Byron's War
Page 35
Rebuffed by Byron, Mavrokordatos took the desperate step of requisitioning flour from Ionian merchants in the town, a serious violation of the islands’ neutrality, of which Byron cannot possibly have approved either. ‘Mavrocordato’, Gamba continues, ‘in this unhappy state of affairs, was overwhelmed with calumnies and even insults.’29 Gamba's loyalty and tact here surely skate over a major row, probably the only one that ever took place between Byron and Mavrokordatos. The insults and calumnies, on this occasion, must have been Byron's. The words of extenuation for Mavrokordatos that Gamba puts into his narrative at this point may reflect his own ineffectual attempt at peacekeeping, at the time.
It is tempting to wonder whether the next evening was not the setting for an episode reported by Millingen, the only one of its kind:
One evening while, as usual, the English gentlemen, then at Mesolonghi, were at Lord Byron's house enjoying the never-failing charm of his society, Mavrocordato entered the room, at a moment, the conversation was most interesting. His lordship received him in a very cool manner; and answered him, with some degree of peevishness; and, notwithstanding Mavrocordato's artful manner of introducing the business, that interested him most, he constantly turned the conversation to another subject. Annoyed to see the prince returning again and again to the charge, Lord Byron got up, and began walking up and down the room. Finding that Mavrocordato persisted in not taking the hint, he could no longer refrain his ill humour; but addressing us, in English, begun by saying: he wished that d—d botherer would regale us with his absence…On observing to Lord Byron, that the prince had undoubtedly understood every word he had been uttering, he merely replied; ‘I trust he has.’30
If this was indeed the occasion, then it was also their last meeting.
That would have been the Wednesday evening, 7 April. The same evening, the troops reached Anatoliko. According to some accounts, Mavrokordatos left Missolonghi the next day, to begin assembling the court martial that would try Karaiskakis. But more likely he had first to deal with provisioning the troops, now that Byron had refused to help. On Sunday, the eleventh, he wrote to Byron from Anatoliko, enclosing a proclamation issued there, that called on witnesses to come forward to the crime of treason. The trial was due to begin at 3 p.m. that day.31
There is no official record of the proceedings against Karaiskakis. But an eyewitness was Nikolaos Kasomoulis, the young secretary to one of the chiefs who had been displaced by recent events to wind up in the vicinity of Missolonghi. Kasomoulis’ lively Military Recollections of his experiences in the Revolution would be written up shortly afterwards but not published until 1939.32 Kasomoulis frankly confesses that he did not like Karaiskakis. But, in common with most of those present, he watched, spellbound and aghast, as the precursor of so many more famous political show trials went ahead. The hearing was held in the Church of the Virgin Mary. Bishop Porphyrios of Arta, in the full majesty of his robes, presided. The doors were locked. The stalls were filled with armed men. Others sat cross-legged on the ground, all armed to the teeth. It was, according to Kasomoulis, a ‘tragic scene’. A pillow was brought for the defendant to sit on, to protect him in his sick condition from the stone floor. And then the proceedings began.
Karaiskakis was accused of plotting with Omer Vryonis to deliver Missolonghi and Anatoliko to the enemy in return for being allowed to return to Agrafa as local chieftain. The father-in-law of Byron's landlord, Voulpiotis, was not accused but called as a witness. Incriminating letters had been found in his possession – but were not produced. Voulpiotis had been granted a passport by Karaiskakis to travel to Ioannina (this much was true, but unremarkable). While there, Voulpiotis had met Vryonis on Karaiskakis’ behalf. Karaiskakis blustered and denied everything.33 He seems to have been too proud even to mention that less than a month ago he had been employed by Mavrokordatos, present in court, to conduct secret negotiations with the same Ottoman pasha, albeit for a somewhat higher purpose.
The judges at this military tribunal were the chieftains and commanders of the irregular forces in western Greece, men much closer in mentality to Karaiskakis than to Mavrokordatos. They had no idea of the kind of legal process that Mavrokordatos was drawing them into. It helped that whatever was going on had the blessing of the Church, to which they all owed the only real allegiance they knew. They were in awe of the responsibilities forced upon them. And enough of them were resentful that Karaiskakis’ wilful action had balked them of the plunder of a campaign to turn against him. Karaiskakis himself was uncharacteristically cowed. After a day of inconclusive wrangling among the chiefs, it was decided that the principal witness, who had already been interrogated twice, must be examined again. Voulpiotis was taken to a private house and subjected to a third interrogation, this time by Kostas Botsaris – a man more noted for ferocity on the battlefield than for forensic subtlety, and also the most loyal of the chiefs to Mavrokordatos. Kasomoulis comments drily, ‘I was not present at this interrogation. I do not know what they did, or what methods they used on Voulpiotis.’ The results were spectacular. This time, contradicting his two earlier testimonies, the witness implicated Karaiskakis on all the charges, even adding for good measure that there had been a plot to kidnap Byron and Mavrokordatos and hold them for ransom.34
There was a moment of farce the next day, when Mavrokordatos’ secretary gave the wrong version of Voulpiotis’ confession to be read out in court. For all their lack of judicial experience, the chieftains then debated hotly whether a man could be convicted on the basis of a changed testimony. But eventually they complied and delivered the verdict that Mavrokordatos had been preparing from the beginning. As these events would be written up a few days later in the Greek Chronicle, the more homely (and daily encountered) deviation of ‘insubordination’ or ‘plotting’ by a local warlord slid into something much more sinister: ‘treason’.35 Karaiskakis’ fit of bad temper had resulted in a conviction as ‘a conspirator against the Fatherland and a traitor’. The language and procedures of European jurisprudence had arrived. The warlords – as much those who participated in the trial as the defendant – had been literally confounded.
After such a farrago, there could be no question of invoking the penalty that such a verdict would automatically have carried in Europe at the time. Even Karaiskakis’ worst enemies among the chieftains would never have consented to put him to death. But all were, once again, overawed by the severity and the language of the sentence that they soon found themselves pronouncing. The traitor Karaiskakis was ‘expelled from the fatherland’ and stripped of all rights, honour, and power, all of which, the official text rubbed it in, derived from the Government. Every Greek was exhorted ‘to shun his company, and to regard him as an enemy, until such time as he should throw himself upon the mercy of the nation, and beg forgiveness’.36 As Kasomoulis, in his comment, seems implicitly to have recognised, it was a secular excommunication: ‘This proclamation, backed by the Authority of the Nation, divided everyone from Karaiskakis, and no one would dare to take his side or even to go near him, for fear of being polluted.’37
The new secular power structures of the ‘nation’ had appropriated the language of religion, and with it, authority over the minds of the rough chieftains and an impressionable young secretary like Kasomoulis. Mavrokordatos had achieved his object. Even the fractious Tzavellas chiefs repudiated Karaiskakis at once. There could be no question, now, of them responding to the call of the insurgents in Tripolitsa. And all this Mavrokordatos had achieved – as he would soon modestly boast to the Executive in Kranidi, with an implied barb against their own more violent proceedings in the Peloponnese – ‘without permitting one drop of blood to be spilt’.38 It was the perfect vindication of his and Byron's policy.
The end of the hundred days
The verdict against Karaiskakis was delivered at Anatoliko on the morning of Wednesday, 14 April.39 For most of the previous week, Byron had been left to his own devices. While Mavrokordatos was out of town, overseeing the trial, for t
he first and only time since he had come to Missolonghi, Byron had nothing to do.
It was now, and not before, that he experienced the intense disillusion that witnesses describe and that most biographers, following Parry's lead, have projected backwards until it becomes the predominant theme of the hundred days. Finlay's authoritative assessment, published many years later, was drawn from what he had observed during March and April – and most of all during the climactic days before he himself took leave of Byron on the evening of the tenth:
The political information which Lord Byron extracted from Mavrocordatos in their personal interviews, and the proceedings of that statesman in the conduct of the public administration, revealed the thousand obstacles to the establishment of an honest government in Greece. A mist fell from Lord Byron's eyes. He owned that his sagacity was at fault, and he abandoned all hope of being able to guide the Greeks, or to assist them in improving their administration. Not long before his death, he frequently repeated, that with Napier to command and form regular troops, with [Frank Abney] Hastings to arm and command a steamer, and with an able financier, Greece would be sure of victory.40
The silent omission of Mavrokordatos’ name from the list in the last sentence speaks volumes. Byron never did have much faith in the Greeks. The latest evidence of treason in their ranks was the last straw.
It was during these days, while Mavrokordatos was at Anatoliko, that Byron ‘became peevish; and…little minded. Losing hope, he lost enthusiasm, and became gloomily sensible to his situation’. According to Millingen's testimony, he had been prepared to cope with almost any depravity, but ‘he was not prepared to meet with black-hearted treachery; or to see Greeks themselves conspiring against their own country; courting the chains of their former masters; and bargaining the liberties and very existence of their own brethren’. Compared to this, the treachery of the Souliots he had thought his friends, and who had then subverted the expedition against Lepanto, was as nothing. Then, back in February, Byron had become violently ill. Stanhope, in his account of that episode, had observed, ‘The mind of Byron is like a volcano, it is full of fire, wealth, and combustibles; and, when this matter comes to be strongly agitated, the explosion is dreadful.’ Now Millingen reported that in the days following the Karaiskakis affair ‘The volcanic mind of Lord Byron…was thrown by these events into a violent state of commotion.’41
No wonder that his health was affected this time too. It was bound to be a vicious circle. The more ill he felt, the more he brooded. The more he brooded, he more ill he became. Parry and Millingen both date the deterioration to the beginning of the month. But, on the fifth, Gamba was reporting to Teresa, ‘Mylord finds himself in the best of health.’ True to form, Byron's spirits would have rallied during the five days of the emergency. The reaction set in afterwards. This would have been on the sixth or seventh, the days of his confrontation with Mavrokordatos about money for the returning troops, the arrest of Voulpiotis in his house, and the first official confirmation that ‘treason’ had apparently been at work. Against the date of Friday, 9 April, even the normally upbeat Gamba notes, ‘Lord Byron had suffered visibly in his health during the last day or two.’42
That morning, a boat arrived from Zante, bringing letters from the islands, from Genoa, and from England. One of these was from Hobhouse, another from his half-sister Augusta, enclosing a silhouette of his daughter Ada.43 As a rule, Byron would reply at once to letters, particularly from people close to him. But it seems he was in no mood to reply to these. At least, there is no evidence that he ever did. So far as is known, he wrote only business letters that day: two to Barff in Zante and one to Barry in Genoa. The tone of these letters is markedly different from all of Byron's previous ones written from Greece. To both recipients he complained of an unnamed Mavrokordatos ‘boring’ him for more money. To Barry, who had only just seen the terms of the loan he had made in Cephalonia, and assumed that Byron intended to write off its loss ‘with grace’, he replied crossly: ‘As the Greeks have gotten their loan – they may as well repay mine – which they no longer require – and I request you to forward a copy of the agreement to Mr. Kinnaird and direct him from me to claim the money from the Deputies.’44
The letters from London had been almost two months on the way. They had been sent too soon to contain any definite confirmation of the Greek loan. Byron fretted to Barff: ‘is it really settled – and how?…some say one thing and some another here’.45 To Finlay and to Parry, in conversation, he expressed darker fears. Even if the terms had been agreed, as the Greeks had been telling him for three weeks now, the subscribers might still pull out when they learned how bad things really were. News of internal dissension was bound to be damaging enough. Byron had been warning of this from the beginning. But ‘high treason’ was something else. Perhaps, he even wondered, he had himself unwittingly encouraged his countrymen to invest in a fraudulent enterprise?46
The letters written, he went out riding with Gamba. They were caught in heavy rain. Byron's mood was still bitter. ‘I should make a pretty soldier, indeed, if I were to care for such a trifle’, he snapped, when Pierino suggested they should abandon their usual routine and make straight for shelter. So they dismounted outside the walls, as was their custom, and returned to the Kapsalis house in an open punt. Both men got drenched. That evening, Byron ‘was seized with a shuddering’, and complained of pain and fever. The next day, Saturday, he was well enough to ride again. This time the rain held off, but apparently his saddle had been still wet from the day before.47
On the eleventh, Sunday, Parry spent longer in Byron's company than he had perhaps done for some time. Finlay left for Athens that morning, and the firemaster found himself once again Byron's closest confidant at Missolonghi. This was the day when Mavrokordatos’ note from Anatoliko arrived, enclosing the proclamation that had been issued there and announcing the start of Karaiskakis’ trial for high treason. This was the occasion when Parry first observed in Byron the signs of what he would later term ‘alienation of the mind’. He was ‘very unwell’, Parry reported, talking ‘a great deal, and…in rather a wandering manner’.48 To the firemaster's consternation, Byron seemed to suppose his work in Greece was already completed. He imagined he was about to set sail in a specially built schooner. (The Bolivar was in his thoughts, since Barry had told him Lord Blessington was still trying to duck out of paying for it.) Aboard this new schooner, Byron declared that he would shortly be on his way to America, an ambassador seeking recognition for newly independent Greece from the government of the United States. That done, he told Parry, he was looking forward to ‘the happiness of domestic life’, in a longed-for ‘retirement’ with his estranged wife and Ada, the daughter that he had not seen since she had been an infant.49 It was an impossible vision. No wonder Parry was alarmed, when he heard it.
The previous time when Byron had been taken ill, in February, there had been some suggestion that he might return to the Ionian Islands to convalesce. Then, he had courteously but firmly refused.50 Now, on 11 April, Parry ‘earnestly supplicated him to go immediately to Zante’, for the sake of his health. This time Byron agreed. Of those who had been present in Missolonghi at the time, only Parry mentioned this fact afterwards. But Parry says that he was himself put in charge of the arrangements, and a year later would be sufficiently sure of his story to reproach Gamba, in print, for having suppressed it. A payment to Parry on the twelfth would have been meant to cover the necessary expenses. And on the same day Sisinis, at Gastouni, who was suspiciously well informed about the latest events in Missolonghi, knew that ‘his Lordship is leaving there very soon’.51
On Tuesday, 13 April, the second day of the trial at Anatoliko, a ‘hurricane’ was blowing from the south, with torrential rain. No boat could have put out in such weather. But now, Byron's fever seemed to be receding. Though still ‘melancholy and very irritable’, he seemed to be over the worst. Next day, the fourteenth, he was sufficiently improved that he could get out of bed. Gamba repo
rts, ‘He received many letters, and he told me what answer I was to give to them.’
One of these was from Praidis:
I have just now received a letter from the Prince in which he tells me, as regards the Karaiskakis affair, ‘that he was found guilty[,] however to avoid any trouble in the town, he has been ordered to depart, which may happen today’.52
The very worst that Byron had feared had been confirmed. The most heinous crime imaginable had been committed against the fledgling state, by one of its own supposed defenders. And now, to cap it all, Mavrokordatos, in whom he himself had invested so much trust, had let the culprit go scot-free – just to avoid the risk of disturbances in the town! That most despicable of all human defects, that Byron had excoriated at the age of nineteen in the epitaph, incised on stone, for a beloved dog, had indeed been rife, right here at the heart of the enterprise to which he had devoted everything.
The price of Mavrokordatos’ victory was that Byron, too, had been duped into believing Karaiskakis guilty as charged. In his physically and mentally weakened state, the offence was no doubt magnified still more. He had had nothing to do but brood upon it for the past week. It was the perfect failure of understanding, worthy of any tragedy that Byron himself might have written.
He had been at Missolonghi exactly one hundred days.
‘I leave behind something precious in the world’
Five days later, Byron was dead. Mavrokordatos never had the chance to explain his actions. The two men never met again.