Byron's War

by Roderick Beaton

  The main object of Odysseus and Negris, as would soon become apparent, was no different from that of the other ‘contending parties’ who had made overtures. In this, they had been lucky enough to enlist two formidable spokesmen, who might prove more persuasive in their interest than the Ionian intermediaries on whom Peroukas and Sisinis relied. Trelawny and Stanhope had both lost any confidence that they had ever had in the ‘prince’ and were determined, by this time, to win Byron over to their new friends in Athens.41 But even if he suspected as much at the time (as surely he did), Mavrokordatos could see the advantage of meeting Odysseus half way. So long as he was not aligned with the rebel chieftains in the Peloponnese, the warlord was potentially a strategic ally whose power and influence might yet be mobilised in the service of the government.42 A diplomatic success at Salona would do more to enhance the prestige of the modernisers, and therefore also the authority of the legitimate government, than a victory over the Albanian garrison of Lepanto would have done. No Greek lives would be lost. And it was playing to the unique strengths that Mavrokordatos and Byron between them possessed.

  The decision seems to have been taken on the spot. Far from being reluctant to go to Salona, as almost all English-language accounts have it, Mavrokordatos wrote at once to Trelawny, Stanhope, and Odysseus promising that he and Byron would both attend – if not at Salona, then at nearby Chrysso (where Byron and Hobhouse had once lodged with the local bishop on their way to Delphi). Byron wrote to Stanhope to the same effect. To Odysseus, Mavrokordatos even gave a date for their departure from Missolonghi – 25 March – and also dangled the allurement of great gains to be made in the north, thanks to the weakness of Omer Pasha of Ioannina.43

  The decision for Salona had already been taken, and a commitment given, when on 21 or 22 March a new batch of letters arrived from Kranidi. It was now that Byron received this carefully worded note from Mavrokordatos:

  The president of the Executive power…writes to me in short that, for the affairs of the highest importance, he believes my presence at Kranidi very necessary;…that he would wish to know whether Mylord, were he to be invited to attend the Government would decide to go there; or whether he would accept the general direction of the affairs of mainland Greece…that he awaits my response and the frank exercise of my opinion, with impatience.44

  The new Executive was offering Byron the choice between the two sets of conditions that Mavrokordatos had laid down for going to Kranidi himself, first in February and now in March. But it was left to Mavrokordatos to negotiate with his Lordship. The Greek government seems never actually to have offered these or any other terms to Byron directly.

  By this time, Mavrokordatos was in less of a hurry than ever to align himself with a government that was pursuing an increasingly belligerent course against the rebels in the Peloponnese. In the same note to Byron in which he outlined the government's offer, he added news of armed clashes that had taken place in Tripolitsa a month ago. Some of the townspeople there had risen up against the exactions of Kolokotronis’ son Gennaios. He also reported that the rebels holding the fortress of Acrocorinth were on the point of surrender.45 These details seem to have been selectively chosen, and were already out of date. The truth was that Acrocorinth had been forced into submission. The twin fortresses of Nafplio, held by Kolokotronis’ son Panos, were under close siege. A government army, 4,000 strong, would shortly be on its way to Tripolitsa, to do battle with Kolokotronis himself. Something of this Mavrokordatos seems to have learned on 23 March, just after he had finished writing his latest report for the government. Diplomatically, in a postscript, he declared himself ‘delighted’ by these developments. He had little choice.46 How much Byron ever knew about the details of what was happening in the Peloponnese is impossible to tell. But, by 30 March, he was in a position to report to Bowring, with what degree of acerbic understatement we can only guess: ‘the dissensions in the Morea still continue – and hamper them [the Greeks] a good deal’.47

  All this would be enough to explain Byron's rather listless response to the invitation he had received, via Mavrokordatos, from the government. Given the choice to attend the government at Kranidi or to command at Missolonghi, he wrote to Barff on the twenty-second: ‘I am willing to serve them in any capacity they please – either commanding or commanded – it is much the same to me – as long as I can be of any presumed use to them.’ The meeting at Salona, where he believed that he and Mavrokordatos could set their own agenda, was more to his taste, and would come first. Gamba reports that Byron ‘returned an answer to the government at Cranidi, that “he was first going to Salona, and that afterwards he would be at their commands”’.48

  There was another reason to hold back from accepting the government's invitation immediately. Hard on the heels of the latest letters from Kranidi had come the first news from London – indirectly, by way of Mavrokordatos’ informants in Pisa and Livorno, and Barff in Zante. As yet it was unconfirmed and details were scanty. But on 22 March, Byron learned that a loan had been agreed. Within weeks, the money would be on its way. He and Stanhope were named as commissioners for its disbursement. Neither he nor Mavrokordatos seems ever to have made explicit what must have been uppermost in both their minds. The time for them to arrive at the seat of government would be at the crucial moment, when the funds from London also arrived, to set the seal on the end of civil conflict, confirm the supremacy of the modernisers, and usher in a new phase of the Revolution.

  Missolonghi blues

  During the last ten days of March, it rained so much that the streets of Missolonghi were turned to mud. The town was cut off from the rest of Greece by the impassable Fidari and Acheloos rivers. In these conditions, nobody could have gone to Salona, or anywhere else, as Byron wrote to inform Barff on 3 April.49 The expedition to meet Odysseus and the leaders of eastern Greece kept being put off. Mavrokordatos will not have been unduly disconcerted by the delay. Every passing day brought the arrival of the loan from London closer. It was a waiting game. Mavrokordatos was good at waiting.

  Byron was not. As the rain came down, day after day, and kept him and his companions cooped up indoors, with too little to do and no possibility of exercise, he once again became prey to extreme and abrupt mood swings. Finlay, who got to know him during March and the first ten days of April, observed that ‘It seemed as if two different souls occupied his body alternately.’ Ever since his convulsive episode in February, at the height of the debacle with the Souliots, as Parry noted: ‘Lord Byron's health appeared not thoroughly re-established, and he frequently complained of slight pains in the head, shivering fits, confusion of thoughts, and visionary fears, all of which indicated to me increasing debility.’50

  Even the normally upbeat Gamba noticed these symptoms. Gamba blamed the rain, which prevented the daily rides that he and Byron were in the habit of taking together. According to Millingen, after his fit, Byron ‘fell into a state of melancholy, from which none of our reasonings could relieve him’, and began to voice thoughts of death.51 It was no doubt as part of the same pattern of alternating extremes of mood, and as a response to the boredom of enforced idleness, that he began to resort to pointless, elaborate, and cruel practical jokes. The victims were invariably those most dependent on him: his faithful valet Fletcher, the black American groom Benjamin Lewis, who had previously been in Trelawny's service, Parry the firemaster, and even a Turkish girl prisoner he was intent on saving.52

  It was an indication of Byron's melancholy, during the doldrums of March, that he once again allowed his thoughts to slide backwards towards the life and the art he had given up to come here. Perhaps what triggered this was a letter from Tom Moore, that reached him at the beginning of the month. ‘Your reproach is unfounded’, he wrote back indignantly to this voice from his past. ‘I have not been “quiet” in an Ionian Island but much occupied with business…Neither have I continued “Don Juan” – nor any other poem.’53 But, during (probably) the last week of March, he thought of it. Grumbli
ng to Parry about what he now called the ‘talk and foolery’ of the London Greek Committee, he warmed to the idea: ‘Well, well, I’ll have my revenge: talk of subjects for Don Juan, this Greek business, its disasters and mismanagement, have furnished me with matter for a hundred cantos.’ There were to be walk-on parts for Bentham and Stanhope. ‘There will be both comedy and tragedy; my good countrymen supply the former, and Greece the latter.’ It was a pleasant threat, but not a serious one. He would not start to write again, he told Parry, ‘till next winter’.54

  But it was not quite the whole truth that he had written to Moore. While sheltering from the Turks and the weather at Dragomestre, on his way from Cephalonia, Byron had dashed off a piece of lively doggerel that captured his excitement at being back on the same shore (more or less) from which he and Hobhouse had all those years ago been rescued by Souliot warriors. Rather more accomplished, if hardly great poetry, are the lines, mentioned earlier, that he wrote and read aloud to his entourage on his birthday, 22 January. It was almost certainly during March that he dug out the page on which he had sketched the euphoric verses on the Souliots (‘Up to battle! Sons of Suli’), turned it over, and began again.55

  His theme, this time, was unrequited love. Its object was his ‘page’, Loukas Chalandritsanos. He had already showed the tenderness of his feelings for the boy during the voyage from Cephalonia. Perhaps it was the association that drew him back to the lines he had written then. The birthday poem, too, had touched on these feelings. But there the emphasis had been on renunciation. The first of the two short poems of March is a love poem, pure and simple. It ends (excruciatingly, to syntactical purists):

  and yet thou lov'st me not,

  And never wilt – Love dwells not in our will –

  Nor can I blame thee – though it be my lot

  To strongly – wrongly – vainly – love thee still.56

  It was not just that fifteen-year-old Loukas refused to act up to the part, or respond to his advances. In reality, the advances may never have been made. Byron was lavish in his gifts to the young man, but made sure, too, that he knew his place. ‘Tea is not a Greek beverage’, he instructed his steward, Lega Zambelli, on 2 February, ‘therefore Master Lukas may drink Coffee instead – or water – or nothing…He will eat with the Suliots – or where he pleases.’57 This is not the language of the besotted lover. And Byron-the-new-statesman will have been perfectly well aware, from his observations with Hobhouse all those years ago, that the kind of liaison he had once carried on with Nicolo Giraud in Ottoman Athens could never have been publicly accepted in the world in which he was now establishing himself. Far from being the mainspring of his actions in Greece, as some have thought, Byron's feelings for Loukas Chalandritsanos were never more than a nostalgic throwback to his own youth, to his real relationship with Giraud, and still more, perhaps, to its fictional projection in Lara – to feelings and experiences that he knew very well could never come again.58

  What is almost certainly his last surviving poem seems to concede this: ‘honours or renown’ and ‘a new-born people's cry’ are more precious to him than any material reward. For these the poet ‘could die’. But he is appalled to find himself ‘the fool of passion’. The poem's central metaphor is finely ambiguous:

  a frown

  Of thine to me is as an Adder's eye

  To the poor bird whose pinion fluttering down

  Wafts unto death the breast it bore so high –

  It seems once again to be a love poem: what brings him down is the loved one's disdain. But then come the final lines:

  Such is this maddening fascination grown –

  So strong thy Magic – or so weak am I.

  Is it not the fatal attraction itself (the ‘Adder's eye’) that threatens the proud bird of prey with destruction? This is what the same image had meant, years ago, when Byron had used it in The Giaour.59 Byron at Missolonghi could not afford to be weak, and he knew it.

  But these last poems are testimony to the effort it cost him.

  By the end of March, Byron had been living among Greeks for eight months, for the last three of those in free Greece. He had still never been close or intimate with a Greek, as he had with friends and lovers of all classes while he had lived in Italy. (Even Nicolo Giraud, his only certain conquest on his earlier travels, though a fluent Greek-speaker and brought up in the country, had French parents.) It was perhaps ironic that Loukas’ contempt, indifference, or quite possibly just uncomprehending vanity, had the effect of closing off the only intimate relationship that Byron seems ever to have considered in Greece. But it says something for his attitude, too, that sex with an underage boy was the only form of intimacy he could envisage with the people for whom he was prepared to sacrifice so much.

  Even with Andreas Londos, his former host at Vostitsa and now a close political ally of Mavrokordatos, Byron guarded himself against acknowledging ties at the level of personal friendship, beyond obligation. When Londos wrote, through a scribe who translated his words into Italian, to recall ‘memories of those happy hours, when in years gone by I had the pleasure of sharing a sweet domesticity with you’, and invoking ‘feelings of pure friendship’, Byron resorted to the high style, praising the struggle and Londos’ part in it, but conceded no more than ‘the duties of Friendship and the recognition of your Hospitality’ in former times. He did end the letter, ‘To see you again, and to serve your Fatherland at your side, and under your eyes – will be for me one of the happiest moments of my life.’ But the emphasis is on the cause, not the person. A second letter to Londos, written in Greek (by a scribe), is purely businesslike, and avowedly eschews ‘compliments’.60

  The one relationship that really mattered while Byron was at Missolonghi was his working relationship with Mavrokordatos. On the success of that would depend the outcome of his formative hundred days. Politically, and in public, Byron's loyalty never wavered. Privately, he was still happy to ‘abuse’ many of his old friends, as Finlay would not be the only one to discover at Missolonghi.61 But he consistently, and quite uncharacteristically, spared Mavrokordatos. The furthest he would go, in answer to a direct question from Parry, was to venture ‘that a little more energy and industry in the Prince, with a disposition to make fewer promises would tend much to his advantage’.62 This had been back in February, soon after Parry's arrival. Byron's restraint is the more striking at a time when almost all the other foreigners who had come to Greece under the auspices of the London Greek Committee were by now openly critical.

  It was becoming evident that Trelawny and Stanhope, in Athens, had transferred their allegiance entirely to the warlord Odysseus, who they thought would make a far worthier recipient of the monies from the English loan than Mavrokordatos. Stanhope, Millingen, and Finlay all found a variety of faults in the ‘prince’, from his lack of true democratic credentials to his devious, ‘Asiatic’ character and indecisive conduct of affairs. Trelawny, writing at the end of April, would go farther, his antipathy perhaps fuelled by an element of sexual jealousy in a letter addressed to Mary Shelley: ‘I hope, ere long, to see his head removed from his worthless and heartless body. He is a mere shuffling soldier, an aristocratic brute – wants Kings and Congresses; a poor, weak, shuffling, intriguing, cowardly fellow.’63 That, at least, Byron was spared from having to read. But by the end of March he was perfectly well aware of the discontent with Mavrokordatos that surrounded him.

  It was Parry who gave him his opportunity, at the end of the month. He and Byron were alone in a punt on the lagoon, surveying the sea fortifications. Out of earshot, a short distance across the water, was Mavrokordatos in another. What the firemaster saw as the lackadaisical attitude of the Greeks to the defence of their town was too much for him to stomach. ‘“And there,”’ he said to Byron, pointing to Mavrokordatos’ punt, ‘“sits the old gentlewoman, Prince Mavrocordato and his troop,” to whom I applied an epithet I will not here repeat, “as if they were all perfectly safe”.’ Parry's reward was to be humilia
ted as Byron ordered the vessel moved close to the other, then repeated his words to Mavrokordatos in his presence. Parry tells the story against himself. But Byron's purpose on that day, which was most probably 31 March, was surely to give a jolt to the man in whom he had invested so much confidence in public. Parry became his proxy to deliver a withering rebuke that really was Byron's own. Not surprisingly, Mavrokordatos was furious (‘very much annoyed’, says Parry).64

  Parry's memoir was ghost-written, and meant to justify his own behaviour and understanding of events against the already-published accounts of Gamba and Stanhope. But here he is, writing to Bowring in his own voice, only a few days before the exchange in the punts:

  however the Prince who commands at this place may be competent to direct offices at the Seat of Government, he is by no means actively sufficient at a place like Messalonghi, for although Lord Byron, treats him with the most marked respect and kindness, not only supporting him in every way possible, But actually supplying his private pecuniary wants, and with respect to the Public Service preparatory to the season's Campaign nothing would have been done[.]65

  By the time of the encounter in the lagoon, at the end of March, the working relationship was coming under strain. Mavrokordatos knew that he risked losing Byron's esteem. Ever mindful of Bishop Ignatios’ advice, he was bound to be watchful for any sign that their noble benefactor might be ‘displeased’ and desert them. And Byron could not help being watchful too, now that he knew the efforts being made, in many quarters, to dent his trust in the ‘prince’. He did not believe the tales he was told.66 But the longer the arrival of the loan was delayed, and while the rains still came down, the greater the pressure on the bond that had made Byron and Mavrokordatos such a formidable combination until now.