These delays had devastating consequences for the Greeks. The month of April saw the forces of the Revolution wiped out in Crete (which would not become part of Greece until 1913). In June, the same fate befell the nearby island of Kasos (not incorporated until 1947). In the same month, Psara in the eastern Aegean, one of the three ‘naval’ islands that had achieved pre-eminence in the war at sea, was totally destroyed by a combined Turkish and Egyptian fleet, with the slaughter of some 8,000 of the inhabitants. To this day, the island has never recovered. All three disasters the Greek government blamed squarely on the untimely demise of Byron, on the behaviour of ‘the accursed Stanhope’, and the withholding in Zante of the money that would have paid for a fleet to go out from Hydra and Spetses.13 Or, as Orlandos, writing from London, would rather gracelessly put it in August: ‘How I curse fate for not having left Byron in the land of the living for fifteen days more, until you could have got the money.’14
At just the same time, and writing from the picturesque hideout of his patron Odysseus in a cave on Parnassos, Trelawny was making much the same complaint, for an even less noble reason: ‘I wish he had lived a little longer, that he might have witnessed how I would have soared above him here, how I would have triumphed over his mean spirit.’15 Conflicted as ever, and now under the spell of a new master, Trelawny had quickly overcome the awed feelings of his visit to Missolonghi and the forbidden sight of the dead Byron's lame foot (or feet, as he would claim many years later).16
Other responses at the time could be equally unsentimental. Jakob Meyer, the editor of the Chronicle, boasted privately to Stanhope (surely with some exaggeration): ‘Lord Noel Byron died in my arms. How strange that the man who always talked against my newspaper should die in my arms…Thanks be to God, I have won…Byron is dead! Is his death harmful to Greece? No.’17 Someone else for whom the cause was no less sacred, but who had had his doubts about Byron from the start, was Bishop Ignatios, Mavrokordatos’ old mentor in Pisa. Writing to Koundouriotis when the news reached him, the bishop offered words of consolation that surely were more political than spiritual:
We often grieve out of ignorance, when what is presented to us is rather cause for joy than for sorrow. The noble Englishman was good and zealous on our behalf, but as a poet he was frivolous and it is not unlikely that [had he lived] he would have taken umbrage, and left, and written such things against the Greeks as would have done more harm than he ever did good.18
Closer to home, Mavrokordatos’ personal feelings are impossible to gauge. Three days after the event, his friend and protégé Spyridon Trikoupis read a florid eulogy at a public ceremony with Byron's body present. Out of this tribute was born the enduring legend of the heroic benefactor who had willingly sacrificed his life for a great cause. The orator had met Byron only once, three weeks before his death. It can only have been on the authority of Trikoupis’ own imagination, unless perhaps of a bruised and resentful Mavrokordatos, that he could inform his hearers, ‘He came…with the determination to die in Greece, and for Greece!’19
The formal announcement of Byron's death that appeared in the Greek Chronicle on 21 April is unlikely to have been the work of the paper's editor. It will certainly have been sanctioned by Mavrokordatos, and may well have been written by him. Most of what it says is conventional. But the bleak words with which it ends do perhaps convey a personal, as well as a political, realisation of the magnitude of the disaster that is Byron's death: ‘The hopes that our nation rested upon this man have failed, and nothing more remains for us but to weep inconsolably for this, to us so cruel, death.’20 The hopes had been not just the nation's, but very much Mavrokordatos’ own.
It was left to an anonymous correspondent from the island of Melos, in the Aegean, to sum up what must have been a hard-nosed but real sense of loss shared by many ordinary Greeks at this time: ‘I grieve greatly for the death of lord byron, untimely both for himself and for the fatherland. In such circumstances, even the fact of his presence in Greece was of the greatest benefit.’21
It was not only in Greece that the practical effects of Byron's loss were felt. Trelawny was for once not far off the mark when he lamented, on 29 April, that Byron's name had been ‘the means chiefly of raising the loan in England. Thousands of people were flocking here…not to the Greeks or interest in the cause, but to the noble poet.’22 In London, the value of the bonds that been issued in the name of the Greek government, and that had only a few weeks before been oversubscribed, fell over fifteen percentage points on the day that news of Byron's death arrived. Despite some less than respectable insider dealing, the stock value continued to fall, bringing Bowring to the edge of personal ruin, and a complete rupture between the Greek deputies and the London Committee. The arrival in London of Stanhope, bearing the kind of tales from Greece that Byron had always warned would be fatal, completed the mischief.23 The reputation of the first Greek loan from London, of those who had negotiated it, and of Greek financial probity in foreign markets, would to varying degrees never recover.24
Thanks very largely to the loan, the government by the end of 1824 had gained the upper hand in two civil wars – the second rather more violent and widespread than the first. Only when it was all but over, in December, did Mavrokordatos return from Missolonghi to a government that would in the meantime have accepted his often-tendered resignation as President of the Legislature – by which time, as Finlay tartly put it, he had ‘allowed all parties to learn that public business could go on perfectly well without him’.25
Byron's adherence to Mavrokordatos during the crucial first months of 1824 had ensured that the modernising, internationalist tendency within the Revolution would win out over the locally based power-structures represented by the warlords. But Mavrokordatos’ adherence to Byron meant that his own prestige would never recover after Byron's death. The vacancy that Mavrokordatos had failed to fill at Kranidi had already been occupied by Ioannis Kolettis, a qualified doctor from Ioannina who had been co-opted on to the Executive at the same time as Koundouriotis. Like Mavrokordatos, Kolettis enjoyed the benefit of a western education and had gained experience of political service at an Ottoman court – in his case, under Ali Pasha. The ‘secretary who spoke German, Latin, French, Italian, Greek, Turkish’ and had entertained Byron and Hobhouse to a ‘bad dinner’ in Ioannina, back in 1809, had been none other than Kolettis.26 Politically, Kolettis was on the same side. But he had little of Mavrokordatos’ idealism. After Byron's death, Kolettis would eclipse Mavrokordatos as the leading moderniser in the crucial final stages of the civil wars, and would outmanoeuvre him decisively again in the course of the two men's long political careers.27
Greece entered 1825 with the broad outline of an internal political settlement at last in place. ‘The problem of power in the Revolution had found its definitive solution’, as one twenty-first-century historian has put it.28 Emblematic of that shift, and of the effectiveness of the kind of leverage that Byron and Mavrokordatos, together, had promoted, was the transformation of the disgraced Karaiskakis, who in 1827 would die a hero's death at Faliro, outside Athens, in the service of the central government.29 Karaiskakis is commemorated, today, in the football stadium that bears his name, built near the site. Not all the former warlords would compromise their independence so readily. The fault-line through Greek society that was in evidence at Tripolitsa, when Kolokotronis threatened to drum Mavrokordatos out of the Peloponnese mounted backwards on an ass, and at Anatoliko during the show-trial of Karaiskakis, can be followed through much of the country's history, down to the present day.
Within two years of Byron's death, Greece would face an even greater threat. The long-awaited Ottoman counter-attack came in 1825, with devastating effect. Byron, dead, would be called upon to play a renewed part in mobilising European opinion when the Revolution was all but snuffed out the following year. The posthumous reputation that had been denied to Christian in The Island, or the deranged ‘giaour’, would be assured for Byron's own posterity, when M
issolonghi itself was obliterated on Palm Sunday, 1826, two years and three days after he had died there. The enduring ‘Byron legend’, that began with Trikoupis’ funeral oration, would play its part in the extraordinary reversal of fortunes that followed, until, in a few dry words of a diplomatic protocol, signed in London on 3 February 1830, would be born not just the newly minted nation-state of Greece, but the very idea of a nation-state on European soil.30 It was exactly what Byron had foreseen, and had pledged himself to do all he could to bring about while he was alive. In the event, it would not be the United States of America, as he had imagined, but three of the most conservative governments of the Old World (those of Great Britain, France, and Russia) that would give their formal blessing to the sovereign independence of Greece.
In that way, in 1830, the first of the new nation-states of Europe came into existence. Within a few decades, national self-government would have become the norm throughout the continent. In the course of the twentieth century, the self-determination of new nations would sweep away entirely the old monarchical empires against which Byron and so many other Romantics had raised their voices, and sometimes their fists. Belgium, Italy, Germany, the Balkan states after 1878, most of eastern Europe after 1918, down to the break-up of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s and the recognition of Kosovo in 2008: the list is long and at the time of writing the impetus behind it seems by no means exhausted.
The Greece that Byron fought for – the Greece that still exists, with all the continuing problems inherited from its violent birth – lies at the very foundation of the Europe that we know today. How that came about, in Greece in the years immediately after Byron's death, is another story waiting to be told.
Notes
Abbreviations used in the notes
Abinger
The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford: MS Abinger
Apomn.
Απομνημονεύματα αγωνιστών [Memoirs of Combatants], ed. E. G. Protopsaltis, 20 vols. (Athens: Vivliothiki, 1955–7)
Arch. Hydras
Αρχείον της Κοινότητος Ύδρας [Archive of the Community of Hydra], vol. 9 (Piraeus: Sfaira, 1927); vol. 10 (Piraeus: Zanneios, 1928); vol. 16 (Piraeus: Eleftherios, 1932)
Arch. Kound.
Αρχεία Λαζάρου και Γεωργίου Κουντουριώτου [Archives of Lazaros and Georgios Koundouriotis], vols. I–III, ed. Antonios Lignos (Athens: Sakellarios, 1920); vol. IV (Athens: Sakellarios, 1927); vol. VI, ed. E. G. Protopsaltis (Athens: Library of the General State Archives, 1966)
Arch. Lond.
Ιστορικόν Αρχείον του Στρατηγού Ανδρέου Λόντου (1789–1847) [Historical Archive of General Andreas Londos], 2 vols. (Athens: Sakellarios, 1914, 1916)
Arch. Pal.
Αρχεία της Eλληνικής Παλιγγενεσίας [Archives of the Greek Regeneration], 3 vols. (Athens: Library of Parliament, 1971–2) (first published 1857–62)
B
Lord Byron
BCMP
Lord Byron, The Complete Miscellaneous Prose, ed. Andrew Nicholson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991)
BCPW
Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann, 7 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–93)
Benaki
Athens: Historical Archive of the Benaki Museum
Blessington
Countess of Blessington, Conversations of Lord Byron, ed. Ernest J. Lovell (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969) (first published 1834)
BLJ
Byron's Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 13 vols. (London: John Murray, 1973–94)
Bride
Lord Byron, The Bride of Abydos
Bulldog
Byron's Bulldog: The Letters of John Cam Hobhouse to Lord Byron, ed. Peter W. Graham (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1984)
CCC
The Clairmont Correspondence, ed. Marion Kingston Stocking (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995)
CCJ
The Journals of Claire Clairmont, ed. Marion Kingston Stocking (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968)
CHP
Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage: A Romaunt
CPWPBS
The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (London: Oxford University Press, 1943)
Deformed
Lord Byron, The Deformed Transformed
Diary
Hobhouse's Diary, ed. Peter Cochran, edited from British Library Add. MSS (www.petercochran.wordpress.com/hobhouses-diary)
DJ
Lord Byron, Don Juan
EEW
‘The Journal of Edward Ellerker Williams’, in Maria Gisborne and Edward E. Williams, Shelley's Friends: Their Journals and Letters, ed. Frederick L. Jones (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1951)
EJTL
Letters of Edward John Trelawny, ed. H. Buxton Forman (London: Oxford University Press, 1910)
Ell. Chron.
Ελληνικά Χρονικά [Greek Chronicle] (Missolonghi, 1824–6). Photographic reprint (Athens: Spanos and Nikas, 1958)
Finlay
George Finlay, History of the Greek Revolution, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1861)
Fotakos
Απομνημονεύματα περί της Ελληνικής Επαναστάσεως υπό Φωτίου Χρυσανθοπούλου ή Φωτάκου [Memoirs of the Greek Revolution by Fotios Chrysanthopoulos or ‘Fotakos’] (Athens: Greka, 1971) (first published 1858)
Frankenstein
Mary Shelley (with Percy Shelley), The Original Frankenstein, ed. Charles E. Robinson (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2008)
GAK
Athens: Γενικά Αρχεία του Κράτους: Ιστορικόν Αρχείον Αλεξάνδρου Μαυροκορδάτου [General State Archives: Historical Archive of Alexandros Mavrokordatos] (1820–4)
Gamba
Pietro Gamba, A Narrative of Lord Byron's Last Journey to Greece [translated from Italian by John Cam Hobhouse] (London: John Murray, 1825)
GF
Annotation by George Finlay (British School at Athens Library copy of cited work)
Gordon
Thomas Gordon, History of the Greek Revolution, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1832)
Hist. Mus.
Athens: National Historical Museum, Archive of Historical Documents
HVSV
His Very Self and Voice: Collected Conversations of Lord Byron, ed. Ernest J. Lovell (New York: Macmillan, 1954)
IAM
Μνημεία της Ελληνικής Ιστορίας, τόμ. : Ιστορικόν Αρχείον Αλεξάνδρου Μαυροκορδάτου [Monuments of Greek History, vol. 5, Historical Archive of Alexandros Mavrokordatos], fascicles I–IV, ed. E. Protopsaltis (Athens: Academy of Athens, 1963–74)
Kasomoulis
Nikolaos Kasomoulis, Ενθυμήματα στρατιωτικά [Military Recollections], 3 vols., ed. G. Vlachogiannis (Athens, 1939)
Kennedy
James Kennedy, Conversations on Religion with Lord Byron and Others (London: John Murray, 1830)
Medwin
Thomas Medwin, Conversations of Lord Byron, ed. Ernest J. Lovell (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966)
Millingen
Julius Millingen, Memoirs of the Affairs of Greece (London: J. Rodwell, 1831)
Moore
Thomas Moore, Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1830)
MWSJ
The Journals of Mary Shelley, 1814–1844, ed. Paula Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987)
MWSL
Letters of Mary W. Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1944)
Nat. Lib. Athens
Athens: National Library of Greece, Papers of the London Greek Committee
NLS
> Edinburgh: National Library of Scotland. John Murray Archives: George Gordon, Lord Byron, Correspondence and Papers
Parry
William Parry, The Last Days of Lord Byron (London: Knight and Lacey, 1825)
PBSL
The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964)
PC
Peter Cochran's website (www.petercochran.wordpress.com/). Accessed March–April 2012
Prophecy
Lord Byron, The Prophecy of Dante
Prothero
Byron's War Page 37