Chapter XV (3)

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 Missolonghi, 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 non-intervention, 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., 1827.]

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.]