Byron's War

by Roderick Beaton

  Many explanations have been proposed, over the years, for Byron's death, shortly after 6 p.m. on Monday, 19 April, at Missolonghi. The bald facts, recorded at the time by Millingen, were these:

  His health had suffered previously very much in consequence of the convulsive fits he fell in in Feby last, but the immediate cause of his death was a rheumatic fever which attacked him from getting wet in a shower. The fever was at its outset very strong, and bleeding was proposed, but he obstinately refused to listen to the urgent remonstrances, and entreaties both of his physician and mine, till the brain was attacked, and the lesions that organ suffered from inflammation became irremediable, his answer to all our arguments was, ‘the lancet had killed more than the lance’.

  Mavrokordatos, within hours of the event, reported much the same to the Greek government, almost seeming to imply that there had been something wilful about Byron to the last: ‘His insistence on not being bled during the first days of the malady, despite the protestations of the doctors, was his undoing.’53

  To bleed or not to bleed? It was standard medical procedure at the time. Modern opinion tends to blame the doctors, who were certainly very young and inexperienced. In past illnesses, Byron had prided himself on overruling his doctors. This time he was too weak to prevail over them. Blood was taken. And Byron died. The claim of these same doctors, based on a rough-and-ready autopsy, that he would not have lived much longer anyway is as likely to be self-serving.54 Bruno and Millingen would never live down their part in the death of the most famous Englishman of the age, and did what they could to salvage their reputations.

  Once those who were there had had time to reflect, other factors soon came to colour their accounts. Byron had had a superstitious side. The prediction of a fortune-teller, way back in his Scottish childhood, had been much on his mind during his final illness. A fixation with this idea, Millingen believed, ‘like an insidious poison, destroyed that moral energy, which is so useful to keep up the patient in dangerous complaints. “Did I not tell you,” said he repeatedly to me, “that I should die at thirty-seven?”’55 (Actually, he was thirty-six.) He had been thinking once more of Shelley, who he believed had ‘had an implicit belief in ghosts’. To Millingen, in one of their last conversations before his illness took hold, he recalled how Shelley had foreseen his own death:

  You will ridicule, also, a belief in incorporeal beings. Without instancing to you the men of profound genius, who have acknowledged their existence, I could give you the details of my friend Shelley's conversations with his familiar. Did he not apprize me, that he had been informed by that familiar, that he would end his life by drowning; and did I not, a short time after, perform, on the sea beach, his funeral rites?56

  Parry took a more robust view. The true cause was ‘disappointment’. The fever, he insisted, ‘was only the symptom of that general disease, which, from the time of my arrival in Greece, had been gradually wasting his frame’.57 Parry was determined to believe that this had been the case from the beginning. The beginning, for Parry, had been only a week before the defection of the Souliots and Byron's seizure. He had not seen how the hundred days had started. But what he says certainly applies to the week in April when Mavrokordatos was at Anatoliko and afterwards.

  One witness to the nature of Byron's last illness, who deserves to be taken more seriously than he has been, is the patient himself. In arguing with Millingen about his treatment, Byron struggled to convince the doctor that his condition belonged to the category ‘of nervous disorders, not of inflammatory ones’, and added: ‘Drawing blood from a nervous patient is like loosening the chords of a musical instrument, the tones of which are already defective for want of sufficient tension.’ Bruno gives less detail, but concedes there was a difference of opinion: ‘it seemed to him that the doctors did not understand his malady’. Bruno's intransigence is the more surprising in view of his notes written to a fellow practitioner on his patient's seizure back in February, which, he had then concluded, ‘depended upon nervous irritability, arising from an excess of stimulus’.58 If his sickness was ‘nervous’ in origin, as Byron believed – induced or exacerbated by psychological rather than purely physical factors, in the language of today – then both the incapacity of the doctors and the fatal sequel to the bloodletting would be explained.

  It is possible that after 14 April, when Karaiskakis’ supposed treachery was confirmed, Byron really did give up. He had already consented to leave Greece. Nothing, naturally, can be proved today. But all the signs are there: while he waited for news from Anatoliko to confirm the extreme charges that had been laid against Karaiskakis, Byron was sick in mind, as much as in body. Praidis’ note arriving on the fourteenth would have been the coup de grace.

  In the delirium of his final days, he kept coming back to his daughter Ada – and also to Greece, and all that he had done for the cause. Gamba, loyal as ever, makes out that he was still attending to business, several days after Parry insists that he had lapsed into incoherence.59 During a lucid interval, he spoke the words that were reported to Gamba, who reproduced them in Italian: io lascio qualche cosa di caro nel mondo. What Byron really meant to say has been disputed.60 But the Italian itself is clear: ‘I leave behind something precious in the world.’ It is, if nothing else, an affirmation. Despite everything, after those months in Greece, and as his own personal ‘war’ came to an end, Byron was ready to hand on something that could be precious, not just to himself, but to others after him. In Don Juan, during the days after he had seen the body of Shelley consigned to the flames, sent out of the world with the trappings of an ancient Greek hero, he had written:

  And I will war, at least in words (and – should

  My chance so happen – deeds)…

  Despite the shocks of his last active days, it was the political reality he had helped to create at Missolonghi, and not the poetry to which he owed his fame, that was Byron's last bequest to the world.

  Sunday was Easter Day, when the Orthodox population was accustomed to celebrate the Resurrection of Christ. There would have been no church bells in Missolonghi at this time. But, after the morning liturgy, everyone who had a firearm would be expected to let it off loudly and repeatedly (as still happens in some parts of Greece today). Mavrokordatos detailed Parry and Gamba to march the Souliots, who had been under Byron's command, out of the town so that the dying man would not be disturbed by their celebrations. In the streets, patrols urged the citizens to restrain their revelry. That evening Byron sank into a coma, from which he never recovered.61

  He had arrived in Greece the day before Christmas. He died the day after Easter, at the climax of a week of storms. It was a moment out of one of his own dramatic poems, or a ballad of the Greek klefts. Even while he was alive he had been hailed as a ‘saviour’, or ‘deliverer’ – most recently by his old friend and travelling companion Hobhouse, in his last letter that Byron had been able to read.62 The fortuitous timing of his arrival and death at Missolonghi would ever afterwards give a whole new resonance to these terms of praise.

  Epilogue

  What had Byron achieved, during his hundred days at Missolonghi? First of all, the complete transformation of himself. As a poet, he had always had a powerful talent for self-invention, a trait that he had projected on to so many fictional creations in his poems and plays. But in the imaginative world of his fictions self-transformation had always ended badly – in futile, if heroic, defiance and the annihilation even of memory. Byron's final transformation of himself into the new statesman was unlike anything he had imagined for a fictional character. Having resisted the call to Greece for so long, once he had heard it and heeded it he overcame all wavering and for the last ten months of his life forged a consistent path. He who had long been fascinated and appalled by the unpredictable forces he recognised within himself, and knew the fickleness of his own mind, suddenly became serious – and stuck to it. As late as 10 March, while he was still recovering from the effects of his seizure, and Barff had offered
him the use of his country house in Zante in which to recuperate, he had replied: ‘I cannot quit Greece while there is a Chance of my being of any (even supposed) utility – there is a Stake worth millions such as I am – – and while I can stand at all – I must stand by the Cause.’1 No ‘byronic hero’ ever submitted in this way to anybody or anything higher than himself. That is the nature of the byronic hero, his ‘tragic flaw’. And for years Byron had played up to that stereotype in his own life. After the decision for Greece, no longer. In the letters and conversations of his last ten months, the ‘Cause’ really was all.

  There is no telling, of course, whether that resolution would have held, if he had lived. Those Greeks who valued his intervention the most – Mavrokordatos, Bishop Ignatios, and their supporters – were acutely aware of the risk that it might not. So was his oldest friend, Hobhouse, back in England. Ironically enough, in the letter that Byron read on 9 April, Hobhouse had expressed himself finally reassured, revealing as he did so his earlier doubts. After everything he had heard from Greece and from the Greek deputies in London, wrote Hobhouse, ‘I am in no fear now of your taking a sudden leave of the cause and country.’2 These jitters had been apparent at Missolonghi, too, while the excitement over the Lepanto campaign had been at its height, and Mavrokordatos had received his first summons to the government at Kranidi. Then, one of his aides had written confidentially to warn Koundouriotis: if Mavrokordatos were to be recalled, all the good work he had been doing with Byron and Stanhope could fall to pieces. Without Mavrokordatos at his side, the writer went on, ‘Lord Byron would undoubtedly become displeased very soon, having no instrument through which to put his noble decisions into effect, since the Greeks have no idea how to handle men of his temperament, and at the height of the struggle he could depart and leave us high and dry.’3

  Byron's reputation had preceded him to Greece. It was this Europe-wide reputation that made his presence there so valuable. But it was a two-edged weapon. Those who knew him best had most cause to fear that he might desert them. That fear became the weak point in the working relationship with Mavrokordatos. Others did their best to exploit it – particularly Odysseus and Negris in Athens, egged on by Trelawny, who knew well this side of Byron's character. But, of all those who tried, it was only Karaiskakis, who had no such intention, who succeeded in driving a wedge between Mavrokordatos and Byron – and, had other factors not combined to cause his death, that would probably have proved only temporary. For all the doubts and suspicions of bad faith, at the time and ever since, the fact is that Byron did not desert the cause. He remained true to it at least until his mind began to give way on 11 April, and so far as he was capable, even beyond, until his death eight days later.

  How much could any individual have achieved in a hundred days? At an immediate and local level, Byron relieved distresses, particularly for prisoners of war, who would otherwise have been murdered or sold as slaves, and for the destitute.4 During his first month he lifted morale at Missolonghi and, with the help of his trusted lieutenants, did as much as anyone could have done to mobilise the fissiparous band of foreign volunteers and unruly local armed bands into a fighting force. As he summed it up, good-humouredly, on 7 February: ‘between Suliote Chiefs – German Barons – English Volunteers – and adventurers of all Nations – we are likely to form as goodly an allied army – as ever quarrelled beneath the same banner’.5

  But his real achievement lay elsewhere. Philhellenes, as a rule, brought their prejudices and expectations with them from Europe. It was only natural that they should try to impose these on their new surroundings. Parry, for one, was alive to the dangers: ‘we introduced plans for codes of laws, and other measures which had for their object to Anglify Greece’, he would complain presciently in 1825.6 What makes Byron's contribution unusual, if not unique, is his insistence that the new political realities emerging in Greece should be allowed to forge a new form of governance, never seen before. This was of a piece with his idea of the ‘Cause’. It was not any sympathy for the Greeks, as people, that drove him. Instead, he had identified in the Revolution in Greece a turning point in the affairs of Europe. His most important achievement was this, in concert with Mavrokordatos: not just to import European values into Greece (though he certainly did that too), but to try to create, in Greece, political conditions that could then be emulated by the rest of the continent. This was what he had meant, in that homily back in January, when he had assured Gamba that ‘those principles which are now in action in Greece will gradually produce their effect, both here and in other countries’. In March, outlining his plans for the foreign-language newspaper that his lieutenant was to edit, he had gone further: ‘I cannot…calculate to what a height Greece may rise. Hitherto it has been a subject for the hymns and elegies of fanatics and enthusiasts; but now it will draw the attention of the politician.’7

  Finally, there was his contribution, with Mavrokordatos, to resolving the civil conflict in favour of a centralised authority. If his and Mavrokordatos’ joint policy towards the rebels was ‘softer’ than the government's, it still offered no concessions. (This was exactly what observers like Trelawny and Stanhope objected to.) In all their correspondence with Andritzou and Negris in Athens, with Sisinis and Peroukas in the Peloponnese, Byron and Mavrokordatos were negotiating from a position of strength, and they knew it. The money that was on its way from London had been raised by the legitimate government. The only way to share in the benefits it brought was by recognising that government as the sole authority in Greece. If Byron had lived to go to Salona and meet Odysseus and Negris with Mavrokordatos, the result could have been to bring all the fighting forces north of the Isthmus round to the government side. The shift in the balance of power would have made further resistance in the Peloponnese futile. (It would be in precisely this way, with different personnel, and still not without bloodshed, that the second civil war would be decisively won a few months later.)

  So if Byron had lived a little longer, and if his and Mavrokordatos’ policy had prevailed, Greece could have been spared the worst effects of two civil wars within a year. Even as it was, the hundred days were not wasted. The disasters at Missolonghi, up to the end of March, were none of them overwhelming. If Byron had been constitutionally stronger, and had recovered from his illness in April, there would have been everything still to play for. In three months, he and Mavrokordatos had laid the foundations, together, for a far-reaching set of policies ready to be implemented once the first tranche of the loan arrived from London. The catastrophic effects of the Karaiskakis affair changed all that. What followed would be much messier. But without Byron and his hundred days, it might not have followed at all.

  Even as Byron lay dying, the struggle to create a new kind of political organisation on Greek soil was slowly being won. On 13 April, the day before the verdict on Karaiskakis was reached at Anatoliko, government forces in the Peloponnese were entering the rebel stronghold of Tripolitsa. By this time, there were 4,000 troops besieging the town. When they broke into the outlying suburbs, a series of skirmishes began and the battle quickly spread. Despite the large numbers of heavily armed men involved, it would later be claimed that only one life had been lost, and that accidentally. By the end of the day, Kolokotronis and the remnants of the rebel Executive had agreed to evacuate their capital, though not to give up their arms. They retreated to the stronghold of Karytaina, in Kolokotronis’ heartland – much to the annoyance of Koundouriotis, who reprimanded his generals for having allowed it.8

  News of the government's success in the Peloponnese was not slow to arrive at Missolonghi. On the seventeenth, two days before Byron's death, the Greek Chronicle reported, with evident satisfaction: ‘The Government has prevailed, and it will not be long before the anti-patriots are punished in a manner commensurate with the acts of which they stand accused.’9 Mavrokordatos may not have approved of the methods used, but now that the advantage had been gained, he was politician enough to capitalise on it. Everywhere, n
ow, the government party was in the ascendant. Two more months would pass before the first civil war would finally be over – with the surrender of the two fortresses of Nafplio by Kolokotronis’ son Panos at the beginning of June. But the power of the rebel Executive had been broken in the Peloponnese, just as Mavrokordatos asserted his authority over the warlords at Anatoliko.

  These events, as much as Byron's death, took the wind out of the proposed conference at Salona. Odysseus and Negris brought many of their supporters from eastern Greece, but Mavrokordatos now had incontrovertible reasons for staying away. On the twenty-fourth, he informed Trelawny, who had come hotfoot from Salona to view Byron's body before it could be embarked for England, ‘that it is impossible for me to attend or to recognise this conference which has been convened by persons who have no proper authority to do so’.10 In the event, he sent two middle-ranking representatives in his stead. The rout of the warlords in Tripolitsa and the subtler scapegoating of Karaiskakis at Anatoliko had left the conference without purpose.11 Odysseus and Negris, perceiving how the distribution of power had shifted, duly made their way to the seat of government – just as they would have been likely to do if the conference had gone as Mavrokordatos and Byron had planned.

  At a purely practical level, Byron's death did have one disastrous consequence for Greece. When the brig Florida reached Zante on 24 April, carrying the first instalment of the loan from London, Blaquiere, who had travelled with it, was met by the news. The money, 40,000 pounds of it, was taken for safe-keeping into the vaults of Byron's banker, Samuel Barff, while the ship went on to Missolonghi, to convey Byron's remains back to England for burial. With one of the two commissioners dead, Barff decided he could not release the money until the other arrived. When Stanhope reached Zante on 12 May, he was against releasing the funds at all, so long as the country continued in a state of civil war. Stanhope had just learned that he had been summoned back to his regiment in England. He would have to resign his role as commissioner for the loan in any case. There were angry exchanges, by letter, with Mavrokordatos in Missolonghi. After all his doctrinaire rants in Greece against the institution of monarchy and anyone who supported it, Stanhope now rather testily informed Bowring that he was commanded by ‘no less a personage than the King of England’ and must quit Greece immediately.12 If Mavrokordatos was right, and Stanhope's recall had somehow been his and Byron's doing, he may have been regretting it now. In the event, the first two instalments of the loan, that had been held up in Zante, would not be released until the end of July.