his bodyguard on his overland journey.
Byron's War Page 31