Byron in Love (19 page)

The army, enrolled under his personal banner, were Suliote tribesmen, exiled from the cliffs of southern Albania, who had taken refuge in Cephalonia and whose picturesque costumes and renown for courage appealed to the romantic in him. Unfortunately, he had based his estimation of all Suliotes on two whom he had taken into service on his travels in 1809, and the army that he now found himself leader of and had to personally provide for were undisciplined, cynical and grasping. They cared nothing for Greek independence, pressed him constantly for higher wages and better rations, were obsessed with tribal status and mutinied at being under the governance of German, English, American, Swiss and Swedish officers. Along with drilling and training, he had to house six hundred soldiers and their horses, their rations alone costing two thousand dollars a week. With the help of an Italian, wife of the local tailor, he had to recruit ‘unencumbered women' to be at their disposal.

‘Revolutions are not to be made with rose water,' he said, Mocked by his army, trapped in a relative barracks, Byron was surrounded by swords, pistols, sabres, dirks, rifles, guns, blunderbusses, helmets and trumpets. He had the double task of maintaining discipline and instilling a martial fervour, to get them to the field. The trumpets could not be sounded until they had taken Lepanto.

An English surgeon, Daniel Forrester, who came ashore briefly with his captain on the gun brig
Alacrity
, gives a vivid description of that rather haphazard ménage, young soldiers in white fustanellas and dirty socks, armed to the teeth, either banging their muskets or sitting on the floor playing cards. Tita, in full livery, ushered Forrester and Captain Yorke in, Loukas, dressed as an Albanian, handsomely chased arms in his girdle, served them coffee and olives, Byron receiving them cordially but talking in such a ‘harem scarem' manner that it was hard to believe he had ever written anything on a ‘grave or affecting subject'. After dinner, the amusement was to fire at maraschino bottles and Byron's aim was surprisingly exact, but as Forrester noted, his hand shook ‘as if under the influence of an ague fit'.

According to information from Greek spies, the capture of Lepanto would not prove difficult, as the Albanian army which manned it had not been paid for months and were close to starvation. They would, it was said, merely put up a token fight, and be happy to surrender. Lepanto taken, they could, according to Mavrocordatos, seize Patras and the castle of the Morea, whence western Greece would be in their hands. The picture of Byron in that fetid lagoon, rain pouring down, the streets like mire, an army bent on discord and disunion, would seem, were it not so lamentably true, like a tale imagined by the young excitable Lord Byron when he rode his pony in the countryside around Aberdeen.

Many things conspired to dishearten him, but worst of all was the violent agitation of feeling for Loukas, Byron believing that as with Edleston and Robert Rushton, his wonted magnetism would captivate the young page, except that it hadn't. For Loukas, Byron was an old man, his hair greying, his teeth discoloured, a tendency to corpulence, merely a potentate to supply uniforms, gold helmets and all the trappings for a warrior. To Byron Loukas's frown was as disquieting ‘as an adder's eye'. On his thirty-sixth birthday in January 1824, though mindful of his waning sexual powers, he wrote a poem on the persistence of love, even in a heart grown old:

Honour, obstinacy, a certain fondness for the rascally Greeks and a responsibility towards the Committee in London kept him there, vowing ‘I mean to stick by the Greeks to the last rag and the last shirt'. His spirits were temporarily buoyed, when after a delay of six months there came news of the arrival of the great fire-master Mr Parry and his team of mechanics. Mr Parry was to bring every species of destructive arms, spoilt powders that would be made serviceable in a ‘laboratory', which he would oversee, along with the manufacture of Congreve rockets. Unfortunately, Parry had never been near a Congreve rocket, he had merely been a clerk in the Woolwich civil department and neither he, Byron nor the Greek Committee had thought of providing coal to fuel an arsenal. Parry quarrelled with the entire household, but much to the irritation of Colonel Stanhope, Byron befriended him, both of them drinking brandy through the night and Parry, ‘a rough burly fellow', regaling Byron with his fund of ‘pothouse stories' and gossip from England.

On 13 February, an advance guard led by Count Gamba was ordered to set out for Lepanto, Byron and his troops primed to follow the next day. But treachery had struck. Colocotronis, learning of it, concluded that if Lepanto were captured it would put his rival Mavrocordatos in the ascendancy and his own authority over western Greece would be sabotaged. He sent a small party of Suliotes from the Peloponnese over to Missolonghi to spread unrest among Byron's Suliote army and to dissuade them from fighting. At the hour of departure they rebelled, said they would not march unless they received higher pay, then demanded that several men from each rank be promoted to general, colonel or captain, ensuring exorbitant wages. But even if those terms were met, they were not prepared to fight against stone walls, to risk their lives to secure Lepanto's crumbling Venetian fortress, which was devoid of booty. Byron, feeling betrayed by this bunch of swindlers, washed his hands of them and only after immense persuasion from one of their chieftains did he agree to form a new corps, but with a lesser body of men. The plan was postponed, but the momentum was gone.

The ‘volcanic mind of Lord Byron', as Gamba said, was thrown into a state of commotion and the following night Gamba found him lying on a divan in his ill-lit room, crushed and broken by both public and private failure. Later on he rose, drank some brandy and cider, when Parry noticed a change in his countenance and when he stood up he collapsed, foamed at the mouth and thrashed around the floor so violently that Parry and Tita had to hold him down, while Dr Bruno and a Dr Millingen, who had been added to his corps, debated the niceties of the fit, unable to agree on whether it was apoplexy or epilepsy. As he lay there, a messenger rushed to the room to say the Suliotes had gone into the town to seize all the arms and ammunition stored in the depot; and they all ran out in consternation, leaving Byron alone. Presently, two drunken German soldiers, who had touted the false alarm about the seizure of the depot, burst into his room, waving and shouting and in what must have seemed a waking hallucination, they told him that he was now under their jurisdiction.

There followed then a series of what he called ‘strange weathers and strange incidents'. A small civil war erupted in the town of Missolonghi between civilians and Byron's soldiers when a Suliote soldier taking a small boy to see the arsenal fell into an argument with a Swiss officer, drew his yatagan, severing the Swiss's arm, and then shooting him in the head. He was summarily arrested, but his compatriots hearing of it assembled and threatened to burn the building unless he was at once released. Parry's mechanics, though not Parry himself, had scooted, not being accustomed to that ‘kind of slashing', and a few days later there was an earthquake, to which soldiers and citizens responded by firing muskets, the way, as Byron said, savages howled at an eclipse of the moon. As the walls quivered, the whole town rocked, men and women reeling as if from wine, Byron, the spurned lover, went around the deserted hall, searching for Loukas, and it was to him that Byron's last poem was addressed, lines as intense and moving as any he had written to Mary Chaworth or Augusta or Teresa. For all his swagger and bravura, Byron's real theme was love:

There remained one last treason in this theatre of war. A Greek chieftain, Georgios Karaiskakis, combined forces with a renegade Suliote leader, Djavella, who in retaliation for some wrong done him by Greek boatmen, decided to lay siege to the town, to paralyse Byron's private army and most importantly to create division between him and Mavrocordatos. They seized hostages, occupied a fort at the entrance to the lagoon, where they were joined by a Turkish fleet, whereupon anarchy ensued in the town, the local people barricading themselves in their houses for fear of being massacred, calling for Byron's protection. As the authorities arrested suspects and seized papers they found, under Byron's very own roof, one Constantine Valpiotti, who confessed that he and Karaiskakis, in treasonable league with the Turks, had embarked on a plot for the joint occupation of Missolonghi, the overthrow of the provisional government, taking Byron as their hostage. It was as if he himself had willed these ‘incidents', being as he once described himself ‘the careful pilot of my proper woe'.

In order to reassure the panic-stricken citizens and in a beautiful defiance of the Turkish fleet and what would seem defiance of fate herself, he organised a cavalcade to ride through the town. He rode with his cohorts, which included foot soldiers and cavalry in their white fustanellas, a display of plumes and muskets, Loukas in scarlet livery, Byron himself in a green jacket, fêted by the people who followed beyond the north gates, calling out to him. When within weeks they would be asking for part of the ‘honourable cadaver' of their illustrious Lord, to be placed in the local church of San Spiridione.

How guarded his last letter to Teresa–‘The spring is come–I have seen a swallow today–and it was time–for we have had but a wet winter hitherto…I do not write to you letters about politics–which would only be tiresome, and yet we have little else to write about–except some private anecdotes which I reserve for “viva voce” when we meet.'

Caught in a downpour as he galloped with Gamba in the olive groves outside Missolonghi, he was soon after seized with cold shuddering fits, for which he was prescribed a hot bath and doses of castor oil. Within days, the fever had worsened and two more doctors were summoned, a Dr Loukas Vaya, who had once been physician to Ali Pasha, and Dr Treiber, surgeon of the artillery brigade, all at variance as to whether he had rheumatic, typhoid or malarial fever. None could agree, except that they bled him frequently, the lancet sometimes going too near the temporal artery, so that the blood could not be stopped, Parry vehemently trying to stop them and Byron in agony crying out ‘Close the veins, close the veins'.

A few days later on Easter Sunday the startled and disbelieving group around his bed began to fear the worst or, as Dr Bruno said, the cup of health was passing from His Lordship's lips. Byron himself recalled that long ago a clairvoyant, Mrs Williams, had foretold misfortune for him in his thirty-seventh year. Outside the pestulent sirocco wind was blowing a hurricane, the rain fell with a tropical violence, the bedroom a scene of confusion and despair, Fletcher and Gamba ‘unmanned' by grief, Parry and Bruno warring, because Bruno was for abundant bleeding. Byron finally agreed to the fourth bleeding because Bruno warned that if he didn't, the disease might act on his cerebral and nervous system, thereby depriving him of his reason. Thus he lay propped on a pillow, his head bandaged, the leeches along his temples discharging trickles of blood, slipping in and out of delirium, giving confused orders and wishes in both English and Italian, a mêlée of tongues, the baffled onlookers helpless as to what to do.

A deathbed scene that many an artist would have painted, litres of blood in basins, wrung towels, lancets, Byron holding Parry's hand and at times weeping uncontrollably. Delacroix would have done so with a poetic ghastliness, Caravaggio with a forensic cruelty, but only Rembrandt would have caught the fear and bewilderment in the eyes of those onlookers, all of whom venerated Byron but in their zeal and their helplessness differed as to what could or should be done. ‘You know my wishes' Byron would say, his commands wild, scattered and contradictory, his mood ranging from the philosophical to the frantic, pressing Parry to get on with building a schooner for their proposed journey to South America, then again believing that the evil eye had been put on him and requesting a witch from Missolonghi be summoned to lift it. He raved and half rose as if he were mounting a breach in an assault, then according to Parry cried out ‘My wife, my Ada, my country', while others claimed that he said ‘Dear Augusta, poor dear Ada', then place names, numbers, snatches of Greek and Latin poetry from his Harrow days, a mysterious reference to ‘something precious' that he was leaving behind, stuttered syllables, then nothing.

At dusk on Easter Monday, 19 April, amid dark skies and a thunderstorm, Lord Byron, who had been the hope of the Greek nation, who had known ‘the idolatry of man and the flattering love of women', breathed his last, passing over, as it was reported, to ‘his everlasting tabernacle'. Tita cut off a lock of his hair and removed the cornelian ring, that ‘toy of blushing hue', which John Edleston had given him. The golden doubloons and dollars missing from the coffer were thought to have been taken by Loukas, and when questioned by Pietro Gamba, Loukas avowed that Lord Byron had given him that money to assist his starving family. The sad aftermath is that Loukas died in Cephalonia some six months later ‘in want of the necessaries of life'.