the faculty of action required by the times–and Kolokotrones, a type of the rough fighting Klepht; a mere savage in attainments, scarcely able to read or write, cunning, grossly avaricious and faithless, incapable of appreciating either military or moral discipline, but a born soldier in his own irregular way, and a hero among peasants as ignorant as himself. There was yet another, who, if his character had been equal to his station, would have been placed at the head of the government of the Morea. This was Petrobei, chief of the family of Mauromichalis, ruler of the rugged district of Maina, in the south-west of Peloponnesus, where the Turk had never established more than nominal sovereignty. A jovial, princely person, exercising among his clansmen a mild Homeric sway, Petrobei, surrounded by his nine vigorous sons, was the most picturesque figure in Greece. But he had no genius for great things. A sovereignty, which in other hands might have expanded to national dominion, remained with Petrobei a mere ornament and curiosity; and the power of the deeply-rooted clan-spirit of the Maina only made itself felt when, at a later period, the organisation of a united Hellenic State demanded its sacrifice.
[Fall of Tripolitza, Oct. 5, 1821.]
Anarchy, egotism, and ill-faith disgraced the Greek insurrection from its beginning to its close. There were, indeed, some men of unblemished honour among the leaders, and the peasantry in the ranks fought with the most determined courage year after year; but the action of most of those who figured as representatives of the people brought discredit upon the national cause. Their first successes were accompanied by gross treachery and cruelty. Had the Greek leaders been Bourbon kings, nurtured in all the sanctities of divine right, instead of tax-gatherers and cattle-lifters, truants from the wild school of Turkish violence and deceit, they could not have perjured themselves with lighter hearts. On the surrender of Navarino, in August, 1821, after a formal capitulation providing for the safety of its Turkish inhabitants, men, women, and children were indiscriminately massacred. The capture of Tripolitza, which took place two months later, was changed from a peaceful triumph into a scene of frightful slaughter by the avarice of individual chiefs, who, while negotiations were pending, made their way into the town, and bargained with rich inhabitants to give them protection in return for their money and jewels. The soldiery, who had undergone the labours of the siege for six months, saw that their reward was being pilfered from them. Defying all orders, and in the absence of Demetrius Hypsilanti, the commander-in-chief, they rushed upon the fortifications of Tripolitza, and carried them by storm. A general massacre of the inhabitants followed. For three days the work of carnage was continued in the streets and houses, until few out of a population of many thousands remained living. According to the testimony of Kolokotrones himself, the roads were so choked with the dead, that as he rode from the gateway to the citadel his horse’s hoofs never touched the ground. [368]
[The Massacre of Chios, April-June, 1822.]
In the opening scenes of the Greek insurrection the barbarity of Christians and of Ottomans was perhaps on a level. The Greek revenged himself with the ferocity of the slave who breaks his fetters; the Turk resorted to wholesale massacre and extermination as the normal means of government in troubled times. And as experience has shown that the savagery of the European yields in one generation to the influences of civilised rule, while the Turk remains as inhuman to-day as he was under Mahmud II., so the history of 1822 proved that the most devilish passions of the Greek were in the end but a poor match for disciplined Turkish prowess in the work of butchery. It was no easy matter for the Sultan to requite himself for the sack of Tripolitza upon Kolokotrones and his victorious soldiers; but there was a peaceful and inoffensive population elsewhere, which offered all the conditions for free, unstinted, and unimperilled vengeance which the Turk desires. A body of Samian troops had landed in Chios, and endeavoured, but with little success, to excite the inhabitants to revolt, the absence of the Greek fleet rendering them an almost certain prey to the Sultan’s troops on the mainland. The Samian leader nevertheless refused to abandon the enterprise, and laid siege to the citadel, in which there was a Turkish garrison. Before this fortress could be reduced, a relieving army of seven thousand Turks, with hosts of fanatical volunteers, landed on the island. The Samians fled; the miserable population of Chios was given up to massacre. For week after week the soldiery and the roving hordes of Ottomans slew, pillaged, and sold into slavery at their pleasure. In parts of the island where the inhabitants took refuge in the monasteries, they were slaughtered by thousands together; others, tempted back to their homes by the promulgation of an amnesty, perished family by family. The lot of those who were spared was almost more pitiable than of those who died. The slave-markets of Egypt and Tunis were glutted with Chian captives. The gentleness, the culture, the moral worth of the Chian community made its fate the more tragical. No district in Europe had exhibited a civilisation more free from the vices of its type: on no community had there fallen in modern times so terrible a catastrophe. The estimates of the destruction of life at Chios are loosely framed; among the lowest is that which sets the number of the slain and the enslaved at thirty thousand. The island, lately thronging with life and activity, became a thinly-populated place. After a long period of depression and the slow return of some fraction of its former prosperity, convulsions of nature have in our own day again made Chios a ruin. A new life may arise when the Turk is no longer master of its shores, but the old history of Chios is closed for ever.
[Exploit of Kanaris, June 18th, 1822.]
The impression made upon public opinion in Europe by the massacre of 1822 was a deep and lasting one, although it caused no immediate change in the action of Governments. The general feeling of sympathy for the Greeks and hatred for the Turks, which ultimately forced the Governments to take up a different policy, was intensified by a brilliant deed of daring by which a Greek captain avenged the Chians upon their devastor, and by the unexpected success gained by the insurgents on the mainland against powerful armies of the Sultan. The Greek executive, which was now headed by Maurokordatos, had been guilty of gross neglect in not sending over the fleet in time to prevent the Turks from landing in Chios. When once this landing had been effected, the ships which afterwards arrived were powerless to prevent the massacre, and nothing could be attempted except against the Turkish fleet itself. The instrument of destruction employed by the Greeks was the fire-ship, which had been used with success against the Turk in these same waters in the war of 1770. The sacred month of the Ramazan was closing, and on the night of June 18, Kara Ali, the Turkish commander, celebrated the festival of Bairam with above a thousand men on board his flag-ship. The vessel was illuminated with coloured lanterns. In the midst of the festivities, Constantine Kanaris, a Psarian captain, brought his fire-ship unobserved right up to the Turkish man-of-war, and drove his bowsprit firmly into one of her portholes; then, after setting fire to the combustibles, he stepped quietly into a row-boat, and made away. A breeze was blowing, and in a moment the Turkish crew were enveloped in a mass of flames. The powder on board exploded; the boats were sunk; and the vessel, with its doomed crew, burned to the water-edge, its companions sheering off to save themselves from the shower of blazing fragments that fell all around. Kara Ali was killed by a broken mast; a few of his men saved their lives by swimming or were picked up by rescuers; the rest perished. Such was the consternation caused by the deed of Kanaris, that the Ottoman fleet forthwith quitted the Ægæan waters, and took refuge under the guns of the Dardanelles. Kanaris, unknown before, became from this exploit a famous man in Europe. It was to no stroke of fortune or mere audacity that he owed his success, but to the finest combination of nerve and nautical skill. His feat, which others were constantly attempting, but with little success, to imitate, was repeated by him in the same year. He was the most brilliant of Greek seamen, a simple and modest hero; and after his splendid achievements in the war of liberation, he served his country well in a political career. Down to his death in a hale old age, he was with justice the idol and pride of the Greek nation.
[Double invasion of Greece 1822.]
[Destruction of the Pilhellenes near Arta, July 16.]
[Unsuccessful siege of Missolonghi, Nov., 1822.]
The fall of the Albanian rebel, Ali Pasha, in the spring of 1822 made it possible for Sultan Mahmud, who had hitherto been crippled by the resistance of Janina, to throw his whole land-force against the Hellenic revolt; and the Greeks of the mainland, who had as yet had to deal only with scattered detachments or isolated garrisons, now found themselves exposed to the attack of two powerful armies. Kurshid, the conqueror of Ali Pasha, took up his headquarters at Larissa in Thessaly, and from this base the two invading armies marched southwards on diverging lines. The first, under Omer Brionis, was ordered to make its way through Southern Epirus to the western entrance of the Corinthian Gulf, and there to cross into the Morea; the second, under Dramali, to reduce Central Greece, and enter the Morea by the isthmus of Corinth; the conquest of Tripolitza and the relief of the Turkish coast-fortresses which were still uncaptured being the ultimate end to be accomplished by the two armies in combination with one another and with the Ottoman fleet. Not less than fifty thousand men were under the orders of the Turkish commanders, the division of Dramali being by far the larger of the two. Against this formidable enemy the Greeks possessed poor means of defence, nor were their prospects improved when Maurokordatos, the President, determined to take a military command, and to place himself at the head of the troops in Western Greece. There were indeed urgent reasons for striking with all possible force in this quarter. The Suliotes, after seventeen years of exile in Corfu, had returned to their mountains, and were now making common cause with Greece. They were both the military outwork of the insurrection, and the political link between the Hellenes and the Christian communities of Albania, whose action might become of decisive importance in the struggle against the Turks. Maurokordatos rightly judged the relief of Suli to be the first and most pressing duty of the Government. Under a capable leader this effort would not have been beyond the power of the Greeks; directed by a politician who knew nothing of military affairs, it was perilous in the highest degree. Maurokordatos, taking the command out of abler hands, pushed his troops forward to the neighbourhood of Arta, mismanaged everything, and after committing a most important post to Botzares, an Albanian chieftain of doubtful fidelity, left two small regiments exposed to the attack of the Turks in mass. One of these regiments, called the corps of Philhellenes, was composed of foreign officers who had volunteered to serve in the Greek cause as common soldiers. Its discipline was far superior to anything that existed among the Greeks themselves; and at its head were men who had fought in Napoleon’s campaigns. But this corps, which might have become the nucleus of a regular army, was sacrificed to the incapacity of the general and the treachery of his confederate. Betrayed and abandoned by the Albanian, the Philhellenes met the attack of the Turks gallantly, and almost all perished. Maurokordatos and the remnant of the Greek troops now retired to Missolonghi. The Suliotes, left to their own resources, were once more compelled to quit their mountain home, and to take refuge in Corfu. Their resistance, however, delayed the Turks for some months, and it was not until the beginning of November that the army of Omer Brionis, after conquering the intermediate territory, appeared in front of Missolonghi. Here the presence of Maurokordatos produced a better effect than in the field. He declared that he would never leave the town as long as a man remained to fight the Turks. Defences were erected, and the besiegers kept at bay for two months. On the 6th of January, 1823, Brionis ordered an assault. It was beaten back with heavy loss; and the Ottoman commander, hopeless of maintaining his position throughout the winter, abandoned his artillery, and retired into the interior of the country. [369]
[Dramali passes the Isthmus of Corinth, July 1822.]
[His retreat and destruction, Aug., 1822.]
In the meantime Dramali had advanced from Thessaly with twenty-four thousand infantry and six thousand cavalry, the most formidable armament that had been seen in Greece since the final struggle between the Turks and Venetians in 1715. At the terror of his approach all hopes of resistance vanished. He marched through Boeotia and Attica, devastating the country, and reached the isthmus of Corinth in July, 1822. The mountain passes were abandoned by the Greeks; the Government, whose seat was at Argos, dispersed; and Dramali moved on to Nauplia, where the Turkish garrison was on the point of surrendering to the Greeks. The entrance to the Morea had been won; the very shadow of a Greek government had disappeared, and the definite suppression of the revolt seemed now to be close at hand. But two fatal errors of the enemy saved the Greek cause. Dramali neglected to garrison the passes through which he had advanced; and the commander of the Ottoman fleet, which ought to have met the land-force at Nauplia, disobeyed his instructions and sailed on to Patras. Two Greeks, at this crisis of their country’s history, proved themselves equal to the call of events. Demetrius Hypsilanti, now President of the Legislature, refused to fly with his colleagues, and threw himself, with a few hundred men, into the Acropolis of Argos. Kolokotrones, hastening to Tripolitza, called out every man capable of bearing arms, and hurried back to Argos, where the Turks were still held at bay by the defenders of the citadel. Dramali could no longer think of marching into the interior of the Morea. The gallantry of Demetrius had given time for the assemblage of a considerable force, and the Ottoman general now discovered the ruinous effect of his neglect to garrison the passes in his rear. These were seized by Kolokotrones. The summer-drought threatened the Turkish army with famine; the fleet which would have rendered them independent of land-supplies was a hundred miles away; and Dramali, who had lately seen all Greece at his feet, now found himself compelled to force his way back through the enemy to the isthmus of Corinth. The measures taken by Kolokotrones to intercept his retreat were skilfully planned, and had they been adequately executed not a man of the Ottoman army would have escaped. It was only through the disorder and the cupidity of the Greeks themselves that a portion of Dramali’s force succeeded in cutting its way back to Corinth. Baggage was plundered while the retreating enemy ought to have been annihilated, and divisions which ought to have co-operated in the main attack sought trifling successes of their own. But the losses and the demoralisation of the Turkish army were as ruinous to it as total destruction. Dramali himself fell ill and died; and the remnant of his troops which had escaped from the enemy’s hands perished in the neighbourhood of Corinth from sickness and want.
[Greek Civil Wars, 1824.]
The decisive events of 1822 opened the eyes of European Governments to the real character of the Greek national rising, and to the probability of its ultimate success. The forces of Turkey were exhausted for the moment, and during the succeeding year no military operations could be undertaken by the Sultan on anything like the same scale. It would perhaps have been better for the Greeks themselves if the struggle had been more continuously sustained. Nothing but foreign pressure could give unity to the efforts of a race distracted by so many local rivalries, and so many personal ambitions and animosities. Scarcely was the extremity of danger passed when civil war began among the Greeks themselves. Kolokotrones set himself up in opposition to the Legislature, and seized on some of the strong places in the Morea. This first outbreak of the so-called military party against the civil authorities was, however, of no great importance. The Primates of the Morea took part with the representatives of the islands and of Central Greece against the disturber of the peace, and an accommodation was soon arranged. Konduriottes, a rich ship-owner of Hydra, was made President, with Kolettes, a politician of great influence in Central Greece, as his Minister. But in place of the earlier antagonism between soldier and civilian, a new and more dangerous antagonism, that of district against district, now threatened the existence of Greece. The tendency of the new government to sacrifice everything to the interest of the islands at once became evident. Konduriottes was a thoroughly incompetent man, and made himself ridiculous by appointing his friends, the Hydriote sea-captains, to the highest military and civil posts. Rebellion again broke out, and Kolokotrones was joined by his old antagonists, the Primates of the Morea. A serious struggle ensued, and the government, which was really conducted by Kolettes, displayed an energy that surprised both its friends and its foes. The Morea was invaded by a powerful force from Hydra. No mercy was shown to the districts which supported the rebels. Kolokotrones was thoroughly defeated, and compelled to give himself up to the Government. He was carried to Hydra and thrown into prison, where he remained until new peril again rendered his services indispensable to Greece.
[Mahmud calls for the help of Egypt.]
After the destruction of Dramali’s army and the failure of the Ottoman navy to effect any result whatever, the Sultan appears to have conceived a doubt whether the subjugation of Greece might not in fact be a task beyond his own unaided power. Even if the mainland were conquered, it was certain that the Turkish fleet could never reduce the islands, nor prevent the passage of supplies and reinforcements from these to the ports of the Morea. Strenuous as Mahmud had hitherto shown himself in crushing his vassals who, like Ali Pasha, attempted to establish an authority independent of the central government, he now found himself compelled to apply to the most dangerous of them all for assistance. Mehemet Ali, Pasha of Egypt, had risen to power in the disturbed time that followed the expulsion of Napoleon’s forces from Egypt. His fleet was more powerful than that of Turkey. He had organised an army composed of Arabs, negroes, and fellahs, and had introduced into it, by means of French officers, the military system and discipline of Europe. The same reform had been attempted in Turkey seventeen years before by Mahmud’s predecessor, Selim III., but it had been successfully resisted by the soldiery of Constantinople, and Selim had paid for his innovations with his life. Mahmud, silent and tenacious, had long been planning the destruction of the Janissaries, the mutinous and degraded representatives of a once irresistible force, who would now neither fight themselves nor permit their rulers to organise any more effective body of troops in their stead. It is possible that the Sultan may have believed that a victory won over the enemies of Islam by the re-modelled forces of Egypt would facilitate the execution of his own plans of military reform; it is also possible that he may not have been unwilling to see his vassal’s resources dissipated by a distant and hazardous enterprise. Not without some profound conviction of the urgency of the present need, not without some sinister calculation as to the means of dealing with an eventual rival in the future, was the offer of aggrandisement–if we may judge from the whole tenor of Sultan Mahmud’s career and policy–made to the Pasha of Egypt by his jealous and far-seeing master. The Pasha was invited to assume the supreme command of the Ottoman forces by land and sea, and was promised the island of Crete in return for his co-operation against the Hellenic revolt. Messages to this effect reached Alexandria at the beginning of 1824. Mehemet, whose ambition had no limits, welcomed the proposals of his sovereign with ardour, and, while declining the command for himself, accepted it on behalf of Ibrahim, his adopted son.
[Turkish-Egyptian plans.]
[Egyptians conquer Crete, April, 1824.]
[Destruction of Psara, July, 1824.]
The most vigorous preparations for war were now made at Alexandria. The army was raised to 90,000 men, and new ships were added to the navy from English dockyards. A scheme was framed for the combined operation of the Egyptian and the Turkish forces which appeared to render the ultimate conquest of Greece certain. It was agreed that the island of Crete, which is not sixty miles distant from the southern extremity of the Morea, should be occupied by Ibrahim, and employed as his place of arms; that simultaneous or joint attacks should then be made upon the principal islands of the Ægæan; and that after the capture of these strongholds and the destruction of the maritime resources of the Greeks, Ibrahim’s troops should pass over the narrow sea between Crete and the Morea, and complete their work by the reduction of the mainland, thus left destitute of all chance of succour from without. Crete, like Sicily, is a natural stepping-stone between Europe and Africa; and when once the assistance of Egypt was invoked by the Sultan, it was obvious that Crete became the position which above all others it was necessary for the Greeks to watch and to defend. But the wretched Government of Konduriottes was occupied with its domestic struggles. The appeal of the Cretans for protection remained unanswered, and in the spring of 1824 a strong Egyptian force landed on this island, captured its fortresses, and suppressed the resistance of the inhabitants with the most frightful cruelty. The base of operations had been won, and the combined attacks of the Egyptian and Turkish fleets upon the smaller islands followed. Casos, about thirty miles east of Crete, was surprised by the Egyptians, and its population exterminated. Psara was selected for the attack of the Turkish fleet. Since the beginning of the insurrection the Psariotes had been the scourge and terror of the Ottoman coasts. The services that they had rendered in the Greek navy had been priceless; and if there was one spot of Greek soil which ought to have been protected as long as a single boat’s crew remained afloat, it was the little rock of Psara. Yet, in spite of repeated warnings, the Greek Government allowed the Turkish fleet to pass the Dardanelles unobserved, and some clumsy feints were enough to blind it to the real object of an expedition whose aim was known to all Europe. There were ample means for succouring the islanders, as subsequent events proved; but when the Turkish admiral, Khosrew, with 10,000 men on board, appeared before Psara, the Greek fleet was far away. The Psariotes themselves were over-confident. They trusted to their batteries on land, and believed their rocks to be impregnable. They were soon undeceived. While a corps of Albanians scaled the cliffs behind the town, the Turks gained a footing in front, and overwhelmed their gallant enemy by weight of numbers. No mercy was asked or given. Eight thousand of the Psarians were slain or carried away as slaves. Not more than one-third of the population succeeded in escaping to the neighbouring islands. [370]
[Greek successes off the coast of Asia Minor, September, 1824.]
[Ibrahim reaches Crete. December, 1824.]
The first part of the Turko-Egyptian plan had thus been successfully accomplished, and if Khosrew had attacked Samos immediately after his first victory, this island would probably have fallen before help could arrive. But, like other Turkish commanders, Khosrew loved intervals of repose, and he now sailed off to Mytilene to celebrate the festival of Bairam. In the meantime the catastrophe of Psara had aroused the Hydriote Government to a sense of its danger. A strong fleet was sent across the Ægæan, and adequate measures were taken to defend Samos both by land and sea. The Turkish fleet was attacked with some success, and though Ibrahim with the Egyptian contingent now reached the coast of Asia Minor, the Greeks proved themselves superior to their adversaries combined. The operations of the Mussulman commanders led to no result; they were harassed and terrified by the Greek fireships; and when at length all hope of a joint conquest of Samos had been abandoned, and Ibrahim set sail for Crete to carry out his own final enterprise alone, he was met on the high seas by the Greeks, and driven back to the coast of Asia Minor. During the autumn of 1824 the disasters of the preceding months were to some extent retrieved, and the situation of the Egyptian fleet would have become one of some peril if the Greeks had maintained their guard throughout the winter. But they underrated the energy of Ibrahim, and surrendered themselves to the belief that he would not repeat the attempt to reach Crete until the following spring. Careless, or deluded by false information, they returned to Hydra, and left the seas unwatched. Ibrahim saw his opportunity, and, setting sail for Crete at the beginning of December, he reached it without falling in with the enemy.
[Ibrahim in the Morea, Feb., 1825.]
The snowy heights of Taygetus are visible on a clear winter’s day from the Cretan coast; yet, with their enemy actually in view of them, the Greeks neglected to guard the passage to the Morea. On the 22nd of February, 1825, Ibrahim crossed the sea unopposed and landed five thousand men at Modon. He was even able to return to Crete and bring over a second contingent of superior strength before any steps were taken to hinder his movements. The fate of the mainland was now settled. Ibrahim marched from Modon upon Navarino, defeated the Greek forces on the way, and captured the garrison placed in the Island of Sphakteria–the scene of the first famous surrender of the Spartans–before the Greek fleet could arrive to relieve it. The forts of Navarino then capitulated, and Ibrahim pushed on his victorious march towards the centre of the Morea. It was in vain that the old chief Kolokotrones was brought from his prison at Hydra to take supreme command. The conqueror of Dramali was unable to resist the onslaught of Ibrahim’s regiments, recruited from the fierce races of the Soudan, and fighting with the same arms and under the same discipline as the best troops in Europe. Kolokotrones was driven back through Tripolitza, and retired as the Russians had retired from Moscow, leaving a deserted capital behind him. Ibrahim gave his troops no rest; he hurried onwards against Nauplia, and on the 24th of June reached the summit of the mountain-pass that looks down upon the Argolic Gulf. “Ah, little island,” he cried, as he saw the rock of Hydra stretched below him, “how long wilt thou escape me?” At Nauplia itself the Egyptian commander rode up to the very gates and scanned the defences, which he hoped to carry at the first assault. Here, however, a check awaited him. In the midst of general flight and panic, Demetrius Hypsilanti was again the undaunted soldier. He threw himself with some few hundreds of men into the mills of Lerna, and there beat back Ibrahim’s vanguard when it attempted to carry this post by storm. The Egyptian recognised that with men like these in front of him Nauplia could be reduced only by a regular siege. He retired for a while upon Tripolitza, and thence sent out his harrying columns, slaughtering and devastating in every direction. It seemed to be his design not merely to exhaust the resources of his enemy but to render the Morea a desert, and to exterminate its population. In the very birthplace of European civilisation, it was said, this savage, who had already been nominated Pasha of the Morea, intended to extinguish the European race and name, and to found for himself upon the ashes of Greece a new barbaric state composed of African negroes and fellaheen. That such design had actually been formed was denied by the Turkish government in answer to official inquiries, and its existence was not capable of proof. But the brutality of one age is the stupidity of the next, and Ibrahim’s violence recoiled upon himself. Nothing in the whole struggle between the Sultan and the Greeks gave so irresistible an argument to the Philhellenes throughout Europe, or so directly overcame the scruples of Governments in regard to an armed intervention in favour of Greece, as Ibrahim’s alleged policy of extermination and re-settlement. The days were past when Europe could permit its weakest member to be torn from it and added to the Mohammedan world.
[Siege of Missolongi, April, 1825-April, 1826.]
One episode of the deepest tragic interest yet remained in the Turko-Hellenic conflict before the Powers of Europe stepped in and struck with weapons stronger than those which had fallen from dying hands. The town of Missolonghi was now beleaguered by the Turks, who had invaded Western Greece while Ibrahim was overrunning the Morea. Missolonghi had already once been besieged without success; and, as in the case of Saragossa, the first deliverance appears to have inspired the townspeople with the resolution, maintained even more heroically at Missolonghi than at the Spanish city, to die rather than capitulate. From the time when Reschid, the Turkish commander, opened the second attack by land and sea in the spring of 1825, the garrison and the inhabitants met every movement of the enemy with the most obstinate resistance. It was in vain that Reschid broke through the defences with his artillery, and threw mass after mass upon the breaches which he made. For month after month the assaults of the Turks were uniformly repelled, until at length the arrival of a Hydriote squadron forced the Turkish fleet to retire from its position, and made the situation of Reschid himself one of considerable danger. And now, as winter approached, and the guerilla bands in the rear of the besiegers grew more and more active, the Egyptian army with its leader was called from the Morea to carry out the task in which the Turks had failed. The Hydriote sea-captains had departed, believing their presence to be no longer needed; and although they subsequently returned for a short time, their services were grudgingly rendered and ineffective. Ibrahim, settling down to his work at the beginning of 1826, conducted his operations with the utmost vigour, boasting that he would accomplish in fourteen days what the Turks could not effect in nine months. But his veteran soldiers were thoroughly defeated when they met the Greeks hand to hand; and the Egyptian, furious with his enemy, his allies, and his own officers, confessed that Missolonghi could only be taken by blockade. He now ordered a fleet of flat-bottomed boats to be constructed and launched upon the lagoons that lie between Missolonghi and the open sea. Missolonghi was thus completely surrounded; and when the Greek admirals appeared for the last time and endeavoured to force an entrance through the shallows, they found the besieger in full command of waters inaccessible to themselves, and after one unsuccessful effort abandoned Missolonghi to its fate. In the third week of April, 1826, exactly a year after the commencement of the siege, the supply of food was exhausted. The resolution, long made, that the entire population, men, women, and children, should fall by the enemy’s sword rather than surrender, was now actually carried out. On the night of the 22nd of April all the Missolonghiots, with the exception of those whom age, exhaustion, or illness made unable to leave their homes, were drawn up in bands at the city gates, the women armed and dressed as men, the children carrying pistols. Preceded by a body of soldiers, they crossed the moat under Turkish fire. The attack of the vanguard carried everything before it, and a way was cut through the Turkish lines. But at this moment some cry of confusion was mistaken by those who were still on the bridges for an order to retreat. A portion of the non-combatants returned into the town, and with them the rearguard of the military escort. The leading divisions, however, continued their march forward, and would have escaped with the loss of some of the women and children, had not treachery already made the Turkish commander acquainted with the routes which they intended to follow. They had cleared the Turkish camp, and were expecting to meet the bands of Greek armatoli, who had promised to fall upon the enemy’s rear, when, instead of friends, they encountered troop after troop of Ottoman cavalry and of Albanians placed in ambush along the road between Missolonghi and the mountains. Here, exhausted and surprised, they were cut down without mercy, and out of a body numbering several thousand not more than fifteen hundred men, with a few women and children, ultimately reached places of safety. Missolonghi itself was entered by the Turks during the sortie. The soldiers who had fallen back during the confusion on the bridges, proved that they had not acted from cowardice. They fought unflinchingly to the last, and three bands, establishing themselves in the three powder magazines of the town, set fire to them when surrounded by the Turks, and perished in the explosion Some thousands of women and children were captured around and within the town, or wandering on the mountains; but the Turks had few other prisoners. The men were dead or free.
[Fall of the Acropolis of Athens, June 5, 1827.]
From Missolonghi the tide of Ottoman conquest rolled eastward, and the Acropolis of Athens was in its turn the object of a long and arduous siege. The Government, which now held scarcely any territory on the mainland except Nauplia, where it was itself threatened by Ibrahim, made the most vigorous efforts to prevent the Acropolis from falling into Reschid’s hands. All, however, was in vain. The English officers, Church and Cochrane, who were now placed at the head of the military and naval forces of Greece, failed ignominiously in the attacks which they made on Reschid’s besieging army; and the garrison capitulated on June 5, 1827. But the time was past when the liberation of Greece could be prevented by any Ottoman victory. The heroic defence of the Missolonghiots had achieved its end. Greece had fought long enough to enlist the Powers of Europe on its side; and in the same month that Missolonghi fell the policy of non-intervention was definitely abandoned by those Governments which were best able to carry their intentions into effect. If the struggle had ended during the first three years of the insurrection, no hand would have been raised to prevent the restoration of the Sultan’s rule. Russia then lay as if spell-bound beneath the diplomacy of the Holy Alliance; and although in the second year of the war the death of Castlereagh and the accession of Canning to power had given Greece a powerful friend instead of a powerful foe within the British Ministry, it was long before England stirred from its neutrality. Canning indeed made no secret of his sympathies for Greece, and of his desire to give the weaker belligerent such help as a neutral might afford; but when he took up office the time had not come when intervention would have been useful or possible. Changes in the policy of other great Powers and in the situation of the belligerents themselves were, he considered, necessary before the influence of England could be successfully employed in establishing peace in the East.
[First Russian project of joint intervention, 12 Jan., 1824.]
A vigorous movement of public opinion in favour of Greece made itself felt throughout Western Europe as the struggle continued; and the vivid and romantic interest excited over the whole civilised world by the death of Lord Byron in 1823, among the people whom he had come to free, probably served the Greek cause better than all that Byron could have achieved had his life been prolonged. In France and England, where public opinion had great influence on the action of the Government, as well as in Germany, where it had none whatever, societies were formed for assisting the Greeks with arms, stores, and money. The first proposal, however, for a joint intervention in favour of Greece came from St. Petersburg. The undisguised good-will of Canning towards the insurgents led the Czar’s Government to anticipate that England itself might soon assume that championship of the Greek cause which Russia, at the bidding of Metternich and of Canning’s predecessor, had up to that time declined. If the Greeks were to be befriended, it was intolerable that others should play the part of the patron. Accordingly, on the 12th of January, 1824, a note was submitted in the Czar’s name to all the Courts of Europe, containing a plan for a settlement of the Greek question, which it was proposed that the great Powers of Europe should enforce upon Turkey either by means of an armed demonstration or by the threat of breaking off all diplomatic relations. According to this scheme, Greece, apart from the islands, was to be divided into three Principalities, each tributary to the Sultan and garrisoned by Turkish troops, but in other respects autonomous, like the Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia. The islands were to retain their municipal organisation as before. In one respect this scheme was superior to all that have succeeded it, for it included in the territory of the Greeks both Crete and Epirus; in all other respects it was framed in the interest of Russia alone. Its object was simply to create a second group of provinces, like those on the Danube, which should afford Russia a constant opportunity for interfering with the Ottoman Empire, and which at the same time should prevent the Greeks from establishing an independent and self-supporting State. The design cannot be called insidious, for its object was so palpable that not a single politician in Europe was deceived by it; and a very simple ruse of Metternich’s was enough to draw from the Russian Government an explicit declaration against the independence of Greece, which was described by the Czar as a mere chimera. But of all the parties concerned, the Greeks themselves were loudest in denounciation of the Russian plan. Their Government sent a protest against it to London, and was assured by Canning in reply that the support of this country should never be given to any scheme for disposing of the Greeks without their own consent. Elsewhere the Czar’s note was received with expressions of politeness due to a Court which it might be dangerous to contradict; and a series of conferences was opened at St. Petersburg for the purpose of discussing propositions which no one intended to carry into execution. Though Canning ordered the British ambassador at St. Petersburg to dissociate himself from these proceedings, the conferences dragged on, with long adjournments, from the spring of 1824 to the summer of the following year. [371]
[Discontent and conspiracies in Russia.]
In the meantime a strong spirit of discontent was rising in the Russian army and nation. The religious feeling no less than the pride of the people was deeply wounded by Alexander’s refusal to aid the Greeks in their struggle, and by the pitiful results of his attempted diplomatic concert. Alone among the European nations the Russians understood the ecclesiastical character of the Greek insurrection, and owed nothing of their sympathy with it to the spell of classical literature and art. It is characteristic of the strength of the religious element in the political views of the Russian people, that the floods of the Neva which overwhelmed St. Petersburg in the winter of 1825 should have been regarded as a sign of divine anger at the Czar’s inaction in the struggle between the Crescent and the Cross. But other causes of discontent were not wanting in Russia. Though Alexander had forgotten his promises to introduce constitutional rule, there were many, especially in the army, who had not done so. Officers who served in the invasion of France in 1815, and in the three years’ occupation which followed it, returned from Western Europe with ideas of social progress and of constitutional rights which they could never have gathered in their own country. And when the bright hopes which had been excited by the recognition of these same ideas by the Czar passed away, and Russia settled down into the routine of despotism and corruption, the old unquestioning loyalty of the army was no longer proof against the workings of the revolutionary spirit. In a land where legal means of opposition to government and of the initiation of reform were wholly wanting, discontent was forced into its most dangerous form, that of military conspiracy. The army was honeycombed with secret societies. Both in the north and in the south of Russia men of influence worked among the younger officers, and gained a strong body of adherents to their design of establishing a constitution by force. The southern army contained the most resolute and daring conspirators. These men had definitely abandoned the hope of effecting any public reform as long as Alexander lived, and they determined to sacrifice the sovereign, as his father and others before him had been sacrificed, to the political necessities of the time. If the evidence subsequently given by those implicated in the conspiracy is worthy of credit, a definite plan had been formed for the assassination of the Czar in the presence of his troops at one of the great reviews intended to be held in the south of Russia in the autumn of 1825. On the death of the monarch a provisional government was at once to be established, and a constitution proclaimed.
[Death of the Czar, Dec. 1, 1825.]
Alexander, aware of the rising indignation of his people, and irritated beyond endurance by the failure of his diplomatic efforts, had dissolved the St. Petersburg Conferences in August, 1825, and declared that Russia would henceforth act according to its own discretion. He quitted St. Petersburg and travelled to the Black Sea, accompanied by some of the leaders of the war-party. Here, plunged in a profound melancholy, conscious that all his early hopes had only served to surround him with conspirators, and that his sacrifice of Russia’s military interests to international peace had only rendered his country impotent before all Europe, he still hesitated to make the final determination between peace and war. A certain mystery hung over his movements, his acts, and his intentions. Suddenly, while all Europe waited for the signal that should end the interval of suspense, the news was sent out from a lonely port on the Black Sea that the Czar was dead. Alexander, still under fifty years of age, had welcomed the illness which carried him from a world of cares, and closed a career in which anguish and disappointment had succeeded to such intoxicating glory and such unbounded hope. Young as he still was for one who had reigned twenty-four years, Alexander was of all men the most life-weary. Power, pleasure, excitement, had lavished on him hours of such existence as none but Napoleon among all his contemporaries had enjoyed. They had left him nothing but the solace of religious resignation, and the belief that a Power higher than his own might yet fulfil the purposes in which he himself had failed. Ever in the midst of great acts and great events, he had missed greatness himself. Where he had been best was exactly where men inferior to himself considered him to have been worst–in his hopes; and these hopes he had himself abandoned and renounced. Strength, insight, unity of purpose, the qualities which enable men to mould events, appeared in him but momentarily or in semblance. For want of them the large and fair horizon of his earlier years was first obscured and then wholly blotted out from his view, till in the end nothing but his pietism and his generosity distinguished him from the politicians of repression whose instrument he had become.
[Military insurrection at St. Petersburg, Dec 26, 1825.]
The sudden death of Alexander threw the Russian Court into the greatest confusion, for it was not known who was to succeed him. The heir to the throne was his brother Constantine, an ignorant and brutal savage, who had just sufficient sense not to desire to be Czar of Russia, though he considered himself good enough to tyrannise over the Poles. Constantine had renounced his right to the crown some years before, but the renunciation had not been made public, nor had the Grand Duke Nicholas, Constantine’s younger brother, been made aware that the succession was irrevocably fixed upon himself. Accordingly, when the news of Alexander’s death reached St. Petersburg, and the document embodying Constantine’s abdication was brought from the archives by the officials to whose keeping it had been entrusted, Nicholas refused to acknowledge it as binding, and caused the troops to take the oath of allegiance to Constantine, who was then at Warsaw. Constantine, on the other hand, proclaimed his brother emperor. An interregnum of three weeks followed, during which messages passed between Warsaw and St. Petersburg, Nicholas positively refusing to accept the crown unless by his elder brother’s direct command. This at length arrived, and on the 26th of December Nicholas assumed the rank of sovereign. But the interval of uncertainty had been turned to good account by the conspirators at St. Petersburg. The oath already taken by the soldiers to Constantine enabled the officers who were concerned in the plot to denounce Nicholas as a usurper, and to disguise their real designs under the cloak of loyalty to the legitimate Czar. Ignorant of the very meaning of a constitution, the common soldiers mutinied because they were told to do so; and it is said that they shouted the word Constitution, believing it to be the name of Constantine’s wife. When summoned to take the oath to Nicholas, the Moscow Regiment refused it, and marched off to the place in front of the Senate House, where it formed square, and repulsed an attack made upon it by the Cavalry of the Guard. Companies from other regiments now joined the mutineers, and symptoms of insurrection began to show themselves among the civil population. Nicholas himself did not display the energy of character which distinguished him through all his later life; on the contrary, his attitude was for some time rather that of resignation than of self-confidence. Whether some doubt as to the justice of his cause haunted him, or a trial like that to which he was now exposed was necessary to bring to its full strength the iron quality of his nature, it is certain that the conduct of the new Czar during these critical hours gave to those around him little indication of the indomitable will which was hence forth to govern Russia. Though the great mass of the army remained obedient, it was but slowly brought up to the scene of revolt. Officers of high rank were sent to harangue the insurgents, and one of these, General Miloradovitsch, a veteran of the Napoleonic campaigns, was mortally wounded while endeavouring to make himself heard. It was not until evening that the artillery was ordered into action, and the command given by the Czar to fire grape-shot among the insurgents. The effect was decisive. The mutineers fled before a fire which they were unable to return, and within a few minutes the insurrection was over. It had possessed no chief of any military capacity; its leaders were missing at the moment when a forward march or an attack on the palace of the Czar might have given them the victory; and among the soldiers at large there was not the least desire to take part in any movement against the established system of Russia. The only effect left by the conspiracy within Russia itself was seen in the rigorous and uncompromising severity with which Nicholas henceforward enforced the principle of autocratic rule. The illusions of the previous reign were at an end. A man with the education and the ideas of a drill-sergeant and the religious assurance of a Covenanter was on the throne; rebellion had done its worst against him; and woe to those who in future should deviate a hair’s breadth from their duty of implicit obedience to the sovereign’s all-sufficing power. [372]
[Anglo-Russian Protocol, April 4, 1826.]
It has been stated, and with some probability of truth, that the military insurrection of 1825 disposed the new Czar to a more vigorous policy abroad. The conspirators, when on their trial, declared it to have been their intention to throw the army at once into an attack upon the Turks; and in so doing they would certainly have had the feeling of the nation on their side. Nicholas himself had little or no sympathy for the Greeks. They were a democratic people, and the freedom which they sought to gain was nothing but anarchy. “Do not speak of the Greeks,” he said to the representative of a foreign power, “I call them the rebels.” Nevertheless, little as Nicholas wished to serve the Greek democracy, both inclination and policy urged him to make an end of his predecessor’s faint-hearted system of negotiation, and to bring the struggle in the East to a summary close. Canning had already, in conversation with the Russian ambassador at London, discussed a possible change of policy on the part of the two rival Courts. He now saw that time had come for establishing new relations between Great Britain and Russia, and for attempting that co-operation in the East which he had held to be impracticable during Alexander’s reign. The Duke of Wellington was sent to St. Petersburg, nominally to offer the usual congratulations to the new sovereign, in reality to dissuade him from going to war, and to propose either the separate intervention of England or a joint intervention by England and Russia on behalf of Greece. The mission was successful. It was in vain that Metternich endeavoured to entangle the new Czar in the diplomatic web that had so long held his predecessor. The spell of the Holy Alliance was broken. Nicholas looked on the past influence of Austria on the Eastern Question only with resentment; he would hear of no more conferences of ambassadors; and on the 4th of April, 1826, a Protocol was signed at St. Petersburg, by which Great Britain and Russia fixed the conditions under which the mediation of the former Power was to be tendered to the Porte. Greece was to remain tributary to the Sultan; it was, however, to be governed by its own elected authorities, and to be completely independent in its commercial relations. The policy known in our own day as that of bag-and-baggage expulsion was to be carried out in a far more extended sense than that in which it has been advocated by more recent champions of the subject races of the East; the Protocol of 1826 stipulating for the removal not only of Turkish officials but of the entire surviving Turkish population of Greece. All property belonging to the Turks, whether on the continent or in the islands, was to be purchased by the Greeks. [373]
Thus was the first step taken in the negotiations which ended in the establishment of Hellenic independence. The Protocol, which had been secretly signed, was submitted after some interval to the other Courts of Europe. At Vienna it was received with the utmost disgust. Metternich had at first declared the union of England and Russia to be an impossibility. When this union was actually established, no language was sufficiently strong to express his mortification and his spite. At one moment he declared that Canning was a revolutionist who had entrapped the young and inexperienced Czar into an alliance with European radicalism; at another, that England had made itself the cat’s-paw of Russian ambition. Not till now, he protested, could Europe understand what it had lost in Castlereagh. Nor did Metternich confine himself to lamentations. While his representatives at Paris and Berlin spared no effort to excite the suspicion of those Courts against the Anglo-Russian project of intervention, the Austrian ambassador at London worked upon King George’s personal hostility to Canning, and conspired against the Minister with that important section of the English aristocracy which was still influenced by the traditional regard for Austria. Berlin, however, was the only field where Metternich’s diplomacy still held its own. King Frederick William had not yet had time to acquire the habit of submission to the young Czar Nicholas, and was therefore saved the pain of deciding which of two masters he should obey. In spite of his own sympathy for the Greeks, he declined to connect Prussia with the proposed joint-intervention, and remained passive, justifying this course by the absence of any material interests of Prussia in the East. Being neither a neighbour of the Ottoman Empire nor a maritime Power, Prussia had in fact no direct means of making its influence felt.
[Treaty between England, Russia and France, July, 1827.]
France, on whose action much more depended, was now governed wholly in the interests of the Legitimist party. Louis XVIII. had died in 1824, and the Count of Artois had succeeded to the throne, under the title of Charles X. The principles of the Legitimists would logically have made them defenders of the hereditary rights of the Sultan against his rebellious subjects; but the Sultan, unlike Ferdinand of Spain, was not a Bourbon nor even a Christian; and in a case where the legitimate prince was an infidel and the rebels were Christians, the conscience of the most pious Legitimist might well recoil from the perilous task of deciding between the divine rights of the Crown and the divine rights of the Church, and choose, in so painful an emergency, the simpler course of gratifying the national love of action. There existed, both among Liberals and among Ultramontanes, a real sympathy for Greece, and this interest was almost the only one in which all French political sections felt that they had something in common. Liberals rejoiced in the prospect of making a new free State in Europe; Catholics, like Charles X. himself, remembered Saint Louis and the Crusades; diplomatists understood the extreme importance of the impending breach between Austria and Russia, and of the opportunity of allying France with the latter Power. Thus the natural and disinterested impulse of the greater part of the public coincided exactly with the dictates of a far-seeing policy; and the Government, in spite of its Legitimist principles and of some assurances given to Metternich in person when he visited Paris in 1825, determined to accept the policy of the Anglo-Russian intervention in the East, and to participate in the active measures about to be taken by the two Powers. The Protocol of St. Petersburg formed the basis of a definitive treaty which was signed at London in July, 1827. By this act England, Russia, and France undertook to put an end to the conflict in the East, which, through the injury done to the commerce of all nations, had become a matter of European concern. The contending parties were to be summoned to accept the mediation of the Powers and to consent to an armistice. Greece was to be made autonomous, under the paramount sovereignty of the Sultan; the Mohammedan population of the Greek provinces was, as in the Protocol of St. Petersburg, to be entirely removed; and the Greeks were to enter upon possession of all Turkish property within their limits, paying an indemnity to the former owners. Each of the three contracting Governments pledged itself to seek no increase of territory in the East, and no special commercial advantages. In the secret articles of the treaty provisions were made for the case of the rejection by the Turks of the proposed offer of mediation. Should the armistice not be granted within one month, the Powers agreed that they would announce to each belligerent their intention to prevent further encounters, and that they would take the necessary steps for enforcing this declaration, without, however, taking part in hostilities themselves. Instructions in conformity with the Treaty were to be sent to the Admirals commanding the Mediterranean squadrons of the three Powers. [374]
[Death of Canning, August, 1827.]
[Policy of Canning.]
Scarcely was the Treaty of London signed when Canning died. He had definitely broken from the policy of his predecessors, that policy which, for the sake of guarding against Russia’s advance, had condemned the Christian races of the East to 1827. eternal subjection to the Turk, and bound up Great Britain with the Austrian system of resistance to the very principle and name of national independence. Canning was no blind friend to Russia. As keenly as any of his adversaries he appreciated the importance of England’s interests in the East; of all English statesmen of that time he would have been the last to submit to any diminution of England’s just influence or power. But, unlike his predecessors, he saw that there were great forces at work which, whether with England’s concurrence or in spite of it, would accomplish that revolution in the East for which the time was now come; and he was statesman enough not to acquiesce in the belief that the welfare of England was in permanent and necessary antagonism to the moral interests of mankind and the better spirit of the age. Therefore, instead of attempting to maintain the integrity of the Ottoman Empire, or holding aloof and resorting to threats and armaments while Russia accomplished the liberation of Greece by itself, he united with Russia in this work, and relied on concerted action as the best preventive against the undue extension of Russia’s influence in the East. In committing England to armed intervention, Canning no doubt hoped that the settlement of the Greek question arranged by the Powers would be peacefully accepted by the Sultan, and that a separate war between Russia and the Porte, on this or any other issue, would be averted. Neither of these hopes was realised. The joint-intervention had to be enforced by arms, and no sooner had the Allies struck their common blow than a war between Turkey and Russia followed. How far the course of events might have been modified had Canning’s life not been cut short it is impossible to say; but whether his statesmanship might or might not have averted war on the Danube, the balance of results proved his policy to have been the right one. Greece was established as an independent State, to supply in the future a valuable element of resistance to Slavic preponderance in the Levant; and the encounter between Russia and Turkey, so long dreaded, produced none of those disastrous effects which had been anticipated from it. On the relative value of Canning’s statesmanship as compared with that of his predecessors, the mind of England and of Europe has long been made up. He stands among those who have given to this country its claim to the respect of mankind. His monument, as well as his justification, is the existence of national freedom in the East; and when half a century later a British Government reverted to the principle of nonintervention, as it had been understood by Castlereagh, and declined to enter into any effective co-operation with Russia for the emancipation of Bulgaria, even then, when the precedent of Canning’s action in 1827 stood in direct and glaring contradiction to the policy of the hour, no effective attempt was made by the leaders of the party to which Canning had belonged to impugn his authority, or to explain away his example. It might indeed be alleged that Canning had not explicitly resolved on the application of force; but those who could maintain that Canning would, like Wellington, have used the language of apology and regret when Turkish obstinacy had made it impossible to effect the object of his intervention by any other means, had indeed read the history of Canning’s career in vain. [375]
[Intervention of the Admirals, Sept., 1927.]
The death of Canning, which brought his rival, the Duke of Wellington, after a short interval to the head of affairs, caused at the moment no avowed change in the execution of his plans. In accordance with the provisions of the Treaty of London the mediation of the allied Powers was at once tendered to the belligerents, and an armistice demanded. The armistice was accepted by the Greeks; it was contemptuously refused by the Turks. In consequence of this refusal the state of war continued, as it would have been absurd to ask the Greeks to sit still and be massacred because the enemy declined to lay down his arms. The Turk being the party resisting the mediation agreed upon, it became necessary to deprive him of the power of continuing hostilities. Heavy reinforcements had just arrived from Egypt, and an expedition was on the point of sailing from Navarino, the gathering place of Ibrahim’s forces, against Hydra, the capture of which would have definitely made an end of the Greek insurrection. Admiral Codrington, the commander of the British fleet, and the French Admiral De Rigny, were now off the coast of Greece. They addressed themselves to Ibrahim, and required from him a promise that he would make no movement until further orders should arrive from Constantinople. Ibrahim made this promise verbally on the 25th of September. A few days later, however, Ibrahim learnt that while he himself was compelled to be inactive, the Greeks, continuing hostilities as they were entitled to do, had won a brilliant naval victory under Captain Hastings within the Gulf of Corinth. Unable to control his anger, he sailed out from the harbour of Navarino, and made for Patras. Codrington, who had stationed his fleet at Zante, heard of the movement, and at once threw himself across the track of the Egyptian, whom he compelled to turn back by an energetic threat to sink his fleet. Had the French and Russian contingents been at hand, Codrington would have taken advantage of Ibrahim’s sortie to cut him off from all Greek harbours, and to force him to return direct to Alexandria, thus peaceably accomplishing the object of the intervention. This, however, to the misfortune of Ibrahim’s seamen, the English admiral could not do alone. Ibrahim re-entered Navarino, and there found the orders of the Sultan for which it had been agreed that he should wait. These orders were dictated by true Turkish infatuation. They bade Ibrahim continue the subjugation of the Morea with the utmost vigour, and promised him the assistance of Reschid Pasha, his rival in the siege of Missolonghi. Ibrahim, perfectly reckless of the consequences, now sent out his devastating columns again. No life, and nothing that could support life, was spared. Not only were the crops ravaged, but the fruit-trees, which are the permanent support of the country, were cut down at the roots. Clouds of fire and smoke from burning villages showed the English officers who approached the coast in what spirit the Turk met their proposals for a pacification. “It is supposed that if Ibrahim remained in Greece,” wrote Captain Hamilton, “more than a third of its inhabitants would die of absolute starvation.”
[Battle of Navarino, Oct. 20th, 1827.]
It became necessary to act quickly, the more so as the season was far advanced, and a winter blockade of Ibrahim’s fleet was impossible. A message was sent to the Egyptian head-quarters, requiring that hostilities should cease, that the Morea should be evacuated, and the Turko-Egyptian fleet return to Constantinople and Alexandria. In answer to this message there came back a statement that Ibrahim had left Navarino for the interior of the country, and that it was not known where to find him. Nothing now remained for the admirals but to make their presence felt. On the 18th of October it was resolved that the English, French, and Russian fleets, which were now united, should enter the harbour of Navarino in battle order. The movement was called a demonstration, and in so far as the admirals had not actually determined upon making an attack, it was not directly a hostile measure; but every gun was ready to open fire, and it was well understood that any act of resistance on the part of the opposite fleet would result in hostilities. Codrington, as senior officer, took command of the allied squadron, and the instructions which he gave to his colleagues for the event of a general engagement concluded with Nelson’s words, that no captain could do very wrong who placed his ship alongside that of an enemy.
Thus, ready to strike hard, the English admiral sailed into the harbour of Navarino at noon on October 20, followed by the French and the Russians. The allied fleet advanced to within pistol-shot of the Ottoman ships and there anchored. A little to the windward of the position assigned to the English corvette _Dartmouth_ there lay a Turkish fire-ship. A request was made that this dangerous vessel might be removed to a safer distance; it was refused, and a boat’s crew was then sent to cut its cable. The boat was received with musketry fire. This was answered by the _Dartmouth_ and by a French ship, and the battle soon became general. Codrington, still desirous to avoid bloodshed, sent his pilot to Moharem Bey, who commanded in Ibrahim’s absence, proposing to withhold fire on both sides. Moharem replied with cannon-shot, killing the pilot and striking Codrington’s own vessel. This exhausted the patience of the English admiral, who forthwith made his adversary a mere wreck. The entire fleets on both sides were now engaged. The Turks had a superiority of eight hundred guns, and fought with courage. For four hours the battle raged at close quarters in the land-locked harbour, while twenty thousand of Ibrahim’s soldiers watched from the surrounding hills the struggle in which they could take no part. But the result of the combat was never for a moment doubtful. The confusion and bad discipline of the Turkish fleet made it an easy prey. Vessel after vessel was sunk or blown to pieces, and before evening fell the work of the allies was done. When Ibrahim returned from his journey on the following day he found the harbour of Navarino strewed with wrecks and dead bodies. Four thousand of his seamen had fallen; the fleet which was to have accomplished the reduction of Hydra was utterly ruined. [376]
[Inaction of England after Navarino.]
Over all Greece it was at once felt that the nation was saved. The intervention of the Powers had been sudden and decisive beyond the most sanguine hopes; and though this intervention might be intended to establish something less than the complete independence of Greece, the violence of the first collision bade fair to carry the work far beyond the bounds originally assigned to it. The attitude of the Porte after the news of the battle of Navarino reached Constantinople was exactly that which its worst enemies might have desired. So far from abating anything in its resistance to the mediation of the three Powers, it declared the attack made upon its navy to be a crime and an outrage, and claimed satisfaction for it from the ambassadors of the Allied Powers. Arguments proved useless, and the united demand for an armistice with the Greeks having been finally and contemptuously refused, the ambassadors, in accordance with their instructions, quitted the Turkish capital (Dec. 8). Had Canning been still living, it is probable that the first blow of Navarino would have been immediately followed by the measures necessary to make the Sultan submit to the Treaty of London, and that the forces of Great Britain would have been applied with sufficient vigour to render any isolated action on the part of Russia both unnecessary and impossible. But at this critical moment a paralysis fell over the English Government. Canning’s policy was so much his own, he had dragged his colleagues so forcibly with him in spite of themselves, that when his place was left empty no one had the courage either to fulfil or to reverse his intentions, and the men who succeeded him acted as if they were trespassers in the fortress which Canning had taken by storm. The very ground on which Wellington, no less than Canning, had justified the agreement made with Russia in 1826 was the necessity of preventing Russia from acting alone; and when Russian and Turkish ships had actually fought at Navarino, and war was all but formally declared, it became more imperative than ever that Great Britain should keep the most vigorous hold upon its rival, and by steady, consistent pressure let it be known to both Turks and Russians that the terms of the Treaty of London and no others must be enforced. To retire from action immediately after dealing the Sultan one dire, irrevocable blow, without following up this stroke or attaining the end agreed upon–to leave Russia to take up the armed compulsion where England had dropped it, and to win from its crippled adversary the gains of a private and isolated war–was surely the weakest of all possible policies that could have been adopted. Yet this was the policy followed by English Ministers during that interval of transition and incoherence that passed between Canning’s death and the introduction of the Reform Bill.
[War between Russia and Turkey, April, 1828.]
By the Russian Government nothing was more ardently desired than a contest with Turkey, in which England and France, after they had destroyed the Turkish fleet, should be mere on-lookers, debarred by the folly of the Porte itself from prohibiting or controlling hostilities between it and its neighbour. There might indeed be some want of a pretext for war, since all the points of contention between Russia and Turkey other than those relating to Greece had been finally settled in Russia’s favour by a Treaty signed at Akerman in October, 1826. But the spirit of infatuation had seized the Sultan, or a secret hope that the Western Powers would in the last resort throw over the Court of St. Petersburg led him to hurry on hostilities by a direct challenge to Russia. A proclamation which reads like the work of some frantic dervish, though said to have been composed by Mahmud himself, called the Mussulman world to arms. Russia was denounced as the instigator of the Greek rebellion, and the arch-enemy of Islam. The Treaty of Akerman was declared to have been extorted by compulsion and to have been signed only for the purpose of gaining time. “Russia has imparted its own madness to the other Powers and persuaded them to make an alliance to free the Rayah from his Ottoman master. But the Turk does not count his enemies. The law forbids the people of Islam to permit any injury to be done to their religion; and if all the unbelievers together unite against them, they will enter on the war as a sacred duty, and trust in God for protection.” This proclamation was followed by a levy of troops and the expulsion of most of the Christian residents in Constantinople. Russia needed no other pretext. The fanatical outburst of the Sultan was treated by the Court of St. Petersburg as if it had been the deliberate expression of some civilised Power, and was answered on the 26th of April, 1828, by a declaration of war. In order to soften the effect of this step and to reap the full benefit of its subsisting relations with France and England, Russia gave a provisional undertaking to confine its operations as a belligerent to the mainland and the Black Sea, and within the Mediterranean to act still as one of the allied neutrals under the terms of the Treaty of London.
[Military condition of Turkey.]
The moment seized by Russia for the declaration of war was one singularly favourable to itself and unfortunate for its adversary. Not only had the Turkish fleet been destroyed by the neutrals, but the old Turkish force of the Janissaries had been destroyed by its own master, and the new-modelled regiments which were to replace it had not yet been organised. The Sultan had determined in 1826 to postpone his long-planned military reform no longer, and to stake everything on one bold stroke against the Janissaries. Troops enough were brought up from the other side of the Bosphorus to make Mahmud certain of victory. The Janissaries were summoned to contribute a proportion of their number to the regiments about to be formed on the European pattern; and when they proudly refused to do so and raised the standard of open rebellion they were cut to pieces and exterminated by Mahmud’s Anatolian soldiers in the midst of Constantinople. [377] The principal difficulty in the way of a reform of the Turkish army was thus removed and the work of reorganisation was earnestly taken in hand; but before there was time to complete it the enemy entered the field. Mahmud had to meet the attack of Russia with an army greatly diminished in number, and confused by the admixture of European and Turkish discipline. The resources of the empire were exhausted by the long struggle with Greece, and, above all, the destruction of the Janissaries had left behind it an exasperation which made the Sultan believe that rebellion might at any moment break out in his own capital. Nevertheless, in spite of its inherent weakness and of all the disadvantages under which it entered into war, Turkey succeeded in prolonging its resistance through two campaigns, and might, with better counsels, have tried the fortune of a third.
[Military condition of Russia.]
The actual military resources of Russia were in 1828 much below what they were believed to be by all Europe. The destruction of Napoleon’s army in 1812 and the subsequent exploits of Alexander in the campaigns which ended in the capture of Paris had left behind them an impression of Russian energy and power which was far from corresponding with the reality, and which, though disturbed by the events of 1828, had by no means vanished at the time of the Crimean War. The courage and patience of the Russian soldier were certainly not over-rated; but the progress supposed to have been made in Russian military organisation since the campaign of 1799, when it was regarded in England and Austria as little above that of savages, was for the most part imaginary. The proofs of a radically bad system–scanty numbers, failing supplies, immense sickness–were never more conspicuous than in 1828. Though Russia had been preparing for war for at least seven years, scarcely seventy thousand soldiers could be collected on the Pruth. The general was Wittgenstein, one of the heroes of 1812, but now a veteran past effective work. Nicholas came to the camp to make things worse by headstrong interference. The best Russian officer, Paskiewitsch, was put in command of the forces about to operate in Asia Minor, and there, thrown on his own resources and free to create a system of his own, he achieved results in strong contrast to the failure of the Russian arms on the Danube.
[Campaign of 1828.]
In entering on the campaign of 1828, it was necessary for the Czar to avoid giving any unnecessary causes of anxiety to Austria, which had already made unsuccessful attempts to form a coalition against him. The line of operations was therefore removed as far as possible from the Austrian frontier; and after the Roumanian principalities had been peacefully occupied, the Danube was crossed at a short distance above the point where its mouths divide (June 7). The Turks had no intention of meeting the enemy in a pitched battle; they confined themselves to the defence of fortresses, the form of warfare to which, since the decline of the military art in Turkey, the patience and abstemiousness of the race best fit them. Ibraila and Silistria on the Danube, Varna and Shumla in the neighbourhood of the Balkans, were their principal strongholds; of these Ibraila was at once besieged by a considerable force, while Silistria was watched by a weak contingent, and the vanguard of the Russian army pushed on through the Dobrudscha towards the Black Sea, where, with the capture of the minor coast-towns, it expected to enter into communication with the fleet. The first few weeks of the campaign were marked by considerable successes. Ibraila capitulated on the 18th of June, and the military posts in the Dobrudscha fell one after another into the hands of the invaders, who met with no effective resistance in this district. But their serious work was only now beginning. The Russian army, in spite of its weakness, was divided into three parts, occupied severally in front of Silistria, Shumla, and Varna. At Shumla the mass of the Turkish army, under Omer Brionis, was concentrated. The force brought against it by the invader was inadequate to its task, and the attempts which were made to lure the Turkish army from its entrenched camp into the open field proved unsuccessful. The difficulties of the siege proved so great that Wittgenstein after a while proposed to abandon offensive operations at this point, and to leave a mere corps of observation before the enemy until Varna should have fallen. This, however, was forbidden by the Czar. As the Russians wasted away before Shumla with sickness and fatigue, the Turks gained strength, and on the 24th of September Omer broke out from his entrenchments and moved eastwards to the relief of Varna. Nicholas again over-ruled his generals, and ordered his cousin, Prince Eugene of Würtemberg, to attack the advancing Ottomans with the troops then actually at his disposal. Eugene did so, and suffered a severe defeat. A vigorous movement of the Turks would probably have made an end of the campaign, but Omer held back at the critical moment, and on the 10th of October Varna surrendered. This, however, was the only conquest made by the Russians. The season was too far advanced for them either to cross the Balkans or to push forward operations against the uncaptured fortresses. Shumla and Silistria remained in the hands of their defenders, and the Russians, after suffering enormous losses in proportion to the smallness of their numbers, withdrew to Varna and the Danube, to resume the campaign in the spring of the following year. [378]
[Campaign of 1829.]
The spirits of the Turks and of their European friends were raised by the unexpected failure of the Czar’s arms. Metternich resumed his efforts to form a coalition, and tempted French Ministers with the prospect of recovering the Rhenish provinces, but in vain. The Sultan began negotiations, but broke them off when he found that the events of the campaign had made no difference in the enemy’s tone. The prestige of Russia was in fact at stake, and Nicholas would probably have faced a war with Austria and Turkey combined rather than have made peace without restoring the much-diminished reputation of his troops. The winter was therefore spent in bringing up distant reserves. Wittgenstein was removed from his command; the Czar withdrew from military operations in which he had done nothing but mischief; and Diebitsch, a Prussian by birth and training, was placed at the head of the army, untrammelled by the sovereign presence or counsels which had hampered his predecessor. The intention of the new commander was to cross the Balkans as soon as Silistria should have fallen, without waiting for the capture of Shumla. In pursuance of this design the fleet was despatched early in the spring of 1829 to seize a port beyond the mountain-range. Diebitsch then placed a corps in front of Silistria, and made his preparations for the southward march; but before any progress had been made in the siege the Turks themselves took the field. Reschid Pasha, now Grand Vizier, moved eastwards from Shumla at the beginning of May against the weak Russian contingent that still lay in winter quarters between that place and Varna. The superiority of his force promised him an easy victory; but after winning some unimportant successes, and advancing to a considerable distance from his stronghold, he allowed himself to be held at bay until Diebitsch, with the army of the Danube, was ready to fall upon his rear. The errors of the Turks had given to the Russian commander, who hastened across Bulgaria on hearing of his colleague’s peril, the choice of destroying their army, or of seizing Shumla by a _coup-de-main_. Diebitsch determined upon attacking his enemy in the open field, and on the 10th of June Reschid’s army, attempting to regain the roads to Shumla, was put to total rout at Kulewtscha. A fortnight later Silistria surrendered, and Diebitsch, reinforced by the troops that had besieged that fortress, was now able to commence his march across the Balkans.
[Crossing of the Balkans, July, 1829.]
Rumour magnified into hundreds of thousands the scanty columns which for the first time carried the Russian flag over the Balkan range. Resistance everywhere collapsed. The mountains were crossed without difficulty, and on the 19th of August the invaders appeared before Adrianople, which immediately surrendered. Putting on the boldest countenance in order to conceal his real weakness, Diebitsch now struck out right and left, and sent detachments both to the Euxine and the Aegean coast. The fleet co-operated with him, and the ports of the Black Sea, almost as far south as the Bosphorus, fell into the invaders’ hands. The centre of the army began to march upon Constantinople. If the Sultan had known the real numbers of the force which threatened his capital, a force not exceeding twenty thousand men, he would probably have recognised that his assailant’s position was a more dangerous one than his own. Diebitsch had advanced into the heart of the enemy’s country with a mere handful of men. Sickness was daily thinning his ranks; his troops were dispersed over a wide area from sea to sea; and the warlike tribes of Albania threatened to fall upon his communications from the west. For a moment the Sultan spoke of fighting upon the walls of Constantinople; but the fear of rebellion within his own capital, the discovery of conspiracies, and the disasters sustained by his arms in Asia, where Kars and Erzeroum had fallen into the enemy’s hands, soon led him to make overtures of peace and to accept the moderate terms which the Russian Government, aware of its own difficulties, was willing to grant. It would have been folly for the Czar to stimulate the growing suspicion of England and to court the attack of Austria by prolonging hostilities; and although King Charles X. and the French Cabinet, reverting to the ideas of Tilsit, proposed a partition of the Ottoman Empire, and a general re-arrangement of the map of Europe which would have given Belgium and the Palatinate to France, the plan was originated too late to produce any effect. [379] Russia had everything to lose and nothing to gain by a European war. It had reduced Turkey to submission, and might fairly hope to maintain its ascendency at Constantinople during coming years without making any of those great territorial changes which would have given its rivals a pretext for intervening on the Sultan’s behalf. Under the guise of a generous forbearance the Czar extricated himself from a dangerous position with credit and advantage. As much had been won as could be maintained without hazard; and on the 14th of September peace was concluded in Adrianople.
[Treaty of Adrianople, Sept. 14, 1829.]
The Treaty of Adrianople gave Russia a slight increase of territory in Asia, incorporating with the Czar’s dominions the ports of Anapa and Poti on the eastern coast of the Black Sea; but its most important provisions were those which confirmed and extended the Protectorate exercised by the Czar over the Danubian Principalities, and guaranteed the commercial rights of Russian subjects throughout the Ottoman Empire both by land and sea. In order more effectively to exclude the Sultan’s influence from Wallachia and Moldavia, the office of Hospodar, hitherto tenable for seven years, was now made an appointment for life, and the Sultan specifically engaged to permit no interference on the part of his neighbouring Pashas with the affairs of these provinces. No fortified point was to be retained by the Turks on the left bank of the Danube; no Mussulman was to be permitted to reside within the Principalities; and those possessing landed estates there were to sell them within eighteen months. The Porte pledged itself never again to detain Russian ships of commerce coming from the Black Sea, and acknowledged that such an act would amount to an infraction of treaties justifying Russia in having recourse to reprisals. The Straits of Constantinople and the Dardanelles were declared free and open to the merchant ships of all Powers at peace with the Porte, upon the same conditions which were stipulated for vessels under the Russian flag. The same freedom of trade and navigation was recognised within the Black Sea. All treaties and conventions hitherto concluded between Turkey and Russia were recognised as in force, except in so far as modified by the present agreement. The Porte further gave its adhesion to the Treaty of London relating to Greece, and to an Act entered into by the Allied Powers in March, 1829, for regulating the Greek frontier. An indemnity in money was declared to be owing to Russia; and as the amount of this remained to be fixed by mutual agreement, the means were still left open to the Russian Government for exercising a gentle pressure at Constantinople, or for rewarding the compliance of the conquered. [380]
[Capodistrias elected President of Greece, April, 1827.]
The war between Turkey and Russia, while it left the European frontier between the belligerents unchanged, exercised a two-fold influence upon the settlement of Greece. On the one hand, by exciting the fears and suspicions of Great Britain, it caused the Government of our own country, under the Duke of Wellington, to insist on the limitation of the Greek State to the narrowest possible area; [381] on the other hand, by reducing Turkey itself almost to the condition of a Russian dependency, it led to the abandonment of the desire to maintain the Sultan’s supremacy in any form over the emancipated provinces, and resulted in the establishment of an absolutely independent Hellenic kingdom. An important change had taken place within Greece itself just at the time when the allied Powers determined upon intervention. The parts of the local leaders were played out, and in April, 1827, Capodistrias, ex-Minister of Russia, was elected President for seven years. Capodistrias accepted the call. He was then, as he had been throughout the insurrection, at a distance from Greece; and before making his way thither, he visited the principal Courts of Europe, with the view of ascertaining what moral or financial support he should be likely to receive from them. His interview with the Czar Nicholas led to a clear statement by that sovereign of the conditions which he expected Capodistrias, in return for Russia’s continued friendship, to fulfil. Greece was to be rescued from revolution: in other words, personal was to be substituted for popular government. The State was to remain tributary to the Sultan: that is, in both Greece and Turkey the door was to be kept open for Russia’s interference. Whether Capodistrias had any intention of fulfilling the latter condition is doubtful. His love for Greece and his own personal ambition prevented his regard for Russia, strong though this might be, from making him the mere instrument of the Court of St. Petersburg; and while outwardly acquiescing in the Czar’s decision that Greece should remain a tributary State, he probably resolved from the first to aim at establishing its complete independence. With regard to the Czar’s demand that the system of local self-government should be superseded within Greece itself by one of autocratic rule, Capodistrias was in harmony with his patron. He had been the Minister of a centralised despotism himself. His experience was wholly that of the official of an absolute sovereign; and although Capodistrias had represented the more liberal tendencies of the Russian Court when it was a question of arguing against Metternich about the complete or the partial restoration of despotic rule in Italy, he had no real acquaintance and no real sympathy with the action of free institutions, and moved in the same circle of ideas as the autocratic reformers of the eighteenth century, of whom Joseph II. was the type. [382]
[The Protocols of Nov., 1828, and March, 1829.]
The Turks were still masters of the Morea when Capodistrias reached Greece. The battle of Navarino had not caused Ibrahim to relax his hold upon the fortresses, and it was deemed necessary by the Allies to send a French army-corps to dislodge him from his position. This expeditionary force, under General Maison, landed in Greece in the summer of 1828, and Ibrahim, not wishing to fight to the bitter end, contented himself with burning Tripolitza to the ground and sowing it with salt, and then withdrew. The war between Turkey and Russia had now begun. Capodistrias assisted the Russian fleet in blockading the Dardanelles, and thereby gained for himself the marked ill-will of the British Government. At a conference held in London by the representatives of France, England, and Russia, in November, 1828, it was resolved that the operations of the Allies should be limited to the Morea and the islands. Capodistrias, in consequence of this decision, took the most vigorous measures for continuing the war against Turkey. What the allies refused to guarantee must be won by force of arms; and during the winter of 1829, while Russia pressed upon Turkey from the Danube, Capodistrias succeeded in reconquering Missolonghi and the whole tract of country immediately to the north of the Gulf of Corinth. The Porte, in prolonging its resistance after the November conference, played as usual into its enemy’s hands. The negotiations at London were resumed in a spirit somewhat more favourable to Greece, and a Protocol was signed on the 22nd of March, 1829, extending the northern frontier of Greece up to a line drawn from the Gulf of Arta to the Gulf of Volo. Greece, according to this Protocol, was still to remain under the Sultan’s suzerainty: its ruler was to be a hereditary prince belonging to one of the reigning European families, but not to any of the three allied Courts. [383]
[Leopold accepts the Greek Crown, Feb., 1830.]
The mediation of Great Britain was now offered to the Porte upon the terms thus laid down, and for the fourteenth time its mediation was rejected. But the end was near at hand. Diebitsch crossed the Balkans, and it was in vain that the Sultan then proposed the terms which he had scouted in November. The Treaty of Adrianople enforced the decisions of the March Protocol. Greece escaped from a limitation of its frontier, which would have left both Athens and Missolonghi Turkish territory. The principle of the admission of the provinces north of the Gulf of Corinth within the Hellenic State was established, and nothing remained for the friends of the Porte but to cut down to the narrowest possible area the district which had been loosely indicated in the London Protocol. While Russia, satisfied with its own successes against the Ottoman Empire and anxious to play the part of patron of the conquered, ceased to interest itself in Greece, the Government of Great Britain contested every inch of territory proposed to be ceded to the new State, and finally induced the Powers to agree upon a boundary-line which did not even in letter fulfil the conditions of the treaty. Northern Acarnania and part of Ætolia were severed from Greece, and the frontier was drawn from the mouth of the river Achelous to a spot near Thermopylae. On the other hand, as Russian influence now appeared to be firmly established and likely to remain paramount at Constantinople, the Western Powers had no motive to maintain the Sultan’s supremacy over Greece. This was accordingly by common consent abandoned; and the Hellenic Kingdom, confined within miserably narrow limits on the mainland, and including neither Crete nor Samos among its islands, was ultimately offered in full sovereignty to Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, the widower of Charlotte, daughter of George IV. After some negotiations, in which Leopold vainly asked for a better frontier, he accepted the Greek crown on the 11th of February, 1830.
[Government of Capodistrias.]
In the meantime, Capodistrias was struggling hard to govern and to organise according to his own conceptions a land in which every element of anarchy, ruin, and confusion appeared to be arrayed against the restoration of civilised life. The country was devastated, depopulated, and in some places utterly barbarised. Out of a population of little more than a million, it was reckoned that three hundred thousand had perished during the conflict with the Turk. The whole fabric of political and social order had to be erected anew; and, difficult as this task would have been for the wisest ruler, it was rendered much more difficult by the conflict between Capodistrias’ own ideal and the character of the people among whom he had to work. Communal or local self-government lay at the very root of Greek nationality. In many different forms this intense provincialism had maintained itself unimpaired up to the end of the war, in spite of national assemblies and national armaments. The Hydriote ship-owners, the Primates of the Morea, the guerilla leaders of the north, had each a type of life and a body of institutions as distinct as the dialects which they spoke or the saints whom they cherished in their local sanctuaries. If antagonistic in some respects to national unity, this vigorous local life had nevertheless been a source of national energy while Greece had still its independence to win; and now that national independence was won, it might well have been made the basis of a popular and effective system of self-government. But to Capodistrias, as to greater men of that age, the unity of the State meant the uniformity of all its parts; and, shutting his eyes to all the obstacles in his path, he set himself to create an administrative system as rigorously centralised as that which France had received from Napoleon. Conscious of his own intellectual superiority over his countrymen, conscious of his own integrity and of the sacrifice of all his personal wealth in his country’s service, he put no measure on his expressions of scorn for the freebooters and peculators whom he believed to make up the Greek official world, and he both acted and spoke as if, in the literal sense of the words, all who ever came before him were thieves and robbers. The peasants of the mainland, who had suffered scarcely less from Klephts and Primates than from Turks, welcomed Capodistrias’ levelling despotism, and to the end his name was popular among them; but among the classes which had supplied the leaders in the long struggle for independence, and especially among the ship-owners of the Archipelago, who felt the contempt expressed by Capodistrias for their seven years’ efforts to be grossly unjust, a spirit of opposition arose which soon made it evident that Capodistrias would need better instruments than those which he had around him to carry out his task of remodelling Greece.
[Leopold renounces the crown, May, 1830.]
It was in the midst of this growing antagonism that the news reached Capodistrias that Leopold of Saxe-Coburg had been appointed King of Greece. The resolution made by the Powers in March, 1829, that the sovereign of Greece should belong to some reigning house, had perhaps not wholly destroyed the hopes of Capodistrias that he might become Prince or Hospodar of Greece himself. There were difficulties in the way of filling the throne, and these difficulties, after the appointment of Leopold, Capodistrias certainly did not seek to lessen. His subtlety, his command of the indirect methods of effecting a purpose, were so great and so habitual to him that there was little chance of his taking any overt step for preventing Leopold’s accession to the crown; there appears, however, to be evidence that he repressed the indications of assent which the Greeks attempted to offer to Leopold; and a series of letters written by him to that prince was probably intended, though in the most guarded language, to give Leopold the impression that the task which awaited him was a hopeless one. Leopold himself, at the very time when he accepted the crown, was wavering in his purpose. He saw with perfect clearness that the territory granted to the Greek State was too small to secure either its peace or its independence. The severance of Acarnania and Northern Ætolia meant the abandonment of the most energetic part of the Greek inland population, and a probable state of incessant warfare upon the northern frontier; the relinquishment of Crete meant that Greece, bankrupt as it was, must maintain a navy to protect the south coast of the Morea from Turkish attack. These considerations had been urged upon the Powers by Leopold before he accepted the crown, and he had been induced for the moment to withdraw them. But he had never fully acquiesced in the arrangements imposed upon him: he remained irresolute for some months; and at last, whether led to this decision by the letters of Capodistrias or by some other influences, he declared the conditions under which he was called upon to rule Greece to be intolerable, and renounced the crown (May, 1830). [384]
[Government and death of Capodistrias.]
Capodistrias thus found himself delivered from his rival, and again face to face with the task to which duty or ambition called him. The candidature of Leopold had embittered the relations between Capodistrias and all who confronted him in Greece, for it gave him the means of measuring their hostility to himself by the fervour of their addresses to this unknown foreigner. A dark shadow fell over his government. As difficulties thickened and resistance grew everywhere more determined, the President showed himself harsher and less scrupulous in the choice of his means. The men about him were untrustworthy; to crush them, he filled the offices of government with relatives and creatures of his own who were at once tyrannous and incapable. Thwarted and checked, he met opposition by imprisonment and measures of violence, suspended the law-courts, and introduced the espionage and the police-system of St. Petersburg. At length armed rebellion broke out, and while Miaoulis, the Hydriote admiral, blew up the best ships of the Greek navy to prevent them falling into the President’s hands, the wild district of Maina, which had never admitted the Turkish tax-gatherer, refused to pay taxes to the Hellenic State. The revolt was summarily quelled by Capodistrias, and several members of the family of Mauromichalis, including the chief Petrobei, formerly feudal ruler of Maina, were arrested. Some personal insult, imaginary or real, was moreover offered by Capodistrias to this fallen foe, after the aged mother of Petrobei, who had lost sixty-four kinsmen in the war against the Turks, had begged for his release. The vendetta of the Maina was aroused. A son and a nephew of Petrobei laid wait for the President, and as he entered the Church of St. Spiridion at Nauplia on the 9th of October, 1831, a pistol-shot and a blow from a yataghan laid him dead on the ground. He had been warned that his life was sought, but had refused to make any change in his habits, or to allow himself to be attended by a guard.
[Otho King of Greece, Feb. 1, 1833.]
The death of Capodistrias excited sympathies and regrets which to a great extent silenced criticism upon his government, and which have made his name one of those most honoured by the Greek nation. His fall threw the country into anarchy. An attempt was made by his brother Augustine to retain autocratic power, but the result was universal dissension and the interference of the foreigner. At length the Powers united in finding a second sovereign for Greece, and brought the weary scene of disorder to a close. Prince Otho of Bavaria was sent to reign at Athens, and with him there came a group of Bavarian officials to whom the Courts of Europe persuaded themselves that the future of Greece might be safely entrusted. A frontier somewhat better than that which had been offered to Leopold was granted to the new sovereign, but neither Crete, Thessaly, nor Epirus was included within his kingdom. Thus hemmed in within intolerably narrow limits, while burdened with the expenses of an independent state, alike unable to meet the calls upon its national exchequer and to exclude the intrigues of foreign Courts, Greece offered during the next generation little that justified the hopes that had been raised as to its future. But the belief of mankind in the invigorating power of national independence is not wholly vain, nor, even under the most hostile conditions, will the efforts of a liberated people fail to attract the hope and the envy of those branches of its race which still remain in subjection. Poor and inglorious as the Greek kingdom was, it excited the restless longings not only of Greeks under Turkish bondage, but of the prosperous Ionian Islands under English rule; and in 1864 the first step in the expansion of the Hellenic kingdom was accomplished by the transfer of these islands from Great Britain to Greece. Our own day has seen Greece further strengthened and enriched by the annexation of Thessaly. The commercial and educational development of the kingdom is now as vigorous as that of any State in Europe: in agriculture and in manufacturing industry it still lingers far behind. Following the example of Cavour and the Sardinian statesmen who judged no cost too great in preparing for Italian union, the rulers of Greece burden the national finances with the support of an army and navy excessive in comparison both with the resources and with the present requirements of the State. To the ideal of a great political future the material progress of the land has been largely sacrificed. Whether, in the re-adjustment of frontiers which must follow upon the gradual extrusion of the Turk from Eastern Europe, Greece will gain from its expenditure advantages proportionate to the undoubted evils which it has involved, the future alone can decide.
CHAPTER XVI.
France before 1830–Reign of Charles X.–Ministry of Martignac–Ministry of Polignac–The Duke of Orleans–War in Algiers–The July Ordinances– Revolution of July–Louis Philippe King–Nature and Effects of the July Revolution–Affairs in Belgium–The Belgian Revolution–The Great Powers–Intervention, and Establishment of the Kingdom of Belgium–Affairs of Poland–Insurrection at Warsaw–War between Russia and Poland–Overthrow of the Poles: End of the Polish Constitution–Affairs of Italy– Insurrection in the Papal States–France and Austria–Austrian Intervention–Ancona occupied by the French–Affairs of Germany–Prussia; the Zollverein–Brunswick, Hanover, Saxony–The Palatinate–Reaction in Germany–Exiles in Switzerland; Incursion into Savoy–Dispersion of the Exiles–France under Louis Philippe: Successive Risings–Period of Parliamentary Activity–England after 1830: The Reform Bill.
When the Congress of Vienna re-arranged the map of Europe after Napoleon’s fall, Lord Castlereagh expressed the opinion that no prudent statesman would forecast a duration of more than seven years for any settlement that might then be made. At the end of a period twice as long the Treaties of 1815 were still the public law of Europe. The grave had peacefully closed over Napoleon; the revolutionary forces of France had given no sign of returning life. As the Bourbon monarchy struck root, and the elements of opposition grew daily weaker in France, the perils that lately filled all minds appeared to grow obsolete, and the very Power against which the anti-revolutionary treaties of 1815 had been directed took its place, as of natural right, by the side of Austria and Russia in the struggle against revolution. The attack of Louis XVIII. upon the Spanish Constitutionalists marked the complete reconciliation of France with the Continental dynasties which had combined against it in 1815; and from this time the Treaties of Chaumont and Aix-la-Chapelle, though their provisions might be still unchallenged, ceased to represent the actual relations existing between the Powers. There was no longer a moral union of the Courts against a supposed French revolutionary State; on the contrary, when Eastern affairs reached their crisis, Russia detached itself from its Hapsburg ally, and definitely allied itself with France. If after the Peace of Adrianople any one Power stood isolated, it was Austria; and if Europe was threatened by renewed aggression, it was not under revolutionary leaders or with revolutionary watchwords, but as the result of an alliance between Charles X. and the Czar of Russia. After the Bourbon Cabinet had resolved to seek an extension of French territory at whatever sacrifice of the balance of power in the East, Europe could hardly expect that the Court of St. Petersburg would long reject the advantages offered to it. The frontiers of 1815 seemed likely to be obliterated by an enterprise which would bring Russia to the Danube and France to the Rhine. From this danger the settlement of 1815 was saved by the course of events that took place within France itself. The Revolution of 1830, insignificant in its immediate effects upon the French people, largely influenced the governments and the nations of Europe; and while within certain narrow limits it gave a stimulus to constitutional liberty, its more general result was to revive the union of the three Eastern Courts which had broken down in 1826, and to reunite the principal members of the Holy Alliance by the sense of a common interest against the Liberalism of the West.
[Government of Charles X., 1824-1827.]
In the person of Charles X. reaction and clericalism had ascended the French throne. The minister, Villèle, who had won power in 1820 as the representative of the Ultra-Royalists, had indeed learnt wisdom while in office, and down to the death of Louis XVIII. in 1824 he had kept in check the more violent section of his party. But he now retained his post only at the price of compliance with the Court, and gave the authority of his name to measures which his own judgment condemned. It was characteristic of Charles X. and of the reactionaries around him that out of trifling matters they provoked more exasperation than a prudent Government would have aroused by changes of infinitely greater importance. Thus in a sacrilege-law which was introduced in 1825 they disgusted all reasonable men by attempting to revive the barbarous mediæval punishment of amputation of the hand; and in a measure conferring some fractional rights upon the eldest son in cases of intestacy they alarmed the whole nation by a preamble declaring the French principle of the equal division of inheritances to be incompatible with monarchy. Coming from a Government which had thus already forfeited public confidence, a law granting the emigrants a compensation of £40,000,000 for their estates which had been confiscated during the Revolution excited the strongest opposition, although, apart from questions of equity, it benefited the nation by for ever setting at rest all doubt as to the title of the purchasers of the confiscated lands. The financial operations by which, in order to provide the vast sum allotted to the emigrants, the national debt was converted from a five per cent, to a three per cent, stock, alienated all stockholders and especially the powerful bankers of Paris. But more than any single legislative act, the alliance of the Government with the priestly order, and the encouragement given by it to monastic corporations, whose existence in France was contrary to law, offended the nation. The Jesuits were indicted before the law-courts by Montlosier, himself a Royalist and a member of the old noblesse. A vehement controversy sprang up between the ecclesiastics and their opponents, in which the Court was not spared. The Government, which had lately repealed the law of censorship, now restored it by edict. The climax of its unpopularity was reached; its hold upon the Chamber was gone, and the very measure by which Villèle, when at the height of his power, had endeavoured to give permanence to his administration, proved its ruin. He had abolished the system of partial renovation, by which one-fifth of the Chamber of Deputies was annually returned, and substituted for it the English system of septennial Parliaments with general elections. In 1827 King Charles, believing his Ministers to be stronger in the country than in the Chamber, exercised his prerogative of dissolution. The result was the total defeat of the Government, and the return of an assembly in which the Liberal opposition outnumbered the partisans of the Court by three to one. Villèle’s Ministry now resigned. King Charles, unwilling to choose his successor from the Parliamentary majority, thought for a moment of violent resistance, but subsequently adopted other counsels, and, without sincerely intending to bow to the national will, called to office the Vicomte de Martignac, a member of the right centre, and the representative of a policy of conciliation and moderate reform (January 2, 1828).
[Ministry of Martignac, 1828-29.]
[Polignac Minister, Aug. 9, 1829.]
It was not the fault of this Minister that the last chance of union between the French nation and the elder Bourbon line was thrown away. Martignac brought forward a measure of decentralisation conferring upon the local authorities powers which, though limited, were larger than they had possessed at any time since the foundation of the Consulate; and he appealed to the Liberal sections of the Chamber to assist him in winning an instalment of self-government which France might well have accepted with satisfaction. But the spirit of opposition within the Assembly was too strong for a coalition of moderate men, and the Liberals made the success of Martignac’s plan impossible by insisting on concessions which the Minister was unable to grant. The reactionists were ready to combine with their opponents. King Charles himself was in secret antagonism to his Minister, and watched with malicious joy his failure to control the majority in the Chamber. Instead of throwing all his influence on to the side of Martignac, and rallying all doubtful forces by the pronounced support of the Crown, he welcomed Martignac’s defeat as a proof of the uselessness of all concessions, and dismissed the Minister from office, declaring that the course of events had fulfilled his own belief in the impossibility of governing in accord with a Parliament. The names of the Ministers who were now called to power excited anxiety and alarm not only in France but throughout the political circles of Europe. They were the names of men known as the most violent and embittered partisans of reaction; men whose presence in the councils of the King could mean nothing but a direct attack upon the existing Parliamentary system of France. At the head was Jules Polignac, then French ambassador at London, a man half-crazed with religious delusions, who had suffered a long imprisonment for his share in Cadoudal’s attempt to kill Napoleon, and on his return to France in 1814 had refused to swear to the Charta because it granted religious freedom to non-Catholics. Among the subordinate members of the Ministry were General Bourmont, who had deserted to the English at Waterloo, and La Bourdonnaye, the champion of the reactionary Terrorists in 1816. [385]
[Prospects in 1830. The Orleanists.]
The Ministry having been appointed immediately after the close of the session of 1829, an interval of several months passed before they were brought face to face with the Chambers. During this interval the prospect of a conflict with the Crown became familiar to the public mind, though no general impression existed that an actual change of dynasty was close at hand. The Bonapartists were without a leader, Napoleon’s son, their natural head, being in the power of the Austrian Court; the Republicans were neither numerous nor well organised, and the fatal memories of 1793 still weighed upon the nation; the great body of those who contemplated resistance to King Charles X. looked only to a Parliamentary struggle, or, in the last resort, to the refusal of payment of taxes in case of a breach of the Constitution. There was, however, a small and dexterous group of politicians which, at a distance from all the old parties, schemed for the dethronement of the reigning branch of the House of Bourbon, and for the elevation of Louis Philippe, Duke of Orleans, to the throne. The chief of this intrigue was Talleyrand. Slighted and thwarted by the Court, the old diplomatist watched for the signs of a falling Government, and when the familiar omens met his view he turned to the quarter from which its successor was most likely to arise. Louis Philippe stood high in credit with all circles of Parliamentary Liberals. His history had been a strange and eventful one. He was the son of that Orleans who, after calling himself Égalité, and voting for the death of his cousin, Louis XVI., had himself perished during the Reign of Terror. Young Louis Philippe had been a member of the Jacobin Club, and had fought for the Republic at Jemappes. Then, exiled and reduced to penury, he had earned his bread by teaching mathematics in Switzerland, and had been a wanderer in the new as well as in the old world. After awhile his fortunes brightened. A marriage with the daughter of Ferdinand of Sicily restored him to those relations with the reigning houses of Europe which had been forfeited by his father, and inspired him with the hope of gaining a crown. During Napoleon’s invasion of Spain he had caballed with politicians in that country who were inclined to accept a substitute for their absent sovereign; at another time he had entertained hopes of being made king of the Ionian Islands. After the peace of Paris, when the allied sovereigns and their ministers visited England, Louis Philippe was sent over by his father-in-law to intrigue among them against Murat, and in pursuance of this object he made himself acquainted not only with every foreign statesman then in London but with every leading English politician. He afterwards settled in France, and was reinstated in the vast possessions of the House of Orleans, which, though confiscated, had not for the most part been sold during the Revolution. His position at Paris under Louis XVIII. and Charles X. was a peculiar one. Without taking any direct part in politics or entering into any avowed opposition to the Court, he made his home, the Palais Royale, a gathering-place for all that was most distinguished in the new political and literary society of the capital; and while the Tuileries affected the pomp and the ceremoniousness of the old regime, the Duke of Orleans moved with the familiarity of a citizen among citizens. He was a clever, ready, sensible man, equal, as it seemed, to any practical task likely to come in his way, but in reality void of any deep insight, of any far-reaching aspiration, of any profound conviction. His affectation of a straightforward middle-class geniality covered a decided tendency towards intrigue and a strong love of personal power. Later events indeed gave rise to the belief that, while professing the utmost loyalty to Charles X., Louis Philippe had been scheming to oust him from his throne; but the evidence really points the other way, and indicates that, whatever secret hopes may have suggested themselves to the Duke, his strongest sentiment during the Revolution of 1830 was the fear of being driven into exile himself, and of losing his possessions. He was not indeed of a chivalrous nature; but when the Crown came in his way, he was guilty of no worse offence than some shabby evasions of promises.
[Meeting and Prorogation of the Chambers, March, 1830.]
Early in March, 1830, the French Chambers assembled after their recess. The speech of King Charles at the opening of the session was resolute and even threatening. It was answered by an address from the Lower House, requesting him to dismiss his Ministers. The deputation which presented this address was received by the King in a style that left no doubt as to his intentions, and on the following day the Chambers were prorogued for six months. It was known that they would not be permitted to meet again, and preparations for a renewed general election were at once made with the utmost vigour by both parties throughout France. The Court unsparingly applied all the means of pressure familiar to French governments; it moreover expected to influence public opinion by some striking success in arms or in diplomacy abroad. The negotiations with Russia for the acquisition of Belgium were still before the Cabinet, and a quarrel with the Dey of Algiers gave Polignac the opportunity of beginning a war of conquest in Africa. General Bourmont left the War Office, to wipe out the infamy still attaching to his name by a campaign against the Arabs; and the Government trusted that, even in the event of defeat at the elections, the nation at large would at the most critical moment be rallied to its side by an announcement of the capture of Algiers.
[Polignac’s project.]
While the dissolution of Parliament was impending, Polignac laid before the King a memorial expressing his own views on the courses open to Government in case of the elections proving adverse. The Charta contained a clause which, in loose and ill-chosen language, declared it to be the function of the King “to make the regulations and ordinances necessary for the execution of the laws and for the security of the State.” These words, which no doubt referred to the exercise of the King’s normal and constitutional powers, were interpreted by Polignac as authorising the King to suspend the Constitution itself, if the Representative Assembly should be at variance with the King’s Ministers. Polignac in fact entertained the same view of the relation between executive and deliberative bodies as those Jacobin directors who made the _coup-d’état_ of Fructidor, 1797; and the measures which he ultimately adopted were, though in a softened form, those adopted by Barras and Laréveillère after the Royalist elections in the sixth year of the Republic. To suspend the Constitution was not, he suggested, to violate the Charta, for the Charta empowered the sovereign to issue the ordinances necessary for the security of the State; and who but the sovereign and his advisers could be the judges of this necessity? This was simple enough; there was nevertheless among Polignac’s colleagues some doubt both as to the wisdom and as to the legality of his plans. King Charles who, with all his bigotry, was anxious not to violate the letter of the Charta, brooded long over the clause which defined the sovereign’s powers. At length he persuaded himself that his Minister’s interpretation was the correct one, accepted the resignation of the dissentients within the Cabinet, and gave his sanction to the course which Polignac recommended. [386]
[Elections of 1830.]
The result of the general election, which took place in June, surpassed all the hopes of the Opposition and all the fears of the Court. The entire body of Deputies which had voted the obnoxious address to the Crown in March was returned, and the partisans of Government lost in addition fifty seats. The Cabinet, which had not up to this time resolved upon the details of its action, now deliberated upon several projects submitted to it, and, after rejecting all plans that might have led to a compromise, determined to declare the elections null and void, to silence the press, and to supersede the existing electoral system by one that should secure the mastery of the Government both at the polling-booths and in the Chamber itself. All this was to be done by Royal Edict, and before the meeting of the new Parliament. The date fixed for the opening of the Chambers had been placed as late as possible in order to give time to General Bourmont to win the victory in Africa from which the Court expected to reap so rich a harvest of prestige. On the 9th of July news arrived that Algiers had fallen. The announcement, which was everywhere made with the utmost pomp, fell flat on the country. The conflict between the Court and the nation absorbed all minds, and the rapturous congratulations of Bishops and Prefects scarcely misled even the blind _côterie_ of the Tuileries. Public opinion was no doubt with the Opposition; King Charles, however, had no belief that the populace of Paris, which alone was to be dreaded as a fighting body, would take up arms on behalf of the middle-class voters and journalists against whom his Ordinances were to be directed. The populace neither read nor voted: why should it concern itself with constitutional law? Or why, in a matter that related only to the King and the Bourgeoisie, should it not take part with the King against this new and bastard aristocracy which lived on others’ labour? Politicians who could not fight were troublesome only when they were permitted to speak and to write. There was force enough at the King’s command to close the gates of the Chamber of Deputies, and to break up the printing-presses of the journals; and if King Louis XVI. had at last fallen by the hands of men of violence, it was only because he had made concessions at first to orators and politicians. Therefore, without dreaming that an armed struggle would be the immediate result of their action, King Charles and Polignac determined to prevent the meeting of the Chamber, and to publish, a week before the date fixed for its opening, the Edicts which were to silence the brawl of faction and to vindicate monarchical government in France.
[The Ordinances, July 26, 1830.]
Accordingly, on the 26th of July, a series of Ordinances appeared in the _Moniteur_, signed by the King and counter-signed by the Ministers. The first Ordinance forbade the publication of any journal without royal permission; the second dissolved the Chamber of Deputies; the third raised the property-qualification of voters, established a system of double-election, altered the duration of Parliaments, and re-enacted the obsolete clause of the Charta confining the initiative in all legislation to the Government. Other Ordinances convoked a Chamber to be elected under the new rules, and called to the Council of State a number of the most notorious Ultra-Royalists and fanatics in France. Taken together, the Ordinances left scarcely anything standing of the Constitutional and Parliamentary system of the day. The blow fell first on the press, and the first step in resistance was taken by the journalists of Paris, who, under the leadership of the young Thiers, editor of the _National_, published a protest declaring that they would treat the Ordinances as illegal, and calling upon the Chambers and nation to join in this resistance. For a while the journalists seemed likely to stand alone. Paris at large remained quiet, and a body of the recently elected Deputies, to whom the journalists appealed as representatives of the nation, proved themselves incapable of any action or decision whatsoever. It was not from these timid politicians, but from a body of obscure Republicans, that the impulse proceeded which overthrew the Bourbon throne. Unrepresented in Parliament and unrepresented in the press, there were a few active men who had handed down the traditions of 1792, and who, in sympathy with the Carbonari and other conspirators abroad, had during recent years founded secret societies in Paris, and enlisted in the Republican cause a certain number of workmen, of students, and of youths of the middle classes. While the journalists discussed legal means of resistance, and the Deputies awaited events, the Republican leaders met and determined upon armed revolt. They were assisted, probably without direct concert, by the printing firms and other employers of labour, who, in view of the general suspension of the newspapers, closed their establishments on the morning of July 27, and turned their workmen into the streets.
[July 27.]
[July 28.]
Thus on the day after the appearance of the Edicts the aspect of Paris changed. Crowds gathered, and revolutionary cries were raised. Marmont, who was suddenly ordered to take command of the troops, placed them around the Tuileries, and captured two barricades which were erected in the neighbourhood; but the populace was not yet armed, and no serious conflict took place. In the evening Lafayette reached Paris, and the revolution had now a real, though not an avowed, leader. A body of his adherents met during the night at the office of the _National_, and, in spite of Thiers’ resistance, decided upon a general insurrection. Thiers himself, who desired nothing but a legal and Parliamentary attack upon Charles X., quitted Paris to await events. The men who had out-voted him placed themselves in communication with all the district committees of Paris, and began the actual work of revolt by distributing arms. On the morning of Wednesday, July 28th, the first armed bands attacked and captured the arsenals and several private depots of weapons and ammunition. Barricades were erected everywhere. The insurgents swelled from hundreds to thousands, and, converging on the old rallying-point of the Commune of Paris, they seized the Hôtel de Ville, and hoisted the tricolor flag on its roof. Marmont wrote to the King, declaring the position to be most serious, and advising concession; he then put his troops in motion, and succeeded, after a severe conflict, in capturing several points of vantage, and in expelling the rebels from the Hôtel de Ville.
[July 29.]
In the meantime the Deputies, who were assembled at the house of one of their number in pursuance of an agreement made on the previous day, gained sufficient courage to adopt a protest declaring that in spite of the Ordinances they were still the legal representatives of the nation. They moreover sent a deputation to Marmont, begging him to put a stop to the fighting, and offering their assistance in restoring order if the King would withdraw his Edicts. Marmont replied that he could do nothing without the King’s command, but he despatched a second letter to St. Cloud, urging compliance. The only answer which he received was a command to concentrate his troops and to act in masses. The result of this was that the positions which had been won by hard fighting were abandoned before evening, and that the troops, famished and exhausted, were marched back through the streets of Paris to the Tuileries. On the march some fraternised with the people, others were surrounded and disarmed. All eastern Paris now fell into the hands of the insurgents; the middle-class, as in 1789 and 1792, remained inactive, and allowed the contest to be decided by the populace and the soldiery. Messages from the capital constantly reached St. Cloud, but the King so little understood his danger and so confidently reckoned on the victory of the troops in the Tuileries that he played whist as usual during the evening; and when the Duc de Mortemart, French Ambassador at St. Petersburg, arrived at nightfall, and pressed for an audience, the King refused to receive him until the next morning. When morning came, the march of the insurgents against the Tuileries began. Position after position fell into their hands. The regiments stationed in the Place Vendôme abandoned their commander, and marched off to place themselves at the disposal of the Deputies. Marmont ordered the Swiss Guard, which had hitherto defended the Louvre, to replace them; and in doing so he left the Louvre for a moment without any garrison. The insurgents saw the building empty, and rushed into it. From the windows they commanded the Court of the Tuileries, where the troops in reserve were posted; and soon after mid-day all was over. A few isolated battalions fought and perished, but the mass of the soldiery with their commander fell back upon the Place de la Concorde, and then evacuated Paris. [387]
The Duke of Orleans was all this time in hiding. He had been warned that the Court intended to arrest him, and, whether from fear of the Court or of the populace, he had secreted himself at a hunting-lodge in his woods, allowing none but his wife and his sister to know where he was concealed. His partisans, of whom the rich and popular banker, Laffitte, was the most influential among the Deputies, were watching for an opportunity to bring forward his name; but their chances of success seemed slight. The Deputies at large wished only for the withdrawal of the Ordinances, and were wholly averse from a change of dynasty. It was only through the obstinacy of King Charles himself, and as the result of a series of accidents, that the Crown passed from the elder Bourbon line. King Charles would not hear of withdrawing the Ordinances until the Tuileries had actually fallen; he then gave way and charged the Duc de Mortemart to form a new Ministry, drawn from the ranks of the Opposition. But instead of formally repealing the Edicts by a public Decree, he sent two messengers to Paris to communicate his change of purpose to the Deputies by word of mouth. The messengers betook themselves to the Hôtel de Ville, where a municipal committee under Lafayette had been installed; and, when they could produce no written authority for their statements, they were referred by this committee to the general body of Deputies, which was now sitting at Laffitte’s house. The Deputies also demanded a written guarantee. Laffitte and Thiers spoke in favour of the Duke of Orleans, but the Assembly at large was still willing to negotiate with Charles X., and only required the presence of the Duc de Mortemart himself, and a copy of the Decree repealing the Ordinances.
[July 30.]
It was now near midnight. The messengers returned to St. Cloud, and were not permitted to deliver their intelligence until the King awoke next morning. Charles then signed the necessary document, and Mortemart set out for Paris; but the night’s delay had given the Orleanists time to act, and before the King was up Thiers had placarded the streets of Paris with a proclamation extolling Orleans as the prince devoted to the cause of the Revolution, as the soldier of Jemappes, and the only constitutional King now possible. Some hours after this manifesto had appeared the Deputies again assembled at Laffitte’s house, and waited for the appearance of Mortemart. But they waited in vain. Mortemart’s carriage was stopped on the road from St. Cloud, and he was compelled to make his way on foot by a long circuit and across a score of barricades. When he approached Laffitte’s house, half dead with heat and fatigue, he found that the Deputies had adjourned to the Palais Bourbon, and, instead of following them, he ended his journey at the Luxemburg, where the Peers were assembled. His absence was turned to good account by the Orleanists. At the morning session the proposition was openly made to call Louis Philippe to power; and when the Deputies reassembled in the afternoon and the Minister still failed to present himself, it was resolved to send a body of Peers and Deputies to Louis Philippe to invite him to come to Paris and to assume the office of Lieutenant-General of the kingdom. No opposition was offered to this proposal in the House of Peers, and a deputation accordingly set out to search for Louis Philippe at his country house at Neuilly. The prince was not to be found; but his sister, who received the deputation, undertook that he should duly appear in Paris. She then communicated with her brother in his hiding-place, and induced him, in spite of the resistance of his wife, to set out for the capital. He arrived at the Palais Royale late on the night of the 30th. Early the next morning he received a deputation from the Assembly, and accepted the powers which they offered him. A proclamation was then published, announcing to the Parisians that in order to save the country from anarchy and civil war the Duke of Orleans had assumed the office of Lieutenant-General of the kingdom.