Byron in Love (18 page)

But in 1823 Lady Blessington, by not being his lover and by not wishing to be, was the one who noted his parched spirits and his heart running to waste for want of being allowed to extend itself. It was to her he first confided his plan to go to Greece as an emissary of the Greek Committee in London and unnervingly, he dreamt that he would die in Greece.

In high-hearted youth Byron had dreamt of being Greece's saviour and this fervour was re-ignited in 1821 at the commencement of the Greek War of Independence. The Greek insurrection, which had begun two years earlier, had however been beset by failure, but the Greeks still strove for independence from the Ottoman Empire and their plight caught the imagination of intellectuals and liberals throughout Europe. Officers from Napoleon's scattered armies, idealists and mystics had gone there to join the various tribal chieftains in their ongoing insurgency, Greece occupying part of western Greece and the Turks still holding the eastern part of the country. Byron's ongoing interest and concern were relayed to Hobhouse in letters, who in turn told the Greek Committee in London, since they were anxious to enlist Byron as their emissary and ally in that ‘theatre of war'.

The correspondent, Captain Edward Blaquiere, who had been canvassing support in Europe, was asked to visit Byron in Genoa and there he outlined the situation of a desperate and beleaguered Greece, her erstwhile sporadic victories as nothing if foreign aid, arms, armoured sea boats and foreign officers did not come to her assistance. ‘Command me' Byron wrote at once to the Greek Committee, saying he would not merely give his name or his money to the cause, he would go to the Levant in person. This was the elixir. It signalled escape from the demands and tedium of everyday life and was a metamorphosing from poet to soldier. Blaquiere followed with a letter–saying that Byron's presence would ‘operate as a talisman in that field of glory'. Intoxicating words and for Byron the fervour of his revolutionary youth was restored, except of course that he foresaw ‘objections of a domestic nature'.

What neither Byron nor the Greek Committee in London foresaw were delays, bewildering and contradictory strategies, tribal leaders who were either weak and irresolute or ruthless, rival factions and armies of untrained youths who wanted belts, blades and rations. ‘Speculators and percolators', Byron would call them, leaders with a considerable shyness with the truth, so that a No could be modified to a Yes in a moment and vice versa.

Four Greek leaders, though ostensibly united, had their own agendas–Colocotronis in the Morea; Botsaris, a Suliote; bandit Odysseus, primate of Athens; and Prince Alexander Mavrocordatos, who had given Greek lessons to Mary Shelley and was now bombarding Byron with unctuous and flattering letters.

There in Genoa, his mind agog, Byron commenced on his plans, using his own money to ensure medical stores and gunpowder for a thousand men for two years, chartering a boat from a shipping merchant in Leghorn, arranging with Mr Barry, his Genoese banker, for bills of dollars to the sum of fifty thousand, along with Spanish gold coins. He engaged a fledgling physician, Dr Bruno, who would be in perpetual terror of Byron and his three dogs. In a bow to splendour, he ordered scarlet uniforms with buttons, epaulettes and sashes and fearsome helmets with waving plumes, for his corps of three, Count Gamba, Edward Trelawny and himself. The helmets were modelled on those in Book VI of the
Iliad
, which had so frightened the infant Astyanax, and even the flashy Trelawny baulked at them and so they were put back in the pink cardboard box, never to be introduced to Greek climes.

As the covert plans progressed, the question was how to tell Teresa. She would swoon, she would cry, she would succumb to fits, she would beg him not to go, or if he must, to take her with him. She swooned, she cried, she clung and eventually numb with grief she lay on a sofa, until she was escorted in hysterics by her father to a waiting carriage, bound for Ravenna.

He had enlisted the ever-credulous Count Gamba, who was still smarting from the failure of the Romagna insurrection, and Trelawny, who appeared to share his enthusiasm, but was in fact writing to Claire Clairmont, to whom he had bizarrely proposed marriage, saying that once in Greece, he would shift for himself, which indeed he did, joining bandit Odysseus. There was also Trelawny's black groom Benjamin, Fletcher, who predicted that they were going to a country of ‘rockets and robbers', Lega Zambelli, Byron's bookkeeper, Tita the former gondolier who thought Mylord ‘amiably mad', Dr Bruno and Prince Schilizzi, a relative of Mavrocordatos, an ardent monarchist, who flattered Byron by telling him that the Greeks would crown him King.

The vessel
Hercules
was ‘a tub of a ship', shaped like a baby's cradle. Though superstitious about setting out on a journey on Friday the thirteenth, the party boarded at Genoa early that morning. With blazing sunshine and no breeze, the water glassy and unruffled, they were stalled until evening, when however a storm arose, the winds so forceful that the boat was tossed from side to side and the horses thrown into such a frenzy that they kicked at their partitions. Passengers had to disembark as carpenters were found to repair the horse boxes, and Byron in elegiac mood, walked in the Lomellini Gardens, where he had ridden with Lady Blessington, then wandered through the empty salons of Villa Saluzzo, with its traces of Teresa, including a lock of her hair, which he did not take with him. The era for romantic keepsakes was over.

Three days later, on 16 July 1823, they set out. Byron, the ‘Pilgrim', as Trelawny called him, in deference to Shelley's ‘Pilgrim of Eternity', was in a black mood, lifted only when they touched down at Leghorn and he received a laudatory verse that Goethe, his ‘liege lord', had written for him, though no one was at hand to translate it from the German. Nevertheless, Byron withdrew to his cabin to write in homage to the ‘Illustrious Sir' of Weimar, apologising for the hasty prose, surrounded by hurry and bustle, going, as he said, to Greece and hoping to be of some little use to that ‘struggling country'.

The empty days were filled with small diversions, he boxed with Trelawny, fenced with Gamba, fired his pistols at the gulls, bathed when the waters were calm, in daytime kept to his abstemious diet of cheese, cucumber and cider, took some grog in the evening. Passing Stromboli and the smoking summit of Etna, he remained on deck all night, absorbing colour and atmosphere for a last canto of
Don Juan
, though poetry was soon to be abandoned. To Trelawny he admitted that if death were to come in Greece in the shape of a cannonball, then death was welcome, asking that his ashes be scattered off the rocky island of Maina in the southern Peloponnese, Trelawny maintaining that they would be claimed by Westminster Abbey.

On 3 August they arrived at Argostoli, the chief port of Cephalonia, with its whitewashed houses set against arid brown mountains, and seeing the Morea in the distance Byron felt elated, believing ‘that eleven long years of bitterness' were lifted from his shoulders. Captain Pitt Kennedy, secretary to the English Resident Colonel Napier, came aboard the ship to welcome Byron and his group. Colonel Napier, he said, was ready to serve them in any way, while having to appear to show neutrality, since the Ionian Islands, under British protectorate, were neutral and could not be seen to be partisan with the Greeks. The news however was not encouraging, the Greeks were war-shy, hiding in the hills, the Turks had regained the coast and had undisputed command of the seas. Greek leaders, far from uniting with one another, were engaged in a vicious cycle of backstabbing, their one common agenda being the pressing need for funds. Pending loans from the London Committee, Byron had to advance more money towards Mavrocordatos, to equip a naval squadron to attack the Turks. He reckoned that already he had given more to the Greek cause than that with which Bonaparte had begun his Italian campaign. The interim in Cephalonia, supposed to have been a matter of weeks, dragged on for five months, Byron writing to the Greek Committee in London to explain away the delays, masking his frustration by saying that it was ‘better playing at nations than gaming at Almack's'. There were indeed beautiful and glistening moonlights, azure waters, azure skies; small Greek triumphs, Prince Alexander Mavrocordatos had ventured into high seas and taken a Turkish ship with its twelve guns, but as Byron said this was ‘not quite Thermopylae'.

He decided on an expedition to Ithaca. It entailed a nine-hour journey in scorching heat, on mules, across the island to San Eufemia and then by boat over the straits to Ithaca. Treated to figs and wine, singing like a Homeric armada, they arrived on the fabled island with their trestle beds, their trunks and Byron's more elaborate bed, since it was decided that they would sleep in caves and decline the hospitality of the English Governor. It was not the Homeric ruins or the grottoes of the nymphs, or the ‘twaddle' spouted by English antiquarians that struck Byron, it was the appalling wreckage and devastation of war. The island was swarming with Greek refugees, destitute and without a roof over their heads, throwing themselves at his mercy, their plaints so extreme, so pitiful, that he deposited money with Mr Knox, the Resident, to be distributed for their relief. He rescued the Chalandritsanos family, a widow with three daughters, had them sent to Cephalonia and maintained at his expense. It was the fifteen-year-old Loukas, the widow's son, then training in the mountains to be a warrior, who would eventually seek out Byron and become the object of ‘love, fathomless love', which was how Byron had described that particular malady in Venice in 1816.

On their return journey at the Monastery of Theotokos Aqvilion near Sami, Byron suffered the first of the convulsive fits that would be a precursor of even worse seizures. They had been welcomed by wafts of incense, then an elaborate ceremony, with hymns of glorification, the Abbot proclaiming the ‘
Lordo Inglese
', when Byron flew into a rage, shouting to be released from this ‘pestilential madman' as he stormed to a nearby room. There he barricaded himself in, stacking chairs and a table against the door. He refused to allow Dr Bruno to enter and give him his pills, then tore his clothes, tore the mattress that was on the floor, stood half naked in a corner, like a hunted animal, calling them ‘fiends', saying he was ‘in hell'. Hamilton Brown, a young Scotsman and soldier who had joined the
Hercules
at Leghorn, eventually restrained him, gave him Dr Bruno's ‘
benedette pillule
' and after uttering some childish drivel, Byron lay down and fell asleep on the mattress, Hamilton Brown's reward was to be let sleep on Byron's portmanteau bed.

Back in Cephalonia, he awaited news from the fragile and rivalrous Greek coalition. The Greek Committee in London somewhat disapproving, asking why he lingered so long on the island, some suspecting him of merely having gone there to bask in the Ionian Islands and accrue material for his poetry. ‘For all this I do not despair' he wrote in his journal, except that he did despair, the revolutionary zeal was gone, the platoons of foreign soldiers had dwindled, some killed by Turks, some by Greeks, some by disease and some by suicide.

According to Mavrocordatos, the point in the fatherland most weak and most threatened by the enemy was Missolonghi, on the Gulf of Patras, to which he was asking Byron to come as its saviour and secure the destiny of Greece. So after five months, on 29 December, they set out, their two boats bearing the neutral Ionian flag, Byron and his party in one and Count Gamba with all their provisions and thousands of dollars in the second boat. The journey was dogged with hazards. There were fleas, there were floods, there were storms and then the pursuit by enemy frigates, Byron and his group escaping to shallower waters and scampering onto the Scorfa rocks, where Byron dispatched an urgent message to Colonel Stanhope on Missolonghi, who had been sent from England to be his fellow commander there. Byron asked that they be safely escorted, expressing his greatest concern for Loukas, saying ‘I would rather see him cut in pieces and myself too than have him taken out by barbarians', words that with their romantic inference can hardly have pleased the doctrinaire Stanhope, who had come to save and enlighten the Greeks. Gamba's boat was captured, the captain brought onto the Turkish frigate to be interrogated before being beheaded, the catastrophe averted only because that captain had once rescued the Turkish captain on the Black Sea. Instead of their boat, with Gamba, Lega Zambelli, the contingent of servants, horses, guns, money, printing press, cannons, arms and Byron's secret correspondence with the Greeks being confiscated, they were treated to dinner and a pipe, then with oriental ceremony, allowed on their way. Byron, not normally religious, put it down to the good offices of St Dionysus and the Madonna of the Rocks.

The initial welcome was indeed heartening, Byron in his scarlet regimental uniform, escorted by canoe to Missolonghi, arriving to the salute of guns, a rejoicing crowd, Mavrocordatos, Colonel Stanhope and a long line of Greek and foreign officers to conduct him to the humble two-storey house above damp ground, with stables for the horses and a courtyard for the drilling of an army. Trelawny, who would come later, described it as ‘the worst spot on the surface of the earth', a dismal swamp surrounded by stagnant pools, looking out on a slime cold sea, and calling it ‘the belt of death'. Mavrocordatos, though full of flourishes and flattery, struck Byron, with his shy eyes and tiny round spectacles, as being more scholar than soldier. Soon he was visited by primates and chiefs with their suite of soldiers, all scrounging for money, and though he had vowed not to join a faction but to join a nation, he now found himself a partisan of Mavrocordatos. His first task was to form an artillery corps that he would lead and train for the proposed siege and eventual capture of Lepanto, a name that resonated throughout history. In 1571 Don Juan of Austria led a European fleet that had defeated the Ottomans, and Donny Johnny Byron was expected to repeat that heroic feat. Lepanto was a fortified town twenty-five miles east of Missolonghi, the fortress now in Turkish hands was garrisoned by Albanian troops, who were rumoured to be unhappy with their wretched circumstances.