‘Greeks only should free Greece,’ wrote Byron in The Age of Bronze. This was a fine aspiration from the early heady period of the revolution, but by the time of the fall of Mesolongi in April 1826 was obviously wishful thinking. Kolokotrónis on land and Miaoúlis at sea could now do no more than harass the Ottoman forces; the Greeks had no commander capable of a decisive victory in either sphere. The government was split by factions, had no money to prosecute the war or relieve the wretched state of the country, and had failed so far to get the committed support of any foreign power. Also the sharing of authority between the Executive and the Senate was now seen as a mistake. ‘The main weakness of the constitution’, wrote Trikoúpis, ‘was the interference of the Senate in the carrying out of the laws, and the consequent slackening of the Executive’s power. Such interference, harmful enough in peacetime, was fatal in time of war.’1
The first priority therefore was to reform the government structure. The government headed by Koundouriótis, with Mavrokordhátos as general secretary of the Executive, had taken office for a year in October 1824 as it emerged victorious from that year’s civil wars. But in October 1825, when elections for a new government should have been held, Ibrahim was ravaging the Peloponnese and Mesolongi was under siege. The Senate and Executive agreed that simply to elect new holders to the existing offices was not enough and that the perilous times called for a radical revision of the constitution by a new National Assembly.
This eventually met at Epídhavros, site of the first Assembly, in April 1826, when its 127 members were stunned by news of the fall of Mesolongi. In a brief ten days the Assembly decided on emergency measures to change the system of government. Senate and Executive were to be replaced for the moment by two new bodies appointed by the Assembly. A Government Commission was to conduct the war and run the country, its edicts to have the force of law, while an Assembly Commission was to be responsible for negotiating with foreign powers, and for reconvening the Assembly itself as soon as possible to adopt a more permanent arrangement.
The Government Commission was presided over by Andréas Zaímis, had eleven members including Trikoúpis (who thought the Commission should be much smaller), and was supported by a secretariat of thirty which replaced the ministers. The thirteen-strong Assembly Commission was initially led by Bishop Yermanós, but by June he was dead of typhus, surprisingly little mourned by contemporaries. ‘All the fame of this protagonist of the revolution rose and sank in its first days,’ wrote Trikoúpis.2 Gordon’s verdict was that ‘his death excited no regret, and he was forgotten as soon as the grave closed over him.’3
The Assembly Commission responsible for foreign relations took one important step. It sent an appeal to Stratford Canning, Britain’s ambassador in Constantinople and cousin of Prime Minister George Canning, to negotiate peace between Greece and Turkey. This was a new approach to the problem of involving Britain on the side of Greece. In 1825 Greeks of all parties had signed the Act of Submission to Great Britain, but Britain had rejected it. In April 1826 the Protocol of St Petersburg opened the way for joint mediation by Britain and Russia, on terms laid down by Britain and Russia and not by the Greeks. Now in the same month the Greeks sent Stratford Canning their own terms, which were a good deal more favourable to themselves than those in the St Petersburg Protocol. All Turks were to leave, handing over all fortresses to the Greeks; the Sultan was to have no authority over internal administration; an independent Greece would include all the provinces which had taken up arms; and these terms were non-negotiable. It was a high-handed document, reflecting faith in the strength of Britain rather than the reality of Greece’s extreme weakness. But Stratford Canning refused to take the matter further until a Russian ambassador, the first since 1821, was in post at Constantinople to act with him, and Russo-Turkish differences delayed the ambassador’s arrival until February 1827, nearly a year later. So this initiative was stalled. Otherwise this interim government by two Commissions did little positive. ‘The councils were too numerous and too motley to be efficient,’ wrote Gordon ‘and the action of government being paralysed by its poverty, it soon fell into disrepute.’4
When the Commissions took office in April 1826 they were expected to last only a few months until the Assembly reconvened, but there was a succession of delays because of disagreement over where the Assembly should meet. It had to meet somewhere in the north-east corner of the Peloponnese or its neighbouring islands as this was the only area still under Greek control, but each faction wanted a meeting place that would favour its own side. Thus the interim government, initially based in Navplion, issued two calls for the Assembly to meet on the island of Póros, but to no avail. In November the government left Navplion, which was racked by disease and disorder, and moved to the island of Éyina. A third summons to the Assembly to meet on Éyina was also ignored.
The two principals in this disagreement were Zaímis, head of the Government Commission and bent on dominating the forthcoming Assembly which would end his current powers, and Kolokotrónis, who was determined to maintain his own position. Alliances had shifted over the past two years, and sometimes been totally reversed. Zaímis and Kolokotrónis had been opponents in the first civil war of 1824, within months had become allies in the second civil war, and were now opposed again. Kolokotrónis had been imprisoned by Koundouriótis when the civil wars ended, but the two now joined forces in opposition to Zaímis. Koundouriótis in his time as president of the Executive had had the support of Mavrokordhátos, who now backed Zaímis.
The question of where to meet had become so contentious because Kolokotrónis refused to bring his supporters to an Assembly on an island, from which his delegates could easily be turned away as unauthorised. Also the last time he had been on an island was as a prisoner on Hydra at the end of the 1824 civil wars. ‘I will not embark on the seas,’ he wrote, ‘for I took an oath when they had me in Hydra that I would never put to sea again.’5 His underlying concern, of course, was that on an island he would be isolated from his troops. Ultimately, in February 1827 Kolokotrónis opened an Assembly with ninety delegates of his own choice at Ermióni on the mainland, while the government had assembled fifty of the original delegates on Éyina. It seemed that there would be a repeat of 1824, with two rival governments and a civil war.
The interventions of three representatives of Britain saved the situation. First to appear was General Sir Richard Church, who had long been a friend and a favourite of the Greeks. As a young major serving in the Ionian islands during the Napoleonic wars he had raised a regiment of Greeks, the Duke of York’s Greek Light Infantry, in which Kolokotrónis and other later revolutionary leaders had served. In 1811 the regiment took part in the capture of Levkás from the French, when Church was seriously wounded, and in 1814 helped retake Páxos. The regiment was disbanded after the Napoleonic wars ended, and Church resigned his British commission for a command in the army of the King of Naples. But as Gordon put it, ‘Neither time nor distance weakened the honourable attachment that subsisted between him and his military pupils. His name was constantly in the mouths of Colocotroni, Anagnostaras, Nikitas, Colliopoulo, and other eminent chiefs, who often expressed a hope that he would once more fight at their head.’6
In the summer of 1826 the interim government offered Church the supreme command of the Greek land forces, which he immediately accepted. With hindsight it was easy to see that Church, though a popular choice, was not an ideal one. As Finlay wrote: ‘Church was of a small, well-made, active frame, and of a healthy constitution. His manner was agreeable and easy, with the polish of great social experience, and the goodness of his disposition was admitted by his enemies, but the strength of his mind was not the quality of which his friends boasted…. Both Church and the Greeks misunderstood one another. The Greeks expected Church to prove a Wellington, with a military chest well supplied from the British treasury. Church expected the irregulars of Greece to execute his strategy like regiments of guards.’7
Church landed in early March 1827 at Portochéli, ten miles from Kolokotrónis’ base at Ermióni, and received a hero’s welcome from his old comrades in arms. ‘Our father is at last come,’ Kolokotrónis proclaimed to his men, ‘we have only to obey him and our liberty is secured.’8 But Church refused to accept any office until the two factions united. Captain Hamilton of the Royal Navy, Greece’s wise friend throughout the war, conveyed Church to Éyina to negotiate a settlement, and Hamilton too urged the Greeks to settle their differences, threatening that unless they did so he would tell Stratford Canning that ‘Greece was in too disorganised a state to be worthy the care of Europe.’9 Then Cochrane arrived in his yacht, a week after Church, and took a yet stronger line. He refused even to land, and in forceful quarterdeck style told the delegates that he was disgusted to find the bravest and most famous Greek commanders squabbling over where to hold an assembly while the enemy was destroying the whole country. A compromise was reached, and it was agreed that all the delegates from both parties, whether legally appointed or not, should meet as a single Assembly at Trizína, Troezen to classical scholars, a few miles inland from Ermióni.
On 31 March 1827 the Trizína Assembly began its sessions, technically a continuation of the Assembly at Epídhavros a year before but in fact a completely different body with a new agenda. A new constitution was produced. Both Church and Cochrane had by now agreed to serve and had arrived in Greece. Within a fortnight both had been formally appointed and had taken the oath of office. A third resolution with far-reaching consequences was also passed at Trizína: to offer the presidency of Greece to Kapodhístrias.
Kapodhístrias had resigned as joint foreign secretary to Tsar Alexander I in August 1822 and settled in Geneva. Like many a leader in waiting, he was in constant contact with his countrymen while insisting that he must stand aside from their troubles. ‘The more I tried’, he wrote, ‘to make the Greeks understand that the events of the year 1821 shut me off henceforth from any possibility of existing for them, the less my words and the evidence of my conduct carried conviction with them.’10 Though no longer Russia’s foreign secretary he was still technically in the Russian diplomatic service, and in February 1826 took the oath of allegiance to the new Tsar Nicholas I. After his nomination as Greece’s president in April 1827 Kapodhístrias spent the rest of the year preparing for his new role, though he did not formally accept his appointment until he reached Greece at the beginning of 1828.
Preparation meant assessing the support he could expect from the powers of Europe. In March 1827 he was in Paris and from April to June in St Petersburg, where Tsar Nicholas finally accepted his resignation from the Russian service offered six months earlier. In August he was in Prussia’s capital Berlin and in London, and in September in Paris again before returning in October to Switzerland. By the end of his travels he had secured the assent of Britain, Russia and France to his presidency, without which he said he could not accept it, but his requests for practical help – foreign troops, subsidies and loans – had produced no firm commitment.
The Greeks had chosen as their first president a man of contradictions. His reputation was international and he had access to the highest levels of government in Europe. His appearance and manner were perfectly fitted to such a role. ‘If there is to be found anywhere in the world’, wrote a contemporary, ‘an innate nobility, marked by a distinction of appearance, innocence and intelligence in the eyes, a graceful simplicity of manner, a natural elegance of expression in any language, no one could be intrinsically more aristocratic than Count Capo d’Istria of Corfu.’11 But the private man was very different: an ascetic bachelor, constantly in poor health, far from rich, and a solitary despite his wide range of acquaintances in the worlds of politics, literature and the arts. Under the suave exterior of an international diplomat was a driven man. Once the presidency of Greece was offered to him and he dropped the pretence of wanting to be forgotten, he worked tirelessly for the Greek cause without ever accepting reward. In the year of his travels in Europe before reaching Greece this work was primarily a matter of handling his copious correspondence with the governments and his influential friends in Europe, with Greece’s provisional government and with his supporters there. This task could last all day and sometimes far into the night, with Kapodhístrias dictating to more than one secretary at a time. Duty was all, but performed in a spirit of melancholy fatalism. ‘Providence will decide,’ he wrote, ‘and it will be for the best.’12
Kapodhístrias was in fact being offered tightly circumscribed powers as president. Sovereignty belongs to the nation, declared the Constitution of Trizína on its first page, and this sovereignty was to be exercised through the Senate. The Senate was to be much more stable than before, only a third of its members retiring in rotation each year somewhat on the American model, instead of all having to seek reelection annually. The president’s ministers were appointed by and were answerable to the Senate. The president could only delay an enactment of the Senate, not veto it. The president could not dissolve the Senate. To underline the sovereignty of the people the constitution included a section of twenty-four articles, in effect a Bill of Rights, defining in detail the civil liberties of the citizen. Thus the Constitution of Trizína was designed to tie down the president like a Gulliver with the strings of lesser men.
For the period until Kapodhístrias reached Greece, a three-man Vice-Presidential Commission was appointed to carry out the president’s duties. None of the previous holders of high office had enough support, so the choice fell on three untried men who commanded no respect. One was Georgios Mavromichális, and of the other two one was, in Gordon’s words, a Psarian ‘enjoying a reputation less than questionable’ and the other ‘perhaps the most consummate blockhead in all Roumelia’.13 The trio was derisively described as a boy, a sailor and a cuckold.
The Constitution of Trizína, like its predecessors, was a balancing act, but the weights to be balanced were now different. One balance had to be struck between the adherents of Britain and Russia. Those who favoured Britain like Zaímis and Mavrokordhátos had the satisfaction of seeing two of Britain’s distinguished citizens, Church and Cochrane, in command of the Greek land and sea forces, while those who looked to Russia had as president Kapodhístrias, a Greek distinguished in Russia’s service who supposedly still had the ear of the Tsar. The other balance attempted at Trizína was between the concentration of power in the hands of a president and the retention of sovereignty in the hands of the people. But in the event this arrangement was never put to the test. As soon as Kapodhístrias arrived in Greece he took steps to snap the ties with which the Trizína Assembly had tried to bind him.
Meanwhile the country was in a terrible state. Its three-man Vice-Presidential Commission was totally ineffective and disorder was widespread. At Navplion the rival commanders of the two strongholds, Palamídhi and Akronavplion, bombarded each other. On Hydra the people attacked their leaders, and rival primates fought for control of Mistrás, Vostítsa and Kalávrita. In the summer of 1827 there were seven distinct civil conflicts by Gordon’s estimate. After listening to two rival leaders relating to each other with great glee the incidents of their battles, Gordon concluded that ‘civil war, and the misery it occasioned, appeared but a pastime’.14
The misery of civil strife was superimposed on the misery already caused by Ibrahim’s invasion. Howe graphically described conditions in the Peloponnese. ‘Those delightful plains,’ he wrote, ‘which poets in all ages have sung, but whose beauties have not been overrated, which two years ago were chequered with pleasant little villages, surrounded by groves of lemon and olive and filled with a busy and contented peasantry, were now barren wastes.’ The uprooted inhabitants:
took refuge in the recesses of the mountains, in caverns, in the centre of swamps; in every situation which afforded them security from the enemy’s cavalry were seen collected crowds of old men women and children … they lived in little wigwams or temporary huts, made by driving poles in the ground and thatching them with reeds…. they had no blankets, they had no clothes to change, and their own had become dirty and tattered; they were obliged to wander about in quest of food, and their naked feet were lacerated by the rocks; their faces, necks, and half-exposed limbs were sunburnt, and their hollow eyes and emaciated countenances gave evidence that their suffering had been long endured.
But Howe always looked for signs of resilience and optimism in even the worst situations. ‘Yet amid all this misery,’ he concluded, ‘strange as it may appear, the light and volatile Greek was not always depressed; the boy sang as he gathered snails on the mountains, and the girls danced around the pot where their homely mess of sorrel and roots was boiling; the voice of mirth was often heard in these miserable habitations, and the smile of fond hope was often seen.’15
The one significant outcome of the Trizína Assembly was the detailed definition of civil liberties written into the constitution. ‘Its Bill of Rights,’ wrote a later historian, ‘which embodied the ideal of the rule of law and respect for the rights of the citizen, has survived as the strongest weapon of liberty against autocracy through the many political changes of more than one hundred years of Greek history.’16 Otherwise the Assembly had made little progress in solving the country’s immediate problems. It had established a new form of government which gave power to the president with one hand and took it away with the other. It had nominated a president who would not arrive in the country for many months, and had meanwhile passed the responsibility for government to three incompetents. A potentially more helpful move was the appointment of two commanders of international repute to lead the land and sea forces. But Church and Cochrane were still untried as leaders in Greek warfare, and their abilities were soon to be tested in the battle to drive off the Turkish army which was besieging the Greek garrison of Athens.