Byrons War – Roderick Beaton

An ailing widow with three underage daughters, apparently singled out because the family had started out from a position of some wealth in Patras, he decreed should follow him to Cephalonia. There he would maintain them and take a personal interest in their welfare. It was as a consequence of this act of charity that Byron would soon fall in love (perhaps) for the last time in his life, with the widow’s adolescent son, Loukas Chalandritsanos.6 A chance meeting at the Residency brought the most direct news, yet, of Blaquiere, and the chance to discover, even at second-hand, something of what Blaquiere had learned from his time at Tripolitsa.

This was how Thomas Smith, a former colleague of Browne who happened to be passing through, found himself immediately swept up into Byron’s party. Smith had been with Blaquiere, in Corfu, only a few days previously. At once he began to tell Byron what he knew. Back in Cephalonia, this was exactly the kind of information that Byron would have seized upon. Now, as the high spirits of the party swirled through the Residency, he seems not even to have heard Smith out.

To the ‘increased amazement’ of his hearer, he turned the conversation, instead, ‘to his works, to Lady Byron, and to his daughter’.7 While in Ithaca, Byron was determined to dwell more upon the past than any serious plans for the future. A perhaps surprising topic of conversation during those days was Sir Walter Scott and the ‘Waverley’ novels.

Practically alone among the British literary establishment, Scott had earned Byron’s consistent and ungrudging admiration, ever since the two had met at the home of their publisher, John Murray, in 1815. Scott had confessed to Byron his authorship of the succès fou of the previous year, the anonymously published novel Waverley. Byron had read almost every one of the series of historical novels that followed.

Roderick Beaton re-examines Lord Byron’s life and writing through the long trajectory of his relationship with Greece. Beginning with the poet’s youthful travels in 1809–11, Byron’s War traces his years of fame in London and self-imposed exile in Italy that culminated in the decision to devote himself to the cause of Greek independence. Then comes Byron’s dramatic self-transformation while in Cephalonia, from Romantic rebel to ‘new statesman’, subordinating himself for the first time to a defined, political cause in order to begin laying the foundations during his ‘hundred days’ at Missolonghi for a new kind of polity in Europe – that of the nation state as we know it today.

Byron’s War draws extensively on Greek historical sources and other unpublished documents to tell an individual story that also offers a new understanding of the significance that Greece had for Byron and of Byron’s contribution to the origin of the present-day Greek state. Roderick Beaton is Koraes Professor of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature in the Centre for Hellenic Studies at King’s College London.

1kitap1.com/en Frontispiece. Theodoros Vryzakis (1819–78), The Reception of Lord Byron at Missolonghi, 1861, oil on canvas, 155 × 213 cm (Athens, National Gallery–Alexandros Soutzos Museum, inv. 1298, donated by the University of Athens. Photo: Stavros Psiroukis) 1kitap1.com/en Byron’s War Romantic Rebellion, Greek Revolution Roderick Beaton 1kitap1.com/en CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107033085 © Roderick Beaton 2013 This publication is in copyright.

Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2013 Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by the MPG Books Group A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Beaton, Roderick.

Byron’s War : Romantic Rebellion, Greek Revolution / Roderick Beaton.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

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