Byron's War
Page 32
Possibly Byron had forgotten them, after the arrival of Orlandos and Louriotis in the lazaretto of Argostoli had caused him to change his plans. But they had not forgotten him. Now recruited to Kolokotronis’ camp and determined to make trouble for Mavrokordatos at Missolonghi, the Drakos brothers went even further, and tried to dun Byron for arrears of wages they claimed were due to themselves and their men for the months when they had gone over to the service of the opposing side in the civil war.13
Ever since the time when his beloved Newfoundland dog Boatswain had died and been buried in the grounds of Newstead Abbey sixteen years before, the one thing that Byron hated, despised, and perhaps feared above all others was treachery. Then, in lines literally engraved in stone, he had deplored the faithlessness of his own species, choosing to commemorate his dog as the only faithful friend he had ever known – and this at the age of nineteen.14 Tzavellas, Drakos, and their men had been the first Greeks to offer Byron a hero's welcome. He had responded with generosity and high hopes for them. Angry and bitter when they tried to take advantage of him in Cephalonia, he had dismissed most of them as soon as he could. But the behaviour of Tzavellas and the Drakos brothers, now, went far further. As well might Boatswain, in Newstead days, have tried to bite off his arm. Among the many other trials and exasperations, the incessant rain and consequent lack of exercise, and Parry's cider, all of which no doubt contributed to Byron's seizure that Sunday evening, the sense of personal betrayal by those ‘brave’ Souliots was surely the one that struck most deeply.
Parry, who probably knew nothing of the earlier story, and certainly not the epitaph for Boatswain, recorded that the Newfoundland's successor, Lyon, was now Byron's ‘dearest and most affectionate friend’. ‘Thou art more faithful than men, Lyon’, he reported Byron as saying very frequently, before adding, ‘I trust thee more.’15
During the days that followed, the new disaffection among the Souliots threatened to break out into open insurrection. The first time was a false alarm, caused by two jittery German volunteers who had drunk too much. But the town was put on alert. That was within hours of Byron's seizure. The second was far more serious. A Swedish lieutenant, acting on orders, barred a Souliot from entering the seraglio where the artillery stores were kept. In the fray that resulted, Lieutenant Sass lost his life and the Souliot was severely wounded. For a time it looked as though
the town might be sacked, or that we should at least come to open war. At Lord Byron's quarters, preparations were made as for a siege. The guns were prepared, and pointed towards the gate…The main body of the Suliotes assembled round the house, threatening to attack it, and to murder every foreigner.16
The foreigners certainly did fear for their safety. Several of Parry's assistants took fright and demanded to be sent home, much to Byron's disgust. Recollecting these events a year later, Stanhope would employ generous licence to evoke the spectacle of Byron confronting the mutinous and dishevelled soldiers from his sickbed: ‘the more the Suliots raged, the more his calm courage triumphed. The scene was truly sublime’.17
In the midst of the mayhem a series of hastily convened meetings took place. Byron was present on at least one of these occasions, wearing full military uniform, and harangued the Souliot chiefs through an interpreter.18 By this time, the townspeople were demanding the removal of the Souliots from Missolonghi altogether. A week after Byron's seizure, a new plan of campaign had been cobbled together. The expedition to Lepanto, officially postponed, was abandoned. The paramount need, now, was to remove something like 3,000 armed men as far as possible from Missolonghi. At least, now, there seemed to be no risk of them going over to Kolokotronis. The Souliot leaders, Mavrokordatos had discovered, would not be separated so far from their local power-bases.19
Instead, he hit upon the idea of sending them north, into the devastated no-man's-land that had been left behind by the enemy's campaigns of the two previous autumns. Omer Pasha was reported to be having troubles of his own with disaffected Albanians and had been obliged to withdraw as far as Ioannina. The towns of Arta and Preveza were left exposed.20 Nominally, it was a secret, but most of the leaders knew soon enough that their next target for a token campaign was to be Arta. This way, their men would be able to live off the land – in effect, at the expense of the local Greek peasantry. Even more encouraging, from Mavrokordatos’ point of view, was that many of the captains had scores of their own to settle with rival Greek bands in these areas. The Souliots and other armed groups agreed to move to Xiromero, the mountainous region that lies between the main road to the north and the sea. In the event, it would not be until the beginning of March that the troops began to leave Missolonghi: and that not until further threats of disturbances and a desperate plea from the leading citizens had induced Byron to part with yet more money to cover their arrears.21
It was the best that could be done in the circumstances. But it was hardly a satisfactory conclusion to the efforts of almost two months. The Albanian garrison at Lepanto sent plaintive messages begging to be ‘attacked’. They had still not been paid by their own side and would happily surrender for ‘five hundred purses’. But Mavrokordatos’ coffers were empty.22 As for Byron, he was able to conceal his chagrin in part by laying the blame on his illness. He had given up all idea of ‘taking the field in person’ – at least ‘for the present’.23 The ‘Byron Brigade’ had been reduced to some 225, in effect little more than a household guard, even if Byron could still boast that it was ‘the only regularly paid corps in Greece’.24
By the first week of March, the emergency had passed. As the troops finally filed out of the town, Mavrokordatos gave vent to his exasperation in a long account of events for the benefit of the government at Kranidi. With weary bravado, he concluded that, at least, ‘the plans of the anti-patriots have not succeeded’.25 But then, neither had his and Byron's. This first skirmish in a civil war, whose main theatre would be far away, had been at best a draw.
Diplomacy versus civil war
While the excitement had been at its height over Parry's arrival and then the imminent campaign against Lepanto, during the first week of February a development of much greater importance had passed almost unnoticed at Missolonghi. At Kranidi, the newly appointed President of the Executive, Georgios Koundouriotis, was no politician. His principal qualification for office was that his family was the richest in Hydra. Mavrokordatos, during the time of his refuge there, had lived in the house of Koundouriotis’ brother-in-law, Orlandos. Mutual respect and shared interest had led to mutual trust. One of Koundouriotis’ first acts in office had been to beg and cajole Mavrokordatos to return to the seat of government and help him out. Mavrokordatos’ response, while Byron had been actually or apparently ‘soldier-mad’ about Lepanto, was to insist that, in that case, Byron must be given overall command at Missolonghi, with Londos and someone else of similar standing to support him.26
There, for the time being, the matter had rested. Now, on the day the Souliots left town, Mavrokordatos was once again under pressure from Koundouriotis to shift his operations to Kranidi. For Mavrokordatos, this should have been the perfect opportunity – and for Byron too. The two arms of government were now effectively controlled by the islanders of Hydra and Spetses. All of the newly appointed Executive and a working majority of the Legislature were Mavrokordatos’ political friends. Officially, he was still the president of the Legislature. He is regularly given this title in letters from the government to Byron, and in the columns of the Greek Chronicle. Now, thanks to Koundouriotis’ warmly expressed but thinly disguised plea for help in discharging his new duties as President, Mavrokordatos had the perfect opportunity to return to office, virtually unopposed. In effect, he was being offered the chance to take charge of operations that would resolve the civil conflict once and for all. Thereafter he would have been in a position to carry through his own modernising programme unhindered. Mavrokordatos would have become the undisputed political leader of Greece – with Byron at his side.
/> It was the most important decision of the hundred days. One of history's fascinating counterfactuals is to wonder how Byron might have worked with the government had he gone with Mavrokordatos to Kranidi, and what the political outcome might have been. Another is to imagine what might have been the rest of Byron's life, if he had left Missolonghi for the drier and healthier climate of the northeast Peloponnese in February or March 1824.
Why did it not happen? Back in February, with momentum for the Lepanto campaign seemingly unstoppable, Mavrokordatos could have been excused for temporising, and perhaps saying nothing, either, to Byron. Now, at the beginning of March, without the distraction of a pseudo-military adventure, with the danger to Missolonghi from friendly as well as hostile forces removed, and while still smarting from their humiliation at the hands of the rebels and their Souliot proxies, both men should have been ready to jump at the chance. Instead, on 2 March, within hours of the departure of the Souliots from Missolonghi, Mavrokordatos laid down conditions. He was willing to go to Kranidi, he replied to Koundouriotis, but only if the Legislative Body were first to accept his resignation, offered three times already, as its President – ‘so that by coming there I do not bring on myself new troubles and complications’. He went on, ‘I consider it essential for the Government to write also to his Lordship to invite him…His presence and his counsel would be of great value there.’ But Byron, too, Mavrokordatos seemed to warn, might be lukewarm about the idea. ‘Should he fail to come, such a letter from the Government will obligate him.’27
It is not hard to work out what the ‘troubles and complications’ were that Mavrokordatos was determined to avoid at Kranidi. He was well aware of what was being said about him, particularly in the Peloponnese. Many ordinary Greeks believed that his own ‘power-lust’ was the root cause of the civil war, as the proclamation now circulating there had it. By the beginning of March, he will have known that vital decisions were already being taken at Kranidi without him. If the government was about to go into action against the rebels, then whoever was in charge would have Greek blood on his hands. For Mavrokordatos to have accepted a leading role for himself too soon would have been to give ammunition to his accusers, perhaps even to enflame the conflict further. A more ruthless politician would have risked it. Had he been driven by personal ambition, as his enemies claimed, surely he would not have hesitated. But Mavrokordatos was committed to the long view. And he had Byron to think of, too.
Since coming to Missolonghi, Byron had never repeated his gung-ho threat, made in the high spirits of his final days in Cephalonia, to help resolve the Greeks’ internal differences by force.28 Now, during the first days of March, in letters and conversations he reverted to a topic that had preoccupied him earlier. In his determination to see a ‘strong national government’ in Greece Byron never wavered. But the way to achieve it, he now insisted, was by ‘the healing of these dissensions’. He was himself, he wrote to Barff on 10 March, ‘doing all I can to re-unite the Greeks with ye Greeks’.29 In other words, although he was careful never to say so in so many words, Byron disapproved of the new policy that was emerging at Kranidi, of facing down the warlords by force. As early as 20 February, he had told Gamba, ‘I must wait here to see the turn that things take in the Morea, and to receive news from London.’ A month later, he would confess to Parry his fear that the government's intransigence towards ‘the bravest and most skilful of the military chieftains’ would lead to outright civil war.30
Mavrokordatos could not possibly risk alienating Byron, over a matter of such importance. He might have tried to talk him round to the government's point of view. But more likely he did not even try. Mavrokordatos could see as well as Byron could that the key to Greece's future lay with the loan that was expected from London. ‘Only let the loan be raised, and in the mean time let us try to form a strong national government, ready to apply the pecuniary resources, when they arrive, to the best objects.’31 So Byron had insisted to Gamba, back in January. Everything else would depend on that. Mavrokordatos’ own expedient to remove the Souliots from Missolonghi, as he would later candidly confess, had had the very same aim: to keep the troublemakers at a distance ‘until the money should arrive’.32 After that, everything else would fall into place, without resort to internal violence. A military strike against the rebels, at this juncture, would be at best superfluous, at worst counter-productive. For the government to make war against its own people would only serve to jeopardise the long-term goal. On this, it seems that Mavrokordatos and Byron were in full agreement.
With his second response to the Executive on 2 March, Mavrokordatos bought an interval during which he and Byron could pursue their own independent policy from Missolonghi. It was nothing like a rupture with the government. All the elements of that policy were firmly designed to strengthen the position of the central authority. But in Western Greece, in March, it seemed that there might be more than one way of going about it. While Koundouriotis and the new Executive were preparing to take the field against the rebels in the Peloponnese, Mavrokordatos and Byron, throughout that month, kept up a series of diplomatic exchanges with figures of doubtful loyalty, on whom peaceful leverage might be just as effective.
To one of these, Dimitrios Peroukas (Parucca), in whose house at Argos he had been given hospitality in 1810, Byron went so far as to express himself willing to go as a ‘hostage’.33 To Sisinis, the client of Kolokotronis who had turned his own former Souliot protégés against him, he responded with consummate courtesy, but made no promises. ‘I have heard a good deal of Sisseni’, wrote Byron to Barff, who had been dragged into mediating, ‘but not a deal of good: however, I never judge from report, particularly in a revolution’ (Plate 8a).34 While negotiations continued with both Sisinis and Peroukas, Byron made his own position plain: ‘I am perfectly sincere in desiring the most amicable termination of their internal dissensions – and…I believe P[rince] Mavrocordato to be so also – otherwise I would not act with him.’ Comparison of Byron's letters with those of Mavrokordatos bears out the truth of this.35 What is more, when Byron was asked by the government to detach part of his brigade of Souliots, ostensibly to support the siege of Turkish-held Patras but actually for offensive operations against Sisinis at Gastouni, Mavrokordatos intervened to refuse on his behalf.36
Plate 8a. Georgios Sisinis, lithograph published in Karl Krazeisen, Bildnisse ausgezeichneter Griechen und Philhellenen, Munich, 1828–31 (Athens: Gennadius Library)
This policy was effective. Sisinis was indeed playing a double game, as Byron and Mavrokordatos suspected. But he was no fool, and according to his lights was acting conscientiously to protect the inhabitants of his region from the depredations of their better-armed neighbours. To a supporter, Sisinis wrote ruefully, in April, acknowledging how he had been outmanoeuvred:
Our own policy is crumbling from the foundations…If it was only a matter of making up to the Milord, that I could take. But then I see Mavrokordatos too, whose intentions are evil and you should know it. And all the time I keep thinking, that the only thing I can do is to abandon my own policy and adopt a new one, and of such a sort, with such fine manners, that maybe that way we can further our old policy [after all]. And this disaster has come upon us because of the loans, because the Milord is going to give it all to the people at Kranidi and that is the basis of their power.37
Uncannily, the primate of Gastouni seems to anticipate the worldly wisdom of Don Fabrizio Salina, the fictional hero of the novel The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa, which depicts a comparable situation in Sicily some four decades later.
Byron never knew the extent of his success with Sisinis. But already, on 9 March, an emissary had arrived from Kolokotronis, a certain Lambros. This time (again, no doubt having consulted Mavrokordatos) Byron disdained to reply. But from the message he received he drew the encouraging conclusion that Kolokotronis ‘found his influence on the decline’.38 By 19 March, Byron was optimistic that the ‘recent pacific overtures of the contending pa
rties in the Peloponnese’ might lead to some ‘favourable result’. A week later, he was not so sure. What the ‘contending parties’ were really trying to do was to drive a wedge between himself and Mavrokordatos, and so gain direct access for themselves to the proceeds of the loan expected from London. Byron had now seen through this ploy. But he had an answer. As he told Parry, probably at about the same time, ‘I have advised Mavrocordato to recommend to the government to supply these chiefs with money, but to keep them as short as possible.’39 That was for after the loan arrived. In the meantime, it was enough to keep the negotiations going, and the warlike energies of the revolution from being dissipated in civil combat.
Of all these diplomatic exchanges, by far the most significant were with the pre-eminent warlord of eastern Greece, Odysseus Andritzou. Odysseus had established his headquarters at Athens. Allied with the young former diplomat in the Ottoman service, Theodoros Negris, Odysseus had for some time been urging on Mavrokordatos a summit meeting of the leaders of western and eastern Greece. The place proposed for this meeting was Salona (pronounced with the stress on the first syllable), today's Amphissa, near Delphi. At the end of February, Finlay had arrived at Missolonghi bearing letters for Mavrokordatos from Odysseus and Negris, and for Byron from Trelawny, who had been won over by Odysseus back in the autumn. When a second batch of letters arrived on 18 March, the newest recruit to Odysseus’ camp added his voice to the others. Stanhope had left Missolonghi at the height of the disturbances with the Souliots, to spread the benefits of the press to other parts of free Greece. He had wound up in Athens, and there had become easily convinced that the warlord Odysseus espoused all the utilitarian principles that had been so airily brushed aside by Byron and Mavrokordatos at Missolonghi.40