The journey from Kephaloniá to Mesolongi turned out to be as dramatic as any that Byron had undertaken. Byron had hired two boats for the voyage, one large and slow, a bombard, to take Pietro Gamba, five of the servants, the horses and the heavy luggage including guns, the other a light fast boat called a mistico for Byron himself with his dogs and the remaining five of his retinue. In case of difficulties with the Turks the papers for both boats gave their destination as the island of Kálamos off Levkás, part of the Ionian islands and a safe fifty miles by sea from their true destination of Mesolongi. This precaution was quickly needed. The two boats left Kephaloniá on the afternoon of 28 December 1823, and spent the next day at Zákinthos taking on supplies and money: 16,000 Spanish dollars on Byron’s mistico and 8,000 dollars on Gamba’s bombard. At six in the evening the two vessels set sail in light winds under a clear sky, and for the next four hours they kept station together, the sailors of both crews singing patriotic songs in which Byron joined, their voices mingling across the darkening sea. Eventually the faster mistico with Byron on board moved ahead out of earshot into the night.
At dawn next day Gamba and the crew of the lagging bombard had almost reached the entrance to the Mesolongi lagoon when a large vessel bore down on them, flying no colours. Gamba’s worst fears were confirmed when his bombard raised the Ionian flag and was answered with the Turkish one. Gamba decided that he would stick to his story that he was heading for Kálamos on a hunting expedition, which would explain the guns in the cargo. The only totally compromising item on board was the packet containing all Byron’s correspondence with the Greek leaders; this was weighted with shot and, sadly for historians, dropped overboard. However, when the Greek captain was summoned aboard the Turkish ship events took a turn which would raise an incredulous eyebrow in the reader of a romantic novel: the Greek recognised the Turkish captain as a man whom years before he had saved from shipwreck in the Black Sea. The Turkish captain, now thoroughly amiable, still had no option but to take his prize back to Patras. There Gamba suffered a searching interview with the Turkish commander Yussuf Pasha, in which he managed to maintain the fiction of the Kálamos hunting trip, and after some days’ delay was given papers to proceed. He reached Mesolongi on 4 January 1824, but found that Byron had still not arrived.
This was because Byron had had adventures of his own. During the first night of the crossing the mistico had been surprised by a large Turkish ship looming up in the darkness. When hailed the mistico made no response, all on board kept quiet (even, miraculously, the dogs), and the freshening wind carried it safely away. The only reason why the Turks did not fire on the mistico was, Byron thought, that they took it for a Greek fireship, to be avoided rather than attacked. At dawn the next morning Byron’s party could see one Turkish ship chasing Gamba’s bombard and another blocking the entrance to Mesolongi, so they put into a little port at rocky Cape Skróphes about eighteen miles west of Mesolongi. Within an hour the approach of a Turkish vessel drove Byron’s party to flee another twenty miles northwards to the port of Dhragoméstri, modern Astakós. From there, in response to a message from Byron to Mesolongi, he and his companions were picked up by some Greek gunboats, and were nearly wrecked on the passage back past Cape Skróphes. At last on the morning of 5 January, the day after Gamba’s arrival, Byron in his scarlet uniform stepped ashore at Mesolongi to a cacophony of gunfire and martial music and a huge and excited crowd of soldiers and citizens, while Gamba wept tears of joy and relief.
This eventful journey showed Byron at his hardy and insouciant best. He had given up his cabin to a sick member of the party, and as he wrote a week after arrival: ‘We had bad weather almost always – though not contrary – slept on deck in the wet generally – for seven or eight nights – but never was in better health (I speak personally) so much so that I actually bathed for a quarter of an hour on the evening of the fourth inst. in the sea – (to kill the fleas and others) and was all the better for it.’1 Byron at nearly 37, and with a clubbed right foot from birth, was combining the activities of a man half his age with the health of a man twice his age. He had long been aware of this, writing to his half-sister Augusta in 1816: ‘My health is good, but I have now & then fits of giddiness, & deafness…. My hair is growing grey, & not thicker; & my teeth are sometimes looseish though still white & sound. Would not one think I was sixty instead of not quite nine & twenty?’2 His digestion had by now become shaky. ‘Dinners kill a weakly stomached Gentleman,’3 he remarked of the lavish hospitality he received in Kephaloniá. This, combined with unorthodox eating patterns, had caused his weight to fluctuate wildly. His friend Leigh Hunt, meeting him in Italy in 1822, hardly knew him, as he had become so fat. Later that year Byron embarked on a strict slimming regime which as time went on increasingly became his normal diet. At the age of 18 he had weighed 13 stone 12 lb (his wine merchants, Berry’s, recorded such matters for their clients) and in 1823, at 35, only 10 stone 9 lb. Thus the early portraits of a robust and glorious youth had given way to the 1823 sketch of a gaunt Byron, slightly stooped, with his head at the questioning angle of old age, and with a stick that seems more for support than for swagger.
Byron had also suffered several prostrating but unexplained illnesses in recent years. On the journey to his last Italian home in Genoa in October 1822, he had been ‘very unwell – four days confined to my bed – with a violent rheumatic and bilious attack – constipation – and the devil knows what’,4 but finally dosed himself and was up on the fifth day, ready to eat cold fish and drink a gallon of country wine. A more serious attack, which apparently drove Byron temporarily out of his mind, occurred in the early days on Kephaloniá, just after a sun-baked and exhausting trip to Ithaca. Byron and his party were dinner guests at a monastery, and Byron was unusually silent. Suddenly he burst into a stream of Italian curses on the abbot and his brotherhood, screamed ‘Will no one release me from the presence of these pestilential idiots?’5 and went off to his room, where he smashed everything in it and hurled a chair at one of his companions who had gone to quieten him. At length he swallowed two of Dr Bruno’s pills and slept, and next morning was full of remorse and apologies. Even Byron, it seems, could not treat this incident in his usual light-hearted way, and there is no mention of it in any of his surviving writings.
On arrival at Mesolongi Byron took up residence on the second and top floors of the house where Stanhope already occupied the first floor, and a Souliot guard was soon afterwards installed on the ground floor. The house was on the western edge of the town and Byron’s bedroom and sitting room faced south across several miles of shallow muddy lagoon towards the open sea, while two or three further rooms looked east over the courtyard to the town beyond. These damp quarters had little furniture, no heating and no drains (slops went into the lagoon), and all Byron could do to domesticate them was to display his collection of weapons on the walls and put his books on shelves above them. It had rained continuously during his crossing to Mesolongi, and heavy downpours soon kept him confined to his rooms all day. It was in these bleak surroundings, the very opposite of his recent quarters in a palazzo under an Italian sun, that Byron and Mavrokordhátos held regular evening discussions of what could be done to advance the Greek cause.
The first project discussed was an attack on the massive Venetian fortress of Návpaktos, twenty-five miles to the east on the north shore of the Gulf of Corinth. Mavrokordhátos put forward grandiose reasons for this venture: if Návpaktos was in Greek hands the Turkish fleet could be driven out of the Gulf of Corinth, the Castles of Roumeli and the Morea at the entrance to the gulf would fall, and so then would Patras itself. However the real reason was that Návpaktos was for the moment a soft target. Its garrison had not been paid for sixteen months, the Turkish ship with money destined to pay it had been captured in the previous November, and the defenders let it be known that they would surrender after a mere token resistance.
Within days of Byron’s arrival in Mesolongi he had undertaken to pay a body of 500 Souliot troops for a year, and these with another hundred on government pay were to be the core of a total force of 2,000 to attack Návpaktos. Though the five or six thousand armed men in Mesolongi were, in Gamba’s view, remarkably well behaved, the Souliots were not, constantly demanding their back pay and asylum for their families, and the citizens of the town denounced the Souliots as more of a menace than the enemy. By mid-January Byron admitted to Gamba that he had little faith in the Souliots as elite troops, but that there was nothing better available.
A further element in the plan to attack Návpaktos was that a corps of artillery was expected to arrive soon from England. This was the outcome of a proposal put to the London Greek Committee a year before by Thomas Gordon, who had left Greece after the sack of Tripolis in 1821 and was now back in his home at Cairness in Scotland. Gordon estimated that this project would cost about £10,000, of which he offered to contribute one-third, and it was assumed from the beginning that Gordon himself would go to Greece at the head of this corps.
However Gordon delayed coming to London and making any commitment to lead the corps in person. Necessary action to put the plan into effect – getting estimates for the artillery, equipping a workshop, finding men to serve – was left to Gordon’s protégé William Parry. Parry, a former navy fire-master, had been taken to Scotland by Gordon in the spring of 1823, and Gordon warmly recommended him: ‘It would be impossible for the Committee to find a man in his situation so capable of rendering essential service.’6 Doubts surfaced later: in November one Committee member wrote to Gordon that ‘I have great fears from Mr. Parry’s warm and lusty disposition,’7 meaning that Parry could be drunk and argumentative, and Blaquiere, reaching Mesolongi after Byron’s death, reported: ‘It now appears that [Parry] is totally ignorant of nearly all those points which induced the Committee to send him out.’8 Nevertheless it was Parry who got things done, and by November he was ready to sail for Greece with ten light mountain guns plus several larger ones donated by Gordon, a workshop comprehensively equipped with tools, materials and instruments, and eight skilled mechanics. His supplies included seventy reams of paper for making cartridges, and many of the bibles sent to Greece by missionary societies were put to the same use.
Meanwhile in July Gordon had finally closed the door on leading the corps himself. His principal reason was that even in 1821 when he was chief of staff, had the full confidence of his commander-in-chief and was supported by experienced officers, he found that he could produce no beneficial result. If Gordon, with his military training and knowledge of the Greeks at war, thought he could do no good, how did he expect someone far less well equipped than himself to succeed? Nevertheless, he concluded his valediction, as he called it, by saying, ‘I must heartily concur (as a member of the Committee) in the proposition, that the charge and direction of the expedition, be confided to Lord Byron.’9
No practical steps to advance the Návpaktos plan were taken until 24 January, when Mavrokordhátos proposed to Byron a command structure for the expedition. Byron would be in overall command, but would co-operate with a council of Greek captains presided over by the Souliot chieftain Nótis Bótsaris, uncle of the late revered Márkos. Byron was to choose his own staff from European officers, and Gamba was to lead the Souliots. Virtually nothing in this something-for-everyone proposal made sense, but Byron, against Stanhope’s advice, accepted the proffered leadership. His argument for doing so was that the Greek captains would rather be commanded by a foreigner than by one of their own number; that the Návpaktos garrison would be more likely to surrender to a western European than to a Greek; that nobody else, not even Mavrokordhátos, would accept the post; and that ‘as I pay a considerable portion of the Clans – I may as well see what they are likely to do for their money’.10 Byron maintained an ironic cheerfulness about the expedition’s prospects: ‘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.’11
A few days after Byron’s acceptance of the leadership Parry and his artillery corps finally reached Greece. Parry had left England in November 1823 and on 27 January reached Dhragoméstri, from where some of his supplies were carried overland to Mesolongi to avoid offloading them into small boats to cross Mesolongi’s shallow lagoon. Parry arrived in Mesolongi on 5 February, and Byron took to him at once: ‘Parry is a fine fellow – extremely active – and of strong – sound – practical talent by all accounts.’12 It was in any case more enjoyable for Byron to spend his evenings drinking brandy with Parry than earnestly discussing logistics with Mavrokordhátos or Benthamite principles with Stanhope. However no coal for the workshop furnaces had been sent with Parry and coal was hard to come by in Mesolongi, so it was clear that it would be some time before Parry’s arsenal was ready to be used: three weeks said Byron, two months and a lot of expense said Gamba. Hopes that Parry could assist in an immediate attack on Návpaktos were dashed.
The plan to attack Návpaktos now began to unravel fast. Parry could be no help for the moment. Yussuf Pasha, the Turkish commander at Patras, learnt of the plot to surrender Návpaktos and, as Green reported, he ‘instantly requested the disaffected and traitorous chiefs to proceed to the Morea Castle [Antírio], on the plea of paying the arrears; these he detained, and sent over several hundred Ottoman troops to strengthen the garrison of Lepanto [Návpaktos], not omitting, however, to send part of the pay due to the Albanians.’13 There would therefore be no easy capture of the fortress. Furthermore the Souliots caused increasing difficulties. Gamba was deputed to muster the 600 Souliots who were to be the core of the expedition. A much larger number applied, attracted by the prospect of pay, and Gamba spent two days, 12 and 13 February, weeding out the very young, very old or sick, and establishing the true and not the inflated numbers serving under each captain. As soon as this was done the Souliots tried a new ruse to increase their pay, demanding officer status, and pay, for two generals, two colonels and so on down the ranks, which would have meant that there were nearly as many officers as common soldiers. Byron’s patience was at an end, and on 15 February he wrote a furious note to himself: ‘Having tried in vain at every expence – considerable trouble – and some danger to unite the Suliotes for the good of Greece – and their own – I have come to the following resolution. – I will have nothing more to do with the Suliotes – they may go to the Turks or – the devil … they may cut me into more pieces than they have dissensions among them, sooner than change my resolution.’14
Two further events destroyed any hope of an attack on Návpaktos. First Byron, on the day that he wrote his note on the Souliots, suffered a seizure which he described as ‘a strong and sudden convulsive attack which left me speechless though not motionless – for some strong men could not hold me – but whether it was epilepsy – catalepsy – cachexy – apoplexy – or what other exy – or opsy – the Doctors have not decided’.15 Byron ascribed the fit to lack of exercise (due to the incessant rains), to agitation over public matters (the Souliot difficulties), and to the fact that he had been ‘perhaps not uniformly so temperate’ as before (drinking sessions with Parry). As a cure leeches were applied to his temples, but ‘too near the temporal Artery for my temporal safety’, and it was some hours before the bleeding could be stopped. A week later he was slowly convalescing, but by then the second disruptive event had occurred. It began innocently enough. One of the Souliot soldiers brought a young nephew of Márkos Bótsaris to look at Parry’s arsenal. The arsenal guard ordered him away, as he was instructed to do, but the Souliot soldier refused to leave. A fight broke out, the captain of the guard, the Swedish philhellene Adolph von Sass, was summoned, and in the ensuing struggle the Souliot drew his yataghan and almost severed Sass’s left arm from his body, and then shot him three times in the head. Sass died within half an hour, and the Souliot killer was arrested but was released to his compatriots when they threatened to burn down the building. The Souliots now saw no further prospects for themselves in Mesolongi and determined to leave for Árta, where there was more chance of plunder, declaring that they had no relish for attacking the stone walls of Návpaktos. Byron offered them a month’s pay on condition that they left and did not return.
The Návpaktos plan was now dead and Byron for the moment deeply depressed. ‘I begin to fear’, he said to Gamba, ‘that I have done nothing but lose time, money, patience and health.’16 Even success in capturing Návpaktos would have had little importance except symbolically; Mavrokordhátos’ domino theory, that with the capture of Návpaktos the Castles of Roumeli, the Morea and Patras would fall, was wishful thinking. But was there ever any realistic chance of success? This could have been achieved only by the charade originally envisaged, whereby a token attack would produce an immediate surrender. Once Yussuf Pasha had learnt of the intrigue and scotched it, the Greeks had to prepare a full-scale military operation. Byron was to lead this assault, but he was not the man for military leadership, and the twenty-three-year-old Gamba was even less suited to be his second-in-command. Eager, faithful and conscientious as he was, Gamba constantly made a mess of even simple tasks. When in the early days at Mesolongi Byron asked him to order some cloth from Corfu, Gamba ordered the wrong material and far too much of it, and when the bill came it was more than ten times what Byron expected. ‘But this comes of letting boys play the man’, Byron wrote in exasperation, ‘all his patriotism diminishes into the desire of a sky blue uniform and be d––d to him – for a coxcomb.’17 Gamba’s competence did not improve, and two months later Byron wrote, of another muddle, ‘Gamba – who is anything but lucky – had something to do with it – and as usual – the moment he had – matters went wrong.’18
The force to be led was as flawed as its leaders. Parry’s artillery was not ready for action, and his corps was badly weakened when after only a few weeks in Mesolongi six of his eight mechanics, terrified by the Sass incident, begged passage back to England, for which Stanhope paid. What, in any case, could such an artillery corps actually achieve in Greece? The assumption seemed to be that, since effective western European armies had artillery and the Greeks did not, providing artillery would make the Greeks effective. For attacks on fortresses artillery was virtually useless. It made little or no impression on even flimsy defensive walls, as Raybaud had discovered at Tripolis in 1821 and as the Turks were to find during their prolonged sieges of Mesolongi. When the objective was one of the massive and well-designed Venetian citadels, such as Návpaktos, artillery was no use at all, and the Souliots were for once absolutely right to echo Kolokotrónis’ dictum on the folly of attempting assault and to refuse to attack stone walls. Otherwise the Souliots contributed nothing but disorder, rapacity and dishonesty to the cause which Byron had come to serve. Perhaps only Márkos Bótsaris could have united and controlled them, and it may be that the single shot which killed Márkos Bótsaris at Karpenísi also killed any prospect of Byron forming an effective corps from the Souliots whom he had admired for so long and towards whom he had been so patient and so generous.
Byron had indeed, as he said to Gamba, spent a great deal of his money, and to little effect. In the previous November he had advanced £4,000, ostensibly to be repaid from the proceeds of the English loan, to bring out the ships of Hydra and Spétses which conveyed Mavrokordhátos to Mesolongi. Pay for the Souliots, first in Kephaloniá and then in Mesolongi, had come to about £2,000, so the money for the fleet and for the Souliots totalled some £6,000 out of the £9,000 or so which Byron initially had available in Greece. There were other drains on Byron’s pocket, quite apart from the living costs of himself and his retinue. He had agreed to advance £600 for the government troops in March; he paid £40 (reduced from £80 after some adroit bargaining) in compensation to the Ionian government for the seizure of one of their ships by the Greeks; he made a loan of £550 to Mavrokordhátos personally; and he paid out around £800 to support Parry, who had arrived from England with no money. Byron was in effect the paymaster for the whole Greek war effort which centred on Mesolongi. It was no wonder that he urged the London Greek Committee, through Bowring, to send money and not supplies, especially as some of the supplies were ludicrously impractical: ‘The Mathematical instruments are thrown away – none of the Greeks know a problem from a poker.’19
Fortunately for the Greeks, Byron’s constant badgering of Kinnaird to raise money had considerably increased his resources. By mid-January 1824 his property of Rochdale Manor, after a long time on the market, was sold for £11,250, and with that boost to his funds Byron estimated that he had upwards of £20,000 at his disposal. Thus Byron in Greece was at least a millionaire in today’s sterling, and, almost as remarkable, was prepared to spend it all on the cause. As early as June 1823, before he had even left Italy, he wrote to Kinnaird that ‘I should not like to give the Greeks but a half helping hand.’20 Furthermore, Byron did not try to influence the recipients of his money, and declared that even if his loans were repaid it would make no great difference as he would still spend the money in the Greek cause. Byron’s financial contribution to the Greeks was thus very great, and amazingly open-handed. All the same, though, there was something reckless about it, as of a man who gave no thought for the morrow because he felt he would not reach a tomorrow, and that all he had should be thrown into one last magnificent venture.
As well as spending big money on big projects which achieved little, Byron took trouble over paying out much smaller sums which effectively helped individuals in distress. In his time in Kephaloniá he had visited Ithaca, and gave £50 to the British Resident for the relief of refugee families there, and took back to Kephaloniá one family named Chalandhrítsanos, whose support cost him £40 in the next three months. At Mesolongi on a number of occasions he secured the release of Turkish men, women and children; he rescued a Turkish sailor captured by the Greeks after falling overboard, for whom he provided clothes and, thoughtfully, tobacco, and who remained under Byron’s protection; and he arranged for four Turkish prisoners to be sent back to Yussuf Pasha in Patras, with a request that Yussuf would show the same clemency to captured Greeks.
Byron took a particular interest in two of the youngest refugees. One was a Turkish girl in Mesolongi aged about nine called Hato or Hatagée. Her mother, wife of one of Mesolongi’s former leading citizens, was now a domestic servant to the English Dr Millingen, the rest of her family having fled or been killed when the Greeks took over the town. Byron spent nearly £20 on elaborate dresses for Hato, and seriously considered adopting her; for her future he considered sending her to Teresa Guiccioli, or to his half-sister Augusta, or even to his estranged wife as a playmate for his daughter Ada. Ultimately, to avoid separating mother and daughter, Byron sent both to Kephaloniá to be cared for temporarily by his devout friend Dr James Kennedy, and they were reunited with their surviving family soon after Byron’s death.
Byron’s other particular protégé was Loukás, the fifteen-year-old son of the Chalandhrítsanos family whom he had rescued from Ithaca. Byron took Loukás to Mesolongi as his page, and was much concerned during their storm-tossed journey from Zákinthos that the boy might be captured by the Turks. In Mesolongi he alternated between spoiling Loukás outrageously – new clothes for him cost even more than dresses for the girl – and exasperation at being exploited by him. On his deathbed he gave Loukás a bag of Maria Theresa crowns and a £600 receipt for one of his loans to the Greeks, but the government was in no position to honour this, and Loukás died in poverty six months later. There has been speculation about whether the relationship between Byron and Loukás was homosexual. Byron’s last verses seem to be about Loukás, and suggest that his feelings were indeed homosexual – ‘I am a fool of passion, and a frown Of thine to me is as an adder’s eye’ – but that they were not returned – ‘And yet thou lovst me not And never wilt.’ If so, it was with Teresa Guiccioli and not Loukás that Byron formed his last mutual attachment.
Once Byron had recovered from the illness, and its treatment, which had finally ended the plan to attack Návpaktos, he resumed his daily rides with Gamba whenever he could. But the weather continued atrociously wet, and Byron and Gamba had to take an open boat across the lagoon to find ground firm enough for the horses. Mesolongi was a mud-basket, Byron wrote, while Gamba reckoned that the town’s main gate was so choked with mud that it would hardly need defending against an enemy attack. But apart from the constant presence of the faithful Gamba Byron’s circle was in continual flux. Volunteers, Greeks and foreigners, were drawn to Mesolongi by the prospect of pay from Byron’s generous pocket and of service in a force which bore at least some resemblance to a western European army. By the end of March they formed the so-called Byron brigade of about thirty philhellene officers and between 100 and 200 men (Byron’s letters show that he was uncertain of their numbers himself). Finlay returned to Mesolongi after a journey to Athens. Stanhope departed, having established with remarkable speed two newspapers in Mesolongi, Elliniká Chroniká in Greek and, for consumption abroad, the multilingual Telegrafo Greco.
Stanhope left Mesolongi on 21 February bound for Athens, taking with him the young English philhellene William Humphreys, who had arrived on the same boat as Parry. In Athens Stanhope and Humphreys both fell under the spell of Odysseus Andhroútsos, as Trelawny had done before them. Stanhope wrote: ‘I have been constantly with Odysseus…. he is a doing man; he governs with a strong arm, and is the only man in Greece that can preserve order. He puts, however, complete confidence in the people.’21 Humphreys praised his looks (‘Very tall … sunburnt face and breast, rude attire, immense bushy moustache, and bent brow’), his horsemanship, his graceful manners, his forcible mind and his military sagacity. Stanhope, Humphreys and Trelawny now pushed forward a plan that Odysseus had been nurturing for some time, to hold a congress of Greek leaders at Sálona.
The ostensible objects of the Sálona congress were to unite Eastern and Western Roumeli, and to produce a joint military strategy. The proposal was the idea of Négris, who had seen his position decline from governor of Eastern Roumeli in 1821 and chief minister in the national government of 1822 to mere deputy secretary of the 1823 constitutional congress and nothing at all in the present government. Odysseus had first written to Byron with the Sálona proposal at the end of January 1824, but received no response. Towards the end of February he sent to Byron and Mavrokordhátos a renewed invitation to Sálona, this time with the backing of both Trelawny and Stanhope. Stanhope wrote: ‘Odysseus is most anxious to unite the interests of Eastern and Western Greece, for which purpose he is desirous immediately of forming a Congress of Salona…. I implore your Lordship and the President, as you love Greece and her sacred cause, to attend Salona.’22 Byron promptly agreed to go to Sálona; so too, though more reluctantly, did Mavrokordhátos.
On the face of it the Sálona congress was just the sort of political initiative to promote unity which Byron had come to Greece to pursue. Furthermore the second invitation was backed by Stanhope, Byron’s fellow representative of the London Greek Committee, with whom, at least in public, he needed to maintain a united front. But below the surface there were as usual other motives. Négris, the originator of the idea, wanted to recover some of his lost influence. For Odysseus, who had already captivated Trelawny and Stanhope, it was an opportunity to win over Byron, and through Byron to get access to the imminently expected English loan. Mavrokordhátos thought the proposed meeting was both unnecessary, as it would not promote unity, and unconstitutional, as military strategy was the preserve of the government and not of some ad-hoc congress. Nevertheless, if Byron went to Sálona, Mavrokordhátos would have to go too, to prevent Byron being lured away by Odysseus.
The news that Byron would go to Sálona quickly prompted rival invitations from other interests, three in a week in the middle of March. Petrobey’s agent Peroúkas, the former finance minister, wrote asking Byron to come to the Peloponnese to unite all factions; Byron replied that it was his duty at present to stay in Roumeli, though if his presence could really help in reconciling two or more parties he was ready to go anywhere. A few days later an envoy of Kolokotrónis arrived to invite Byron to the Peloponnese. This approach too was rejected on the ground that Stanhope would be going to the Peloponnese so there was no reason for Byron to go. Finally the national government at Kranídhi invited Byron to a conference, and offered him the position of governor-general of Roumeli; Byron replied that he was first going to Sálona, but afterwards would be at the government’s command.
It was thus Byron’s settled purpose to go to Sálona and refuse for the moment all rival invitations. However the journey to Sálona, fifty miles and two or three days away, was repeatedly delayed. Byron and Mavrokordhátos originally agreed to set out on 13 March but on that day there was a public health scare: a man recently arrived from the Peloponnese died in Mesolongi, supposedly of the plague, though this turned out to be a false alarm. On 22 March Byron and Mavrokordhátos were still at Mesolongi expecting to start in three days’ time. This date too was missed, and 27 March was next fixed as the day of departure, but by then the weather was even worse than before, making the rivers unfordable and the roads impassable. A final delay came from an unexpected quarter: an attack by their own side. On 3 April Georgios Karaïskákis, captain of a band in Ágrapha to the north, with 150 of his own men supported by a party of Souliots occupied the lagoon outposts of Anatolikó and Vasiládhi. His justification was that a nephew of his had been assaulted by a Mesolongi citizen, but it was widely suspected that his attack on Mesolongi had been instigated by Mavrokordhátos’ opponents in the Peloponnese. For Byron and Mavrokordhátos to leave for Sálona was temporarily out of the question. However, after a show of force by the troops in Mesolongi, Karaïskákis’ attack fizzled out, and on 6 April Byron was able to refer casually to ‘some tumult here’ from the incident and report that ‘to-day matters seem settled or subsiding’.23
Three days after that Byron went out for the ride which began his last fatal illness, and he never went to Sálona. Nor did Mavrokordhátos; his only reason for going was to be at hand to prevent Byron transferring his allegiance to Odysseus. Mavrokordhátos sent two or three delegates, but explained pointedly that they were not participants, merely observers to see that the national interest did not suffer. Even Stanhope did not attend the congress when it was finally held at the beginning of May, and it produced nothing but a formal declaration of support for the national government. Would it have achieved more if Byron had been there? It is extremely doubtful. The dapper, sophisticated Mavrokordhátos and the charismatic brigand Odysseus were as different as any two Greek leaders could be, and would never have trusted each other, would never have agreed to a joint military plan, and would never have surrendered any of their autonomy in their own regions.
On 9 April Byron went out riding with Gamba; they were caught in heavy rain and chilled through during the half-hour boat journey back to the town. Two hours after his return Byron was seized by shuddering and extreme pain. ‘I do not care for death,’ he said, ‘but these agonies I cannot bear.’24 Such a remark wrung from the normally uncomplaining Byron indicate that this illness was more serious than anything before. After a day confined to the house he again went riding, without the rain but on a wet saddle, and spent the day after that in bed. Parry, by his own account, prepared a boat to take Byron to Zákinthos, but they could not sail because of a hurricane. Only Dr Bruno, Byron’s young personal physician, attended him at first, but on 13 April, four days after the start of his illness, the local Dr Millingen was called in. Now began the infamous bleedings, against Byron’s objections, which almost certainly shortened his life. The prevailing mental picture of the human body determined, as always, the treatment given. The doctors saw the body as a bag filled with blood; too much of this liquid would pressurise and inflame the brain, so the pressure must be reduced by bleeding. Byron, on the other hand, was well aware of the dangers of bleeding and thought of the body as a stringed instrument. ‘Drawing blood from a nervous patient’, he said, ‘is like loosening the chords of a musical instrument, the tones of which are already defective for want of sufficient tension.’25
Despite his reluctance Byron eventually consented to bleeding, and this was done, sometimes twice a day, by lancet or leech, removing over four pints of blood in some sixty hours. On 17 April two more doctors were called in, one a German, the other a Greek and Mavrokordhátos’ personal physician, but they could suggest nothing more than continued bleeding and a bizarre assortment of medicines: during Byron’s last illness these included antimony, castor oil, Epsom salts, henbane, cream of tartar, boracic, quinine, extract of tamarind, laudanum, ether and claret. On 18 April, Easter Sunday, the usual celebratory firing of guns was kept well away from Byron’s house by the town guard so as not to disturb him. On the same day a boat was sent to Zákinthos to fetch a Dr Thomas, but he was away from home and could not be found. But Thomas would have known no more than the other four doctors what Byron’s illness was. Nor in fact do we know now. A variety of diagnoses has been suggested, including rheumatic fever, typhoid fever, uraemic poisoning, malaria, syphilis and, perhaps most likely, some form of brain haemorrhage, the last in a series which had caused Byron’s previous attacks. Whatever the nature of Byron’s last illness, his impaired physique was unable to resist it, and his doctors’ hit-and-miss methods were unable to cure it. At six o’clock on the evening of Easter Monday, 19 April, Byron died.
Byron had spent just over a hundred days in Mesolongi, and in one sense had achieved nothing. He had wanted to use his influence and his money in three spheres: military, political and humanitarian. The military (Návpaktos) and the political (Sálona) initiatives came to nothing and would have had little effect even if they had succeeded. If Návpaktos had surrendered to a force under Byron, no other Turkish stronghold would have fallen as a result. If Byron had gone to the Sálona congress he would not have brought Mavrokordhátos and Odysseus together. Only in the humanitarian sphere was Byron successful, but his rescue of Greeks and Turks impartially, laudable as it was, had no effect on the war.
In another sense, though, Byron achieved everything he could have wished. His presence in Greece, and in particular his death there, drew to the Greek cause not just the attention of sympathetic nations but their increasingly active participation. Blaquiere, for all his irritating vagueness about Byron’s possible role, had foreseen from the start what his true contribution would be: ‘Your presence will operate as a talisman.’ With Byron dead, the Greek cause could not die.
Byron has had his critics, from his own time down to the present; they have castigated his way of life, especially his treatment of women, derided his verse and questioned his motives in going to Greece. Much of the adverse criticism by Byron’s contemporaries can be ascribed to self-seeking or self-justification. Much of the later condemnation can be put down to the propensity, which seems to be peculiarly English, to bow before a famous man only to examine more closely his feet of clay. Despite the critics, Byron is primarily remembered with admiration as a poet of genius, with something approaching veneration as a symbol of high ideals, and with great affection as a man: for his courage and his ironic slant on life, for his generosity to the grandest of causes and to the humblest of individuals, for the constant interplay of judgement and sympathy. In Greece he is still revered as no other foreigner, and as very few Greeks, and like a Homeric hero he is accorded an honorific standard epithet, megálos kai kalós, a great and good man.