Byron in Love Page 18

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

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

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

  I watched thee on the breakers, when the rock

  Received our prow and all was storm and fear,

  And bade thee cling to me through every shock;

  This arm would be thy bark, or breast thy bier.

  …

  Thus much and more; and yet thou lov’st me not,

  And never wilt! Love dwells not in our will.

  Nor can I blame thee, though it be my lot

  To strongly, wrongly, vainly love thee still.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  At Mavrocordatos’s orders, the guns were fired over the lagoon at given intervals and answered by volleys of rejoicing cannon from the Turks at Patras and Lepanto. The Greek woman who had laid him out said that the ‘corpse was white like the wing of a young chicken’ and the citizens of Missolonghi kept asking for his heart. Twenty-one days of mourning were ordered to be held in every church in Greece.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  ‘Let not my body be hacked or sent to England–here let my bones moulder’, were two injunctions of Byron’s that were ignored. Just as the poet Orpheus had his body hacked by women infuriated by the constancy of his love for Eurydice, Byron’s body was likewise hacked. His doctors decided on a general autopsy to settle among themselves the bitter dispute as to the cause of his death. They paused, as the young Dr Millingen would write in his Memoirs of the Affairs of Greece some seven years later, ‘in silent contemplation of this abused clay which still bore witness to the physical beauty which had attracted so many men and women…the only blemish of his body which might otherwise have vied with that of Apollo himself, was the congenital malformation of his left foot and leg’. In this orgy of lament, Millingen got the foot wrong. The brain and the dura mater was what interested them, thinking, as witch doctors might, to trace the mysteries within the man. They found the cranium could be that of a man of eighty, the heart of great size but flaccid, the liver showing the toll of alcohol, stomach and kidneys impaired. Those honoured organs were placed in urns for embalming, but the lungs allowed to reside in the Church of San Spiridione so that the local citizens might shed their tears over them. No lead coffin being available, the body was placed in a packing case lined with tin, the urns beside it, the lid hermetically closed and fixed with the seals of the Greek authorities.

  There was much squabbling as to where Byron should be buried. Trelawny, temporarily forsaking his ‘great mission’ with Odysseus, travelled for three days, fording torrents and mountain passes, pursued by mad dogs; come supposedly to mourn, but with ghoulish curiosity he asked Fletcher to lift the shroud and allow him to see the deformed foot which Byron had hidden all his life. No marble bust, he claimed, could do justice to the beautiful white face and perfect features. He was of the same opinion as Stanhope that Byron should be buried in the Acropolis; Lord Sydney Osborne, the British Ambassador at Zante, arguing that if the Turks were to recapture Athens, Byron’s tomb would be desecrated, Gamba, Parry and Fletcher repeating Byron’s conflicting orders; stasis until Lady Byron’s wishes were made known.

  The coffin, draped with his helmet and the sword with which he had meant to charge on Lepanto, along with a crown of laurels, was placed in San Spiridione. The locals, wishing for his heart to be left there, were given instead his lungs and larynx, which were placed in an urn and stolen not too long afterwards. In churches and in makeshift churches in olive groves, warriors and citizens alike came to hear orations to his greatness, Byron a son of Greece, whose arms would receive him, whose tears would bathe the tomb containing his body and be perpetually shed over his precious heart. Even Stanhope, who was by then in Salona, forgetting their quarrels, waxed eloquent in his letter to the London Committee, saying England had lost her brightest genius, Greece her noblest friend and that what remained were the emanations of a splendid mind.

  On 23 May the embalmed remains were brought onto the brig Florida, bound for England, the brig, ironically, on which Captain Blaquiere had travelled, bringing with him the first portion of the loan from the Greek Committee.

  From Zante, the news had reached Lady Blessington at Naples, Leigh Hunt at Florence, and the Guiccioli family at Ravenna. Mary Shelley’s condolence letter and all newspapers were kept away from Teresa until her father was permitted to leave Ferrara so as to tell her himself, except that his courage failed him. The story goes that Teresa had a premonition of it upon seeing an old school friend arrive at her doorstep in the hottest hour of day.

  The ‘fatal intelligence’ came upon England like an earthquake on 14 May, the blue envelope bearing the official letter from Lord Sydney Osborne was delivered to Douglas Kinnaird, who sent it by courier to Hobhouse, who read it in ‘an agony of grief’.

  There were also letters from Count Gamba and from Fletcher, Gamba saying that Byron had died in a strange land and amongst strangers, but that no man was more loved and more wept over, while Fletcher asked to ‘please excuse all defects’, followed with a commodious account of Byron’s last days.

  ‘Byron is dead. Byron is dead.’ Thus did Jane Welsh write to her future husband Thomas Carlyle, who felt as if he had lost a brother, as did Victor Hugo in France, where young men wore black crêpe bands on their hats in mourning. A hasty painting, depicting Byron on his deathbed, was placed in the Passage Feydeau in Paris, where crowds filed past, and in the newspapers it was noted that the two greatest men of the century, Napoleon and Byron, had departed in the same decade. School children were put to reciting verses of Childe Harold. Tennyson, aged fifteen, ran into the woods and carved the same grieving sentence on sandstone rock near his father’s rectory.

  Byron’s nephew, Captain George Byron, now the seventh heir, travelled to Kent to tell Annabella, then reported to Hobhouse that he had left her in a ‘distressing state’ and that she expressed the wish for any account of Byron’s final weeks. Sir Francis Burdett broke the news to Augusta at St James’s Palace, who clung to a sanctimonious straw, gathered from Fletcher’s letter, that Mylord, since his first seizure, had placed the Bible she had given him on the breakfast table each morning. It seems to be the only recorded time that Byron appeared at a breakfast table. Hobhouse advised that she should not disclose such a confidence, convinced as he was that Byron would not make ‘superstitious use’ of the Holy Book. As a rising young parliamentarian, Hobhouse appointed himself as Byron’s keeper.

  So in that great flux of grief and condolence, something ugly and incontrovertible was afoot, with Hobhouse as its mastermind, backed, as he wrote triumphantly in his diary, by Murray’s decisive conduct. The ‘plaguy’ Memoirs were for burning.

  ‘After the first excessive grief was over, I determined to lose no time in doing my duty of preserving all that was left to me of my friend–his fame’; so Hobhouse wrote in his diary. At the very same time Sir William Hope, in his esteem for Lady Byron, sent her solicitor, G. B. Wharton, a letter pointing out that it would be most cruel and lamentable for her ladyship to ‘undergo any further mortification’. The mortification devolved around Byron’s Memoirs, which Mr Murray had told him were written ‘in a language so horrid and disgusting’ that as a man of honour, he would not publish them.

  In 1819 when Tom Moore visited him in his villa at Brenta, near Venice, Byron presented him with 78 folio pages of his Memoirs, written as he said ‘in his finest, fiercest, Caravaggio style’. Byron’s one stipulation was that they would not be published in his lifetime and he gave Moore the freedom to sell them if he had to. He also gave Moore the discretionary power to change a thing or two, to add what he pleased from his own knowledge of the author and to contradict where necessary. He admitted that a reader would find a host of op
inions and some fun in the detailed autopsy of his marriage and its consequences. The summation was no doubt unforgiving but we must remember that Byron did not spare himself either.

  Lady Byron had been invited to read ‘this long and minute account’ of their marriage and separation, with the freedom to detect any falsity and to mark any passages which did not coincide with the truth. The story he wished to tell was for future generations, which neither he nor she could arise from the dust to prove or disprove. She declined to read it, but after conferring with her solicitors thought that such a memoir was wholly unjustifiable and that she would not ever sanction it.

  Byron wrote and despatched many more pages to Moore who, finding himself in ‘pecuniary difficulties’ and with Byron’s knowledge, sold them to Murray for two thousand pounds, the agreement being that he could buy them back when he so wished.

  In May 1824, while Byron’s remains had not even left the port of Zante, the machinations had begun, with Hobhouse and Murray as the masterminds. Augusta had at first dithered, but soon, under the sway of Robert Wilmot-Horton, Byron’s avowed enemy, she capitulated. Lady Byron, while professing detachment in the matter, appointed Colonel Doyle to act as her arbiter.

  The four men met in Murray’s drawing room in Albemarle Street in London along with Moore and the poet Henry Luttrell whom he had brought as an ally to augment his case but who was already wavering. Moore had borrowed two thousand guineas from Longmans the publishers and arrived determined to buy the Memoirs back from Murray, who along with interest was also requesting collateral expenses. Moore was detested by all of Byron’s friends and mocked for being the son of a Dublin grocer, hailing, as Leigh Hunt had said, ‘from the bogs of Clontarf’, a neighbourhood, to my knowledge, free of bogland. Augusta called him that ‘detestable little man’, yet nevertheless Moore was the one to whom Byron in a letter not long before his death, bequeathed the last ‘dregs of affection in [his] heart’.