Byron had not been in Greece since his travels there in 1809–10 with John Cam Hobhouse, but he had altogether pleasant memories of the country, the only place, he said, that he was ever contented in. He had been deeply impressed by his visit to Ali Pasha at his stronghold in Tepelene. He had been enraptured by the view of the Parthenon and other monuments of antiquity from his Athens lodgings. He had enjoyed a light-hearted amorous interlude, probably more mock than serious, with his first Athenian landlady’s young daughter Theresa Makrí (‘Maid of Athens, ere we part, Give, oh give me back my heart’). ‘I like the Greeks,’ he wrote, ‘some are brave, and all are beautiful.’1 He had formed a particularly high opinion of the Souliots, who had rescued and entertained him after a shipwreck near Párga, and who were invested, when the incident was related in Childe Harold, with all the romance of rugged and good-hearted banditry. Byron’s affection for the Souliots was to cause him a lot of trouble when he finally returned to Greece.
The years 1810 to 1816 saw the dazzling rise and fall of Byron’s star: wealth and fame from the publication of his verse, starting with the first two cantos of Childe Harold in 1812; scandal in the same year from his brazen affair with Lady Caroline Lamb, wife of the future prime minister Lord Melbourne; the even more scandalous matter of his alleged incestuous relationship with his half-sister Augusta; his marriage to Annabella Milbanke, and its failure after the birth of a daughter Ada; dissipation and debt; and his departure from England for good. He lived first in Switzerland and then in Italy, with the Shelleys as his constant companions: Shelley himself, his wife Mary, and Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont, who had met and declared her passion for Byron while they were still in London. Near the end of 1816 Byron left Geneva and the Shelleys for Venice, where he arrived in November, and soon afterwards rented the Palazzo Mocenigo on the Grand Canal. Claire Clairmont’s daughter by him, Allegra, was born in the following January, and in May 1817 came to live with him in Venice, where Byron, poet and philanderer, was a fond but hardly an orthodox father.
At the end of 1819 he met the object of his last attachment, Teresa Guiccioli. Teresa was 19 and had been married for a year, in a marriage of convenience, to the 58-year-old Count Alessandro Guiccioli, she for the first time and he for the third. It was not long before Byron became Teresa’s cavalier servente in a triangle of young wife, elderly complaisant husband and cavalier who was ostensibly the friend of both and no more than a platonic admirer and shawl-carrier for the wife. The Count’s toleration of the obvious affair between his wife and Byron eventually snapped when he returned one evening to find them, as Byron put it, ‘quasi in the fact’. Her father, Count Gamba, applied to the Pope for a legal separation, which was granted on condition that Teresa lived in the house of her father at Filetto, about fifteen miles south-west of Ravenna. Byron was a frequent visitor to Filetto, welcomed by Count Gamba, who much preferred the poet to his elderly son-in-law, and by Teresa’s younger brother Pietro.
Both Pietro and his father had been involved for some time with the Carbonari, the Italian organisations working for independence from the Austrian domination of Italy. ‘I vaticinate a row in Italy,’ Byron wrote, ‘in which case I don’t know that I won’t have a finger in it. I dislike the Austrians and think the Italians infamously oppressed.’2 Soon Byron did have a finger in it; by July he had acquired the title of capo of one of the local revolutionary bands, though this probably involved no more than romantic night-time meetings in the forests. But in the spring of 1821 a general rising of Italians was crushed by an Austrian army, and Byron and Teresa, with mingled irony and emotion, pronounced its epitaph. ‘Alas,’ she said with tears in her eyes, ‘the Italians must now return to making operas.’ ‘I fear,’ Byron commented, ‘that and maccaroni are their forte.’3
One result of the failure of the Carbonari rising was the break-up of the Gamba household at Filetto. In July 1821 Count Gamba and his son Pietro, known supporters of the revolution, were banished from the Romagna, the area around Ravenna and Bologna. Because Teresa’s judicial separation from her husband required her to live in her father’s house, she had to follow. Shelley found a house for them in Pisa, where in October Byron joined them. The following year, 1822, brought a double blow to Byron. His 5-year-old daughter by Claire Clairmont, Allegra, who had been placed in a convent at Ravenna, died there on 20 April. Teresa described how she broke the news to him: ‘ “I understand,” said he, – “it is enough, say no more.” A mortal paleness spread itself over his face … I began to fear for his reason; he did not shed a tear…. He remained immovable in the same attitude for an hour, and no consolation which I endeavoured to afford him seemed to reach his ears.’4 The second catastrophe followed three months later: Shelley was drowned when his boat was caught by a sudden storm in the Gulf of Genoa. Byron’s tribute to him was a simple one: ‘Without exception, the best and least selfish man I ever knew.’5 The Shelley circle in Pisa no longer held together and in September Byron moved with Teresa and her father and brother to his last Italian residence, the Casa Saluzzo at Albaro, on a hill above Genoa and looking out over the harbour. Only his feelings for Teresa now kept Byron in Italy, and even his attachment to her was beginning to weaken.
During the winter of 1822–3 at Genoa Byron became increasingly restless. For some years he had been attracted by the idea of a simple but useful life in newly liberated South America, and in the summer of 1822 the project was still in his mind, but balanced by the lure of Greece: ‘I had, and still have, thought of South America, but am fluctuating between it and Greece. I should have gone, long ago, to one of them, but for my liaison with the Countess G[uicciol]i; for love, in these days, is little compatible with glory.’6 Byron’s interest in Greece was finally tipped over into commitment by a visit in April 1823 from two strangers to him: Edward Blaquiere and Andréas Louriótis.
Blaquiere was an Irishman of the Protestant ascendancy, of Huguenot descent. During the Napoleonic wars he had served in the Mediterranean as a British navy lieutenant, and in the following years lived in Paris, because it was cheap, earning a modest living from his books on Mediterranean countries and his journalism. At the time of the foundation of the London Greek Committee in March 1823 Blaquiere was in London, as was Andréas Louriótis, the agent of the Greek government for raising loans abroad, who at Blaquiere’s suggestion had come to try the London market. On 4 March, the day after the London Greek Committee’s first meeting, Blaquiere and Louriótis left for Greece to gather information for the Committee on the state of Greece and to persuade the Greek government to send representatives to London to negotiate a loan. It was while en route to Greece that they arrived in Genoa on 5 April and Blaquiere sent a note to Byron asking for a meeting. Byron replied promptly and warmly: ‘Dear Sir – I shall be delighted to see you and your Greek friend – and the sooner the better. – I have been expecting you for some time – you will find me at home – I cannot express to you how much I feel interested in the cause….’9 This meeting proved decisive. Though Byron continued to harbour considerable doubts and reservations, his course was now firmly set for Greece.
Byron’s doubts and reservations were of two kinds. The first was over how he could abandon Teresa, who had after all abandoned her husband for him. The matter was eventually settled by events: Teresa’s father’s exile from the Romagna was lifted on condition that she returned there with him (as already required by her decree of separation from her husband) and on the further condition, imposed by her husband, that Byron did not. When Byron sailed from Italy in July, the parting was marked by passionate grief from Teresa but no more than kindly concern from Byron.
Byron’s other set of difficulties revolved round the question of what exactly he should do to help the Greek cause. All that he had gathered from the Blaquiere meeting was that ‘Blaquiere seemed to think that I might be of some use – even here; – though what he did not exactly specify.’ In mid-May he was still presuming that the London Greek Committee ‘will give me some regular instructions of what they wish to be observed – reported or done – I will serve them as humbly as they please’. But all he received from the Committee was news that he had been elected a member of it, accompanied by a flattering letter. Even when on board ship bound for Greece at the end of July he was writing to John Bowring, secretary of the London Greek Committee, that ‘the Committee has not favoured me with any specific instructions as to any line of conduct they might think it well for me to pursue’.8 Byron was therefore left to use his discretion, based on what he knew of affairs in Greece.
Byron could see at once that the Greek cause would need money. ‘Cash is the sinew of war,’ he wrote, ‘as indeed of most other things – love excepted and occasionally of that too.’9 Within a fortnight of meeting Blaquiere he wrote to his friend and banker Douglas Kinnaird that he needed all the floating sums he could collect. Byron’s letters for the rest of his time in Italy are full of instructions for raising money on his property and from his publications, and for converting it into credits on which he could draw in the Ionian islands. By the time he left Italy in July he had, as he wrote to Bowring, nearly 9,000 pounds sterling to take to Greece, but he also urged Bowring to press ahead with the plan to raise a Greek loan on the London market.
As well as assembling funds, Byron was concerned to get more detailed information about Greece. Blaquiere’s letters, of which three reached Byron before he left Italy, were enthusiastic but vague. ‘Your presence will operate as a talisman,’ Blaquiere wrote, ‘and the field is too glorious, too closely associated with all that you hold dear to be any longer abandoned…. The cause is in a most flourishing state.’10 Information from expatriate Greeks in Italy and from returning philhellenes was sparse and unreliable. So Byron eventually decided that he must go to Greece himself, and that he must first learn more of the Greek situation from the proximity of the Ionian islands.
By 13 July 1823 Byron’s preparations for departure from Genoa were complete. A ship had been chartered, the Hercules, a collier-built tub of 120 tons, round-bottomed and bluff-bowed, with Captain Scott in command. Byron was to sleep on board ready to sail the following morning. He remained with the distraught Teresa until five o’clock that evening and then left her in the care of Mary Shelley, now his neighbour in Genoa. Three companions joined Byron on the Hercules: Teresa’s ardent younger brother Pietro, Byron’s recently engaged personal physician Francesco Bruno, and the adventurer Edward Trelawny, who had got to know Byron the year before and who responded at once to his invitation (‘My dear T. – You must have heard that I am going to Greece. Why do you not come to me? I want your aid …’).11 Byron had also offered passage to a Greek returning home, Konstantínos Skilítzis, who subsequently sent him a detailed analysis of the Greek political situation. There were eight servants on board, plus four horses, two dogs (one a huge Newfoundland) and an amazing list of stores, from the military (blunderbusses, gunpowder) to the domestic (toothbrushes, spectacles), and from the practical (candles, speaking trumpet) to the recreational (cognac, gin and Swift’s works in nineteen volumes).
The voyage of the Hercules began inauspiciously. On 14 July there was no wind, and the party went ashore again, Teresa fortunately for her feelings having already left. The next day they set out again, but after a day of calm the wind freshened at night, the horses kicked down their partitions, and the ship had to return yet again to Genoa for repairs. On 16 July they finally departed and after five days of slow progress reached Livorno, a mere 100 miles to the south. There they took on board James Hamilton Browne, a young Scot who had been dismissed from his post in the Ionian government by Sir Thomas Maitland for his pro-Greek sympathies. It was on Browne’s recommendation that Byron decided to head not for Zákinthos, which Blaquiere had suggested, but for Kephaloniá, which was governed by the forceful philhellene Colonel Charles James Napier as Resident. The Hercules anchored in the harbour of Argostóli, Kephaloniá’s capital, on 3 August, and on the very next morning, according to Trelawny, a flock of ravenous Souliot refugees rowed out to the ship and clambered over the gunwales to put themselves under Byron’s protection. The captain was prepared to drive them off, and Byron’s steward, Zambelli, rushed to the money chest and coiled himself on it ‘like a viper’. But Byron was tolerant. ‘As was his wont,’ Trelawny concluded, ‘he promised a great deal more than he should have done; day and night they clung to his heels like a pack of jackals, till he stood at bay like a hunted lion.’12 Byron took forty of the Souliots into his own pay, but not for long. By the end of September he was exasperated by their constant demands for money, and offered them a final month’s pay and the price of their passage back to mainland Greece. This they accepted, and the episode ended with Byron’s authority restored, with considerable sums of his own money spent to no purpose, but as later events proved with his faith in the Souliots unshaken.
Napier had returned to Kephaloniá two days after Byron’s arrival, and the two had long discussions on the Greek situation and what could be done about it. It was soon clear that Napier’s and Byron’s ideas were very different. It was characteristic of Napier to think big and talk tough: he wrote to Byron that ‘A foreign force is the only thing which can give a speedy and decisive turn to the war,’ and his solution to the Greek problem, he told Trelawny, was ‘two European regiments, money in hand to pay them, and a portable gallows’.13 Byron’s approach was different. ‘I am not come here in search of adventures,’ he wrote, ‘but to assist in the regeneration of a nation.’14 Byron’s discussions with Napier thus failed to show him a way forward; so too did his first direct contact with the Greeks. While still in Italy Byron had learnt of the reputation of the Souliot Márkos Bótsaris as one of the bravest and most honest of the Greek captains, and was willing to spend a thousand dollars a month to support the defence of Mesolongi by Bótsaris and his countrymen. Soon after reaching Kephaloniá Byron got a letter through to Bótsaris, who was then facing the Turks at Karpenísi. Bótsaris replied inviting Byron to join him, and saying that he meant to attack the Turks next day. This was the attack which ended with the death of Bótsaris, the Greek captain whom Byron at that stage felt most deserved his support.
Captain Scott of the Hercules was anxious to remove his ship from the danger of attack by Turkish or Greek vessels, and had in any case never seen the point of Byron’s expedition: ‘Why, my Lord, with your fortune and fame, you ought to be sitting in the House of Lords and defending the right side of the question … instead of roaming over the world.’15 At the beginning of September Byron released Scott to sail back to England, and moved ashore to a house at Metaxáta on the coast south of Argostóli, from whose balcony he could see Zákinthos to the south and in the distance the outline of the Peloponnese. Within days of Byron’s move to Metaxáta Trelawny and James Hamilton Browne left for the Peloponnese on a fact-finding mission. However their report from Salamís, where Senate and Executive were still uneasily cohabiting, was quickly contradicted by another, written from Navplion after the two bodies had split, by Skilítzis, Byron’s travelling companion on the Hercules. ‘Matters are in a wholly different state’, he wrote, ‘from what Browne reported from Salamís.’16 Navplion was in ruins, he went on: government was more an idea than a fact, with the Executive’s influence confined within the walls of Navplion and the Senate’s within Árgos. A particularly disturbing item was that the Executive was preparing to send its own representative to London to seek a loan in competition with the appointees of the Senate. Skilítzis had warned the Executive that if it went ahead with this there would be no loan at all.
Confusion was further increased by the arrival at Metaxáta, during the remaining months of 1823, of a stream of emissaries from Greece bringing letters to Byron pleading the cause of this or that party or individual. Finlay, then in his early twenties, was with Byron at Metaxáta in October and November and described the torrent of appeals to Byron:
Kolokotrones invited him to a national assembly at Salamis. Mavrocordatos informed him that he would be of no use anywhere but at Hydra, for Mavrocordatos was then in that island. Constantine Metaxa, who was governor of Mesolonghi, wrote, saying that Greece would be ruined unless Lord Byron visited that fortress. Petrobey used plainer words. He informed Lord Byron that the true way to save Greece was to lend him, the bey, a thousand pounds…. Every Greek chief celebrated his own praises and Lord Byron’s liberality, but most of them injured their own cause by dilating too eloquently on the vices and crimes of some friend or rival.17
Byron was not taken in. The worst tendency of the Greeks, he wrote in his journal, is that ‘they are such d - - - - d liars; – there never was such an incapacity for veracity shown since Eve lived in Paradise’.18
Byron insisted throughout that he must deal only with the Greek government. In November an opportunity to do so seemed to arise: an emissary of the Executive branch of the government, which could still be regarded as speaking for the government as a whole, invited Byron to join them in Navplion, and he made detailed preparations for doing so. This would have been a disastrous move: Byron would have found himself isolated in Navplion, a town dominated by Kolokotrónis’ forces, and in exactly the situation of being sucked into one faction that he had consistently tried to avoid.
Fortunately, only days before departure, a new proposal arrived, a request, this time from the Senate, that Byron should make a personal loan to the Greek government specifically to fund the sailing of a squadron from Hydra and Spétses to patrol the waters off Mesolongi. Byron delayed his departure for Navplion to deal with this, and on 13 November signed a loan agreement for £4,000. Finlay, who was present at the signing, had no illusions about this so-called loan: ‘I said, you may bid that money farewell, my Lord; you have taken the last look of it.’19
Another development coincided with Byron’s funding of the Greek fleet. The Turkish attack on Anatolikó had prompted the civilian and military leaders of Mesolongi to call on Mavrokordhátos to return there from Hydra and undertake the direction of affairs. The Senate approved Mavrokordhátos’ appointment at the end of October, and on the same day wrote to Byron, asking him to co-operate fully with Mavrokordhátos in the defence of Mesolongi. Mavrokordhátos reinforced the Senate’s request, writing to Byron: ‘It is not in order to flatter you, my Lord, that I assure you that I should have hesitated to accept so vast a task had I not based my hopes on your co-operation.’20 Mavrokordhátos reached Mesolongi after the Turkish besiegers had withdrawn, and with the fleet which Byron had funded, on 12 December 1823.
On the same day Colonel Leicester Stanhope, representative of the London Greek Committee, also arrived in Mesolongi, with orders, as Byron understood it, ‘to work along with me for the liberation of Greece’.21 Byron gently mocked Stanhope’s naivety, his commitment to lofty Benthamite ideals and his faith in the universal benefits of a free press, but appreciated his worth. As he wrote to Bowring after meeting Stanhope on Kephaloniá: ‘I am happy to say that Colonel Leicester Stanhope and myself are acting in perfect harmony together – he is likely to be of great service both to the cause and to the Committee, and is publicly as well as personally a very valuable acquisition to our party on every account.’22 Byron reached a decision, and on 26 December wrote to Bowring, in one of his last letters from Kephaloniá: ‘I embark tomorrow for Messolonghi.’23
Byron had at last found the way forward, after taking a month or more to reject the invitation of the Executive to Navplion and to accept the Senate as the proper authority to speak for the Greek government. He would now be working with Mavrokordhátos, the one Greek leader that he trusted and respected as a statesman (‘their Washington, or their Kosciusko’). In Mesolongi he would be better placed than in remote Navplion to oversee the distribution of an English loan channelled through the Ionian islands, and would have easier access to his own funds through his Ionian bankers. Stanhope too was now in Mesolongi, and the two together should be able to speak for the London Greek Committee more powerfully than Byron alone.
Byron’s months at Kephaloniá have often been represented as a time of dithering and indecision. When Byron moved from the Hercules to the house at Metaxáta, the hyperactive Trelawny commented: ‘I well knew, that once on shore, Byron would fall back on his old routine of dawdling habits – plotting, planning, shilly-shallying, and doing nothing.’ Byron too contributed to this picture of himself as an inveterate lingerer, saying, according to Trelawny, ‘If I am stopped for six days at any place, I cannot be made to move for six months.’24 But this approach does Byron an injustice. Mesolongi became a possible destination only with the prospect of Mavrokordhátos’ arrival there; if Byron had moved before that, he would have had to go to the Peloponnese (as he nearly did), and, as he wrote to Bowring with emphasis, ‘Had I gone sooner they would have forced me into one party or the other….’25 The Peloponnese was a political bear-pit, and as Byron admitted he had no capacity for that kind of bear-taming. One of the many dualities in his nature was that between the rational and the intuitive. Finlay, perhaps Byron’s most perceptive companion at this period, saw the division as between judgement and sympathy, or the masculine and the feminine:
Both his character and his conduct presented unceasing contradictions. It seemed as if two different souls occupied his body alternately. One was feminine, and full of sympathy; the other masculine, and characterized by clear judgment, and by a rare power of presenting for consideration those facts only which were required for forming a decision. When one arrived the other departed…. Hence he appeared in his conduct extremely capricious, while in his opinions he had really great firmness.26
It was only, it seems, when judgement and sympathy, reason and intuition came together, and a decision appeared both arguably right and instinctively right, that Byron would wholeheartedly adopt it. This conjunction finally came at the end of the year, when the fateful commitment to Mesolongi was made.