Lord Byron’s Jackal: A Life of Trelawny. David Crane

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