LORD BYRON’S JACKAL

THE LIFE OF

Edward John Trelawny

DAVID CRANE

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

List of Maps

Nauplia

1 The Wolf Cub

2 The Sun and the Glow-Worm

3 Et in Arcadia Ego

4 Odysseus

5 The Death of Byron

6 Parnassus

7 The Plot

8 Whitcombe

9 Assassination

10 Humphreys

11 Enter the Major

12 Shame

13 The Last of Greece

14 Going Public

15 The Keeper of the Flame

Notes to the Text

Reference Notes

Sources and Select Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Praise

Copyright

About the Publisher

LIST OF MAPS

Greece 1823–1827

Major Francis D’Arcy Bacon’s Journey 1823–1825

NAUPLIA

‘What a queer set! What an assemblage of romantic, adventurous, restless, crack-brained young men from the four corners of the world. How much courage and talent is to be found among them; but how much more of pompous vanity, of weak intellect, of mean selfishness, of utter depravity … Little have Philhellenes done towards raising the reputation of Europeans here!’

Samuel Gridley Howe ¹

ON 6 FEBRUARY 1833 a seventeen-year-old Bavarian prince entered the town of Nauplia as the first king of Modern Greece. Out in the Gulf of Argos the ships of the sponsoring powers rode at anchor in the bright spring sunshine. French, Russian and British bands serenaded each other across the water in an improbable display of amity, while from the batteries on shore salute after salute rolled across the bay in tribute to Christendom’s youngest nation.

To the pragmatist and romantic alike there can have been no more fitting place for Otho to begin his reign than here on the Argolic Gulf under the watchful gaze of Europe’s navies and Greece’s Homeric past. Nothing, it seemed, had been left to chance to guarantee his future. The civilized world had given its blessing and its money. A loan had been provided to buttress his new country through her first years, an indemnity paid to her old Ottoman masters to rescue her from her troubled past.

Inside the town Bavarian and French troops stood ready to enforce Europe’s choice on a population only too accustomed to dissent, but for the moment the precautions were unnecessary. Mountain Suliotes and island merchants, sailors and Moreot bandits, Peloponnesian peasants and Phanariot politicians waited to greet the young king as their saviour from years of war and chaos. As Otho rode on his white horse through the cheering crowds into the reconquered Turkish town, the peculiar spell of Greece, its unique hold on the nineteenth century as the cradle of Western culture and the champion of Christianity, took on a palpable form that seemed in itself a guarantee of the new order.

For a dozen years this small town on the eastern coast of the Peloponnese, some forty miles south of Corinth, had exercised the same charm over the imaginations of Europe and America. From that moment in 1821 when Bishop Germanos had raised the standard of revolt and called on Greece to throw off four centuries of Ottoman rule Nauplia had been as familiar as any city in Europe. Its news was carried in newspapers from Vienna to Boston, its victories celebrated and its defeats mourned, its dead turned into martyrs, its leaders into the heirs of Demosthenes and Leonidas on a wave of popular enthusiasm which sent money and men to fight for a cause that seemed as much Christendom’s as Greece’s. ‘No other subject has ever excited such a powerful sensation,’ one enthusiast could write long after the first flush of excitement had faded,

The very peasants throughout Switzerland and Germany inquire with anxiety, when their affairs call them to market, what are the last news … In France subscriptions have been opened, and money solicited throughout every town, on behalf of a Christian Nation doomed to perish by the sword or by famine. The Duchesses of Albey, Broglio, and De Caze; every Frenchwoman distinguished by rank, riches, talent, or virtue, have divided the different quarters of Paris among them, and traverse on foot every street, and enter into every house, demanding the charity of their inhabitants for a nation of martyrs.²

Almost every foreign volunteer swept along by this enthusiasm had passed through the town of Nauplia, many of them to stay for ever, victims of the squalor, disease and factional greed which lay behind the ceremonial glamour of Otho’s welcome. Italians, Swiss, Swedes, Scots, Irish and Poles had all come here, national rivalries if not forgotten at least subsumed into a common cause, Germans and French who had fought on opposite sides in the Napoleonic Wars, Americans and English enemies at New Orleans united under the name of ‘Philhellene’ – friend of Modern Greece, a Greece which Nauplia promised was the true heir to the land of Homer and Thucydides.

The ceremonial entry of Otho was the last great charade in Nauplia’s history, the last time that the town would work its illusions on a Europe determined to believe. That place is gone, the walls of its lower town pulled down, the surrounding marshes which once earned its pestilential reputation as the Batavia of Greece drained. Within a year of coming ashore from a British frigate, Otho had moved his capital to Athens and the port that the Venetians had called Napoli di Romania had begun its slow decline into the quaint irrelevance of modern Nauplia.

If you wander now among its steep, narrow streets, or along the waterfront with its view across to the jewel-like island fortress where nineteenth-century Nauplia, with its instinctive dislike for reality, housed its public executioner, there can seem nowhere in Greece that retains so much of its architecture and so little of its history. There is an elegance about even its fortifications that belies their past, that touch of unreality which is Venice’s supreme gift to her former possessions. Towards evening, especially, as the sun sinks behind the central mass of the Peloponnese, and the lines of Lassalle’s Palamidi citadel almost dissolve into the rock face, it is difficult to believe anything ever disturbed the town’s peace. Down in the harbour, near an obelisk commemorating French soldiers, a Hotel Grand Bretagne throws off a confused echo of the excitement of 1824 when a ship carrying English gold made Nauplia a sink for every patriot, idealist, charlatan and scrounger in Greece. In the centre of the old town, where the starving Turkish population once held out for a whole year, their mosque has been turned with an insolence too complete to be accident into a cinema. A little higher up the slope, a bullet mark still pocks the wall where Greece’s first president was assassinated. And in that bullet hole, carefully preserved behind glass, we have the quintessential Nauplia-history in aspic, sanitised and mythologized, history reduced to civic statuary and street names, the narrow alleys once notorious for their filth sunk now beneath nothing more oppressive than bougainvillaea, the extravagance, rivalries and violence of its brief years of fame no more intrusive than the wrecks of warships that lie submerged beneath the waters of the gulf.

On a July day in 1841 a group of foreigners gathered in the town’s Roman Catholic Church to add their own lie to the great historical deception that modern Nauplia enshrines. The Church of the Metamorphosis is a small domed building, perched alongside the Hotel Byron on a terrace beneath the walls of the upper town, looking out westwards across the bay towards the ruins of Argos and the Frankish citadel of Larissa. At its south east corner the foundations of an old minaret are visible, and inside the sense of space and air still feels closer to the mosque it once was than any Greek church. Above its altar, a copy of a Raphael Holy Family, the gift of Louis Philippe to King Otho, intrudes a fleshily different but no less alien note. Opposite it, framing the door in a sad parody of a triumphal arch, stands the monument that had brought the congregation to the church that day. It was the work of a Frenchman called Thouret, a ‘Lt. Colonel’ and a ‘Chevalier de Plusieurs Ordres’ he has signed himself with a gallic swagger. ‘A La Memoire Des Philhellènes’, it reads across the top, ‘Morts pour L’independance, La Grèce, Le Roi, et Leurs Compagnons D’Armes Reconnaissants.’ Down the length of its four pillars, inscribed in white on black wood, riddled with mis-spellings, are the names of almost three hundred foreign dead who in the decade before Otho’s arrival had come out to fight for Greek independence.

There can be few more forlorn memorials. Sometimes along the Dutch border one comes across a German cemetery from the last war buried deep in a wood, but even those graves with their air of furtive and collective guilt scarcely catch the sad futility that clings to Thouret’s monument. There is something about its shabby theatricality that nothing else quite matches, a sense of defeated grandeur and deluded optimism which inadvertently captures the fate of the men it commemorates. ‘Hellenes,’ it says, ‘we were and are with you.’ It is not true and it never was. Who, inside or outside Greece, has heard of a single Philhellene other than Byron? How many memorials are there raised by the Greeks themselves in their memory? How, if Greece had deliberately set out to disown their memory, could it have done better than here in Nauplia? – in a town synonymous with Philhellene disillusion, in a converted Turkish mosque given by a German King to the Roman Catholic Church? Could there be any more eloquent or insouciant tribute to the insignificance of these lives than to obliterate their identity in the crude errors and chaotic lettering of their only monument?*

Beneath its hollow rhetoric, however, is that common denominator which links its names with those on the monuments of villages, schools, hospitals or railway stations from the Falklands to Burma, from South Africa to Sevastopol. There is always a sharp poignancy in the way these memorials bring the familiar and strange into such permanent proximity, that lives begun on Welsh farms can end in the mission compound at Rorke’s Drift, and nowhere is that more vividly felt than here. Who in 1821 had heard of Missolonghi, Peta, or any of the other battle honours that punctuate the lists of Philhellene dead? What was it that brought William Washington here from America, to die on a British flagship in the harbour at Nauplia, killed by a Greek bullet? Or the nineteen-year-old Heise from Hanover to Peta – only to be beheaded on the field if he was lucky, and if not, forced to carry his comrades’ heads back to Arta before being impaled on the grey castellated walls of its Frankish citadel?

‘We are all Greeks,’³ Shelley proclaimed in 1821 with the largesse of a man firmly lodged in Italy, and yet if Washington and Heise might well have made the same claim it is less clear what they would have meant. There are certainly men here who would have echoed the language of Shelley’s ‘Hellas’, homeless refugees from monarchical despotism who would have died to keep the seventeen-year-old scion of the house of Wittelsbach or any other royal line out of Greece. There were men again for whom the war was a crusade, fought with all the polemical and emotional bitterness of religious war. ‘I wholly wish,’ one volunteer wrote, ‘to annihilate, extirpate and destroy those swarms and hordes of people called Turk.’⁴ Others fought because they had always fought and knew nothing else. There were young Byronists absorbed in some designer war of their own invention, charlatans attracted by the hope of profit, classicists infatuated with Greece’s past, Benthamite reformers, ageing Bonapartists – and then all those there for a dozen different motives, who might just once have known why they came but had long forgotten by the time they died.

‘For the most part the scum of their country,’ the English volunteer Frank Abney Hastings harshly wrote of them, ‘perhaps no crime can be named that might not have been found among the corps called Philhellenes.’⁵ This was a verdict, too, which Greek indifference would seem to have endorsed but one need only point to Hastings himself to qualify that judgement.* Or to Number 18 among the Missolonghi dead on the monument, General Normann – the same Normann who had found himself on different sides during the Napoleonic wars, fighting first against, then for, and finally against the French as his native Württemberg changed allegiance. He was in Greece as much to restore his tattered credit in his own eyes as in those of the world. Wounded at Peta, the man who had fought with the Austrians at Austerlitz and with the Grand Army on the retreat from Moscow, died grief-stricken at Missolonghi, finally broken by the last and bitterest disaster of his life.

There are twenty-five dead listed on this monument under Missolonghi; thirty-five under Nauplia; a single name, a man called Coffy, under Mitika; three under Parnassus and so on. In the first and last stages of the war some of these fought and died alongside their comrades, but for most of them these were lonely deaths in a struggle that had no shape and almost no battles, a conflict that wasted lives with a casual and purposeless savagery. There are no decorations after men’s names on this monument, no MM’s, no Croix de Guerre to suggest their courage or folly was ever recognized; no battalion names – no East Kents, no Artists’ Rifles, no Manchester Regiments – to promise any sense of comradeship. Some of them died of their wounds, some died mad, killed themselves or wasted from diseases. Some were killed by the Turks, others by the Greeks they had come to defend. Lord Charles Murray, a son of the Duke of Atholl, rich, generous and unbalanced, died in Gastoumi with a single dollar in his pocket. The eighteen year old Paul-Marie Bonaparte ran away from the university of Bologna only to shoot himself while cleaning his gun before he had so much as seen action. His corpse was kept for five years in a keg of rum in a Spetses monastery before being laid to rest on the island of Sphacteria.*

One of the more surprising ironies of history that this monument brings out is that if there was a single country that was relatively untouched by the excitement which swept Europe in 1821 it was Greece’s friend of popular mythology, Britain. It is true that in Thomas Gordon and Frank Abney Hastings Britain sent two of the wealthiest and most influential of the early Philhellenes, and yet in spite of all the committees formed and the pamphlets written, for a whole gamut of reasons that range from party politics to an oddly modern-looking compassion fatigue, no more than a dozen Britons actually made the journey out to Greece to fight during the first two years of the war.†

In the July of 1823, however, an ill-assorted menagerie of animals and men sailed from Genoa in an ugly, round-bottomed ‘tub’ on a voyage that would change this for good and hijack for Britain a place in Philhellene history it has never lost.

On board was the greatest of all Philhellenes, Lord Byron, and at his side a figure who embodies more vividly than anyone else the impact for good and ill that Byron had on the generation of Romantics who went to fight for Greek independence. With the exception of Byron he is probably the only English volunteer of whom anyone has heard, and yet for all that he said and wrote of himself in a lifetime of ruthless self-promotion there is scarcely a fact from his birth onwards that biography has not had to prise free of the lies with which he covered his tracks. He called himself one thing when the parish register gives another, claimed the friendship of Keats when he never met him; railed at his poverty with a private income, and boasted of an exotic past as a pirate when he was no more than a failed midshipman with the diluted romance of his family name, a squalid divorce and a musket ball in a knee to show for his first thirty years.

‘But tell me, who is this odd fish?’ Keats’s friend Joseph Severn demanded when he first met him in 1822 and it is a question biographers have been trying to answer ever since.⁶ To modern scholarship he is one of the great obstacles to historical truth, a compulsive braggart and liar. To the late Victorians he was the last apostolic link with its Romantic past, the intimate of Byron and Shelley through whom the ‘mighty dead’ spoke to a smaller and meaner age.⁷ To his contemporaries though – more vivid, more imaginatively ‘true’ than either the Grand Old Man of Millais’ portrait or the fraud of modern research – he was the man Severn himself dubbed ‘Lord Byron’s Jackal’;⁸ the man known to his friends with an impartiality which perhaps suggests why his name is not among the Philhellene dead, as ‘Greek’ or ‘Turk’ Trelawny.

1 THE WOLF CUB

My birth was unpropitious. I came into the world, branded and denounced as a vagrant; for I was a younger son of a family, so proud of their antiquity, that even gout and mortgaged estates were traced, many generations back, on the genealogical tree, as ancient heirlooms of aristocratic origin, and therefore reverenced. In such a house a younger son was like the cub of a felon wolf in good King Edgar’s days, when a price was set upon his head.

Trelawny’s Adventures of a Younger Son ¹

ONE OF the most depressing assumptions of modern biography is the belief that the truth of men’s or women’s lives always lies in the trivia of their existence. There is often a devotion to the minutiae of a subject’s life that no biographer would dream of expending on his own, a kind of displaced egotism which produces the biographical equivalent of ‘Parnassian’ poetry or possession football, an intricate and over burdened account which bears as much relation to the proper business of biography as chronicle does to history.

The most part of most lives is no more interesting than that of a cat and as both subject and practitioner of biography no one better illustrates this fact than Edward John Trelawny. At some stage in an obscure and embittered youth he seems to have taken stock of his early years, found them wanting in every detail and invented for himself a wilder and more glamorous history of rebellion and adventure which he then successfully maintained in conversation and print for another sixty years.

Of all the silences open to a human being on the subject of himself, Trelawny’s is that of a man who knows how little of interest there is to say, and there is an important lesson to be learned from his deception. There are certainly writers like Shelley or Dickens whose creative life is intimately connected with the rhythms and textures of everyday existence, but the ‘Trelawny’ who still matters, the ‘Trelawny’ Byron and Shelley could both call friend, is the ‘Trelawny’ of myth and not dull reality, the romantic hero who sprang frilly formed from out of his own fantasies and not the failed midshipman modern scholarship has put in its place.

Edward John Trelawny was born on 13 November 1792, that rich and varied year in the history of English Romanticism, the year which saw the birth not just of two of its greatest leaders in Shelley and John Keble but of its hidden and unsuspected nemesis in the infant shape of the future ‘Princess of the Parallelograms’ and wife to Lord Byron, Anne Isabella Milbanke. Through both his parents Trelawny was descended from some of the most colourful figures in English and West Country history, and at the end of the eighteenth century the senior branches of his mother’s and father’s families were still wealthy and important landowners in their native Cornwall. In later years Trelawny usually claimed to have been born in Cornwall himself, but whatever he inherited in terms of character from West Country forebears who fought at Agincourt and against the Armada, the less romantic setting for his own birth was almost certainly his grandfather’s house in Soho Square from where, on 29 November, he was baptized John in the parish church of St Mary Le Bone.

The little we know of his early life comes from a work of fiction that the forty-year old Trelawny foisted on a credulous world as ‘autobiography’ under the title of Adventures of a Younger Son. There is no more than a tiny fraction of it that careful examination has left intact as reliable history, but if among all the fantasies with which he embroidered his life there is one subject on which he can be trusted it is that of his parents, as unlovely a couple from all existing evidence as even their son portrayed. His father was a Charles Trelawny, a younger son himself and an impoverished lieutenant-colonel in the Coldstream Guards; his mother was Mary Hawkins, a sister of Sir Christopher Hawkins Bt., of Trewithen, ‘a dark masculine woman of three and twenty’ with nothing to recommend her but an inheritance.² They met at a ball. He was the handsomest man in the room, she apparently the richest catch. In the eyes of the impoverished twenty-nine-year-old officer, wrote their son with that dry economy which characterizes his best prose, ‘Rich and beautiful soon became synonymous’.

He received marked encouragement from the heiress. He saw those he had envied, envying him. Gold was his God, for he had daily experienced those mortifications to which the want of it subjected him; he determined to offer up his heart to the temple of Fortune alone, and waited but an opportunity of displaying his apostacy to love. The struggle with his better feelings was of short duration. He called his conduct prudence and filial obedience – and those are virtues – thus concealing its naked atrocity by a seemly covering.… But why dwell on an occurrence so common in the world, the casting away of virtue and beauty for riches, though the devil gives them? He married; found the lady’s fortune a great deal less, and the lady a great deal worse than he had anticipated: went to town irritated and disappointed, with the consciousness of having merited his fate; sunk part of his fortune in idle parade to satisfy his wife; and his affairs being embarrassed by the lady’s extravagance, he was, at length, compelled to sell out of the army, and retire to economise in the country.³

In the history and literature of a century famous for its battles of the generations, it is doubtful whether even Shelley or Samuel Butler pursued their fathers’ memory with the same dogged and public hatred that Trelawny showed for his. There is a notorious tale he tells in Adventures of what he calls his first childhood ‘duel’,⁴ a mythic battle to the death with his father’s pet raven which in its capacity for violence and surrogate vengeance is the archetype of all the real and imagined struggles of his life ahead, of those fights with maddened stallions or the savage encounters with figures in authority who seemed to his adult mind the reincarnations of early tyranny.

One day I had a little girl for my companion, whom I had enticed from the nursery to go with me to get some fruit clandestinely. We slunk out, and entered the garden unobserved. Just as we were congratulating ourselves under a cherry-tree, up comes the accursed monster of a raven. It was no longer to be endured. He seized hold of the little girl’s frock; she was too frightened to scream; I did not hesitate an instant. I told her not to be afraid, and threw myself upon him. He let her go, and attacked me with bill and talon. I got hold of him by the neck, and heavily lifting him up, struck his body against the tree and the ground …

His look was now most terrifying: one eye was hanging out of his head, the blood coming from his mouth, his wings flapping the earth in disorder, and with a ragged tail, which I had half plucked by pulling at him during his first execution. He made a horrid struggle for existence, and I was bleeding all over. Now, with the aid of my brother, and as the raven was exhausted by exertion and wounds, we succeeded in gibbeting him again; and then with sticks we cudgelled him to death, beating his head to pieces. Afterwards we tied a stone to him, and sunk him in the duck-pond.⁵

Trelawny was five at the time of this incident, but there is no record of where it might have taken place. Judging from Adventures and the baptismal records of the successive children born to his increasingly gloomy parents, the Trelawny family lived a peripatetic life during his early years, moving between rented houses in the country, his maternal uncle John Hawkins’s seat at Bignor in Sussex and the family house of his grandfather, General Trelawny, at 9 Soho Square. When Trelawny was six his father had taken on the name of Brereton and with it a large fortune. Yet even with this new wealth there seems to have been no thought of an education for Trelawny and he grew up by his own account an intractable and surly boy, unloved and unloving, as large, bony and awkward as his mother and as violent in his moods as his father.

It was one of his father’s outbursts of temper that led, when he was about nine or ten, to his being literally frog-marched with his older brother Henry, to a private establishment in Bristol for his first experience of school. It was a bleakly forbidding building, enclosed within high walls and, to a child’s eyes, more like a prison. ‘He is savage, incorrigible! Sir, he will come to the gallows, if you do not scourge the devil out of him,’⁶ was his father’s parting injunction to the headmaster. The Reverend Samuel Seyer, incongruously small, dapper and powdered for a man who was a savage disciplinarian even by the standards of the day, eagerly embraced the advice. As a pupil of his, Trelawny later recalled with a nice discrimination, he was caned most hours and flogged most days. It was when he finally turned on his attackers, half-strangling the under master and assaulting Seyer himself, that he was sent home, as ignorant as the day he arrived two years earlier. ‘Come, Sir, what have you learnt,’ his father demanded of him.

‘Learnt!’ I ejaculated, speaking in a hesitant voice, for my mind misgave me as to what was to follow.

‘Is that the way to address me? Speak out, you dunce! and say, Sir! Do you take me for a foot-boy?’ raising his voice to a roar, which utterly drove out of my head what little the school-master had, with incredible toil and punishment, driven into it. ‘What have you learnt, you ragamuffin? What do you know?’

‘Not much, Sir!’

‘What do you know in Latin?’

‘Latin, Sir? I don’t know Latin, Sir!’

‘Not Latin, you idiot! Why, I thought they taught nothing but Latin.’

‘Yes, Sir; – cyphering.’

‘Well, how far did you proceed in arithmetic?’

‘No, Sir! – they taught me cyphering and writing.’

My father looked grave. ‘Can you work the rule of three, you dunce?’

‘Rule of three, Sir?’

‘Do you know subtraction? Come, you blockhead, answer me! Can you tell me, if five are taken from fifteen, how many remain?’

‘Five and fifteen, Sir, are – ’counting on my fingers, but missing my thumb, ‘are – are – nineteen, Sir!’

‘What! you incorrigible fool! – Can you repeat your multiplication table?’

‘What table, Sir?’

Then turning to my mother, he said: ‘Your son is a downright idiot, Madam, – perhaps knows not his own name. Write your name, you dolt!’

‘Write, Sir? I can’t write with that pen, Sir; it is not my pen.’

‘Then spell your name, you ignorant savage!’

‘Spell, Sir?’ I was so confounded that I misplaced the vowels. He arose in wrath, overturned the table, and bruised his shins in attempting to kick me, as I dodged him, and rushed out of the room.⁷

As the poet James Michie once remarked, the fact that a man lies most of the time does not mean he lies all of the time, but with Trelawny it is as well to be sceptical. There is no way of knowing whether this exchange, any more than the duel with the raven, actually occurred, and yet what is perhaps more important is that even as a history of Trelawny’s inner life Adventures needs to be treated with a caution that has not always been shown.

There is an obvious sense in which this same wariness has to be extended to all autobiographies, consciously or unconsciously shaping and selecting material as they inevitably do, but with Trelawny the timing of his Adventures makes it of particular relevance. There seems no doubt that the miseries he describes in its pages were real enough, and yet by the time that he came to put them in written form in 1831, the friendships of Byron and Shelley had armed him with a self-dramatizing language of alienation and revolt that enabled him to invest his infant battles with a stature and significance which seem curiously remote from the prosaic reality of childhood unhappiness.

For all that, though, it is clear that the young Trelawny felt and resented these indignities with an unusual intensity. There was an innate physical and mental toughness about him which equipped him for survival in even the most alien of worlds, and yet beneath a hardening carapace of indifference that sense of injustice and emotional betrayal which would fuel his whole life was festering dangerously. On his first night at school, as he lay on a beggarly pallet of a bed, the rush-lights extinguished, he had listened to the snores of his fellow pupils and stifled the sobs that would have betrayed his misery. The child who two years later escaped Seyer’s joyless and savage regime would allow no such weakness in his makeup, no vulnerability. Deprived of affection, he had learned the power of brute strength and domination, the virtue of self-reliance. He had become, he says in his richest Romantic strain, ‘callous’, ‘sullen’, ‘Vindictive’, ‘insensible’ and ‘indifferent to shame and fear’.⁸ ‘The spirit in me was gathering strength,’ he proudly recalled, ‘in despite of every endeavour to destroy it, like a young pine flourishing in the cleft of a bed of granite.’⁹

For a younger son of Trelawny’s class and educational inadequacy the options in life were strictly limited, but one of the more intriguing schemes for his future after this failure at school was Oxford and a career in the church. With a boy of thirteen who was still plainly gallows-bound, however, the navy offered a more traditional solution, and soon after leaving Seyer’s academy he was taken by his father down to Portsmouth and placed as a gentleman volunteer on the Superb under the command of a Captain Keates.

The treatment a volunteer of Trelawny’s age could expect in the Royal Navy during the time of the Napoleonic Wars would have varied with the personality of the ship’s captain, but even under the most enlightened and humane regime the life in the midshipman’s cockpit of a man-of-war was harsh and brutalizing. In the light of his fixed hatred of the service in later life, however, it is interesting that Trelawny’s first feelings for his new profession were ones of delight, and he soon had an unforgettable glimpse of the excitement and prize-money which made the wartime navy such a dangerous but attractive option to indigent younger sons. After a few days at sea, his ship crossed with the Pickle on its way back from Trafalgar, bringing to the stunned crew of the Superb the news of Nelson’s victory and death. The next morning they fell in with a part of the triumphant fleet, and Trelawny was transferred first to the Temeraire and then across to the stricken Colossus for its journey back to Portsmouth.

We had had a rough passage, being five or six sail of the line in company, some totally, and others partially dismasted. Our ship, having been not only dismasted, but razed by the enemy’s shots (that is, the upper deck almost cut away), our passage home was boisterous. The gallant ship, whose lofty canvases, a few days before, had fluttered almost amidst the clouds, as she bore down on the combined fleets … was crippled, jury-mast, and shattered, a wreck labouring in the trough of the sea, and driven about at the mercy of the wild waves and wind. With infinite toil and peril, amidst the shouts and reverberated hurrahs from successive ships, we passed on, towed into safe moorings at Spithead.

What a scene of joy then took place. From the ship to the shore one might have walked on a bridge of boats, struggling to get alongside. Some, breathless with anxiety, eagerly demanded the fate of brothers, sons, or fathers, which was followed by joyous clasping and wringing of hands, and some returned to the shore, pale, haggard, and heart-stricken. Then came the extortionary Jew, chuckling with ecstacy at the usury he was about to realise from anticipated prize-money, proffering his gold with a niggard’s hand, and demanding monstrous security and interest for his monies. Huge bomboats, filled with fresh provisions, and a circle of boats hung around us, crammed with sailors’ wives, children, doxies, thick as locusts. These last poured in so fast, that of the eight thousand said to belong at that period to Portsmouth and Gosport, I hardly think they could have left eight on shore. In a short period they seemed to have achieved what the combined enemies’ fleets had vauntingly threatened – to have taken entire possession of the Trafalgar squadron. I remember, the following day, while the ship was dismantling, these scarlet sinners hove out the first thirty-two pound guns; I think there were not less than three or four hundred of them heaving at the capstan.¹⁰

This passage is memorable enough for that exuberance and energy that made him one of the finest storytellers of the century, yet its real interest lies in the light it throws on an event which must in some way have shaped Trelawny’s whole personality and sense of self. Here was an occasion where Trelawny was in a sense there but not really a part, a figure hovering somewhere between participant and spectator at one of the great events of history, an innocently fraudulent beneficiary of the acclaim and excitement which greeted the shattered but victorious Colossus on its return to England.

For the rest of his days Trelawny would bitterly regret that he had missed the greatest battle ever fought under sail and the hurrahs of the ships’ crews anchored at Spithead lodged deep in his soul. Throughout the whole of his life the instinctive movement of Trelawny’s memory would always take him to the centre of great events, cavalierly annexing whole scenes and achievements as if they had been his own, and it was possibly here at Portsmouth, as a romantic and impressionable thirteen-year-old blending invisibly with the men who had won Trafalgar, that he had his first heady taste of that surrogate fame that would be the life blood of his adult existence.

If that is the case, his next years in the navy, from 1806 to 1812, must have been ones of bitter disappointment. By the time that Trelawny emerged from obscurity onto a public stage he had sunk their memory beneath the piratical fantasies that fill Adventures, but in the muster books and logs of Admiralty records his life as a volunteer and then midshipman stretches out from ship to ship in a sobering and unbroken line which leaves no room for romance, ambiguity or fulfilment.*

There is no historical document at once so dry and compelling as a ship’s log, nothing that better evokes the routine, discipline and anonymity Trelawny came to hate, but there was another reason, too, for his growing resentment that no mere record could show. ‘Who can paint in words what I felt?’ he asked of his readers later,

Imagine me torn from my native country, destined to cross the wide ocean, to a wild region, cut off from every tie, or possibility of communication, transported like a felon as it were, for life, for, at that period, few ships returned under seven or more years. I was torn away, not seeing my mother, or brother, or sisters, or one familiar face; no voice to speak a word of comfort, or to inspire me with the smallest hope that any thing human took an interest in me … From that period, my affections, imperceptibly, were alienated from my family and kindred, and sought the love of strangers in the wide world …

I could no longer conceal from myself the painful conviction that I was an utter outcast; that my parent had thrust me from his threshold, in the hope that I should not again cross it. My mother’s intercessions (if indeed she made any) were unavailing: I was left to shift for myself. The only indication of my father’s considering he had still a duty to perform towards me, was in an annual allowance, to which either his conscience or his pride impelled him. Perhaps, having done this, he said, with other good and prudent men, – ‘I have provided for my son. If he distinguishes himself, and returns, as a man, high in rank and honour, I can say, – he is my son, and I made him what he is! His daring and fearless character may succeed in the navy.’ He left me to my fate, with as little remorse as he would have ordered a litter of blind puppies to be drowned.¹¹

All the evidence suggests, in fact, that his father exerted whatever influence he had in his son’s favour. Trelawny’s career, however, was proof against help. The account he gave of this time in his Adventures is clearly heightened for effect, but his tales of brawls and endless hours of punishment at the masthead are endorsed by his long list of ships as one captain after another rid himself of a recalcitrant midshipman.

From the Colossus to the Puissant, from the Puissant to the Woolwich and on to the Resistance, the Royal William, the Cornelia and the Hecate; the list stretches out, each change marking another step in Trelawny’s disillusionment, another loosening of ties, a fresh confirmation as the surly boy grew into embittered manhood that there was nowhere he belonged.

After his sudden and dramatic baptism of 1805, there was also little action to alleviate the boredom of naval life. In the period immediately after Trafalgar he had gone on two long voyages to the east and South America, but it was not until 1810 – five years and ten ships after going to sea on the Superb – that the amphibious assault on the French-held island of Mauritius gave him his first hope of the excitement he craved.

As it turned out, the defendants offered virtually no resistance to the massive force which had been assembled, but the attack on Java in the following year – one of the forgotten classics of British arms – at last brought the nineteen-year-old midshipman into a war that, with only a brief respite, had been going on since the execution of Louis XVI just two months after Trelawny’s birth.

The fleets carrying the combined army of native and European troops had sailed from Madras and Calcutta, with the Commander in Chief, General Auchmuty, and the Governor-General, Lord Minto, aboard the HMS Akbar on which Trelawny served. After a fraught passage south the invasion force was landed on 4 August 1811 at Chilingching, and marching eastwards through a heavily cultivated landscape of ditches, water tanks and dykes which reminded Minto of a Chinese wallpaper, entered Batavia only to find its defendants withdrawn behind the strongly fortified Lines of Cornelis some six miles to the north.

On 26 August, under the brilliant leadership of Colonel Rollo Gillespie, and supported by naval guns dragged overland and fired by sailors, the lines were stormed and the campaign effectively brought to a conclusion. By that time, however, Trelawny’s role in the victory was over. Sometime before the final assault, his gun party had been surprised on the approach to Cornelis, and in the skirmish which followed he received a sabre slash across the face and a musket ball which remained in his leg for over thirty years until it was removed without anaesthetic by an Italian surgeon under the impressed gaze of Robert Browning.

Java was Trelawny’s first experience of warfare on any major scale with the navy, and his last. Taken back to the Akbar, he soon went down with the cholera that swept through the invasion force, killing more than two hundred sailors. He was lucky to survive, but it marked the end of his career. By the August of 1812 he was back in England, and three years later finally discharged from the navy without a commission, a midshipman sans prospects, education or even the halfpay of a lieutenant, one more ‘useless Dick Musgrove’ left high and dry by the coming of peace.

When Trelawny came to write about his career in the navy, he was again to invest his adolescent anger with all the political and revolutionary radicalism that coloured his schoolday memories. At the age of twenty-three, however, there can have seemed nothing glamorous to him in failure. The knowledge we have of him in these years after he returned from the east is admittedly of a fragmentary and rather special kind, yet the few clues that do survive suggest a far more conventional and vulnerable personality than the man who finally emerged from obscurity to stake his claim as one of the century’s most defiant rebels.

The first of these is no more than a footnote, but it is nevertheless interesting that, in these first years of peace, he seems to have gone out of his way to assert his naval credentials. In the confident pomp of his later Adventures he might denounce the service as an instrument of arbitrary despotism, and yet, far from rejecting it at the time, he masqueraded in civilian life under the name of ‘Lieutenant’ Trelawny, a rank to which he had no claim and one the mature Trelawny would have despised.

For a young man of his temperament and background, coming to terms with the blank mediocrity of his prospects, this discreet and venial piece of self-promotion is neither very unusual nor important, but the same years throw up another clue to his personality which is best recorded in his own words.

The fatal noose was cast around my neck, my proud crest humbled to the dust, the bloody bit thrust into my mouth, my shaggy mane trimmed, my hitherto untrammeled back bent with a weight I could neither endure nor shake off, my light and springy action changed into a painful amble – in short, I was married.¹²

It is as much a truism of biography as it is of fiction that domestic happiness leaves little trace of its presence, and so it is perhaps not surprising that we know what we do of Trelawny’s marriage only because and when it failed. His bride, Caroline Addison, was the eighteen-year-old daughter of an East India merchant, a girl of a family ‘fully the equal of his own’¹³ as he defensively told his uncle John Hawkins, attractive, ‘accomplished’ and, from the slim evidence of her surviving letters, in love with the tall, handsome midshipman that the ungainly lout of a boy had become.

In spite of the conventional claims he made for his wife’s pedigree, the marriage marked another step in Trelawny’s alienation from his parents. ‘My father was never partial to me,’ he later wrote to John Hawkins, touchingly but unsuccessfully eager to preserve some contact with at least part of his family,

& from the moment of my mariage discarded for ever me, and my hopes, nor has he since either pardoned or even allowed my name to be mentioned in his presence.¹⁴

The Addison family were clearly as opposed to the union as Trelawny’s because with the single exception of the bride’s uncle there was nobody from either side at the wedding that followed their brief courtship. They were married on 17 May 1813 in St Mary’s Paddington and, after an initial period living in Denham and London, moved first to lodgings in College Street, Bristol, in January 1816, and then in the July of the same year to board with a Captain White and his family at Vue Cottage near Bath.

It was from this house on 31 December 1816, just three and a half years and two daughters after their marriage, that Caroline Trelawny eloped to Southampton with a Thomas Coleman, a Captain in the 98th of Foot. In the immediate shock of betrayal Trelawny spoke and wrote wildly of a duel, but as with everything else in his early life reality lagged dully behind and in the summer of 1817 he began instead a long and public haul through the civil and ecclesiastical courts that only ended with the royal assent to an Act of Parliament permitting his divorce and remarriage in May 1819.

There is something in the very nature of divorce testimony which exposes a side of life that history scarcely notices, and through the evidence of the landladies and servants during these trials we have a squalid picture of a life that must have been the opposite of everything the young Trelawny craved. Even the geography of his betrayal has a sadly ignoble feel to it. His wife’s affair with Coleman had begun at their lodgings in Bristol, where the Trelawnys had the first floor, consisting of a drawing room and adjoining bedroom. At the end of March 1816, Captain Coleman, a much older man, arrived, renting a parlour and bedroom on the ground floor beneath. At the hearing in the Consistory Court, the Trelawnys’ landlady, Sarah Prout, described her own discovery of what was going on in the house.

Shortly after Captain Coleman came to lodge in her House, Mrs Trelawny formed an Acquaintance with him unknown to her Husband. Captain Coleman occasionally lent the Deponent (Sarah Prout) Books, but she, having but little time for reading, lent them to Mrs Trelawny, who, as the Deponent afterwards discovered, used to send Margaret Bidder the Servant to Captain Coleman’s Apartments to return or change the Books, and sometimes went herself for that purpose; and it was by these means, as the Deponent believed, that the Acquaintance between them first commenced. The Deponent further saith that by reason of what she will hereafter depose, she verily believes that the Acquaintance between Mrs Trelawny and Captain Coleman led to a criminal Intimacy between them, and that they were guilty of many improper Familiarities with each other … One evening … the Deponent went out to take a walk, and returned about eight o’clock in the Evening: Candles were usually brought and the Window Shutters closed in Captain Coleman’s Parlour before this time, and they were so upon the present Ocasion, but as the Deponent was waiting for the Street Door to be opened she observed the Shutters to be not quite closed, and the Blinds within to be not quite drawn down; and on then looking through the opening the Deponent by the light of the Candle saw Mrs Trelawny reclining on the Sofa on the left Arm of Captain Coleman, whilst his right Hand was thrust into her Bosom and he was kissing her. The Deponent, on the street door being opened, went up Stairs, and almost immediately afterwards heard Mrs Trelawny go up Stairs from the passage as if she had just entered the House, and go into her Bed Room as if to take off her Bonnet after a Walk, Mr Trelawny being, as the Deponent at that time observed, reading in his own Room … ¹⁵

For all the conventionality of its phrasing, Sarah Prout’s testimony provides a sadly absorbing insight into a world poised between a Rowlandsonesque coarseness and an encroaching moral censoriousness. It is not clear from the evidence how much Trelawny himself suspected, but shortly after Coleman’s arrival there had been a row over a handkerchief which uncannily echoes the casus belli in Trelawny’s favourite Othello. Another incident followed soon after when Caroline Trelawny was forced to hide in Coleman’s bedroom on the arrival of some of his fellow officers. Then, one evening at the beginning of June, Trelawny tried to persuade his wife and landlady to join him at the theatre, one of his favourite activities. Caroline refused and he went on alone. Once he had left the house, Caroline suggested to Mrs Prout that the two of them should go instead to the Circus, ‘another place of Theatrical Amusement at Bristol’:

The Deponent endeavoured to dissuade her very much from going, and represented the Impropriety of it, in her, Mrs Trelawny’s then state of Pregnancy, but she persisted in going, and the Deponent in Consequence agreed to accompany her. They accordingly left home, but had not proceeded far before Mrs Trelawny complained of being very poorly, and requested the Deponent to get someone else to accompany her, saying that she would return home. The Deponent accordingly parted with Mrs Trelawny but followed her home in about a quarter of an Hour afterwards and let herself in with a private Key of her own. She tried the Parlour Door, but found it locked, and then walked out into the Garden behind the House where she observed the Blind of Captain Coleman’s Bed Room Window not quite drawn down, and she at the same time observed a Towel lying on the Roof of an adjoining Outhouse, having apparently fallen from Mr and Mrs Trelawny’s Bed Room Window. The Deponent’s Suspicions having been excited by the Circumstances before deposed of, and by the sudden return home of Mrs Trelawny, she walked out on to the Roof of the said Outhouse which she could very easily do, as if to pick up the Towel, and looked into Captain Coleman’s Bed Room, through that part of the Window over which the Blind was not drawn down: It was between eight and nine o’Clock in the Evening, and not quite dark. The Door between the Bed Room and Parlour was also open, and there was light in the latter: the Deponent could therefore distinguish every Object in the Bed Room, and she saith that she then saw Captain Coleman and Mrs Trelawny on the Bed together: Captain Coleman had his Coat and Waistcoat off, his Pantaloons were down, and he was lying upon Mrs Trelawny whose Petticoats were up; and they were then in the Act of Sexual Intercourse with each other. The Deponent remained a Minute or two at the Window, greatly surprised, until she saw Mrs Trelawny get off the Bed, and then she returned into the House, and waited on the Stairs, where in about five minutes she saw Mrs Trelawny come out of the Parlour Door very hastily with her Shoes in her Hand.¹⁶

Mrs Prout testified that she had confronted Caroline with the evidence of her adultery, and demanded that the Trelawnys should leave. After an initial denial Trelawny’s wife had confessed everything, but ‘entreated her not to tell her husband of it’,

as her, Mrs Trelawny’s life depended on it: She also promised most fervently, never to be guilty of such a Crime again, and begged that the Deponent would herself make the Excuse to Mr Trelawny for wishing him to quit his lodgings.¹⁷

The excuse Mrs Prout came up with was that she needed to paint their rooms, and sometime towards the end of July or the beginning of August the couple moved to new lodgings near Bath owned by a Captain White. Within a short time an unrepentant Caroline was recruiting different members of the White family to collect mail addressed to her under fictitious names at addresses in the town, but if the trial evidence is to be believed, no hint of this seems to have reached Trelawny, who alone among his landladies, servants and his mother-in-law was unaware of his wife’s liaison.

Even if Trelawny was ignorant of what was going on, however, relations between him and Caroline had deteriorated beyond repair, and after the birth of their second daughter at Vue Cottage communications between them were bizarrely limited to written requests for interviews. Unable to tolerate this atmosphere any longer, Mrs White finally asked them to leave, fixing 31 December for their departure. ‘About four o’Clock in the Afternoon however of that day,’ Mrs White testified to the Consistory Court,

Mrs Trelawny being wanted in the Drawing Room, the Deponent and others of her family went to seek her all over the House but she was not to be found: Captain White and Mr Trelawny then left the House to go different ways in search of her, and the Deponent was afterwards informed by her said husband that he had met with Mrs Trelawny who had acknowledged to him that she had eloped with the Intention of proceeding to Captain Coleman at Southampton, and pressed him (Captain White) not to prevent her, but that he had conducted her to her Mother in Bath, and left her under her said Mother’s protection, without apprizing Mr Trelawny therof.¹⁸

Trelawny’s humiliation was complete, the injury to his pride as the case dragged through the courts public and prolonged. For over two years after her elopement he was forced to live with the sordid details of her betrayal, with the bleak evidence that crumpled sheets and billets doux, towels drying at parlour windows and provincial intimacies made up the sad reality of his waking hours.

The one consolation to emerge from this crisis was the friendship of the White family with whom he and Caroline had boarded, and in particular with the young daughter Augusta. In the wider picture of his life this relationship is of only marginal importance but, in the way their kindness brought out all those feelings that had been stifled in childhood and the navy, it foreshadows the most important ties of his life. From the start the Whites had taken his side against Caroline and when, in the February after her elopement, Captain White, dragged down by debts and depression, killed himself, their friendship was sealed. ‘After so dreadful a catastrophe most of your friends would write lamentations at your Father’s rash fate,’ he wrote to Augusta,

but as I differ and am not swayed by opinions of other men – I shall commence with rejoicing that your unfortunate Father has at last ended his miseries … tell your mother to command me in every way … If I can be of the most trivial service command me and I will fly down to my loved Sisters … Your mother shall find in me a Son, you a Brother, and your Brothers a Father.¹⁹

That last note, so revealing of the emotional vacuum marriage had done nothing to fill, is repeated in another letter to Augusta, written from his family house in Soho Square on 1 October 1817. ‘With my trunks,’ he wrote,

arrived your affectionate letters My Dear Kind Sister, they infused new life, into my drooping soul, – ought not such a friend to counterbalance, all the ills I have endured, – Your love, and sympathy, soothed my signed soul – and bid me hope … O my dearest Sister could you but see my heart, you would wonder it should be inclosed, in so rough a form; – my study through life, has been, to hide under the mask of affected roughness, the tenderest, warmest, and most affectionate sencibility.²⁰

Only a handful of Trelawny’s letters survive from this period, and yet colourful as they are, they need to be treated warily as evidence of his feelings. The temptations of so sympathetic a correspondent for a humiliated cuckold are too obvious to need spelling out, but what is more interesting is the impression his letters give that he had neither the education nor the vocabulary at this period to express or even understand the more complex aspects of his personality.

Trelawny was a late and slow developer, and nowhere is this plainer than in his correspondence. With the mature Trelawny it is a safe bet that when he writes something he says precisely what he means to say, but in his early years there is an invariable sense of a man struggling for a voice and character, of a writer fumbling towards an identity that he has not yet made his own.

In their very turbulence, however, their romantic theatricality, their heavy posturing, these letters remain the clearest sign of the inward transformation that Trelawny underwent during the unhappy years of navy and married life. There is no doubt that in the best traditions of romantic alienation he went out of his way to exaggerate his loneliness to any woman prepared to listen, but as in childhood the misery was real enough and the overriding consequence of his marriage was to drive Trelawny into an internalized world of the imagination in which he could take refuge from the disappointments of life.

Collaborating in this retreat, shaping and colouring this inner world, were the books on which Trelawny glutted himself during these wilderness years in Bristol and London. If his grammar and spelling are anything to go by, he had left the navy as ignorant and illiterate as the day he entered, but in the first years of peace he set out on a bizarre but heroic course of reading and self-improvement that was to alter his life, immersing himself in the tragedies of Shakespeare and the romances of Scott, in the defiance of Milton’s Satan and the violence of Jacobean revenge, in Hope’s Anastasius and Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey, in the poetry of Rogers, Cowper, Young, Falconer and Moore, but above all – ten of the fifty odd volumes in his library in 1820 – in the exotic, profligate and dazzling world of Byron’s poetry and tales.

The influence of Byron on Trelawny’s development is a classic example of the sad paradox that while great art seldom made anyone a better person bad art can be profoundly dangerous. There were certainly aspects of Byron’s wonderful mature genius from which Trelawny might well have learned but it was the self-indulgent Byron of Childe Harold that lodged in his soul, the gloomily antisocial heroes of the Eastern Tales like Lara or Conrad, mysterious, violent and aristocratic outcasts from a petty world, in whom he found the model, mirror and philosophical justification for his own troubled personality.

It seems almost too pat that also among his books at this time was Volney’s Ruins of Empire, the work from which Frankenstein’s monster, listening at the cottage window, learned all he knew of human society, but it is too potent a symbol of Trelawny’s plight to let pass. In old age Trelawny was to become an extraordinarily open-minded and intelligent judge of books, but the failed midshipman who fed off Byron in this way was above all an outcast, an intellectual and emotional outsider incapable of measuring a world of which he was largely ignorant, desperate only to find in his reading some echo or corroboration of his own feelings.

There is nothing rare in men or women shaping their lives by some ideal but as one looks at the influence of Byronic Romanticism on Trelawny during these years it seems doubtful that anyone ever chose so spurious a model. He seems to have been able to read and re-read the great tragedies of Shakespeare, and learn nothing but quotations. Dryden has left no mark. Jane Austen appears never to have been read. Byron, however, filled his imagination, shaped his aspirations and confirmed him in his worst excesses, determined the way he talked and wrote, the way he dressed and behaved, until within a decade it was impossible for contemporaries to know whether he had spawned the Corsair or the Corsair him.

It was under this influence, in the boarding houses of Bristol, Bath and London, that Trelawny now committed himself to that major deception which was ultimately to transform his existence. It is hard to imagine that the idea of actual imposture can have seized hold of him all at once, and yet as the failures became starker his youthful daydreams must have taken on a more urgent and adult significance, edging the innocent escapism of his naval days ever closer to a wholesale denial of a life which had let him down.

It would be another dozen years before the fantasies of these years took on their definitive shape in Adventures, but it is still in its pages that we can best trace the genesis of a story that for the next century and more would enjoy the status of history. According to the version of his ‘autobiography’, Trelawny’s ship was in harbour in Bombay when he and a friend called Walter decided to desert, and formed a friendship with a man calling himself De Witt, but whose name turns out to be the equally fictional De Ruyter.* Trelawny’s devotion to him was immediate and complete. There was nothing De Ruyter could not do, nothing he did not know, no way either physically or mentally that he was not Trelawny’s superior. He was approaching his thirtieth year, could speak most European languages faultlessly, and all the native dialects from ‘the guttural, brute-like grunting of the Malay, the more humanized Hindostanee’ to the ‘softer and harmonious Persian’ with equal ease.²¹ In stature he was majestic, ‘the slim form of the date-tree’ disguising ‘the solid strength of the oak’.²² His forehead was smooth as sculptured marble, his hair dark and abundant, his features well defined, his eyes – the windows to his restless and brilliant soul – as various as a chameleon in their colour.

Shortly after coming under De Ruyter’s spell, the incident occurred in this imaginary version of events that ended Trelawny’s naval servitude. The two men were playing billiards, when a Scotch lieutenant who had tormented his and Walter’s lives entered. He demanded to know when Trelawny was rejoining his ship, which was sailing the next day. At this Trelawny’s blood seemed to ignite with fire, and then congeal to ice. He dashed his hat in the man’s face, tore off the last insignia of bondage from his own dress, and drew his sword. The lieutenant broke into abject disclaimers of friendship, and begged his pardon. In his rage Trelawny struck him to the ground, kicking and trampling and spitting on him as the creature begged for mercy. ‘His screams and protestations,’ Trelawny wrote,

while they increased my contempt, added fuel to my anger, for I was furious that such a pitiful wretch should have lorded it over me so long. I roared out, ‘For the wrongs you have done me, I am satisfied. Yet nothing but your currish blood can atone for your atrocities to Walter!’

Having broken my own sword at the onset, I drew his from beneath his prostrate carcass, and should inevitably have despatched him on the spot, had not a stronger hand gripped hold of my arm. It was De Ruyter’s; and he said, in a low, quiet voice, ‘Come, no killing. Here!’ (giving me a broken billiard cue) ‘a stick is a fitter weapon to chastise a coward with. Don’t rust good steel.’

It was useless to gainsay him, for he had taken the sword out of my hand. I therefor belaboured the rascal: his yells were dreadful; he was wild with terror, and looked like a maniac. I never ceased till I had broken the butt-end of the cue over him, and till he was motionless.²³

The young rebel who had suffered under his father’s brutality, under the cruelty of the Reverend Seyer, and in the navy, was at last free. The mysterious De Ruyter who had passed himself off in Bombay as a merchant, now revealed himself as a privateer operating under a French flag, an enemy to all tyranny and corruption, and in the seventeen-year-old midshipman recognized his spiritual heir and child.

It was the beginning of a new life, and under the leadership of this man, Trelawny embarked on the imaginary career of adventure, excitement, bloodshed, romance and crime which forms the great bulk of his ‘autobiography’. There is no summary of Adventures that can possibly do justice to the colour and imaginative profligacy of his fantasies, nothing that can capture either the compelling immediacy of Trelawny’s fictional world or the visions of violence and domination with which he took his revenge on Caroline and a world that stolidly refused to come up to expectations. As a lonely and unhappy young midshipman, he had daydreamed with his friend Walter of a life without parents, patrimonies or ties ‘amidst the children of nature,’²⁴ but the dreams now were more sinister. Crazed stallions, Malay peasants, naval officers, ugly old women are all brutally mastered, bullied, beaten, burned, killed or crushed like toads beneath his feet. The vegetation and landscape of the east which so prosaically reminded Lord Minto of a Chinese wallpaper, takes on a vivid almost surrealistic life. Wild animals fill his vision with the same haunting, threatening force that they have in Othello. It is wish fulfilment on the grand scale. In De Ruyter the emotional orphan has found a father; in the lovely Zela, shy and beautiful as a faun, devoted to Trelawny until she expires in his arms after a shark attack, the cuckold at last finds the bride he deserves; and in the excitement, colour and violence of his adventures, the unemployed midshipman wins the recognition the Royal Navy had denied him.

After the public humiliations of the King’s Bench and Consistory Courts, Trelawny was ready to face the world, a Byronic hero with a history and personality to match. In the depths of his imagination he had forged an identity which seemed more vividly true to his sense of self than the reality he had left behind, and if the same might be said of every creative liar, what distinguishes him from a Savage or Baron Corvo is that for the next five years life was to give him what he wanted with an almost Faustian prodigality – years in which invention became a self-fulfilling ordinance, and events danced to the tune of the imagination until fantasy and life pursued each other in an unbreakable circle.

If psychologically he was prepared for a new life, financially, too, he was at last able to expand his horizons. Through all the rows with his father he had continued to draw an allowance of three hundred pounds a year, and while that was scarcely enough to support a family in comfort, for a single man ready to live abroad it opened up possibilities of leisured and gentlemanly self-indulgence. On 19 May 1819, the Royal Assent to his divorce was given, freeing him of those domestic ties which had shackled his turbulent spirit. The seven lean years were over. Caroline, at last, was out of his life, taking their younger daughter, Eliza, with her. The elder child, Julia, had been farmed out to friends of the Whites. He seems to have backtracked too from the brief intensity of his friendship with Augusta, allowing it to mellow into a mutual warmth which lasted throughout their lives.

The disappointment and failures of the navy and marriage, the first-floor parlours and bedrooms, were not just forgotten but buried. Mentally he had toughened and changed, developing out of all recognition from the dull lout his uncle had found him ten years earlier. At the age of twenty-eight he had also physically grown into the role he had created for himself, tall, dark, athletic, immensely strong and handsome. All he needed now was a stage on which to play out his new part. His father had offered to buy him a commission in the army, but for a follower of De Ruyter that was hardly an option. He had talked vaguely for a time of South America as well, of joining either General Wilson or a commune. In the end, however, he settled for the Continent. One of his last addresses in England before leaving was 7 Orange St, the site now of the archives of the National Portrait Gallery. It was a prescient choice of address for a man about to launch himself into the forefront of the nation’s consciousness.

2 THE SUN AND THE GLOW-WORM

‘You won’t like him.’

Byron to Teresa Guiccioli ¹

IT MUST HAVE BEEN sometime in the autumn of 1819 or the beginning of 1820 that Trelawny finally left England for the Continent, travelling first to Paris where his mother was chaperoning his sisters on a predatory hunt for husbands, and from there to Geneva.

With the poverty of letters from this time it is impossible to be dogmatic about Trelawny’s motives but there would have been compelling reasons other than disappointment and money for his decision to live abroad. There appears to have been nothing particular in his choice of Switzerland, but for a man of his burgeoning radicalism the England of Castlereagh and the Peterloo Massacre can have seemed no place to be, a country frozen in the mini ice-age of reaction which gripped post-Napoleonic Europe, a land, in Shelley’s savage assault, of,

An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king, –

Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow

Through public scorn, – mud from a muddy spring, –

Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,

But leech-like to their feinting country cling,

Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow, –²

At a time when so many European liberals were seeking refuge in England, there seems something stubbornly wrongheaded in the reverse process, but for Trelawny at least the freedom the Continent offered had more to do with the texture of life than any considered set of principles. Like so many men of his nation and class nineteenth-century Europe represented above all else a continuation of the eighteenth century ‘by other means’, an opportunity – heterosexual, homosexual, financial, social or whatever – to pursue a style of life which inflation and the looming threat of ‘Victorian’ morality was endangering at home.

It was an opportunity he embraced with relief and gusto, but amidst the shooting, hunting and fishing that signalled a reabsorption into his own class, a meeting occurred that was to change the direction of his life for good. A family friend of the Trelawnys from the West Country, Sir John Aubyn, kept a generous if irregular open house at his villa just outside Geneva, and it was in this motley expatriate world that Trelawny first met Edward Williams, an Indian army officer living in Switzerland as a married man with the wife of a fellow officer, and Thomas Medwin, the cousin of Percy Bysshe Shelley.

The friendship of Williams, at least, was one that Trelawny treasured all his life, but more important, it was through these two men that he now found himself drawn into the Italian orbit of Byron and Shelley. There is no way of being sure when he first came across the name or work of a poet who, in 1820, was known mainly for his atheism, but Trelawny’s account invests the occasion with a significance that is poetically if not literally true. The scene is set in Lausanne in 1820, during a conversation with a bookseller-friend, who would translate passages of Schiller, Kant or Goethe for an ex-midshipman still painfully conscious of his lack of education. The story forms the opening scene of his Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author and among the apocrypha of his early life it holds a special place.

One morning I saw my friend sitting under the acacias on the terrace in front of the house in which Gibbon had lived, and where he wrote the Decline and Fall. He said, ‘I am trying to sharpen my wits in this pungent air which gave such a keen edge to the great historian, so that I may fathom this book. Your modern poets, Byron, Scott, and Moore, I can read and understand as I walk along, but I have got hold of a book by one that makes me stop to take breath and think.’ It was Shelley’s ‘Queen Mab’. As I had never heard that name or title, I asked how he got the volume. ‘With a lot of new books in English, which I took in exchange for old French ones. Not knowing the names of the authors, I might not have looked into them, had not a pampered, prying priest smelt this one in my lumber-room, and after a brief glance at the notes, exploded in wrath, shouting out, ‘Infidel, jacobin, leveller: nothing can stop this spread of blasphemy but the stake and the faggot; the world is retrograding into accursed heathenism and universal anarchy!’ When the priest had departed, I took up the small book he had thrown down, saying, ‘Surely there must be something here worth tasting.’ You know the proverb, ‘No person throws a stone at a tree that does not bear fruit.’

‘Priests do not’, I answered; ‘so I, too, must have a bite of the forbidden fruit.’³*

Set alongside the impact of Byron on Trelawny, the influence of Shelley’s poetry seems virtually negligible, but this, in stylized form, is still one of the key moments of his life. A few days after this exchange he was breakfasting at a hotel in Lausanne, when a chance conversation with an Englishman on a walking holiday with two women gave him his first opportunity to test this new enthusiasm. It was only after their party had broken up that Trelawny learned that the ‘self-confident and dogmatic’ stranger was Wordsworth, but chasing him down again he ‘asked him abruptly what he thought of Shelley as a poet.

‘Nothing,’ he replied, as abruptly.

‘Seeing my surprise, he added, ‘A poet who has not produced a good poem before he is twenty five, we may conclude cannot, and never will do so.’

‘The Cenci!’ I said eagerly.

‘Won’t do,’ he replied, shaking his head, as he got into the carriage: a rough-coated Scotch terrier followed him.

‘This hairy fellow is our flea-trap,’ he shouted out as they started off …

I did not then know that the full-fledged author never reads the writings of his contemporaries, except to cut them up in a review – that being a work of love. In after years, Shelley being dead, Wordsworth confessed this fact; he was then induced to read some of Shelley’s poems, and admitted that Shelley was the greatest master of harmonious verse in our modern literature.⁴

It says a lot for Trelawny’s critical judgement that, almost alone and untaught, he could have discovered Shelley for himself, but there must also have been more personal and less literary factors that helped quicken his new interest. For a man who saw himself in the self-dramatizing terms he so habitually used, the exiled poet would have offered a mirror to his own miserable experience, and if Shelley was merely the ‘glow-worm’ to Byron’s ‘sun’, then that can only have made him appear more accessible. The arrival of Medwin meant too that the chance of meeting him was something that had probably been discussed from the earliest days in Switzerland, but the unlamented death of Trelawny’s father in 1820 put any thoughts of Italy back by at least a year. Travelling in his own carriage through Chalon-sur-Saône, where he left Edward and Jane Williams to winter in genteel poverty, he continued on to England with his financial hopes high only to discover that he was no better off than he had been before. The old uncertainty of the allowance, the galling necessity of tempering hatred with self-interest, was gone, but there was to be no more money. He had been left £10,000 in 3% gilt-edged stocks which gave him an income of £300 a year.

The evidence for Trelawny’s movements during these months is as sketchy as for any time of his life, but it is likely that arriving in England at the end of 1820 he found himself in no hurry to leave, staying at his mother’s new London home in Berners Street before returning to the Continent in the May or June of 1821.

It is at this moment as one begins to attempt to chart his steps, however, that it becomes obvious just how futile an exercise it is, and just how far at this point a traditional sense of ‘biographical’ time must give way to what could be called ‘Trelawny’ time. Because to any observer totting up the weeks and months spent shooting and hunting during these years a picture emerges of a life hopelessly and terminally adrift, and yet for Trelawny himself this same time seems to have been crushed into a series of defining highlights that obliterate all else, secular epiphanies which, in the great drama he made of his life, assert a pattern of significance – of destiny – that biography can do nothing but follow.

Throughout his life there would be an almost Marvellian fierceness in the way Trelawny would seize his opportunities and in 1820 this destiny seemed to him to lead nowhere but Italy. Through the summer of 1821 he hunted and fished with an old naval friend Daniel Roberts in the Swiss mountains, but beneath the seemingly aimless wanderings the real business of his life was already taking shape. In April 1821, Edward Williams had written to him from Pisa, where he and Jane were living after a bleak winter of ‘soupe maigre, bouilli, sour wine, and solitary confinement’ at Chalon-sur-Saône.⁵ He was, he told Trelawny, already an intimate of Shelley. They were planning a summer’s boating together, ‘adventuring’ among the rivers and canals of that part of Italy. ‘Shelley’, he wrote, tantalizingly

is certainly a man of most astonishing genius in appearance, extraordinarily young, of manners mild and amiable, but withal frill of life and fun. His wonderful command of language, and the ease with which he speaks on what are generally considered abstruse subjects, are striking; in short, his ordinary conversation is akin to poetry, for he sees things in the most singular and pleasing lights; if he wrote as he talked, he would be popular enough. Lord Byron and others think him by far the most imaginative poet of the day. The style of his lordship’s letters to him is quite that of a pupil, such as asking his opinion, and demanding his advice on certain points, &. I must tell you, that the idea of the tragedy of ‘Manfred’, and many of the philosophical, or rather metaphysical, notions interwoven in the composition of the fourth Canto of ‘Childe Harold’, are of his suggestion; but this, of course, is between ourselves.⁶

Trelawny printed this letter in his history of this period of his life, the Records of Shelley, Byron and the Author. Back to back with it, as if the intervening eight months had simply not existed, comes a second letter from Williams, written in the following December and giving the momentous news of Byron’s arrival.

My Dear Trelawny,

Why, how is this? I will swear that yesterday was Christmas Day, for I celebrated it at a splendid feast given by Lord Byron to what I call his Pistol Club – i.e. to Shelley, Medwin, a Mr Taaffe, and myself, and was scarcely awake from the vision of it when your letter was put into my hands, dated 1st of January, 1822. Time flies fast enough, but you, in the rapidity of your motions, contrive to outwing the old fellow … Lord Byron is the very spirit of the place – that is, to those few to whom, like Mohannah, he has lifted his veil. When you asked me in your last letter if it was probable to become at all intimate with him, I replied in a manner which I considered it most prudent to do, from motives which are best explained when I see you. Now, however, I know him a great deal better, and I think I may safely say that point will rest entirely with yourself. The eccentricities of an assumed character, which a total retirement from the world almost rendered a natural one, are daily wearing off. He sees none of the numerous English who are here, excepting those I have named. And of this I am selfishly glad, for one sees nothing of a man in mixed societies. It is difficult to move him, he says, when he is once fixed, but he seems bent upon joining our party at Spezzia next summer.

I shall reserve all that I have to say about the boat until we meet at the select committee, which is intended to be held on that subject when you arrive here. Have a boat we must, and if we can get Roberts to build her, so much the better … ⁷

With the entry of Byron into Shelley’s world Trelawny’s twin deities were in place. Even before Williams’s second letter, however, he was already making ready for Italy. He had shipped his guns and dogs to Leghorn in preparation for a winter’s hunting in the Maremma, but with this news of bigger game on the banks of the Arno, the woodcock were now going to have to wait their turn.

Travelling south from Geneva with his friend Roberts, shooting, fishing and sketching as they went, Trelawny finally reached Pisa in the January of 1822 to take up his place among the circle that had formed around Shelley. Since the early spring of 1818 when they left England for the last time, Shelley and his tribe of dependents had been wandering across the Continent, moving restlessly from one Italian town to another, from Milan to Bagni di Lucca, Venice, Naples, Rome, Leghorn, Florence, and then, in the January of 1820, to Pisa, his penultimate resting place in that ‘Paradise of exiles – the retreat of Pariahs’ as he called nineteenth-century Italy.⁸

At the beginning of 1822, when Trelawny first joined them, Shelley and his wife Mary were living above Edward and Jane Williams in the Tre Palazzi di Chiesa at the eastern end of the Lung’ Arno, diagonally across the river from the Palazzo Lanfranchi which Byron had taken the previous November. Anxious to be with them as quickly as he could, Trelawny had left Roberts at Genoa and hurried on alone. He arrived late, and after putting up his horse at an inn and dining, hastened to the Tre Palazzi to renew acquaintances with the Williamses and to meet Shelley. He was greeted by his old friends in ‘their earnest cordial manner’, and the three were deep in conversation,

when I was rather put out by observing in the passage near the open door, opposite to where I sat, a pair of glittering eyes steadily fixed on mine; it was too dark to make out whom they belonged to. With the acuteness of a woman, Mrs Williams’s eyes followed the direction of mine, and going to the doorway, she laughingly said.

‘Come in, Shelley, it’s only our friend Tre just arrived.’

Swiftly gliding in, blushing like a girl, a tall thin stripling held out both his hands; and although I could hardly believe as I looked at his flushed, feminine, and artless face that it could be the Poet, I returned his warm pressure. After the ordinary greetings he sat down and listened. I was silent from astonishment: was it possible this mild-looking beardless boy could be the veritable monster at war with all the world? – excommunicated by the Fathers of the Church, deprived of his civil rights by the fiat of a grim Lord Chancellor, discarded by every member of his family, and denounced by the rival sages of our literature as the founder of a Satanic school? I could not believe it; it must be a hoax.⁹

This account was published in his Records almost sixty years after, at a time when Trelawny was established beyond challenge as the last and greatest of Byron’s and Shelley’s friends, and yet even if much of its ease is of a later date, he clearly slid into the world that revolved around the two poets as if he had known no other. Within twenty-four hours of this first sight of Shelley he was playing billiards with Byron at the Palazzo Lanfranchi, coolly holding his own in conversation (and there is no more conversationally demanding a game than billiards), the acolyte an immediate familiar, a welcome addition to the daily shooting parties and drama plans and as interesting an object to his new friends as they were to him.

Indeed, when Trelawny first burst upon Byron’s Pisan world that January, launching himself from nowhere with the same fanfare of lies that fill his Adventures, it seemed to them that here at last was the Byronic hero made flesh. Here was a Conrad with a Gulnare in every port, a Lara who had exhausted all human emotion, who had murdered and pillaged, whored and sinned; had loved only to cremate his Zela’s corpse on the edge of a Javan bay; betrayed and been betrayed, deserted from the Royal Navy, fought beside his pirate-hero De Ruyter, and all, as Mary Shelley noted with that fine lack of irony that is her hallmark, ‘between the age of thirteen and twenty.’¹⁰

Appropriately, in fact, it is to the author of Frankenstein that we owe the first sustained description of Trelawny that we have. The arrival of this exotic figure among their small circle was important enough to warrant a long entry in her journal, and a month later she was still sufficiently intrigued to write to an old friend, Mary Gisborne, of her giovane stravagante. He was, she said

a kind of half Arab Englishman – whose life has been as changeful as that of Anastasius & who recounts the adventures of his youth as eloquently and well as the imagined Greek – he is clever – for his moral qualities I am yet in the dark – he is a strange web which I am endeavouring to unravel – I would fain learn if generosity is united to impetuousness – Nobility of spirit to his assumption of singularity & independence – he is six feet high – raven black hair which curls thickly & shortly like a More – dark, grey – expressive eyes – overhanging brows, upturned lips & a smile which expresses good nature & kindheartedness – his shoulders are high like an Orientalist – his voice is monotonous yet emphatic & his language as he relates the events of his life energetic & simple – whether the tale be one of blood & horror or irresistable comedy. His company is delightful for he excites me to think and if any evil shade the intercourse that time will tell.¹¹

It seems fitting in a sense that we have no painting or description of Trelawny before this time, that we have to wait until he was the ‘finished article’ strutting the public stage to know in any detail what he might have looked like. There are moments when one feels that some glimpse of a younger and more vulnerable Trelawny might help ‘explain’ him in some way, but there is no image which even half suggests the ghost of another self – either of the boy who cried himself to sleep that first night at school, or the man who sat through Sarah Prout’s testimony in the divorce courts. By 1822, cuckold and boy were both gone, hidden behind the mask that so intrigued Mary Shelley, that stares out still from portrait after portrait done over the next fifty years – the eyes aggressive, challenging, the nose aquiline, the lines already set into the obdurate mould Millais caught in old age: the face, as Mary Shelley suggests, of Thomas Hope’s Anastasius, the one romantic outcast that Byron wept that he had not himself created.

It has always been baffling that Trelawny could have got away with his tales and fantasies among the Pisan Circle, but at a more mundane level it is scarcely less astonishing to find the daughter of Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft still thinking and writing of an uneducated midshipman in these terms after almost a month of his company.

But if charm, singularity and good-looks were possibly enough to provoke her fascination with him, something more than a lazy and tolerant male camaraderie is needed to explain away the confidence with which he adjusted to the sophisticated literary and political interests of Byron and Shelley.

The admirers of the two poets have traditionally agreed on very little but if there is one thing that does unite them it is a comforting belief that Trelawny was only a marginal figure in their Pisan Circle. The principal reason for this is a natural and proper reaction to the inflated claims he made for himself in his later memoirs, and yet even when one has discounted his exaggerations it is still clear that there was a genuine warmth in their welcome that reflects as well on him as it does on them.

There was a kindness about Shelley and an aristocratic carelessness about Byron which must have smoothed any awkwardness, but in such a circle Trelawny would have had to earn his place with his conversation or simply disappear. In old age the force and vitality of his talk left an indelible impression on all who met him, and even at thirty he was obviously a brilliant and charismatic story-teller with the power to interest men whose lives in many ways had been more circumscribed than his own.

Trelawny’s strength and skills, his shooting, his boxing and sailing were all valued currencies in Byron’s world and yet the explanation of his success that often goes forgotten is the simple fact that he was a man of real if unformed talent. In terms of sophistication and learning he might well have been out of his depth in this alien literary world, but if one takes out Byron and Shelley and that strange fluke of a novel, Frankenstein, was there anything produced by the Pisan Circle that could remotely compare with the books Trelawny would go on to write?

Williams, Medwin, Taafe, Mrs. Mason, Claire Clairmont, even Leigh Hunt? – the truth is that Trelawny wrote at least one book and probably two that were beyond the compass of any of them. There is certainly nothing in his letters from this period to suggest he had yet found the voice to match his abilities, but there must have been an inner conviction of power that rubbed off on others, a strong and even savage faith in his own singularity that enabled him to brazen out his adopted role in a world whose very lifeblood was the imagination. It is again as if all those years of misery that seem so arid and sterile from the outside had been nothing of the sort, but rather an essential apprenticeship in romantic alienation, a training in disaffection whilst the inner man, fed on little more than the poetry of Byron and Shelley, shaped for himself a destiny he was ready to seize the moment it was offered him.

Not even Trelawny, though, in the drawn-out loneliness of his life at sea or the humiliations of the divorce courts, could have anticipated that destiny would bring him to Italy in time to play his part in English Romanticism’s Götterdämmerung. Neither, during his first weeks, was there any hint of the dramas that lay ahead. Through the early months of 1822, the sexual and political tensions that were always part of their Pisan world were stirring ominously beneath the surface, and yet in the very ordinariness of Edward Williams’s journal for this same time one glimpses in its last, leisurely days a world that feels as if it might have gone on for ever.

At the end of March their peace was threatened by an unpleasant and absurdly inflated incident with a sergeant major called Masi, a degrading brawl that ended in Masi’s wounding and ultimately Byron’s exit from Pisa. Some of the details of this incident are still obscure but it began when the party of Byron and Shelley, returning from shooting practice, took umbrage at a dragoon who galloped through their ranks on the road into Pisa. When the English gave chase there was a scuffle beneath the city gate that left Shelley on the ground and a Captain Hay wounded, but it was only when an unknown member of Byron’s household subsequently stabbed Masi outside the Palazzo Lanfranchi that the incident threatened serious consequences.

After one fraught night through which he was not expected to live, Masi recovered from his wound. But anti-English feeling ran high in the city, and even before the Gambas, the family of Byron’s mistress Teresa Guiccioli, were expelled and Byron went with them, Shelley and Mary had determined to quit Pisa.

The final calamity, when it came, however, sprang from a different direction with all the suddenness and violence of the Mediterranean storm that caused it. From long before Trelawny’s appearance there had been excited talk in Shelley’s circle of boats and boating expeditions, and when Trelawny arrived in January 1822 he immediately assumed, as the ex-naval man among them, a leading role in their schemes. In his journal for 15 January, Williams noted that Trelawny had brought them a model for an American schooner, and that they had settled to have a 30-foot boat built along its lines. Within days an order was placed through Daniel Roberts for this boat, together with a larger vessel that Trelawny was to skipper himself for Byron. Then, on 5 February, Trelawny wrote to Roberts again with his last, fateful instructions, dangerously reducing the original specifications for Shelley’s boat by almost half.

Dear Roberts,

In haste to save the Post – I have only time to tell you, that you are to consider this letter as definitive, and to cancel every other regarding the Boats.

First, then, continue the one that you are at work upon for Lord B. She is to have Iron Keel, copper fastenings and bottom – the Cabin to be as high and roomy as possible, no expense to be spared to make her a complete BEAUTY! We should like to have four guns, one … as large as you think safe – to make a devil of a noise!– fitted with locks – the swivels of brass! – I suppose from one to three pounders.

Now as to our Boat, we have from considerations abandoned the one we wrote about. But in her lieu – will you lay us down a small beautiful one of about 17 or 18 feet? To be a thorough Varment at pulling and sailing! Single handed oars, say four or six; and we think, if you differ not, three luggs and a jib – backing ones!¹²

It is given to few men to kill two major poets, but the friend to whom Byron turned for his doctors and Shelley for his boat has claims to be considered one of the seminal influences on nineteenth-century literature. It was not until the middle of May that the Don Juan as she was named was finally delivered to Shelley at Lerici, but even then there were further sacrifices of stability to elegance to be made, additions of a false stern and prow to accentuate her lines, and a new set of riggings which gave her, to Williams’s eye, all the glamour and prestige of a 50-ton vessel.

Fast, graceful and spirited as she was, the Don Juan was certainly no craft to survive the approaching storm into which, with Shelley, Edward Williams and the boat-boy Charles Vivian on board, she disappeared off Leghorn on 8 July 1822. Trelawny had initially intended to accompany them on their journey back to Lerici in Byron’s Bolivar, but at the last was delayed by the port authorities. Sullenly and reluctantly, he refurled the Bolivar’s sails, and watched the Don Juan’s progress through his spy-glass. The sea had the smoothness and colour of lead, but to the south-west black storm-clouds were massing dangerously. The devil, he was told by his Genoese mate, was brewing mischief. On shore, an anxious Daniel Roberts took a telescope to the top of the lighthouse, straining to get one last view of the boat before it vanished into the thickening mist.

Sometime after six the storm broke with a sudden and spectacular violence. The captain of an Italian vessel which had made it back to the safety of the harbour reported sighting the Don Juan in mountainous seas. He had offered to take its crew aboard, but a voice had cried back ‘No’. A sailor called across for them to reef their sails at least, but when Williams was seen trying to lower them Shelley had seized an arm, angrily determined to stop him.¹³*

It was the last time the Don Juan was seen. Over the next ten days, while Mary and Jane waited in agony and Trelawny tirelessly patrolled the coast, pieces of wreckage followed by the bodies of Vivian, Williams and Shelley were washed ashore. Shelley’s corpse was found on the beach at Viareggio. After so long in the water the face was gone but Trelawny was able to identify him by the clothes and a copy of Keats’s poems still folded back in his jacket pocket. The body was buried where it lay in a shallow grave of quicklime, and Trelawny hurried to the Casa Magni on the Gulf of Spezia, the summer house where the Shelleys and Williamses had been living since the end of April. Over fifty years later he returned to the memory in a passage honed by time and repetition.

I had ridden fast, to prevent any ruder messenger from bursting in on them. As I stood on the threshold of the house, the bearer, or rather confirmer, of news which would rack every fibre of their quivering frames to the utmost, I paused, and looking at the sea, my memory reverted to our joyous parting only a few days before.

The two families, then, had all been on the veranda, overhanging a sea so clear and calm that every star was reflected on the water, as if it had been a mirror; the young mothers singing some merry tune, with the accompaniment of a guitar. Shelley’s shrill laugh – I heard it still – rang in my ears, with Williams’ friendly hale, the general buona notte of all the joyous party, and the earnest entreaty to me to return as soon as possible, and not forget the commissions they had given me.

My reverie was broken by a shriek from the nurse Caterina, as, crossing the hall she saw me in the doorway. After asking her a few questions, I went up the stairs, and, unannounced, entered the room. I neither spoke, nor did they question me. Mrs Shelley’s large grey eyes were fixed on my face. I turned away. Unable to bear this horrid silence, with a convulsive effort she exclaimed –

‘Is there no hope?’

I did not answer, but left the room, and sent the servant with the children to them. The next day I prevailed on them to return to Pisa. The misery of that night and the journey the next day, and of many days and nights that followed, I can neither describe nor forget.¹⁴

There were quarantine laws to meet before the bodies of Shelley or Williams could be touched, but the man who claimed to have cremated his eastern bride was more than up to the challenge of a proper funeral. Mary Shelley had at first wanted her husband buried alongside their son in the Protestant cemetery in Rome, but in the end more exotic council prevailed. On 14 August, the body of Williams was finally exhumed and cremated in a macabre dress rehearsal for what was to follow. The next morning, with Byron and the newly arrived Leigh Hunt present, it was Shelley’s turn in a scene which in all its gruesome detail has etched itself onto the Romantic imagination.

The lonely and grand scenery that surrounded us so exactly harmonized with Shelley’s genius, that I could imagine his spirit soaring over us. The sea, with the islands of Gorgona, Capraja, and Elba, was before us; old battlemented watch-towers stretched along the coast, backed by the marble-crested Appenines glistening in the sun, picturesque from their diversified outlines, and not a human dwelling was in sight. As I thought of the delight Shelley felt in such scenes of loneliness and grandeur whilst living, I thought we were no better than a herd of wolves or a pack of wild dogs, in tearing out his battered and naked body from the pure yellow sand that lay so lightly over it, to drag him back to the light of day; but the dead have no voice, nor had I power to check the sacrilege – the work went on silently in the deep and unresisting sand, not a word was spoken, for the Italians have a touch of sentiment, and their feelings are easily excited into sympathy. Byron was silent and thoughtful. We were startled and drawn together by a dull hollow sound that followed the blow of a mattock; the iron had struck a skull, and the body was soon uncovered. Lime had been strewn on it; this or decomposition had the effect of staining it of a dark and ghastly indigo colour. Byron asked me to preserve the skull for him; but remembering that he had formerly used one as a drinking-cup, I was determined Shelley should not be so profaned. The limbs did not separate from the trunk, as in the case of Williams’s body, so that the corpse was removed entire into the furnace … After the fire was well kindled we repeated the ceremony of the previous day; and more wine was poured over Shelley’s dead body than he had consumed during his life. This with the oil and salt made the yellow flames glisten and quiver. The heat from the sun and fire was so intense that the atmosphere was tremulous and wavy. The corpse fell open and the heart was laid bare. The frontal bone of the skull, where it had been struck with the mattock, fell off; and, as the back of the head rested on the red-hot bottom bars of the furnace, the brains literally seethed, bubbled, and boiled as in a cauldron, for a very long time.

Byron could not face this scene, he withdrew to the beach and swam off to the ‘Bolivar’. Leigh Hunt remained in the carriage. The fire was so fierce as to produce a white heat on the iron, and to reduce its contents to grey ashes. The only portions that were not consumed were some fragments of bones, the jaw, and the skull; but what surprised us all was that the heart remained entire. In snatching this relic from the fiery furnace, my hand was severely burnt; and had anyone seen me do the act I should have been put into quarantine.¹⁵

In the long years ahead, Shelley’s funeral would come to seem the making of Trelawny, the beginning of his public ministry as high priest and interpreter of English Romanticism. During the short time that he had known Shelley and Byron he had certainly become an integral part of their Pisan world, but the truth is that it was his role at their deaths and not the friendship of a few brief months which gave him his apostolic authority over a generation infatuated with their memory.

In account after account over the next sixty years he would return to this summer of 1822 with ever new details, peddling scraps of history or bone with equal relish. Yet if his long-term strategy became one of ruthless self-promotion, in the short term Shelley’s death brought out a streak of selfless and generous kindness his earlier life had stifled. In the bleak and wearing months after the Don Juan went down, Trelawny almost single-handedly sustained the grieving widows, giving them not just unstinted emotional support but practical and financial help that earned their deep and genuine gratitude. ‘His whole conduct during his last stay here has impressed us all with an affectionate regard, and a perfect faith in the unalienable goodness of his heart,’¹⁶ Mary Shelley wrote to Jane Williams from Florence on 23 July 1823, shortly before her own departure for England where Jane had already gone. ‘It went to my heart to borrow the sum from him necessary to make up my journey,’ she wrote again only a week later, ‘but he behaved with so much quick generosity, that one was almost glad to put him to the proof, and witness the excellence of his heart.’¹⁷

Through the desolate winter of 1822–3 Trelawny came closer to Mary than at any time in their long relationship, but it was with another of Shelley’s circle that he formed during this time what is possibly the most enduring, if impenetrable, friendship of his life.

A curious compound of apparent opposites, of selfishness and generosity, common sense and fatuous silliness, of shrewd judgement and uncontrollable passion, of clinging dependence and brave and dogged self-sufficiency, Claire Clairmont is at once the most touching and exasperating member of Shelley’s and Byron’s world. She had been born in the spring of 1798 as the illegitimate child of a woman who went under the name of ‘Mrs Clairmont’, and at the age of three was taken with her brother Charles to Somers Town in London, where in the same year their mother met and married the widower of Mary Wollstonecraft, the great radical and political philosopher, William Godwin.

From the earliest age, Claire thus found herself in one of the most free-thinking and politically conscious households in England, the step-daughter of a famous writer and step-sister to another in the future Mary Shelley. As a child, too, she was raised and educated with the same care that was expended on the boys of the family, and she grew up with all the principles and beliefs that lay at the core of the Godwin ménage, as exuberantly and unapologetically a child of the revolutionary age as if she had indeed been Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft’s natural daughter.

When Claire was fourteen her half-sister, Mary, fell in love with the young poet and disciple of Godwin, Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley was already a married man when he first met Mary, but two years later the couple eloped to France and took Claire with them, walking, riding and slumming their way across the French countryside until poverty and Mary’s pregnancy brought them back to England and reality.

It is hard to imagine what the sixteen-year-old girl thought she was doing with Mary and Shelley in France at this time, but if her teasing and subversive presence in their lives is still one of the unresolved mysteries of biography, there was odder yet to come. Within two years of their triangular elopement and still only seventeen, she eclipsed Mary’s conquest of Shelley with a married poet of her own, throwing herself at Lord Byron with a reckless and infatuated passion that his indolent and self-indulgent nature was unable to resist. ‘An utter stranger takes the liberty of addressing you,’ she wrote to him above the assumed name of E. Trefusis.

It may seem a strange assertion, but it is none the less true that I place my happiness in your hands … If a woman, whose reputation as yet remained unstained, if without either guardian or husband to control, she should throw herself on your mercy, if with a beating heart she should confess the love she has borne you many years … could you betray her, or would you be silent as the grave?¹⁸

If a whole life can ever be said to hinge on a single action or judgement, then Claire Clairmont’s unprovoked assault on Byron in the March of 1816 is it. In the wake of the scandalous collapse of his marriage Byron was certainly ready for a brief and loveless affair, but to Claire it was the most important moment of her life, a moment at once of complete fulfilment and self-destructive folly which she was to regret for sixty bitter years.

Had the affair ended there and then, however, Claire Clairmont’s history might well have been very different, but in that same summer of 1816, a mixture of her persistence and Byron’s weakness saw it revived on the shores of Lake Leman and in January 1817 she gave birth to his daughter. The following March the baby was christened Clara Allegra Byron, but other than giving the child his name the father was unmoved. Boredom with Claire had long turned to an uncharacteristically implacable dislike of what he called her ‘Bedlam behaviour’, and even when the following year he agreed to assume responsibility for his daughter, it was an arrangement from which the mother was ruthlessly excluded.

It was this unstable, passionate and generous woman, with a past and pedigree to match – the step-daughter of Godwin, the sister-in-law of Shelley and the ex-mistress of Byron – with whom Trelawny now fell violently in love. Claire was still only twenty-three when they first met at the house of the Williamses in February 1822, a gifted linguist and musician, dark haired, clever and attractive enough – whatever the evidence of Amelia Curran’s Rome portrait – to have inspired at least one brilliantly shallow lyric of homage from Byron.

In her journal Claire recorded this first meeting without comment, and yet even had she felt any reciprocal interest at this time, the sudden death from typhoid of her daughter Allegra in the convent where Byron had placed her was soon to eclipse all else. In the immediate aftermath of the news Claire seems to have behaved with a dignity and calm that surprised everyone, but the silence of her journal over the next five months is an eloquent measure of a grief which only grew with the years.

It was a grief, too, which no one around could ignore, an event about which no one could remain neutral, and Allegra’s death marks the first major split in the Pisan Circle that had gathered around Byron and Shelley, the first bitter issue over which those battle lines were drawn that were to hold their partisan shape way beyond the deaths of the main protagonists.

At a time of such drama and tension it is difficult to see Trelawny remaining indifferent, but there is no clue to the way his relationship with Claire developed until in a sense it was all over. In the wake of Allegra’s and Shelley’s deaths his kindness must have brought her closer in the same way it did Mary and Jane, and yet as Claire prepared over the summer of 1822 to leave Italy there is nothing in any surviving correspondence that could possibly suggest a crisis in their friendship, and still less the torrent of passionate letters from Trelawny that followed her into her long exile as a governess.

That crisis is cryptically marked in her journal. The last prosaic entry had been for 13 April, just six days before Allegra’s death. It resumes again on Friday 6 September 1822, with a simple note of the date and nothing else. Three years later, however, while Claire was living on the country estate of her employers at Islavsk, outside Moscow, another entry gives some hint of what that date had meant to her. ‘Tuesday August 25th. Septr. 6th.’ she recorded, using both calendars

Lovely weather. I think a great deal of past times to-day and above all of this day three years, but the sentiments of that time are most likely long ago, vanished into air. This is life. So five to nothing but toil and trouble – all its sweets are like the day whose anniversary this is – more transitory than a shade – yet it had been otherwise if Inwalert had been different and I might have been as happy as I am now wretched.¹⁹

In Trelawny’s letters over the autumn and winter of 1822–3, however, the crackling fallout of that day in September has left a less ambiguous trace. It is impossible to say with any certainty what happened when they met for the last time on the banks of the Arno, but the bond that it established and its devastating impact on Trelawny are beyond question. Over the next months he sent letter after letter to Claire in Vienna, violent and tender, demanding and conciliatory, histrionic and emotionally truthful by turn. ‘A gnarled tree may bear good fruit,’ he gnomically declared from the back of his horse in one undated letter soon after, ‘and a harsh nature may find good council …’

let us be firm and staunch friends we both want friends – you have lost in Shelley one worthy to be called so – I cannot fill his place – as who can – but you will not find me altogether unworthy the office. Linked thus together we may defy the fate that separates us for a time – with united hearts – what can separate us … In solitude silence or absence I think of your words – and can even make sacrifices to reason … ²⁰

The last six lines of this letter have been scratched out by Claire, but enough of Trelawny’s correspondence remains uncensored to underline the Byronic tenor of his courtship. You ‘tortured me almost into convulsions,’ he told her in a letter written from Pisa when he realized she was irreparably lost to him, ‘have left me fetid, morbid, and broken hearted.’

Why have you thus plunged me into excruciating misery by deserting him that would – but bleed on in silence my heart – let not the cold and heatless mock thee with their triumphs.²¹

‘Your weak impress of Love was a figure Trenched in ice; which with an hour’s heat dissolved to water!’ he complained on 4 October,

you! you! torture me Claire, your cold, cruel heartless letter has driven me mad – it is ungenerous under the mask of love – to enact the part of a demon … you have had my heart, and gathered, and gathered my crudest, idlest most entangled surmises … I am hurt to the very soul. I am shamed and sick to death to be thus trampled on & despised, my heart is bruised … much as endurance has hardened me, I must give you the consolation of knowing – that you have inflicted on me an incurable wound which is festering & inflaming my blood.²²

‘I have used no false colours,’ he again told her with more emotional than literal truth, ‘no hypocrisy – enacted no part.’

I have as dispassionately as I could – disclosed my feelings … I loved you the first day, – nay before I saw you, – you loathed and heaped on me contumely and neglect till we were about to separate – Clare I love you and do what you will – I shall remain deeply interested for you. I think you are right in withdrawing your fate from mine – my nature has been perverted by neglect and disappointment in those I loved – my disposition is unamiable. I am sullen, savage, suspicious & discontented – I can’t help it – you have sealed me so.²³

Somewhere behind the grief, the mortification and the posturing at Claire’s abandonment, however, Trelawny probably knew, as he suggests here, that she was right to keep their two fives apart. There seems no need to question the intensity of his feelings for her, and yet it is difficult to resist the sense that it was her history as much as herself that attracted him, or that his love was something that could flourish more easily in absentia.

This was something Claire, despite her genuine and lasting fondness for him, also recognized. ‘I admire esteem and love him;’ she wrote to Mary Shelley eight years later, when experience had damped down those passions that had ruined her life,

some excellent qualities he possesses in a degree that is unsurpassed but then it is exactly in another direction from the centre of my impetus. He likes a turbid and troubled life; I a quiet one; he is full of fine feelings and has no principles; I am full of fine principles but never had a feeling (in my life). He receives (every) all his impressions through his heart; I through my head. Che vuol? Le moyen de se rencontrer when one is bound for the North Pole and the other for the South.²⁴

It is characteristic of Trelawny that at the same time as he was berating Claire for her inconstancy, he was consoling himself with other affairs, but without her or the circle that had gathered round Shelley and Mary, his life threatened to lapse back into the brainless rhythms of former days. On 22 November, he wrote half-heartedly to her of his plans. Byron’s boat, the Bolivar, which he had skippered, was laid up, but he had thoughts of shooting with Roberts and then sailing among the islands in the spring in the salvaged Don Juan. It was, he told her ‘a weary and wretched existence without ties,’ his life little more than ‘dying piecemeal’.²⁵

Almost in spite of himself, however, there was a buoyancy about Trelawny that would always assert itself, and in Shelley’s death, too, he still had unfinished business. In January 1823, Shelley’s ashes had been deposited in the Protestant Cemetery at Rome, but when Trelawny visited the place in the spring he found them in a public grave, ‘mingled in a heap with five or six common vagabonds’.²⁶

His distress at this indignity was certainly genuine, and yet a letter of Keats’s friend, Joseph Severn – complaining of Trelawny’s cavalier attitude to a memorial design Severn had done for the tomb – underlines just how far down the road to recovery he had come:

There is a mad chap come here – whose name is Trelawny. I do not know what to make of him, further than his queer, and, I was near saying, shabby behaviour to me. He comes on the friend of Shelley, great, glowing, and rich in romance. Of course I showed all my paint-pot politeness to him, to the very brim … I made the drawing, which cost us some trouble, yet after expressing the greatest liking for it, this pair of Mustachios has shirked off from it, without giving us the yea or no – without even the why or wherefore. – I was sorry at this most on Mr Gotts account, but I ought to have seen that this Lord Byron’s jackal was rather weak in all the points I could judge, though strong enough in stiletto’s. We have not had any open rupture, nor shall we, for I have no doubt that this ‘cockney corsair’ fancies he has greatly obliged us by all this trouble we have had. But tell me who is this odd fish? They talk of him here as a camelion who went mad on reading Ld. Byron’s ‘Corsair’.²⁷

With the help of Severn, Trelawny had Shelley’s ashes disinterred and reburied in a ‘beautiful and lonely plot’²⁸ near the pyramid of Caius Cestius. He added an inscription from The Tempest to Leigh Hunt’s simple ‘Cor Cordium’, and planted the grave with ‘six young cypresses and four laurels’.²⁹ In a gesture which, in 1823, must have had more to do with a clinging sense of identification than inspired prescience, he then had his own grave dug next to that of Shelley – ‘so that when I die,’ as he reported back to Mary in a burst of necrophiliac chumminess,

there is only to lift up the coverlet and role me into its – you may he on the other side or I will share my narrow bed with you if you like.³⁰

But if Shelley was gone Byron was still left, and for all the talk of death and world-weariness, the sniff of celebrity Trelawny had enjoyed in Pisa had been too intoxicating for him to face oblivion now with any equanimity. Throughout his life Trelawny would always ride the shifting thermals of their literary fame with effortless ease, but in truth it had always been the ‘sun’ rather than the ‘glow-worm’ that had warmed his youthful imagination into life, and it was to Byron now that he turned in search of a new role.

He was fortunate, too, in his timing, as events in both his and Byron’s lives now freed them from the chains of their Italian idleness. Trelawny was still writing long letters to Claire, but the first intensity of his attachment had cooled to something more honest, more in keeping with what they both wanted and needed of their friendship. In a letter written to her from Rome in April 1823, he told her that she had misunderstood his meaning, that he had never intended her staying with him. The following month he was more explict. ‘Now to proceed to your most urgent questions, which I have hitherto avoided,’ he wrote in reply to a lost letter:

As to my fortune – my income is reduced to about £500 a year – the woman I married having bankrupted me in fortune as well as happiness. If I outlive two or three relations – I shall, however, retrieve in some measure my fortunes – so you see, dear Clare how thoughtless and vain was my idea of our living together: as Keats says

‘Love in a hut, with water and a crust,

Is – Love, forgive us! cinders, ashes, dust;’

Poverty and difficulties have not – or ever will – teach me prudence or make me like Michael Cassio a great Arithmetician – all my calculations go to the devil – in anything that appeals to my heart – and this kind of prodigality has kept me in troubled water all my days: as to my habits – no Hermit’s simpler – my expenses are within even the limits of my beggarly means – but who can have gone through such varieties of life as I have – and not have formed a variety of ties with the poor and unfortunate; – I am so shackled with these that I do not think I have even a right to form a connection which would affect them – what abject slaves are us poor of fortune – enough of this hateful topic.

It is a source of great pleasure to me, your friendship – to be beloved – and Love – under whatever circumstances – is still happiness – the void in my affections is filled up – and though separate – I have lost that despairing dreary feeling of loneliness – I look forward with something of hope.

I am anxious to get to sea. Write to me here – and let me know your address – I do not like to importune you about writing. There are some pleasant women here, which induces me to go more into society than usual ….

Dear, I am not in the vein for writing –

Your unalterably

Attached

Edward.

May 15 1823

Florence³¹

At the time of this letter Trelawny probably had nothing fixed in mind when he spoke of the sea, but over the next months the unspoken possibility of joining Byron on an expedition took on a solid form. From the very start of their acquaintance there had always been desultory talk of travel in one direction or another, and when the idea of fighting for Greek independence suddenly became more than talk in the early summer of 1823, Trelawny was ready to join the crusade. ‘I wish Lord Byron was as sincere in his wish of going to Greece – as I am,’ he confided to Mary Shelley,

every one seems to think it a fit theatre for him … at all events tell him how willingly I will embark in the cause – and stake my all on the cast of the die – Liberty or nothing.³²

By the early summer of 1823 Greece had been at war with Ottoman Turkey for just over two years, drawing men from all over Europe and America to a country that had long held a special place in the Western imagination. From the day in March 1751 when James Stuart and Nicholas Revett landed at the port of Athens to make the first accurate drawings of its ruins, travellers, painters, scholars, dilettanti, soldiers and architects had all made their way out to Greece, sketching and plundering its sites, charting its battlefields and searching the modern Greek’s physiognomy for some trace of its ancient lineaments, some link between the Greece which languished under Turkish rule and the land that had produced the poetry of Homer and the sculpture of the Acropolis.

It was in 1809 that the twenty-one-year-old Byron had first followed in this tradition, travelling with his long-suffering Cambridge friend John Cam Hobhouse through Ali Pasha’s Albania to Delphi, Athens, and on to Smyrna, Ephesus and Constantinople. In the years before this ‘pilgrimage’, Byron had gained a minor reputation in England as an aristocratic poetaster and satirist, but it was with the verses of ‘Childe Harold’, published on his return, that he not only made his own name but cast this old Philhellenism into the form that was to galvanize Romantic Europe into action.

Oh, thou, Parnassus! whom I now survey,

Not in the phrensy of a dreamer’s eye,

Not in the fabled landscape of a lay,

But soaring snow-clad through thy native sky,

In the wild pomp of mountain majesty!

What marvel if I thus essay to sing?

The humblest of the pilgrims passing by

Would gladly woo thine Echoes with his string,

Though from thy heights no more one Muse will wave her wing.

Fair Greece! sad relic of departed worth!

Immortal, though no more; though fallen, great!

Who now shall lead thy scatter’d children forth,

And long accustom’d bondage uncreate?

Not such thy sons who whilome did await,

The hopeless warriors of a willing doom,

In bleak Thermopylae’s sepulchral strait –

Oh! who that gallant spirit shall resume,

Leap from Eurotas’ banks, and call thee from the tomb?

Where’er we tread ’tis haunted, holy ground;

No earth of thine is lost in vulgar mould,

But one vast realm of wonder spreads around,

And all the Muse’s tales seem truly told,

Till the sense aches with gazing to behold

The scenes our earliest dreams have dwelt upon;

Each hill and dale, each deepening glen and wold

Defies the power which crush’d thy temples gone:

Age shakes Athena’s tower, but spares gray Marathon.³³

There is not an idea here that was new – not an idea of any sort it could be argued – but faced with verses of this power it is as idle to think of Byron as a product of Philhellenism as it is to see Shakespeare as a mere child of the Elizabethan Renaissance. The excitement and sentiments displayed were certainly no more Byron’s invention than was the ‘Byronic hero’, and yet in ‘Childe Harold’ and his Eastern Tales he succeeded in setting the stamp of his personality on a whole movement, giving it a new and popular currency and charting the emotional and topographical map-references from which Philhellenism has never tried to escape.

It is not simply that there is no figure in Philhellene history to compare with Byron, there is no second to him. What we are looking at in the verses of ‘Childe Harold’ or ‘Don Juan’ is some kind of literary take-over, at a whole disparate, woolly and amorphous movement captured and vitalized by the specific genius of one man. Before Byron, it is safe to say, for all its seriousness, its achievements, its intelligence, there was no folly of which western Philhellenism was incapable: after Byron, for all its romantic froth, there was nothing to which it would not aspire.

The mountains look on Marathon –

And Marathon looks on the sea;

And musing there an hour alone,

I dream’d that Greece might still be free;³⁴

The history of the Philhellene movement is so impossible to imagine without Byron that it always comes as a surprise to remember that for almost three years of the war his involvement remained no more than this ‘dream’. On the outbreak of rebellion in 1821, he had returned to the theme of Greek freedom with some of the most famous lyrics in ‘Don Juan’ and, again, in the following year, there had been some desultory talk of volunteering, but his letters for this period – for the years that Trelawny knew him – are the letters of a man submerged in a life of literary and social affairs that left little room for Greece. It was a life full of gossip and flirtations, of boats, business and his mistress, Teresa Guiccioli, of Italian politics and proof-reading, of arguments about Pope and the deaths of Shelley and Keats, of Leigh Hunt’s financial affairs and repulsive children, of rows with his publisher Murray and over Allegra, of Lady Byron and his half-sister Augusta – a life at once so full and empty as to be much like any other except that it was lived out by Byron. In 1823 Byron could as easily have gone to Spain as Greece; or Naples, or South America, or a South Sea Island, or nowhere at all. Chance, pique, sloth, lust, avarice, good nature and pride might still have disposed of him in any of a dozen ways that summer: only myth pushes him towards Greece with a confidence that will brook no dissent.

Given how much was at stake there is something alarming in the precariousness of this historical process, in its casual and arbitrary shedding of options until all that was left was the brittle chain of events that in 1823 lead Byron from Italy to Missolonghi. During the months that Trelawny chafed impatiently at his irresolution, the London Greek Committee had done all it could to flatter and cajole Byron into a proper sense of his destiny, and yet it remains as hard to define what it was that finally stirred him to action as it is for the most obscure volunteer whose name is alongside his on that Nauplia monument.

It is tempting to think, in fact, that there is no one about whom so much was said and written and about whom we know so little as the figure on whom Trelawny and all Philhellene Europe waited that summer. A generation before Byron, Boswell’s Johnson had been the object of the same obsessive interest to his circle, but between the two men something had happened – some permanent and vulgarizing shift in the popular conception of the artist – that the Byron myth both lived off and fed.

The minutiae of Johnson’s life seemed of value to Boswell because, with the instinct of genius, he knew that they revealed the inner man. With Byron the details were all that mattered, valuable by a simple process of association, the raw material of an indiscriminate and insatiable curiosity which set the pattern for all future fame. Nobody it seems, at this time, met Byron without recording their impressions. Nothing, either, was too small to be saved for posterity. We know then the state of the Cheshire cheese he ate and the manufacturer of his ale, the colour and trimming of his jacket, the style of his helmet and every last detail of the bizarre retinue of servants, horses and dogs that he collected in preparation for war: what remains a mystery is the lonely process by which he came to terms with the realities of his commitment to the Greek cause.

It is more than likely that he did not know himself. Certainly his letters – flippant, self-deprecating, brilliant, but ultimately elusive – give nothing away. Byron was far too intelligent to indulge in the inflated expectations of so many Philhellenes, only too aware of Greek attitudes and of his own limitations. He had enjoyed and suffered far too much fame to need to find it in Greece. He was thirty-six years old, though sixty in spirit, as he had been claiming on and off since 1816. He was, since the collapse of his disastrous marriage seven years earlier, an exile. He was a poet writing the greatest poetry of his life, but conscious too of a world of action that held an irresistible fascination. He was an aristocrat alert to his status, and a liberal conscious of his moral duties. He was, above all, half reluctantly, indolently, but inescapably, the repository of the expectations of an age he had done so much to shape – expectations which carried with them a burden that took on all the heaviness of fate: ‘Dear T.,’ he finally wrote to Trelawny in June: ‘you may have heard that I am going to Greece. Why do you not come with me?… they all say that I can be of use in Greece. I do not know how, nor do they; but at all events let us go.’³⁵

It was the letter for which Trelawny had been waiting – for months certainly, possibly all his life. On 26 June, he wrote to his old friend Daniel Roberts from Florence.

Dear Roberts,

Your letter I have received and one from Lord Byron. I shall start for Leghorn to-morrow, but must stop there some days to collect together the things necessary for my expedition. What do you advise me to do? My present intention is to go with as few things as possible, my little horse, a servant, and two very small saddle portmanteaus, a sword and pistols, but not my Manton gun, a military frock undress coat and one for superfluity, 18 shirts, &. I have with me a Negro servant, who speaks English – a smattering of French and Italian, understands horses and cooking, a willing though not a very bright fellow. He will go anywhere or do anything he can, nevertheless if you think the other more desirable, I will change – and my black has been in the afterguard of a man of war. What think you?

I have kept all the dogs for you, only tell me if you wish to have all three. But perhaps you will accompany us. All I can say is, if you go, I will share what I have freely with you – I need not add with what pleasure!… How can one spend a year so pleasantly as travelling in Greece, and with an agreeable party?³⁶

The next day, on the road to Leghorn, there was a more difficult letter to write.

Dearest Clare,

What is it that causes this long and trying silence? – I am fevered with anxiety – of the cause – day after day I have suffered the tormenting pains of disappointment – tis two months nearly since I have heard. What is the cause, sweet Clare? – how have I newly offended – that I am to be thus tortured? –

How shall I tell you, dearest, or do you know it – that – that – I am actually now on my road – to Embark for Greece? – and that I am to accompany a man that you disesteem? [‘Disesteem’ to one of the century’s great haters!] – forgive me – extend to me your utmost stretch of toleration – and remember that you have in some degree driven me to this course – forced me into an active and perilous life – to get rid of the pain and weariness of my lonely existence; – had you been with me – or here – but how can I live or rather exist as I have been for some time? – My ardent love of freedom spurs me on to assist in the struggle for freedom. When was there so glorious a banner flying as that unfurled in Greece? – who would not fight under it? – I have long contemplated this – but – I was deterred by the fear that an unknown stranger without money &. would be ill received. – I now go under better auspices – L.B. is one of the Greek Committee; he takes out arms, ammunition, money, and protection to them – when once there I can shift for myself – and shall see what is to be done!³⁷

The implied urgency in Trelawny’s letters, their sense of bustle and importance, was for once justified. Now that Byron had made up his mind, he moved quickly. The Bolivar was sold, and his Italian affairs brought into order. He had engaged a vessel, the Hercules, he told Trelawny, and would be sailing from Genoa. ‘I need not say,’ he added, ‘that I shall like your company of all things,’ – a tribute he was movingly to repeat in a last footnote to Trelawny in a letter written only days before his death.³⁸

Travelling on horseback from Florence to Lerici, where he wandered again through the desolate rooms of Shelley’s Casa Magni, Trelawny reached Byron at the Casa Saluzzi, near Albaro. The next day he saw the Hercules for the first time. To the sailor and romantic in him it was a grave disappointment. To Byron, however, less in need of exotic props than his disciple, the collier-built tub – ‘roundbottomed, and bluff bowed, and of course, a dull sailor’³⁹ – had one estimable advantage. ‘They say’, he told Trelawny, ‘I have got her on very easy terms … We must make the best of it,’ he added with ominous vagueness. ‘I will pay her off in the Ionian Islands, and stop there until I see my way.’⁴⁰

On 13 July 1823, horses and men were loaded on board the Hercules, and Trelawny’s long wait came to an end. Ahead of him lay a life he had so far only dreamed of, but he was ready. The war out in Greece might have been no more than ‘theatre’ to him, yet if there was anyone mentally or emotionally equipped to play his role in the coming drama, anyone who had already imaginatively made the part his own, then it was Trelawny.

Over the last eighteen months too, he had grown into his role, grown in confidence, in conviction, in plausibility. At the beginning of 1822 Byron had announced Trelawny’s arrival to Teresa Guiccioli with a cool and ironic amusement: by the summer of 1823 he had become an essential companion.

And now, too, as the Hercules ploughed through heavy waters on the first stage of its journey south, all the landmarks that had bound Trelawny to the Pisan Circle slipped past in slow review as if to seal this pact: Genoa, where the Don Juan had been built for Shelley to Trelawny’s design – ‘the treacherous bark which proved his coffin,’⁴¹ as he bitterly described it to Claire Clairmont; St Terenzo, with the Casa Magni, Shelley’s last house, set low on the sea’s edge against a dark backdrop of wooded cliffs; Viareggio where he and Byron had swum after Williams’s cremation until Byron was sick with exhaustion; Pisa where they had first met at the Palazzo Lanfranchi, and finally Leghorn, from where almost exactly a year earlier, Shelley, Edward Williams and the eighteen-year-old Charles Vivian – one of Romanticism’s forgotten casualties – had set out on their last voyage.

It was on the fifth day out of Genoa, and only after a storm had driven them back into port, that the Hercules finally made Leghorn. Byron had business ashore, and some last letters to write – a three-line note to Teresa Guiccioli, assuring her of his love, and a rather more fulsome declaration of homage to Goethe, ‘the undisputed Sovereign of European literature’.⁴² On 23 July they were ready to sail again, and took on board two dubious Greeks and a young Scotsman, Hamilton Browne, who had served in the Ionian Isles. Browne was rowed out to the ship by a friend, the son of the Reverend Jackson who had famously poisoned himself during the Irish troubles to thwart justice. Byron recognized the name and was quick with his sympathy. ‘His lordship’s mode of address,’ Browne wrote of this first meeting, ‘was peculiarly fascinating and insinuating – “au premier abord” it was next to impossible for a stranger to refrain from liking him.’⁴³

Byron, however, was going to need more than charm to survive the months ahead as their brief stop in Leghorn underlined. While the Hercules was still in the roads, he wrote a final letter to Bowring, the Secretary of the London Greek Committee to which he had been elected, striking in it a note that can be heard again and again in his subsequent letters from Greece. ‘I find the Greeks here somewhat divided amongst themselves’, he reported,

I have spoken to them about the delay of intelligence for the Committee’s regulation – and they have promised to be more punctual. The Archbishop is at Pisa – but has sent me several letters etc. for Greece. – What they most seem to want or desire is – Money – Money – Money … As 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 – I of course have to suppose that I am left to my own discretion. If at any future period – I can be useful – I am willing to be so as heretofore. –⁴⁴

The punctuation of Byron’s letters invariably gives a strong sense of rapidity and urgency of thought, an immediacy that makes him one of the great letter writers in the language, and yet curiously here it only serves to reinforce a sense of uncertainty and drift. It is a feeling that seems mirrored in the mood on the Hercules as each day put his Italian life farther behind him. There is an air of unreality about this journey, as if the Hercules and its passengers were somehow suspended between the contending demands of past and future, divorced from both in the calm seas that blessed the next weeks of their passage. It is hard to believe that, for all his clear-eyed and tolerant realism about the Greeks, Byron had any real sense of what lay ahead. The memory of Shelley’s corpse on the beach could quicken his natural fatalism into something like panic at the thought of pain but even this was a passing mood. As Trelawny later recalled, he had never travelled on ship with a better companion. The weather, after they left Leghorn, was beautiful and the Hercules seldom out of sight of land. Elba, the recent scene of Napoleon’s first exile, was passed off the starboard bow with suitable moralizings. At the mouth of the Tiber the ship’s company strained in vain for a glimpse of the city where Trelawny had buried Shelley’s ashes and prepared his own grave. During the day Byron and Trelawny would box and swim together, measure their waistlines or practise on the poop with pistols, shooting the protruding heads off ducks suspended in cages from the mainyard. At night Byron might read from Swift or sit and watch Stromboli shrouded in smoke and promise another canto of ‘Childe Harold’.

And yet Byron, if he ever had been, was no longer the ‘Childe’ and in that simple truth lay a world of future misunderstandings. One of the most moving aspects of his last year is the way his letters and actions reveal a gradual firming of purpose, a steady discarding of the conceits and fripperies of his Italian existence, a unifying of personality, an alignment at last of intelligence and sensibility – a growth into a human greatness which mirrors the development of his literary talents from the emotional and psychological crudity of ‘Childe Harold’ into the mature genius of ‘Don Juan’.

For anyone interested in poetry it is in that last masterpiece that the real Byron is to be found, but it was not the Byron that Trelawny had come to Italy in search of. Even before the Hercules had left Leghorn he was airing his reservations in letters to Roberts and Claire, but the fact is that his unease in Byron’s company was as long as their friendship itself. Eighteen months earlier, in January 1822, Trelawny had come looking for Childe Harold and found instead a middle-aged and worldly realist. He had come to worship and found a deity cynically sceptical of his own cult. ‘I had come prepared to see a solemn mystery,’ he wrote of their first meeting in the Palazzo Lanfranchi, ‘and so far as I could judge from the first act it seemed to me very like a solemn farce.’⁴⁵

One of the great truisms of Romantic history is that Byron was never ‘Byronic’ enough for his admirers but this failure to live up to expectations seems to have constituted a more personal betrayal for Trelawny than it did for other acolytes. In trying to explain this there is a danger of ignoring the vast intellectual gap which separated the two men, yet nevertheless something is needed to account for the resentment which, even as they set off together, he was stoking up against Byron. Partly, of course, it was the bitterness of the disappointed disciple, but there was something more than that, something which Romantic myth and twentieth-century psychology in their different ways both demand to be recognized – the rage of the creature scorned in the language of one, of childhood rejection in the more prosaic terminology of the other.

The moment words are put to it they seem overblown and lame by turns but it is impossible to ignore the evidence of a lifetime’s anger. No iconoclast ever had such a capacity for hero-worship as Trelawny and, of the long string of real or imagined figures who filled the emotional vacuum of a loveless childhood, Byron was the earliest and the greatest. In among the fantasies that Trelawny published as his Adventures, there is a description of his first meeting with the mythical De Ruyter, the imagined archetype and amalgam of all Trelawny’s heroes. It gives a vivid insight into what he had sought in Byron when he first came to Italy. ‘He became my model,’ he wrote,

The height of my ambition was to imitate him, even in his defects. My emulation was awakened. For the first time I was impressed with the superiority of a human being. To keep an equality with him was unattainable. In every trifling action he evinced a manner so offhand, free, and noble, that it looked as if it sprung new and fresh from his own individuality; and everything else shrunk into an apish imitation.⁴⁶

This kind of hero, however, was not a role that the thirty-five-year old Byron, with his anxieties over his weight or the thickness of his wrists, had either the inclination or temperament to fill. The helmets and uniforms in his luggage are reminders that, even in his last year, the exhibitionist in him was never entirely stilled, but the irony and self-mockery with which he treated himself in his poetry was now equally, if humorously, turned on his ‘corsair’. Trelawny, he memorably remarked, could not tell the truth even to save himself. In another variant on this he suggested that they might yet make a gentleman of him if they could only get him to tell the truth and wash his hands.

For a man who was probably only too familiar with Trelawny’s battle against his father’s pet raven, this was a dangerously cavalier attitude to take to the child of his poetic imagination. ‘The Creator’, as Claire had warned Byron in her first letter to him before they met, ‘ought not to destroy his Creature.’⁴⁷ For a man, also, who in Pisan lore had been responsible for the death of Claire’s Allegra, this was doubly true. Byron was too careless, however, to see the trouble he was laying down. On board the Hercules a mixture of his own tolerance and Trelawny’s presumption kept relationships cordial, but it was a deceptive calm. ‘Lord B. and myself are extraordinarily thick,’ Trelawny wrote edgily to his friend Roberts in a letter from Leghorn.

We are inseparable. But mind, this does not flatter me. He has known me long enough to know the sacrifices I make in devoting myself to serve him. This is new to him, who is surrounded by mercenaries. I am no expense to him, fight my own way, lay in my own stock, etc … Lord B. indeed does everything as far as I wish him.’⁴⁸

It was a sad delusion but it was enough to preserve the peace of the voyage. At the toe of Italy the Hercules turned east, through the Messina Straits and towards Greece. Their first destination was the port of Argostoli on Cephalonia, one of the Ionian Isles under British control. As they passed through the untroubled waters between Scylla and Charybdis, Byron complained of the tameness of life. His boredom was premature. His and Trelawny’s lives were moving to their distinct but inseparable crises. ‘Where’, Byron had mused at Leghorn, ‘shall we be in a year?’ It afterwards seemed to Pietro Gamba, Teresa Guiccoli’s brother, ‘a melancholy foreboding; for on the same day of the same month, in the next year, he was carried to the tomb of his ancestors.’⁴⁹ On 2 August 1823, the Hercules entered the approaches to Argostoli. Byron had just nine months to live: Trelawny, nearly sixty years to vent his feelings against the man who had first created and then wearied of him.

3 ET IN ARCADIA EGO

‘And without ties – wearied and wretched – melancholy and dissatisfied – what was left me here? – I have been dying piecemeal – thin – careworn – and desponding – Such an excitement as this was necessary to rouse me into energy and life – and it has done so – I am all on fire for action – and ready to endure the worst that may befall, seeking nothing but honour.’

Trelawny to Claire Clairmont 22 July 1823 ¹

TEN DAYS AFTER THE Hercules anchored off the port of Argostoli, a small group from the ship lay picnicking beside the Fountain of Arethusa on the Homeric isle of Ithaca. Beneath them the water from the spring tumbled away into a dark ravine. ‘The view,’ Hamilton Browne, the young Philhellene who had joined them at Leghorn, recalled ten years later,

embracing the vast sea-prospect, the Aechirades, the entrance to the Gulf of Corinth, or Lepanto, with the distant purple mountains of Epirus and Aetolia, lifting their lofty peaks into the clouds, was superb; and ascending the hill at the back of the cavern, Santa Maura, the ancient Leucadia, with its dependencies, was distinctly descried, together with Cephalonia, apparently close at hand; Zante, and the coast of the Peloponessus, trending far away to the southeast. A more lovely situation could scarcely be imagined.²

It would be difficult also to imagine a view more completely at odds with reality. If one could have followed Browne’s panoramic sweep across the map of western and southern Greece, only seen it shorn of that seductive allure which distance and classical associations gave it for him – if one could have extended that view further, beyond the ruined city of Tripolis to Nauplia and Argos in the east, and beyond those again as far northwards as Salonica or south to Crete and Cyprus: or, again, if one shortened that perspective, to take in the emaciated figures crowding the little port of Vathi hidden at the picnickers’ feet, refugees from the ruins of Patras and the horrors of Chios, then wherever one looked the wasted faces of survivors or the whitening bones which littered the Greek landscape in their thousands would all have told the same story of a war of unimaginable brutality.

The conflict that had so devastated Greece had begun just over two years earlier in the spring of 1821. On 6 March, a Russian general of Greek extraction had crossed the River Pruth from Bessarabia into what is now modern Romania, raised his banner of the phoenix and called on the Christian populations of the Ottoman empire to throw off their oppressors.

Political realism has never been a feature of modern Greek history but, even by the extravagances of the last century and a half, Moldavia was a curious place to start a revolution. For almost four hundred years the Trans-Danubian provinces of Moldavia and Wallachia had suffered the heavy burden of Ottoman rule, and yet at the end of all that time, if there was a single sentiment beyond a hatred of the Turks that might have united its disparate peoples, it was a loathing of the Greek that ran almost as deep. For nearly four centuries Greeks had worked within the Ottoman Empire as assiduously as they had within its Roman predecessor, their women stocking its harems and their children its armies, their merchants, sailors, translators and administrators garnering to themselves those tasks and powers that seemed below Moslem dignity, and their great Constantinople families – the Greeks of the Phanar on the southern shore of the Golden Horn – sending out generation after generation to govern in the Danubian provinces with a greed that comfortably eclipsed that of their masters.*

It was one of the great tragedies of the War of Independence that the melancholy condition of Greece itself meant that its leadership inevitably fell to these Greeks of the Phanar and the scattered communities which made up the world of the Greek diaspora. Since the last, magical flowering of Byzantine culture at Mystra in the fifteenth century the geographical area of Modern Greece had declined into a state of impoverished misery, an almost forgotten backwater of Ottoman Europe, its traditions of freedom wilted to the bandit culture of the mountain klephts and all memory of its unique artistic and political inheritance buried under centuries of oppression.

It was from the West that this memory, so vital and so hazardous to the regeneration of the country, was re-imported into Greece, but it was crucially among the educated communities of the diaspora that the first Greek converts were made. Throughout the eighteenth century, these colonies had grown and prospered in capitals and ports from Marseilles to Calcutta, and as this new pride in their ancient past seeped into their consciousness, western Hellenism underwent a crucial seachange that took it out of the study and into the realm of political ambition.

The result was a volatile and dangerous new faith which owed as much to the trading and cultural links of these colonies with the Phanariot world of Constantinople as it did to the architectural purism of Stuart and Revett. In the journals and paintings of European travellers and scholars, eighteenth-century Philhellenism largely remained an innocuous and literary phenomenon, but as it made its way back to the Greek communities of the Black Sea and southern Russia it became a heady mix of Hellenistic posturing and Byzantine nostalgia, of alien political theory and grandiose ambition that looked to Constantinople – simply but eloquently the ‘polis’ – as the centre of a new-born Greece.

With the spread of the ideas and language of revolution after 1789 and the increased trade of the Napoleonic years, these aspirations gained a momentum that not even the Congress of Vienna could halt. By 1820, revolution to most Greeks within and without the Ottoman Empire seemed inevitable. For the previous five years a secret society called the Philike Hetairia had been at work, proselytizing and fund raising within the thriving Greek communities of Europe and Russia, and recruiting among the clergy and leaders of the Peloponnese and Northern Greece.

In 1820, a year of revolution across Europe, with rebellions in Portugal, Spain, Italy, and crucially, Ali Pasha’s in Albania, the moment seemed at hand. Through the winter the Apostles of the Philike Hetairia moved through the islands and mainland of Greece, spreading the word from initiate to initiate to prepare for war. Secrecy was virtually abandoned, so certain was everyone of the approaching rebellion, so rightly confident of Turkish indolence. In the Peloponnese, Germanos, the Bishop of Patras, and Petro Bey Mavromichaelis, head of the Maniots in the southern mountains of ancient Sparta, made ready. From the Ionian Isles, the great bandit leader, Theodore Colocotrones, slipped back from exile onto the mainland, drawn by the irresistible lure of patriotism and plunder; and in a town in southern Russia, the committee of merchants who were the sole reality behind the Philike Hetairia’s shadowy ‘Grand Arch’ appointed Alexander Ypsilanti to its supreme command.

Perhaps nothing so typifies the limitations of the Hetairists as that choice, because if Moldavia was an improbable place to begin a Greek revolution then Alexander Ypsilanti was an even more unlikely candidate for leader. A major general in the Russian army and the son of a Moldavian Greek hospadar or prince, Ypsilanti seems to have brought little to his task beyond the arrogance of the court and the morals of an autocracy, his single, dubious qualification for command being an arm lost in battle.

Within days of crossing the Pruth and beginning his leisurely march south, the ‘steward of the stewards of the August Arch,’ as he styled himself in a piece of characteristic masonic flummery, had succeeded only in alienating the Christian population he had come to redeem. By June the revolution in the Danubian provinces was over before it had ever really begun, disowned by the Tsar and riven by jealousies, a casualty of the indecision and moral cowardice of its leader and the sheer fatuity of Greek ambitions.

Ypsilanti’s campaign and his own subsequent flight into Austria rank among the most disgraceful episodes of the whole war, and yet while the insurrection had failed in the Danubian provinces, it had taken hold in Greece itself. It had seemed inconceivable to conspirators there that the Philike Hetairia could enter Moldavia without the tacit support of the Tsar, and as they took stock of an Ottoman Empire frustrated from within by the conservatism of its military and religious leadership, threatened on its borders by their Russian co-religionists, its authority in Africa no more than nominal and its forces engaged in a war against its most powerful vassal in Albania, the expectations raised by the Society generated their own self-fulfilling momentum.

‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,’ Wordsworth had once believed of the French Revolution, and few of Europe’s Philhellenes who now saluted the Greek insurrection in the same vein can have had any idea of the forces they had unleashed. For centuries Greek and Turk had lived together in close proximity and when fighting burst out in 1821 it was not between army and army, but between community and community, atrocity met by atrocity and massacre by massacre in a frenzy of racial and religious hatred that convulsed the whole of the Greek world.

Within months of Germanos declaring a Holy War at Ayia Lavra, twenty thousand Turks had disappeared in the Peloponnese, as Monemvassia, Navarino, Tripolis, and eventually Nauplia fell into Greek hands. On the island of Chios, eighteen thousand Greeks were slaughtered in a matter of days. At Athens, Constantinople, Nicosia, Smyrna, Saloniki, on Rhodes and Cos, Greek butchered Turk and Turk Greek until, finally, when ancient hatreds had been glutted, when there were no more Turks to burn, rape, baptize and slaughter in the Peloponnese, and no more Greeks to circumcise and kill on Chios; when two thousand women and children had been stripped and butchered in a pass outside Tripolis, and the eighty-year-old patriarch hanged outside his cathedral in Constantinople, the war settled down into a more conventional shape.*

There are few conflicts before this century which so insistently demand to be remembered in terms of human misery, but if it is these horrors of 1821 that have left their most vivid mark on the national psyches of Greece and Turkey, it was the events of the next year that determined whether revolt would ever blossom into a full-scale war for independence. During the first months of rebellion Ottoman armies had been too busy with Ali Pasha of Ionnanina to deal with a second uprising as well, but with Ali’s murder on 5 February 1822 Sultan Mahmoud II, a ruler of slow and inexorable purpose, was at last free to turn his full attention to Greece itself.

The Ottoman plan was simple, and was embarked on with a characteristic confidence that took no account of terrain, season or opposition. From his base at Larissa in northern Greece the overall commander in Roumeli, Khurshid Pasha, sent two armies southwards down the western and eastern sides of the country, the first towards Misssolonghi and the other under the command of Dramali Pasha across the Isthmus of Corinth and into the Peloponnese and the heartland of the revolt.

With 23,000 men and 60,000 horses, Dramali’s army was the greatest to enter Greece in over a hundred years. Sweeping virtually unchallenged across the isthmus in July 1822, the Turks pushed down as far as Argos only to be reduced within a month by disease, privation, incompetence and unripened fruit to a dangerous and humiliating retreat through the unsecured mountain passes south of Corinth.

This retreat of Dramali’s weakened army gave the Greeks their greatest opportunity of the war in a terrain for which history, temperament and necessity had left them supremely well equipped. To the disgust of every foreigner reared on western tactics, their irregulars could never be made to stand up to Turkish cavalry in open conflict, but here among the crags and narrow mountain paths of Dervenakia it was another story, with those guerrilla skills honed by generations of brigand klephts coming spectacularly into their own.

With the Ottoman army trapped ‘like a herd of bisons’³ in the narrow passes, flight or defiance equally useless, Dervenakia was less a battle than a massacre. If the Greeks had not been more interested in plunder than killing, the slaughter would have been still worse, but even so five thousand Turks were killed and the army which had been sent to bring back ‘the ashes of the Peloponnese’ effectively destroyed. Ravaged by disease and hunger the remnant began their retreat along the southern coast of the Gulf of Corinth towards Patras, reduced first to horseflesh and then cannibalism, fighting among themselves over the graves of their comrades, burying their dead in the mornings only to dig them up again at night in a gruesome bid to ward off starvation.

Dervenakia gave the Greek army its most decisive victory of the whole war but just as important in its way was the campaign fought at the same time in western Greece. The army that had slaughtered the Turks in the passes of the north-east Peloponnese had fought under the most experienced of brigand chiefs in Theodore Colocotrones, but the force raised to face the Ottoman threat to Missolonghi was entrusted to the leadership of a newly arrived Phanariot aristocrat, Alexander Mavrocordato, a man for all his other talents without any experience of warfare and little enough of Greece itself.

The details of the campaign which followed belong properly to the military history of the rebellion, but the political and psychological impact of Mavrocordato’s failure are too important to ignore. The first task of this force was to relieve the Christian Suliote tribes of Epirus on the Turkish army’s right flank, and with this in mind Mavrocordato marched north from Missolonghi towards Arta with an army of a little over two thousand men, including in its ranks about one hundred Philhellene volunteers who had come out in the first months of the uprising.

The absurd vanity of many of these Philhellenes and the ingratitude of the Greeks they had come to save had already strained relations in Mavrocordato’s camp, and the first pitched battle they fought together confirmed the prejudices of both sides. Establishing his own headquarters at Langada on the eastern shore of the Ambracian Gulf, Mavrocordato pushed his army forward under the command of General Normann, his Chief of Staff. Advancing as far as Peta, a small village in the low hills to the east of the Turkish held town of Arta, Normann’s army prepared to face the enemy in a battle which could lose them everything and win them very little. In the van were their regular troops, comprising the Philhellene corps, and two battalions of Ionian volunteers and Greek soldiers. Behind them, holding the high ground and guarding their right flank, was a force of Greek irregulars led by an old and cynical bandit chief of dubious loyalty, Gogos.

Against the vastly superior force of infantry and cavalry that issued from Arta, the regulars held firm, their discipline and firepower repulsing the first Turkish assault without casualties. For the next two hours the battle seemed still to go their way, but while the Turkish commander, Reshid Pasha, kept up a desultory frontal attack on this force, a large contingent of his Albanian soldiers was marching in a flanking movement to the north in a bid to turn the Greek position.

With a strong body of Greek irregulars commanding the high ground, this should have been impossible, and the first that the Philhellenes knew of their fate was when they saw the Ottoman standard planted on the highest hill behind them. Gogos, in league with the enemy, had fled. The regulars were now hopelessly surrounded. Leading the cavalry himself, Reshid stormed their position, capturing their two pieces of artillery. Only twenty-five of the volunteers managed to force a way at bayonet point through the Turkish fines. The rest, fighting heroically to the end, redeemed every Philhellene folly by their courage, dying where they stood, or more horribly, on the walls of Arta.

The failure of Reshid to follow up his victory by taking Missolonghi limited the short-term significance of this campaign, but the strategic consequences of Peta reverberated dangerously on through the rest of the war. From the first tactless intrusion of Philhellene volunteers there had been an innate prejudice among Greeks against western methods of warfare, and with the contrasting evidence of Peta and Dervenakia at their disposal that breezy sense of superiority which is never far below the surface of the Greek national character hardened into an arrogance that would have fatal consequences.

For the time being, however, the rebellion was safe. With the defeat of Dramali’s army in the east and the withdrawal of Reshid in the west, Turkish initiative and energy were exhausted. Their troops still held on to Patras at the western end of the Gulf and to Modon and Coron – the old ‘Eyes of Venice’ – in the south-west. Up in the north, Greek resistance, isolated and exposed, had all but collapsed. In Attica, though, the former pupil of Ali Pasha, Odysseus Androutses, held Athens. In western Greece the heroism of Missolonghi had saved the town for even greater fame. At sea Ottoman and Greek fleets seemed as bent on avoiding each other as anything else. And in the Peloponnese – or the Morea as it was more usually known – the original heartland of the revolution, the Greeks did what Greeks have always done best when freed of external threat, and turned on one other.

Even through the dangers and triumphs of 1821–2, the divisions among the Greek leaders were never far below the surface, and by the middle of 1823 the country was sliding inexorably towards civil war. To the enthusiastic Philhellenes of Europe and America, it might seem that Greece had found itself the heirs to Demosthenes and Epaminondas, and yet even after a National Constitution and Government were established at Epidaurus on 13 January, with an executive and legislature and all the trappings of modern statehood, real power remained in the hands of local factions bent on turning the rebellion to their own narrow profit.

The politics of revolutionary Greece were so riddled by family and regional loyalties and feuds that no coherent picture is possible, but there were four main factions that dominated this struggle for power: the military capitani who won the first battles of the conflict; the great island families, grown powerful on the rich pickings of the Napoleonic War, who controlled the Greek fleets; the landlords or ‘primates’ of the Morea who had exercised such influence under the Turks; and the educated Phanariots and Greeks of the diaspora who had flooded in at the beginning of the revolution.

The social and economic realities which lay behind these divisions were real enough to hold serious consequences for the future of Greece, but to most foreigners and natives allegiances were more a matter of personalities than politics. In Athens, Odysseus Androutses governed eastern Greece with an Ali Pasha-like selfishness which made him a law to himself, but in western Greece and the Morea all those antagonisms that the successes of 1822 had exposed, the divisions between civilian and military, between constitutionalist and brigand, between Phanariot and native Greek, embodied themselves most vividly in the destructive rivalry of the two men who had presided over disaster and triumph at Peta and Dervenakia, Alexander Mavrocordato and Theodore Colocotrones.

It would be difficult to imagine two leaders more opposed in their backgrounds, aspirations or personalities. A descendant of the great Phanariot families that had governed in the Danubian provinces through the eighteenth century, ‘Prince’ Alexander Mavrocordato as he was styled, was living in impoverished exile in Italy – and teaching Mary Shelley Greek – when the rebellion broke out in the spring of 1821.

Among the first volunteers to sail from Marseilles to join the cause, Mavrocordato was perhaps its only leader who not only spoke but understood the languages and the ‘language’ of European diplomacy and Philhellenism. Among the native commanders of the rebellion Colocotrones or Petro Bey might invoke the shade of Epominandas or the principles of the nation state when it suited their purposes, but their Hellenism and liberalism were the thinnest of veneers on a narrow feudalism which had nothing in common with the modern and centralized Greece of which Mavrocordato dreamed at Epidaurus.

It is perhaps perverse to dismiss the career of the first President of Modern Greece as a failure, but because of this fundamental difference of vision Mavrocordato was never as successful a leader as his talents and meteoric rise had seemed to promise. At the first congress of 1821 he had been elected to the Presidency of the Assembly and then the country, and yet even in this moment of triumph, the determination of the old primates and captains to hold on to power guaranteed that while the Constitution might be written in his image Greece would still be run in theirs.

With the military failure of Mavrocordato at Peta any last hope of a stable and powerful central government was dealt a fatal blow, but the fact is that with his western frock coat, spectacles and principles he was always going to be at a disadvantage in a country locked in a ruthless and savage war. To the Greeks who had fought at Tripolis and Dervenakia there was inevitably something alien in his western skills, and it is a sobering feet about the way Greece still sees its revolution that while there is only one statue in the whole country to the most civilized of its leaders, it is difficult to find anywhere – from Tripolis to the old Parliament building in Athens – where the hawk-like features of Theodore Colocotrones do not glower down from under a ‘classical’ helmet on a nation only too happy to sacrifice political integrity to glamour.*

Avaricious and violent, corrupt, bold, cynical and charismatic, the fifty-year-old Colocotrones was everything as a military leader that the cosmopolitan and haplessly civilian Mavrocordato could never be. ‘It would be impossible for a painter or novelist to trace a more romantic delineation of a robber chieftain,’ the Philhellene soldier and great historian of the war, Thomas Gordon, wrote of Colocotrones,

tall and athletic, with a profusion of black hair and expressive features, alternately lighted up with boisterous gaiety, or darkened by bursts of passion: among his soldiers, he seemed born to command, having just the manners and bearing calculated to gain their confidence.⁴

Along with this air of authority, with the physical strength and presence so essential to any klepht leader, went a history to match. Born under a tree in the hills of Messenia on the Easter Monday of 1771, Colocotrones came from a long line of Turk-haters who had slid between policing the mountains as armatoles and living off them as bandits in the central Morea.

It was always his proud boast that in four hundred years of occupation his family had never once succumbed to Ottoman rule, and at the age of only fifteen Colocotrones himself fell naturally into the brigand life which had already killed his father and thirty-three of his nearest kin.

After twenty years of indiscriminate banditry against Greek and Turk alike, he was forced into exile in the Ionian Isles, but when the revolution broke out in 1821 he was ready again to resume his old life with a new and expanded brief. Present at the fell of Kalamata in the first days of the uprising, his influence and guerrilla talents soon gained him command of the troops besieging Tripolis, and victory there and at Dervenakia the following year gave him the plunder and prestige to make him the most powerful man in the Morea.

It was a position he exploited entirely for his own ends. He was not interested in the fate or even the idea of a Greece beyond the Peloponnese. To Colocotrones the war was about wealth and power, not about nationhood or any of the other battle cries of Philhellenism. In April 1823 he used the threat of his soldiers to have himself and Petro Bey elected to the Presidency and Vice Presidency, but it was a gesture of contempt for the position Mavrocordato had once held and not an endorsement of the political process. His authority, like his vision, was that of a chieftain, and by the middle of the year the rump of the government that he had usurped had fled from his vengeance to the safety and irrelevance of the islands.

It was this political situation, with the two-year-old nation only weeks from civil war, with feudal warlords in control of their private fiefdoms in the Morea and eastern Greece, with western Greece in chaos, the government in exile and Mavrocordato fled for his life to the island of Hydra, which greeted Byron when he landed at Argostoli.

From on board the Hercules he had pointed out the distant coastline of the Morea with all the excitement of a man reliving his youth, but it was not long before the reality that lay behind the shimmering image was brought rudely home. ‘The instinct that enables the vulture to detect carrion from far off,’ Trelawny wrote of their arrival, ‘is surpassed by the marvellous acuteness of the Greeks in scenting money.

The morning after our arrival a flock of Zuliote refugees alighted on our decks, attracted by Byron’s dollars. Lega, the steward, a thorough miser, coiled himself on the money-chest like a viper. Our sturdy skipper was for driving them overboard with hand-spikes. Byron came on deck in exuberant spirits, pleased with their savage aspect and wild attire, and, as was his wont, promised a great deal more than he should have done.⁵

In the months ahead Byron would have to pay for the caprice that made him take on these Suliots as a bodyguard, but it was the wider chaos of Greece that was soon engrossing his attention. From the moment that he went ashore at Argostoli on 3 September 1823, the struggle among the Greek factions for his money and support began. ‘No stranger,’ the young Philhellene George Finlay,* who was on Cephalonia at this time, recalled, ‘estimated the character of the Greeks more correctly than Lord Byron …’

It may, however, be observed that to nobody did the Greeks ever unmask their selfishness and self-deceit so candidly. Almost every distinguished statesman and general sent him letters soliciting his favour, his influence, or his money. Colocotrones invited him to a national assembly at Salamis. Mavrocordato informed him that he would be of no use anywhere but at Hydra, for Mavrocordato 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. With that sum not three hundred but three thousand Spartans would be put in motion to the frontier, and the fall of the Ottoman empire would be certain.⁶

Byron was never one to need much encouragement towards parsimony, but it was not now just his own money that was at stake. After an initial coolness in Britain to the fate of Greece, there were moves afoot in London to raise a Stock Exchange loan on her behalf, and as the sole agent of the London Greek Committee on the spot Byron had to take this into account. It made him move with a caution that other Philhellenes would have done well to emulate. He was not going to budge a foot farther until he could see his way, he told Trelawny, and to the Greeks he was equally firm. ‘And allow me to add once for all,’ he addressed their government in a letter,

I desire the well-being of Greece, and nothing else; I will do all I can to secure it; but I cannot consent, I never will consent that the English public, or English individuals, should be deceived as to the real state of affairs. The rest, gentlemen, depends on you: you have fought gloriously; act honourably towards your fellow-citizens, and towards the world; then it will no more be said, as it has been said for two thousand years, with the Roman historian, that Philopoeman was the last Grecian.⁷

The vigour and propriety of every action of Byron’s in these dealings with the Greek parties makes an extraordinary contrast with the indolent rhythms of his Italian life. There were certainly times on Cephalonia when the seeming hopelessness of his task made him wish that he had never come, and yet in spite of all the disappointments the truth is that he had not felt so alive and decisive in years, writing letters and meeting visiting Greeks, arranging or parrying loans, assessing military reports and projects for steam vessels, or playing the strategist with the English Representative and future conqueror of Sind, Colonel Napier.

He was also working to a strict regime preserved in the account of Pietro Gamba, Teresa Guiccioli’s brother. He would leave his bedroom at nine, and for the next two hours would deal with his correspondence, with Gamba to help. He would then breakfast on a cup of tea. At noon he would ride until three, and dine on cheese and vegetables. There would then be pistol shooting practice, and after that he would retire to his room until seven, only then emerging to talk until midnight.

There was, too, another aspect of Byron’s existence on Cephalonia which is more difficult to quantify but no less important to his emotional well-being. During the long years of exile in Italy there had never been any shortage of English acquaintances in his life, but the common denominator of the Pisa Circle, the tie as it were that bound them all together, was a sense of alienation which made their ‘Englishness’ a burden rather than a source of any emotional comfort.*

On Cephalonia it was different. Over the first three years of the Greek rebellion there had been a gradual thawing of British attitudes towards the insurgents, but Turkey was still technically an ally and Britain was as cautious in her sympathies for a people in revolt from their rightful sovereign as anywhere in conservative Europe. In the Ionian Isles, governed by that irascible foe of Greece, Sir Thomas Maitland, this caution shaded into downright hostility but Cephalonia was an exception. There, the underlying popular sympathy for the Greeks that ran as a powerful countercurrent to government policy, found eloquent support in the official Representative. Byron had chosen the island in the first place because of Napier’s strong Greek sympathies, and in his company or that of the garrison officers who surprised and touched Byron with the warmth of their welcome, he probably felt more entirely at home – more English even – than he had done in the seven years of his exile.

There was, however, little place for Trelawny in all this. Before he left Italy he had managed to half-convince himself that he was only using Byron to get to Greece, but as the ‘Childe’ moved from on board the Hercules into a cottage near Argostoli and settled into his fixed routine, the fears he had confided to Mary Shelley weeks earlier seemed only too justified. ‘The Poet’s attention’, he had written to her with an authentic mix of resentment and pride, ‘and professed kindness is boundless; he leaves everything to my discretion’;

if I had confidence in him this would be well, but I now only see the black side of it; it will eventually rob me of my free agency, by so weaving me in with his fortunes that I may have difficulty in separating myself from them.⁸

Even now this would probably not have much mattered, had he been able to feel any sense of importance in the connection. In Italy his feelings for Claire Clairmont had inevitably drawn him into her camp against Byron, and yet so long as he had been in charge of the Bolivar or giving orders on the Hercules he could at least preserve an illusion of independence that was his own best protection against his meanest instincts.

With their arrival on Cephalonia, however, and the sense of his own waning importance, even that illusory prop to his self-esteem was gone. He could go on competing in those kind of ways that were his sole resort, could shoot, box or swim better than Byron. But Byron now belonged to another and larger world than anything he could imagine, to a world of politics and finance which left him with a galling proof of his own insignificance and that sense of emotional abandonment which shadowed all his deepest relationships.

‘Dear Hunt,’ he wrote on 2 September, continuing a letter he had begun three weeks earlier: ‘You will see a long blank, in which nothing having been done, I had nothing to communicate.’⁹ It was a blank Trelawny was ill-equipped to fill. His motives for coming to Greece, his aspirations, had none of Byron’s complexity about them, none of his selflessness, and no room now for any of his circumspection. Whatever cloak of Byronic despair he might throw over them in his letters to Claire or Mary, he was there in search of raw excitement and little else.

‘When was there so glorious a banner as that unfurled in Greece?’ he had asked Claire in his last letter to her from Italy. ‘Who would not fight under it?’¹⁰ As the days stretched into weeks on Cephalonia, however, the prospect of fighting was looking increasingly distant. Rumours filtered across the channel that separated them from the Morea of ‘battles never fought, prisoners never taken’.¹¹ There was talk of the islands and the Peloponnese at loggerheads; of the factions on the brink of civil war.

Despite the presence of refugees, though, they were no nearer that conflict than when they first arrived. By the beginning of September, Trelawny had determined to assert his independence and leave, to proceed to the Greek centre of government, he told Hunt, and ‘apply to be actively employed’.¹² In a letter to Mary Shelley written four days later on the 6th, he was at once more venomous about his decision and more silkily double-tongued. ‘The Noble Poet has been seized with his usual indecision, when just on the brink’, he told her, ‘and when I would have him, without talking, leap.’

After being here a month in idleness, we seemed both to have taken our separate determination, his to return to Italy and mine to go forward with a tribe of Zuliotes to join a brother of Marco Bozzaris, at Missolonghi … He [Byron] has written nothing more, but will I doubt not. Our intimacy has never been ruffled, but smoother than ever, and I am most anxious in upholding his great name to the world.¹³

That last sentence is revealing. Whatever the private grievances that might emerge in his letters, Trelawny knew where his public credit lay. His plans, so extravagant in their telling here, were more circumscribed, more dependent on Byron than he would ever have confessed to the Pisan women. On 2 September, he was loading his belongings onto a small vessel, waiting for an opportunity to run the Turkish blockade under the cover of dark, and land on the western coast of the Peloponnese. His instructions were to go with Hamilton Browne to the Greek leaders, and acting as Byron’s secretaries, deliver letters and report back on the political situation.

On the night of the 6th, they were at last ready to leave. Their farewell was warm. ‘As I took leave of him,’ Trelawny recalled in his Records, ‘his last words were, “Let me hear from you often, – come back soon. If things are farcical, they will do for ‘Don Juan’; if heroical, you have another canto of ‘Childe Harold’.”’¹⁴

It was the last time Trelawny saw Byron. Farewells over, he and Hamilton Browne embarked on a caique for the short journey across to the Peloponnese, beaching the next morning without incident on the scruffy coastline beneath the half-ruined tower of the Pirgos customs house.

In classical times, this north-west corner of the Peloponnese had been celebrated for its prosperity, but the long depredations of Turkish rule had begun a task that two years of war had now completed. There was only a solitary guard on the customs post to mark their arrival, a ‘creature’ of Colocotrones living under semi-siege in a sort of hen coop at the top of the tower, reachable only by a ladder which he pulled up at night. It was a necessary precaution. The sole authority he recognized, he told Trelawny, was Colocotrones’s, but even his writ had a limited jurisdiction. A few days earlier a party of Turks from Patras had raided the village of Gastoumi a few miles to the north, killing a number of inhabitants and carrying off women and other booty.

Byron’s name, however, seemed enough to secure the guard’s co-operation and their bags went unsearched. They were treated to a breakfast of fowl and eggs, an execrable sweet wine and raki and then escorted on foot through a landscape of dunes and prickly thorn into Pirgos. That night they spent in the town. Twenty Spanish dollars secured them mules and a guide for the journey on to Tripolis and early the next morning they were ready to start.

In later years when Trelawny looked back to these first hours on Greek soil, reality was adjusted to fall more in line with expectations, and that single guard cowering in his hencoop was replaced by a squad of Moorish mercenaries. If Greece, however, fell short of what was required, Trelawny did not. His whole life had been an imaginative preparation for this, and he was ready. Like some initiate, he had held himself aloof from their hosts, from the sordid reality embodied in the poverty and pinched, emaciated faces of Pirgos. His old clothes were gone too, and he was dressed now in Suliote costume, ‘which wonderfully became him’, Hamilton Browne admiringly recorded, ‘being tall in stature and of a dark complexion, with a fine, commanding physiognomy’.¹⁵ Less than a day’s ride ahead of them lay the gentle, wooded hills among which the ancient shrine of Olympia nestled. Beyond those, clearly visible in the distance, and filled for every Philhellene with all the violent glamour of its classical past rose the massive and spectacular heartland of the central Peloponnese.

It was a hard, four-day journey to Tripolis and it was the afternoon of the first day before the two men emerged from a defile onto a long, narrow plain covering the remains of Olympia. Along its southern edge the River Alpheius marked their course, shallow and clear in the late summer, its gravelly bed broken up by little islets as it flowed westwards to its mythical union beneath the waters of the Mediterranean with the nymph Arethusa.

For many volunteers following this same route, the first sight of the river, with all its classical associations, came almost as a guarantee that their crusade had at last begun. To the Moreot peasants who lived on its ravaged banks it was nothing more romantic than the ‘Rufea’, but to every Philhellene who passed this way it was still stubbornly the ‘Alpheius’ – the river of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Pausanias’s travels, the path not just into the central highlands where it has its source but into a Greece that was more real to them than the land they had come to save.

It is one of the paradoxes of ‘Philhellenism’ that while the word means the love of Modern Greece, as opposed to ‘Hellenism’ which is concerned with its past, it was precisely that past which had brought most volunteers to the war. It can seem at times, in fact, as if the Greece through which the volunteer travelled was two separate countries, occupying the same physical space and clothed in the same landscape, but as distinct in his mind as the Holy Land and modern Israel to the devout pilgrim, the present only sanctified by its association with a history which was at once inspiration and balm, moral justification and emotional crutch among the horrors of Balkan warfare. ‘The dress, the manners, the very ignorance of the people has something in it wild and original,’ Lytton Bulwer rhapsodized in a letter home that captures the mental confusions and immaturity of so many Philhellenes at this time.

We are brought back to our boyhood by the very name of Greece; and every spot in this land reminds us of the days devoted to its classic fables, and the scenes where we were taught them. Methinks I see old Harrow Churchyard, and its venerable yews, under whose shadow I have Iain many a summer evening.¹⁶

And now, as the two men skirted the plain of Olympia, it was this other and older Greece, invisible but potent, that lay quite literally buried around them beneath the silt left by centuries of inundation. Across the river a few piles of ruined brickwork and the odd massive fragment of marble from the temple of Zeus were visible, but six years before the first systematic excavations that was almost all of the ancient site that could be seen.

It is a futile but irresistible exercise to try to balance the profit and loss that stand between contemporary experience and the Greece the Philhellenes knew. There is such a deceptive feeling of immutability about even its ruins that it is easy to forget how different their Greece was, but it is worth remembering that for all the remote beauty of early nineteenth-century Olympia everything that now conjures up its classical past for us, the stadium, the treasuries, the Philippeion, the drinking cup of Pheidias, the inscribed helmet of Miltiades, the victor of Marathon – that supreme symbol of the Greece Philhellenism invoked with such totemic force – still belonged to the future.

There is a genuine poignancy in the image of a great classicist like Colonel Leake standing alone in the middle of what he called ‘a beautiful desert’,¹⁷ cut off by the mud as much from this future as Olympia’s history. With a man of his seriousness it is tempting to feel that he was born a century too soon, and yet for most Philhellenes the name itself was enough, the past all the richer for existing nowhere outside their imaginations, entwined with school-day memories and unfettered by an historical knowledge which Byron only half-jokingly denounced as the enemy of romance. Gladiators could fight here in the fancy where they had never trod in history, crowds bay for blood. ‘How striking the contrast between the silence of these fields,’ one Philhellene wrote of Olympia,

now melancholy and deserted, and their jubilee in the old times of Greece! One marvelled in re-peopling the spot, all lonely but for a few travellers on their sorry mules, with the glad assemblage of aspiring thousands; – in listening for the spirit of eloquence in that solitude, and looking on a desolate waste as the glittering arena of pride, valour, and wisdom.¹⁸

Here was a vision of Greece which in its dangerous sentimentality was fraught with certain disillusion, but for the moment it found an echo in a landscape as seductive as itself. Ahead of Trelawny and Browne waited the barren uplands and wild gorges of the central Morea, yet as they began their ascent out of the plain of Pisa, crossing and recrossing the Alpheius, they were in the world of myth and classical association which western art has so curiously expropriated for Arcadia.

In 1821, the young English volunteer William Humphreys, feverish and embittered by his first experience of warfare, had invoked the myth of Alpheius on the banks of the Rufea as if somehow he could wash away the contagion of reality in its pure, classical stream. Now, for Trelawny and Browne, the same magic held sway. The crops of maize and wheat which before the war had grown on its banks, were ruined or burned; but pines, and wild olive, groves of oaks and chestnuts, and thickets of vallonia still bore out Pausanias’s claims for the Alpheius as the ‘greatest of all rivers … the most pleasure giving to the sight’.¹⁹

Gradually, however, as they climbed, the gravitational pull of the past gave way to a more brutal present. Often their path would be scarcely wide enough for their mules, a sheer drop of hundreds of feet awaiting the first false step. On some outcrop of rock, a shepherd would suddenly appear, warily watching them, long gun in hand, his figure etched against a sky in which eagles soared.

On the second day it began to rain in torrents, bringing, even in September, a piercing cold. As night fell and they sought the rough shelter of an overhang they saw the lights of an isolated settlement. Approaching it, they were attacked by a pack of dogs. Trelawny was about to shoot when their owners appeared out of the dark, their faces, caught in the lurid glare of their torches, showing ‘the most ferocious and cut-throat countenances’ Browne had ever seen.²⁰

In his years in the Ionian service stories had reached Hamilton Browne of travellers eaten alive by the dogs of these nomadic northern shepherds and the two men resigned themselves to a long and nervous night. They were refused food but were eventually allowed shelter, making beds out of sacks of maize, while their hosts huddled at a distance around their fire, eyeing Trelawny’s weapons and ‘jabbering in their own dialect’.²¹ The next morning they had ridden some distance when Trelawny discovered a pistol missing. On turning back, they were attacked again by the dogs. From high above them shots rang out as the shepherds swarmed down across the rocks, but they made their escape unharmed, injured in nothing worse than their dignity.

On the fifth day after landing at Pirgos they finally rode out of a narrow cut in the hills to see the towers and curtain walls of the town that only two years earlier had been the Ottoman capital of the Morea. As they made their way through the gate of the ruined city of Tripolis, the debris of its recent history lay on all sides. A few orange trees and the odd evergreen remained of the old seraglio gardens, but everything else was gone, looted and taken back on mules to the Mani, or smashed, burned or razed to the ground in the frenzy of destruction that had followed the town’s capture in October 1821.

There is a sense in which the brutalities of the Greek War of Independence all lie beyond imaginative recall, too sickening to be stomached in detail, too numbing to make much sense as statistics. Tripolis, however, seems to belong to another realm again, the ultimate expression of the racial and religious hatred that convulsed the Morea in the first summer of war. It is estimated that in the first weeks after the Greek flag was raised at Ayia Lavra, something like ten thousand Turks were slaughtered across the Peloponnese: in the days that followed the fall of Tripolis that number was to be doubled.

Throughout the long summer of 1821 the siege had dragged itself out in inimitable Greek fashion, heat, disease and starvation doing their grim work within the walls while Maniots bartered in their shadow and the captains negotiated their own private deals with the richer Turks. By the beginning of October it was clear the town could not hold out much longer. From all points of the Morea and even the islands, peasants congregated on the surrounding plain, determined to share in the spoils. Mutterings of discontent grew among the soldiers, conscious of negotiations that threatened their pockets, fearful of being balked of their reward. Then, on 4 October, a curious silence fell over the camp, an air of suppressed anticipation, the calm, as one witness put it, that was precursor of the bloody horrors to come.

All the Philhellene officers had left by this time except a young Frenchman in charge of the Greek artillery called Maxime Raybaud. Too young to do anything more than ‘assist’ France in her final reverses, as he quaintly put it, Raybaud had been culled from the French army in the cuts of 1820 and, inspired by thoughts of Ancient Sparta and Athens, joined Mavrocordato’s ship at Marseilles.

It was on 18 July that a Greek bishop had blessed their ship and Raybaud took his last emotional farewell of France. Less than three months later he watched as the morning sun rose bright above the barren plain on 5 October, burning with an implacable fierceness on a defenceless population about to expiate the crimes of four centuries of oppression. The air, Raybaud remembered, was heavy and dolorous. At nine o’clock a second French officer arrived at his tent, in time for the final rites. Half an hour later they heard a commotion from the direction of the town, and rushing out found that a small party of Greeks had forced the Argos gate, and the flag of independence was flying from a tower. As Raybaud ran into the town he became an impotent witness of Greece’s first great triumph of the war.

The streets were thick with unburied corpses, victims of famine and disease that lay putrefying where they had dropped. Soon, however, the stench of the dead mingled with that of fresh blood and fire as the Greeks began a long orgy of looting and revenge. They seemed to Raybaud to be everywhere, killing and mutilating, chasing their victims through the streets, the town’s packs of famished and maddened dogs in their wake, ready to tear apart the inhabitants and devour them as they fell. Beauty, age, sex, nothing could stop the attackers. Pregnant women were obscenely mutilated and butchered, children beheaded, dismembered and burned.

Wherever Raybaud went, helpless to interfere, there was the crackle of flames and the crash of masonry. Everywhere too there were the screams of victims, competing with another sound which was to haunt Raybaud’s memory – the guttural ululation of the Greek soldier in sight of his victim, and then the change of note as the ataghan was plunged in, an inhuman blood cry that was half scream, half laugh, ‘le cri de l’homme-tigre, de l’homme devorant l’homme’.²²

If the sun beat down in judgement all that day, night brought no relief. The slaughter went on, and with it the search under the October moon for fresh victims, dragged from their hiding places. Mere death, as Raybaud says, was a gift of rare generosity. Some faced it when it came, however, with a curious impassivity, an indifference almost. Others, young women and children, driven by some inexplicable impulse, a symbiotic urge of victim and attacker to bring centuries of religious hatred to a supreme pitch, died goading their killers on to fresh brutalities with insults of ‘infidel’, ‘dog’, and ‘impure’. Only the discovery of one of the town’s Jews could divert a Greek’s hatred from his Turkish victims for a moment. Then he might stop even with his dagger raised, postponing the pleasure to assist in the roasting of a Jew, revenge for the indignities Constantinople’s Jews had heaped on Patriarch Gregorius’s corpse.

No one could end it. An order went out to stop the killing. It was ignored. A second order went out from Colocotrones that there should be no killing within the town’s walls, but that too was useless. Not even the dead were safe. Tombs were ransacked, bodies exhumed, fuel to the contagion that was the inevitable aftermath of siege.

Perhaps, though, the worst crime was still to come. After the first attack something between two and three thousand inhabitants, mainly women and children, were taken out and held in the Greek camp at the foot of the hills. On 8 October they were stripped naked, and herded into a narrow gorge just to the west of the town. It was a perfect killing field the attackers had chosen for their business, sealed off at one end so there could be no escape, its grey limestone walls streaked with red as if the rocks themselves bled in sympathy. There are no descriptions of what happened that day, but a week later the Scottish Philhellene and historian, Thomas Gordon, passed the scene on his way back to the Ionian Isles. He was never able to bring himself to write of it in his great history of the war, but while serving out his quarantine in the lazar house on Cephalonia he told the English doctor – a Doctor Thomson, whose report made its way back through Sir Thomas Maitland to London – what he had seen. The corpses lay where they had been butchered, ‘the bodies of pregnant women were ripped open, their bodies dreadfully mangled, their heads struck off and placed on the bodies of dogs, whilst the dogs heads were placed on theirs, and also upon their private parts.’²³

There are towns and places which seem to remain the same through every change, as if there is some indestructible genius about them, some essence that will reassert itself like a damp mould through every disguise. It is perhaps nothing more than fancy that finds an echo of these horrors among the hills that squat so balefully above the modern town, and yet in the way Tripolis subverts history to the triumphalism of a national myth, we are brought as close as landscape or place can take us to the Greece of 1821.

With the bombast of its civic statuary, with the tyres, rubbish and broken-down trucks that mix with the brittle bones in that nearby gorge, Tripolis is even now a litmus test of sensibility that is not easy to fail and it is a sobering thought that in Trelawny’s account it merits only a casual half-line. It is often as worth noting what a man omits of his experience as what he includes, and Trelawny’s silence here – so different from Gordon’s – seems as eloquent as anything he wrote, an involuntary revelation of the man himself, a sudden glimpse into a moral abyss all the more chilling because he was too blind to try to hide it.

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