THE GREEK REVOLUTION.

 

CHAPTER XVI.

PRESIDENCY OF COUNT CAPODISTRIAS. JANUARY 1828 TO OCTOBER 1831.

 

“ Unlimited power corrupts the possessor; and this I know, that where law ends, there tyranny begins.”

Lord Chatham.

 

 

The struggle for independence unfolded some virtues in the breasts of the Greeks which they were not previously supposed to possess. But a few years of a liberty that was mingled with lawlessness could not be expected to efface the effects of old habits and a vicious nurture. National energies were awakened, but no national responsibility was felt by individuals, so that the vices of modern Greek society were in each class stronger than the popular virtues which liberty was endeavouring to nourish. The mass of the people had behaved well; but the conduct of political and military leaders, of primates and statesmen, had been selfish and incapable. This was deliberately proclaimed by the National Assembly of Troezene in 1827, when  public opinion rejected all the actors in the Revolution as unworthy of the nation’s confidence, and elected Count Capodistrias president of Greece on the 14th April 1827 for a period of seven years.

The decree which conferred the presidency on Capodistrias declared that he was elected because he possessed a degree of political experience which the Othoman domination had prevented any native Greek from acquiring. Much was therefore expected at his hands. It is the duty of the historian not only to record his acts, but to explain why his performances fell short of the expectations of the Greek nation.

Capodistrias was fifty-one years of age when he arrived in Greece. He was born at Corfu. His ancestors had received a title of nobility from the Venetian republic, but the family was not wealthy, and the young count, like many Corfiot nobles, was sent to Italy to study medicine, in order to gain his livelihood. In 1803 he commenced his political career, being appointed secretary to the newly created republic of the Ionian Islands; in 1807, when Napoleon I annexed the Ionian Islands to the French empire, he transferred his services to Russia, where accident gained him the favour of the Emperor Alexander I; and in 1815 he was employed in the negotiations relating to the treaty of Paris. At that time he exerted himself, and was allowed to employ all the influence of the Russian cabinet, to re-establish the Ionian republic; but Great Britain insisted on retaining possession of these islands, and of holding complete command over their government, as a check on Russian intrigues among the orthodox population of the Othoman empire. Capodistrias was consequently obliged to rest satisfied with the concession that the  Ionian Islands were to be formed into a separate, but not an independent, state under the British crown, instead of being, like Malta, declared a dependency of the British empire. Capodistrias hoped that even this might be rendered subservient to his ambitious schemes. He affected great contempt for English dulness, and he hoped that English dullards might be inveigled into favouring his views in the East. He never forgave English ministers for foiling his diplomatic projects, and the rancorous malevolence of his nature led him into several grave political errors. He hated England like an Ionian, but he indulged and exhibited his hatred in a way that was very unlike a statesman.

The patriotism of Capodistrias was identified with orthodoxy and nationality, not with civil liberty and political independence. To the social progress of the bulk of the population in Western Europe during his own lifetime, he paid little attention, and this neglect prevented his observing the influence which public opinion already exercised on the general conduct of most cabinets. He overrated the influence of orthodoxy in the Othoman empire, and the power of Russia in the international system of Europe. All this was quite natural, for his experience of mankind had been acquired either in the confined and corrupt society of Corfu, or in the artificial atmosphere of Russian diplomacy.

Yet with all his defects and prejudices, Capodistrias was immeasurably superior to every Greek whom the Revolution had hitherto raised to power. He had many virtues and great abilities. His conduct was firm and disinterested; his manners simple and dignified. His personal feelings were warm, and, as a consequence of this virtue, they were sometimes so strong as to warp his judgment. He wanted the equanimity and impartiality of mind and the elevation of soul necessary to make a great man.

The father of Capodistrias was a bigoted aristocrat, and his own youthful education was partly Venetian and partly Greek. His instruction was not accurate, nor was his reading extensive, so that, through the cosmopolite intellectual cultivation of his later years, his provincial ideas often peeped out. He generally used the French language in writing as well as speaking. He was indeed unable to write Greek, though he spoke it fluently. Italian was of course his mother tongue. For a statesman he was far too loquacious. He allowed everybody who approached him to perceive that on many great political questions of importance in Greece, his opinions were vague and unsettled. At times he spoke as a warm panegyrist of Russian absolutism, and at times as an enthusiastic admirer of American democracy.

Before accepting the presidency of Greece, Capodistrias visited Russia, and obtained the approbation of the Emperor Nicholas. He arrived in Greece in the month of January 1828, and he found the country in a state of anarchy. The government had been compelled to wander from one place to another, and had rendered itself contemptible wherever it had appeared. In November 1826 it fled from Nauplia, and soon after established itself at Egina. In 1827 it removed to Poros. In consequence of a decree of the National Assembly of Troezene, it returned to Nauplia, but its presence caused a civil war, and it went back to Egina.

The first measures of Capodistrias were prompt and judicious. He could not put an immediate stop to some of the grossest abuses in the army, navy, and financial administration, without assuming dictatorial power. The necessity of his dictatorship was admitted; and the manner by which he sought its ratification from the existing government and the representative body, was generally approved. To give his administrative changes a national sanction without creating any check on his own power, he established a council of state, called Panhellenion, consisting of twenty-seven members, divided into three sections, for the consideration of administrative, financial, and judicial business. Decrees of the president were to be promulgated on reports of the whole Panhellenion, or of the section to which the business of the decree related. Capodistrias announced that he would convoke a national assembly in the month of April, and the warmest partisans of representative institutions allowed that the state of the country rendered an earlier convocation impracticable. But after making these concessions to public opinion, Capodistrias began to display his aversion to any systematic restraint on his arbitrary powers. He violated the provisions of the constitution of Troezene without necessity, and by his proceedings soon taught the liberal party to regard him as the representative of force and not of law. Yet a clear perception of his position and his interest would have shown him that his power could have no firm foundation unless it was based on the supremacy of right.

The opinions and the policy of Capodistrias during his presidency are revealed by Count Bulgari, another Greek, who was Russian minister in Greece, and who was understood to echo the president’s sentiments, even if he did not, as was generally reported, write under his dictation. In a memoir on the state of Greece in 1828, the views of Capodistrias are thus stated : “It would be a strange delusion to believe seriously in the possibility of organising any government whatever in Greece upon purely constitutional principles, which require a general tendency of the people to political forms, as well as elements of civilisation which exist only in a few individuals. The president of Greece thought that it was the duty of the three powers to destroy the Greek Revolution by establishing a monarchical government, in order to put an end to the scandalous and sanguinary scenes which made humanity shudder.” These sentiments were repeated by the president both to foreigners and Greeks, and showed oil many occasions his want of sympathy with the cause of national independence, as well as his aversion to political liberty. His language constantly insinuated, though he perhaps never directly asserted, that he was the only fit sovereign for Greece. He harped incessantly on the theme, that all the men previously engaged in public business were demoralised either by the Turkish yoke, or by revolutionary anarchy; and he asserted that no permanent improvement could take place in the condition of the Greeks until the living generation had passed away. He called the primates, Christian Turks; the military chiefs, robbers; the men of letters, fools; and the phanariots, children of Satan; and he habitually concluded such diatribes by adding, that the good of the suffering people required that he should be allowed to govern with absolute power. And perhaps nothing better could have happened to Greece, had it been possible for him to forget that he was a Corfiot, and that he had two or three stupid brothers at Corfu.

The presidency of Capodistrias lasted more than three years and a half. It was not, therefore, want of time which prevented his laying the foundations of an administrative system, and adopting a judicial organisa­ion. The Greeks possessed local institutions of great administrative value; but instead of making use of these institutions, he wasted much time in striving to undermine them. He argued that no political good could rest on a democratic foundation. To the reign of law he had a passionate antipathy. He sometimes spoke of the law as a kind of personal enemy to his dictatorship. He insisted that, to govern Greece well, his power must be exercised without limit or restraint, and that the law which subjected his arbitrary authority to systematic rules was in some degree a mere constitutional delusion. He forgot that he required the assistance of the law to prevent his own creatures from robbing him of the power he had assumed. Unfortunately for Greece, Capodistrias was a diplomatist and not a statesman. His plans of government were vaguely sketched in provisional laws. He never framed a precise code of administrative procedure, and, as a natural consequence of the provisional nature of his government, his ordinances were nullified by the agents charged to carry them into execution. While he ridiculed the liberal theories of the constitutions of Epidaurus and Troezene, he did not perceive that his own acts were those of an administrative sciolist.

The president’s attention was early directed to the anarchy that prevailed in the military forces of Greece. The extortions of the soldiery were wasting all those districts into which the Egyptians had not penetrated. The agricultural population was in danger of extermination. The armed men who extorted pay and provisions from the country were now the followers of military chiefs, not the soldiers of the Greek government. In order to form an army, it was necessary to break the connection between the soldiers and their leaders, and to form corps in which both the inferior and superior officers should depend directly on the president for their authority, and in which the soldiers should look to him for their pay, subsistence, reward, and punishment. Of military affairs Capodistrias was utterly ignorant, and, as usual, he allowed his suspicious nature to neutralise the effect of his sagacity. From excessive jealousy of his personal authority, he refused to employ experienced soldiers in organising his army, and he made a vain attempt to direct the enterprise himself.

Demetrius Hypsilantes had proved his inability for organising an army, and Sir Richard Church had never been able to introduce any discipline in his camps. Capodistrias appointed the first to command an army destined to reconquer Eastern Greece, and left the second at the head of the disorganised bands in Western Greece. Fabvier, who had proved himself a good disciplinarian, and had formed regular battalions under circumstances of great difficulty, was neglected and driven from Greece. Capodistrias had the weakness or the misfortune to name always the wrong man for every important place. His enemies accused him of fearing the right man in any office.

The consequence of the unmilitary president attempting to regulate the details of military organisation, was that the Greek army remained without either order or discipline. A few reforms were introduced, tending to enable the president to know how many men Greece had in the field, and to diminish the frauds committed in the distribution of rations; and this introduction of a regular system of mustering, paying, and provision­ing the troops by the central government deserves praise, though it was a very small step towards the formation of a Greek army.

The circumstances in which the Greek soldiery were placed at this epoch of the Revolution afforded great facilities for the introduction of military discipline, and for the formation of an efficient national army of veteran troops. The soldiers had eaten up the substance of the agricultural population, and were themselves in danger of starvation. Capodistrias, holding in his hands the absolute disposal of all the supplies from abroad on which the troops were dependent for pay and rations, could command their obedience to any terms he might impose. The most powerful chieftains only maintained a few followers by seizing the public revenues. They were hated by the people for their extortions, envied by the mass of the soldiery for the benefits they conferred on a few, and in open hostility with the public interests. The arrival of Capodistrias annihilated their usurped power, and the chieftains who kept possession of the fortresses of Corinth, Nauplia, and Monemvasia, in defiance of the preceding government, were compelled to surrender those places into his hands.

A camp was formed at Troezene, to which all the troops of continental Greece in the Morea were summoned, in order that they might receive their new organisation. The president appeared and promulgated his scheme for the formation of a national army. About eight thousand men, consisting in great part of the armatoli who had remained faithful to the Greek cause, were divided into eight regiments or chiliarchies. The chiliarchs or colonels, and the other officers of these regiments, were named by the president. Pay­masters were also appointed, and a regular commissariat formed, so that an end was put to the previous system of trading in rations. The facility with which every reform was adopted by the soldiers, and their alacrity in preferring the position of government troops to that of personal followers of individual chieftains, proved that the president might easily have effected much more than he attempted.

The new regiments were inspected by the president at Troezene in February 1828. The men had the aspect of veteran soldiers; still the review presented a very unmilitary spectacle. The chiliarchies were only distinguished by being separate groups of companies. The different companies were ranged in various forms and figures, according to the fancies of their captains—some were spun out in single files, some were drawn up four deep, some seemed to form circles, and some attempted to form squares. At last the whole army was ranged in lines, straggling in disorder, and undulating in unmeaning restlessness. The review, if such a spectacle can be called by a military term, was a parade for the purpose of enabling the inexperienced eye of the president to count the companies and examine the men of whom they were composed.

At a later period Capodistrias attempted to carry his organisation a step farther. In the autumn of 1829, after the termination of the war against the Turks in continental Greece, he again mustered the chiliarchies at Salamis. His military counsellor was Colonel Gerard, a French officer, whom he had appointed inspector of the Greek army. The troops present did not exceed five thousand men, who were divided into twenty battalions, and each battalion was composed of four companies. The commanders of the new battalions were called taxiarchs, and the chiliarchs were now ranked as generals. Paymasters were appointed to each battalion, and commanders were deprived of all control over the military chests. Had Capodistrias, when he introduced this new organisation, settled the supernumerary officers who were willing to become agriculturists on national lands, he might have broken up the system of farming the revenues of the country to military men, which the chieftains had introduced, and saved Greece from the calamity of nourishing in her breast a second generation of these vipers.

Demetrius Hypsilantes was appointed to command the chiliarchies formed at Troezene, and he established a camp at Megara. But though he was at the head of eight thousand armatoli, and the Turks had not four thousand men in Eastern Greece, he remained for seven months in utter idleness. No attempt was made to drill the men, to instruct the companies in the manoeuvres of light infantry, nor to teach the chiliarchies the tactics of an army. Capodistrias justly reproached Hypsilantes with his inactivity and incapacity; but he forgot that it was his own duty to frame systematic regulations for the discipline of the whole Greek army, and to transmit both to Hypsilantes and Church precise orders to carry these regulations into effect.

Amidst the military reforms of Capodistrias he neglected the regular troops. Yet be was well aware that this body formed the only corps on which the government could always rely. Indeed this fact contains the true explanation of his neglect. The regular corps was a body that from its nature would identify itself with the executive government of Greece. The semi-organised battalions of regulars were held in dependence on the personal will and favour of Count Capodistrias. The president wished everything in Greece to be provisional until he should be appointed president for life, or sovereign of the country. That he might have it in his power to revive the regular corps when he required its services, he revived the law of conscription passed by the Greek government  in 1825, and applied it to the islands of the Archipelago. The pay of Fabvier’s corps had fallen ten months into arrear after the unfortunate expedition to Chios. Instead of paying these arrears, and retaining Fabvier’s veterans under arms, he allowed them to disband themselves. These men were attached to Fabvier, and Capodistrias was jealous of Fabvier’s influence. But as it was necessary to gain credit in Western Europe for a wish to form a regular army, the president pretended that it was necessary to apply the law of conscription in order to obtain men. In this case the conduct of the president was marked by excessive duplicity, for he knew well that it would have been more economical to retain the veterans of the regular corps by paying the ten months’ arrears which were due to them, than to enrol new recruits; and he was not insensible to the folly of withdrawing active labourers from the cultivation of the soil in the only part of Greece where agriculture was pursued in security and with profit. As soon as Fabvier perceived that the military plans of the president were subordinated to personal schemes of ambition, he resigned his command, as has been already mentioned, and quitted Greece in May 1828.

Hypsilantes, as has been said, passed the summer of 1828 at Megara. The Russian war compelled Reshid Pasha to leave continental Greece and Epirus almost destitute of troops, and he was threatened with an insurrection of the Albanian chieftains in his own pashalik of Joannina. In autumn the Greeks advanced to Lombotina, famous for its apples, and drove the Turks into Lepanto. Hypsilantes about the same time occupied Boeotia and Phocis, and on the 29th of November the Turks in Salona capitulated, and the capitulation was faithfully observed by the Greeks. On the 5th of December Karpenisi was evacuated. A few insignificant skirmishes took place during the winter. The Turks were too weak to attempt anything, and the anarchy that still prevailed among the Greek chiefs prevented the numerical superiority of the Greek forces from being available.

The army of Western Greece was not more active than that of Eastern during the summer of 1828. Capodistrias visited the camp of Sir Richard Church near Mytika, and he declared that, on inspecting the troops in Acarnania, he found less order than in those he had reviewed at Troezene. This visit gave the president a very unfavourable opinion of the generalissimo’s talents for organisation. In September the Greeks advanced to the Gulf of Arta, and occupied Loutraki, where they gained possession of a few boats. Capodistrias named Pasano, a Corsican adventurer, to succeed Hastings as commander of the naval forces in Western Greece. Pasano made an unsuccessful at­tempt to force the passage into the Gulf of Arta, but some of the Greek officers under his command, considering that he had shown both cowardice and incapacity in the affair, renewed the enterprise without his order, and passed gallantly under the batteries of  Previsa. This exploit secured to the Greeks the command of the Gulf of Arta. Pasano was recalled, and Admiral Kriezes, a Hydriot officer of ability and courage, succeeded him. The town of Vonitza, a ruinous spot, was occupied by the Greek troops on the 27th December 1828; but the almost defenceless Venetian castle did not capitulate until the 17th March 1829. The passes of Makrynoros were occupied in April.

Capodistrias, who had blamed both Hypsilantes and Church for incapacity, now astonished the world by making his brother Agostino a general.

Count Agostino Capodistrias, besides not being a military man, was really little better than a fool; yet the president, blinded by fraternal affection, named this miserable creature his plenipotentiary in Western Greece, and empowered him to direct all military and civil business. The plenipotentiary arrived in the Hellas. On the 30th April 1829, the garrison of Naupaktos (Lepanto) capitulated, and was transported to Previsa. On the 14th May, Mesolonghi and Anatolikon were evacuated by the Turks.

Reshid Pasha escaped the mortification of witnessing the loss of all his conquests in Greece. His prudence and valour were rewarded with the rank of grand vizier, and he quitted Joannina to assume the command of the Othoman army at Shumla before the Turks evacuated continental Greece.

The war terminated in 1829. The Allied powers fixed the frontier of Greece by a protocol in the month of March. Yet the Turks would not yield possession of the places they still held in Eastern Greece, and some skirmishes ensued, in which a great deal of powder was wasted, and very little blood was shed. A body of Albanians, under Aslan Bey, marched from Zeituni by Thermopylae, Livadea, and Thebes, and reached Athens without encountering opposition. After leaving a small and select garrison in the Acropolis, Aslan Bey collected all the Turks in Attica and Boeotia, and commenced his retreat. But on arriving at the pass of Petra, between Thebes and Livadea, he found a body of Greek troops strongly posted to dispute the passage. The Turks, unable to advance, concluded a capitulation on the 25^th of September 1829, by which they engaged to evacuate all Eastern Greece, except the Acropolis of Athens and the fort of Karababa on the Euripus. Thus Prince Demetrius Hypsilantes had the honour of terminating the war which his brother had commenced on the banks of the Pruth; and this action cherished in his mind the delusion that, as the representative of his brother Alexander, he was the right sovereign for Greece. As a military man, he was deficient in tactical knowledge and strategic capacity; as a statesman, he was utterly destitute of judgment ; but his personal courage and private virtues command respect.

The civil administration of Capodistrias was founded on no organised system. He found the Greeks enjoying a degree of individual liberty, and exercising in their municipalities more independent political action than he had supposed existed on the continent of Europe; for his opinions concerning the internal administration of Switzerland, though he had resided there for some time, and laboured as a Russian diplomatist to secure its existence as an independent state, were very crude. In Greece he mistook the liberty he found existing for the cause of the anarchy that desolated the country, and this anarchy he considered to be a necessary consequence of the sovereignty of the people. He determined to eradicate the municipal system, which appeared to him to have transfused the elements of revolutionary action into the frame of society; and he began to weaken the power of the municipalities, by converting the demogeronts into agents of the executive authority. To complete the destruction of revolutionary principles, he created a governmental police, and rendered its members responsible to him alone for the exercise of their powers. His plan of government was very simple, but really impracticable. He retained in his own hands the absolute direction of every branch of the public administration, declaring that nothing could be permanently settled concerning the internal organisation of the country until the three powers had decided its external position as an independent state. The real object was to render his services indispensable either as prime minister, hospodar, prince, or king.

Capodistrias divided the Morea into seven provinces, and the islands into six. These provinces were governed provisionally by thirteen extraordinary commissioners, to whom he intrusted great and ill-defined authority. Immemorial usages, and old as well as new political institutions, were suspended, and the despotism of these Greek pashas was restrained by no published instructions, no fixed forms of proceeding, and by no judicial authority.

The evil effects of arbitrary power were soon visible. Ibrahim’s conquests, the financial corruption of Konduriottes’s government, and the military anarchy that succeeded, had paralysed the action of the municipalities. Instead of removing abuses and restoring their vigour, they were robbed of all independent action, even in the direction of their local affairs. The commissioners of Capodistrias presided at the election of new demogeronts; and these newly-elected municipal magistrates were converted into subordinate agents of the president’s minister of the interior. By this change in the local institutions of Greece, the way was prepared for their complete nullification by the Bavarians.

The operation of Capodistrias’s government may be exemplified by citing the proceedings of Viaro Capodistrias, who was considered the most energetic of the extraordinary commissioners, and who governed the Western Sporades, which was the most important province in the islands. Viaro was the president’s elder brother : he was a Corfiot lawyer. The confined experience gained in a corrupt semi-Venetian society was not counteracted by good sense and a benevolent heart: Viaro was sulky, obstinate, and insolent. Capodistrias cannot have been entirely blind to his brother’s defects, for he drove him away from Russia, though he invited him to Greece.

While Capodistrias was a favourite minister of the Emperor Alexander, Viaro visited Russia, where he met with a very kind reception. For a moment the Corfiot lawyer indulged in visions of wealth and splendour, which were very soon dispelled by his diplomatic brother. One evening, after Capodistrias had waited on some members of the imperial family, he came back to Viaro, and addressed him to the following purport: “I have seen the emperor today, and I have just quitted several members of the imperial family. The emperor is ready to appoint you to an honourable place in his service; but I must tell you beforehand, that if you accept the offer, I shall immediately resign my place and return to Corfu. We are foreigners, and we could not both long retain office here. It is for you to decide which of us ought to remain.” Viaro believed that he was capable of ruling an empire, but he felt that he could not instantly move with an unembarrassed step among the statesmen and princes of Russia if deprived of his brother’s countenance. He therefore returned to Corfu.

A more confined sphere of action was opened to him in 1828, but he was intrusted with absolute power over the islands of Hydra, Spetzas, Poros, and Egina. The elevation was sufficient to turn his head. He arrogated to himself both legislative and judicial, as well as merely administrative, authority, within the bounds of his province, and he exercised the sovereign power he assumed in a very capricious manner. In virtue of his legislative power he fixed the rate of interest, and in virtue of his judicial he inflicted the penalty of confiscation for the violation of this provincial law. He arrested Greek citizens, and retained them in prison, without accusing them of any offence except dissatisfaction with his conduct. He appointed demogeronts without even going through the formality of a popular election; he superseded those elected by the people whenever they opposed his measures, and replaced them by his own nominees. He named judges without any warrant from the president; and when a primate of Livadea refused to obey a decision of these judges, he sent the primate to prison. He imposed taxes when lie was in want of money, without any vote of the municipalities, or any authority from the central government. He ordered private letters to be stopped and opened; and he carried his imprudence and folly so far as to break open and read despatches addressed to the English naval officer on the station, though he was assured by Gropius, the Austrian consul, that these despatches were official orders passing from one ship on the station to another, and which ought not to be passed through the health-office.

The friends of Capodistrias declared that many of the arbitrary acts of Viaro’s administration proceeded from the misconduct of his subordinates. The inhabitants of Egina, believing this, appealed to the sense of justice of their extraordinary commissioner. They transmitted to him a petition complaining of the oppressive and corrupt conduct of the health-officer he had appointed. Viaro received the document at Poros, and immediately ordered his secretary, who remained at Egina, to call a meeting of the inhabitants to receive his answer. When the Eginetans were assembled, the secretary produced the petition, and asked them if that was the paper they had signed and transmitted to Viaro. They replied that it was. The secretary then announced to them that they were convoked to see their petition burned by order of Count Viaro Capodistrias, extraordinary commissioner of the president of Greece in the Western Sporades; and when the document was consumed, they were told that they had received a milder reply than they merited.

The acts of Viaro rendered him unpopular; his proclamations rendered him ridiculous. The Hydriots resisted some of his quarantine regulations, and when the quarantine to which he had subjected them expired, he addressed them thus—“Place your confidence in the providence of God and the forethought of your government; but beware of examining the acts or criticising the conduct of your rulers, for you may be led into error, and error may bring down calamity on your heads.”

The folly of Agostino, and the tyranny of Viaro, would have ruined the president without the assistance  of any other Corfiots, but he brought over Mustoxidi, a literary man of some merit, and Gennatas, a lawyer in good practice, to aid in exciting the jealousy of the Greeks, who had borne an active part in the Revolution, and considered themselves entitled to all the spoils of official employment.

Public opinion generally verifies the value of modern governments by the touchstone of finance. The presidency of Capodistrias was not remarkable either for the ability or the honesty of its financial administration. He found the collection and expenditure of the public revenues a mass of fraud and peculation. His overweening self-sufficiency prompted him to assume the whole task of cleansing the Augean stable, and he retained the supreme direction of the finance department in his own hands. His hostility to all constitutional forms prevented him from making use of publicity as a means of controlling subordinate and distant officials, over whose proceedings he could exercise no direct inspection. His admiration of the autocratic system of administration blinded him to the impossibility of applying it without a well-organised body of officials. His want of practical acquaintance with the details of financial business rendered all his schemes for reforming abuses unavailing; and, as in every other department, his extreme jealousy prevented him from employing men who possessed the practical knowledge in which he was deficient. The general conduct of the finance department was intrusted to a board composed of three members. But they were men who possessed little knowledge beyond that of experienced accountants. No payments were made for the service of any ministerial department without an order under the president’s sign-manual. He reserved to himself the task of framing a new financial system for Greece. The consequence of this determination to do everything was, that he neither effected any improvement, nor allowed others to propose any extensive reform.

The principal branch of the Greek revenues was the tenth of the annual produce of all cultivated land, and an additional rent of fifteen per cent on all Turkish property which had been declared national. The Othoman system of farming the taxes was adhered to, and the revolutionary practice of letting large districts to primates and military chiefs, instead of committing the collection to the municipal authorities.

Capodistrias did not restrain the abuses of the farmers of the tenths. He even employed the farming system as a means of strengthening his power. He favoured the chieftains whom he considered to be his personal partisans, and increased their influence by allowing them to farm large districts. By this means they maintained large bodies of military followers as tax-collectors, and the president considered these men as more completely under his personal influence than the soldiers of the government. This policy often led him to sacrifice national advantages to the tortuous schemes of personal ambition.

The receipts of the year 1829 exceeded 4,000,000 drachms, and the expense of three thousand regular troops amounted to only about 1,000,000. The sum of 3,000,000 would have been amply sufficient to maintain an army of five thousand regulars, with a due proportion of cavalry and artillery. Now, as the expenditure of the civil government was only estimated at 300,000 drachms, it is evident that an able and honest administration might have laid the foundations of order in the army, and secured an impartial administration of justice by appointing well-paid judges. A man less occupied with diplomatic intrigues, Holy-Alliance policy, and foreign protocols, than Capodistrias, even though of far inferior ability, might, by giving his principal attention to the improvement of the condition of the agricultural population, have soon raised Greece to a flourishing position, and secured to himself a great historic name.

The administration of the customs was greatly improved. Under the inspection of Colonel Heideck, those of the Gulf of Argolis were raised from 20,000 to 336,000 drachms annually, without any increase of duties, and those of Syra were greatly increased.

A new monetary system was introduced, but it was unfortunately based on an erroneous theory, and carried into execution with a defective assay. The monetary relations of Greece indicated that the currency either of France or Austria ought to have been adopted as the standard of the Greek coinage, and there were strong theoretic and practical reasons for preferring the franc as the unit. Capodistrias, influenced by old commercial associations of Levant merchants, struck a new coin called a phoenix (which was afterwards termed a drachma by the Bavarian regency), as the unit of the Greek monetary system; but in place of making it equal in value to a franc, he made it one-sixth of the metallic value of a Spanish pillar dollar. Now, as the Spanish pillar dollar was a coin circulating in Levant for commercial purposes at an agio, it was clearly an error to base the monetary system on such a standard. A defective assay also caused an error in the metallic value of the coinage issued by Capodistrias, and the phoenix was issued in small quantity.

A national bank was also established in name, but the title was intended to deceive Western Europe, not to facilitate banking operations in Greece. The so-called national bank was nothing more than a loan, opened at first by voluntary subscription. The misapplication of the name caused distrust in a mercantile society like that of Greece; and the president, finding his persuasion insufficient to induce many wealthy Greeks to deposit money in the national bank, used his political power to compel them to advance money to it. Government took possession of all the sums received; and before two months elapsed, Capodistrias himself candidly admitted to Captain Hastings that for the time the national bank was only a forced loan.

At a later period the president proposed an excellent financial measure to the national assembly of Argos, but, like too many of his good intentions, it was never carried into execution. The public accounts were ordered to be submitted to the supervision of a court of control at the end of every quarter.

The absence of any systematic administration of justice was the cause of great national demoralisation during the course of the Greek Revolution. Honest men ruined themselves by fulfilling their obligations ; dishonest men repudiated even those pecuniary debts which they could have paid without inconvenience. To the people it appeared that honesty was not the best policy in pecuniary affairs, and the general tendency to financial dishonesty is, as the preceding pages have shown, deeply marked on the history of the Greeks. When Capodistrias arrived, the insecurity of life and property among the agricultural classes threatened the dissolution of society, and the Greeks  seemed in danger of becoming a nation of traders in towns and cities like the Jews. The desire to see the supremacy of justice firmly established was one cause of the election of Capodistrias to the presidency, and to the fervour with which he was welcomed on his arrival. He was selected by the almost unanimous voice of his countrymen as the only Greek capable of putting an end to the reign of injustice. Nothing in his political career exhibits his deficiencies as a states­man so strikingly as his failure to appreciate the value of a firm and impartial administration of justice. The career of a legislator lay before him. Had he seized the sword of justice and walked boldly forward, he would have soon marched at the head of the Greek nation; and courts, cabinets, and protocols would have found some difficulty in contesting his right to be the ruler of Greece. But he loved power more than justice; and yet by not loving justice he lost his hold on power.

The indifference of Capodistrias to the establishment of legal tribunals can only be explained by his love of absolute power. Soon after his arrival, he created a few justices and some minor courts to decide trifling questions. But no legal tribunals were established, and his extraordinary commissioners were allowed to exercise an exceptional and extensive legal jurisdiction, of which his brother Viaro took every possible advantage, and used with unrestricted licence. A decree organising civil and criminal tribunals, and establishing a court of review, at last appeared on the 27th August 1830 Capodistrias attempted to excuse his delay by declaring that he had avoided doing anything to circum­scribe the authority of the future sovereign of Greece— a futile assertion; for he well knew that by prolonging anarchy he had increased the difficulties in the way of establishing order. As long as Capodistrias had any prospect of retaining the government of Greece in his own hands, he wished to retain all judiciary authority in direct subordination to the executive, as in Russia; and he was adverse to the promulgation of fixed rules of procedure, and to the constitution of independent courts of law. The Corfiot lawyer, Gennatas, whom he appointed minister of justice, and to whom he in­trusted the task of preparing the judicial organisation, was the instrument of his views rather from defective judgment than from malevolent intentions. The assembly of Argos declared that the president ought to render the judges irremovable, but neither Capodistrias nor Gennatas were of this opinion. This good advice was rejected by Capodistrias, as it has been for more than a quarter of a century by King Otho. But Capodistrias, in the true spirit of despotism, conferred arbitrary powers on the police authorities, and created exceptional tribunals to judge political offences.

Capodistrias made a great show of promoting education, but he did very little for facilitating public instruction, and nothing for improving the intellectual condition of the Greek clergy. Yet he affected to be a friend to knowledge, and he was sincerely devout. Political intrigue seems to have occupied all his thoughts, absorbed his time, and inspired all his actions during his presidency.

He built an immense orphan asylum at Egina, which was filled with children delivered from slavery and brought back from Egypt. It was from no fault of Capodistrias, perhaps, but the internal management of this establishment was ill regulated, and it did not prosper. The president ordered many schoolhouses to be built in different parts of Greece, but he had shown so little forethought in the business, that many were soon converted into barracks for soldiers. In the towns, government did very little to promote public education, and the governors named by the president more than once prevented teachers from opening pri­vate schools. The education of the clergy was utterly neglected, and a race of priests remained, whose ignorance was a disgrace to the Orthodox Church, and who increased the national corruption. Capodistrias succeeded in deceiving the Liberals in France, Germany, and Switzerland, into a belief that he was labouring sincerely to improve public instruction, but his personal views are exemplified by two acts. He ordered the professor of Greek literature at Egina not to read the Gorgias of Plato with his pupils, and he made war on the press at Nauplia.

The arbitrary conduct of the president created a constitutional opposition to his administration, and he found himself obliged to convoke a national assembly, in order to give a sanction to his dictatorial power. His popularity with the people in the Morea was very great, for his government had delivered them from the Egyptians, and established some better guarantees for the protection of life and property than had previously existed. In a freely-elected chamber of deputies he would have been sure of a large majority, but he wished to silence all opposition, and he adopted many violent and illegal measures to exclude every man whom he deemed a Liberal. In a number of districts where the character of his opponents seemed likely to insure their election, he proposed himself as a candidate ; and after securing his own election, it was generally not difficult to obtain the nomination of one of his own partisans in his place.

The national assembly of Argos was opened by Capodistrias in a Russian uniform on the 23d July 1829. The assembly ratified everything the president had done, and intrusted him with all the additional power he desired. Only the laws which he approved and re­commended were passed. He did not venture to obtain his nomination to the presidency for life, for it would have been imprudent to take so important a step in the settlement of the government of Greece without the previous consent of the three allied powers. But he obtained an act of the assembly, declaring that the decisions of the conferences of London should not be held to be binding on Greece until they were ratified by the Greek legislature. He trusted to his own diplomatic skill for rendering this law subservient to his schemes concerning the sovereignty of Greece.

The Panhellenion was replaced by a senate, but the organisation of this senate was left by the assembly entirely in the hands of the president. It was a consultative and not a legislative council, and its consent was not indispensable to any laws except those relating to the permanent disposition of the national lands.

Capodistrias was also empowered to name a regency in case of his death, which was to conduct the government until the meeting of a national assembly.

The proceedings of the national assembly of Argos were opposed to the free spirit of the national assemblies of the earlier period of the Greek Revolution. The principle of government nomination too often replaced the old usage of popular election, and tortuous ways were adopted instead of direct courses. Thus, in appointing the senate, sixty-eight names were submitted by the assembly to the president, who selected twenty-one of these candidates to be senators. The senate was then completed by the addition of six members named by the president.

The establishment of two chambers to share the legislative power, was contemplated by the assembly, but the president was intrusted with the arrangements necessary for calling the legislature into existence.

The excessive confidence of the deputies misled Capodistrias into the conviction that his power was irresistible, and from this time his conduct became more arbitrary, and his personal partisans more insolent.

The proceedings of the three protecting powers gave him great anxiety. He detested England, mistrusted France, and doubted the sentiments of the Russian cabinet, for he felt that he was not admitted to its secrets. The nomination of Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg (Leopold, king of the Belgians) to be sovereign of Greece, disappointed his hopes and irritated his feelings. He had laboured to convince Europe that he was the only man capable of organising a state in Greece. His ambition was legitimate. But his own double-dealing had prevented even Russia from assuming the responsibility of advocating his cause. Had his conduct not been marked by duplicity, and had he sought to attain his object by honest and legal measures, it is probable that he would have succeeded. Diplomacy is not in the habit of working miracles, and neither an Epaminondas nor a Washington was likely to arise among the semi-Venetian aristocracy of Corfu.

The three powers conducted their conferences at London in a slow and vacillating manner. The principles which ought to have regulated their proceedings were lucidly announced in a report drawn up by their representatives at Poros, on the 12th December 1828. The measures then recommended were embodied in a protocol signed at London on the 22d March 1829, and were not very dissimilar from those which were ultimately adopted when Greece was declared a kingdom in 1832. The frontier of the Greek state was drawn from the Gulf of Volo to the Gulf of Arta. The annual tribute to the sultan was fixed at about £30,000. The Turks who had possessed land in Greece were allowed to sell their property. An hereditary sovereign was to be chosen by the three protecting powers, who, though he acknowledged the suzerainty of the Porte, was to enjoy complete independence in all business relating to the political government and the internal administration. This plan, warmly supported by Sir Stratford Canning (Lord Stratford de Redcliffe), might have been carried into execution without delay, had the Earl of Aberdeen, who was then Foreign Secretary, been as well acquainted with the state of Turkey and Greece as Sir Stratford. Unfortunately the Earl of Aberdeen treated the question with diplomatic pedantry. While Capodistrias was intriguing, while Sultan Mahmud was fuming with rage, and while the population of Greece was perishing from misery, the English Foreign Secretary insisted on reserving to each of the Allied courts the right of weighing separately the objections which the indignant sultan might make to the proposed arrangements; and England and France sent ambassadors to Constantinople to open negotiations with the 0 thorn an government.

In the meantime the success of Russia compelled the sultan to sign the treaty of Adrianople on the 14th September 1829 ; and an article in this treaty bound the sultan to adhere to the treaty of 6th July 1827 for the pacification of Greece, and to adopt the provisions of the protocol of the 22d March 1829. The alarm of the sultan at the progress of the Russian army had induced him to make this concession a few days sooner to the ambassadors of England and France. On the 9th September the reis-effendi notified to them the sultan’s adhesion to the treaty, and pledged himself to adopt all the decisions of the powers for carrying it into execution. The Russians took advantage of the vagueness of this communication to exact a precise recognition of the protocol of the 22d of March in their treaty of peace, and in order to prevent the Porte from making use of its habitual tergiversations and delays, they bound the sultan to name a plenipotentiary for executing the stipulations of the protocol in conjunction with commissioners of the Allied powers.

The policy of the British cabinet received a severe rebuke. Great Britain had prevented France from establishing the pacification of Greece, by sending the French troops in the Morea to compel the Turks to evacuate continental Greece. France yielded to the counsels of Lord Aberdeen, and Russia profited by his lordship’s blunder.

The courts of England and France felt humiliated by the position in which Russia had placed them. The sultan was obsequious; the Greeks were grateful. Capodistrias perhaps expected with secret tremulation to hear that he was named hospodar of the Morea. To give the negotiations a new turn, and neutralise the credit of Russia, a decisive step was taken in a different direction. By the protocol of 3d February 1830, Greece was declared an independent state, but the boon of independence was rendered a punishment by diminishing the extent of the country. A new frontier was drawn from the mouth of the Achelous to the mouth of the Sperchius. Diplomatic ignorance could hardly have traced a more unsuitable line of demarcation.

All Acarnania and a considerable part of Aetolia were surrendered to the sultan. That part of the continent in which Greek is the language of the people was annexed to Turkey, and that part in which the agricultural population speaks the Albanian language was attached to Greece. With such a frontier it was certain that peace could only be established by force; yet the protocol declared that no power should send troops to Greece without the unanimous consent of the Allies. Lord Aberdeen’s injudicious protocol concluded with a foolish paragraph, congratulating the Allied courts on having reached the close of a long and difficult negotiation.

The sovereignty of the diminished state was offered to and accepted by Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg. The Porte immediately accepted these arrangements. It was not blind to the advantage of retaining possession of Acarnania and great part of Aetolia. On the other hand, Capodistrias availed himself of the unsuitable frontier to thwart the execution of the protocol. He was so sure of the nation’s support, that he did not give himself any trouble to conceal his duplicity. He declared that the decree of the national assembly of Argos deprived him of the power of giving a legal sanction to the provisions of the protocol signed by the Allied powers. He pretended that he was placed in a position of great difficulty; that he feared to convoke a national assembly, as the deputies would either protest against the proceedings of the Allies, or violate their duty to their country and their instructions from their electors; but that he would accept the protocol on his own responsibility. The ministers of Great Britain, France, and Russia knew that he had drawn up the instructions of the electors to the deputies with his own hand, and they could not overlook the fact, that while he manifested extreme tenderness for the consciences of the deputies, he showed no hesitation in violating his own duty as president of Greece by setting aside a national decree, and accepting the protocol in an illegal manner, in order to obtain its repudiation, if it suited his convenience, at a later period.

Greece was so tortured by her provisional condition that the nomination of Prince Leopold was accepted by the people as a boon. Addresses of congratulation were spontaneously prepared. There was an outbreak of national enthusiasm; and many officials, believing that Capodistrias was sincere in the assurance which he gave in public, that he was anxious to give the new sovereign a cordial reception, signed these addresses. At first the president did not venture to oppose the general feeling, but he announced that previous approval of the government was necessary in order to give the addresses a legitimate character. Shortly after, he ventured to proclaim that every address which had not been submitted to the revision of the agents of his government previous to signature, emanated from obscure emissaries of the opposition. He was seriously alarmed at the eagerness to welcome the new sovereign in order to put an end to his own provisional administration. His devoted partisans alone knew his private wishes, and they endeavoured to pre­vent the spontaneous addresses from being signed, and delayed their transmission to the prince.1 After the resignation of Prince Leopold, Capodistrias treated the signature of the spontaneous addresses as an act of hostility to his government, and dismissed many officials who were innocent of any wish to join the opposition, but who had been misled by his own assur­ance into a belief that he wished the prince to receive a hearty welcome. In order to neutralise the effect of the popular demonstrations in the prince’s favour, the civil governors in the provinces were ordered to prepare other addresses. Many of these were not circulated for signature until the resignation of Prince Leopold was known to Capodistrias, and several of them were antedated.

From this period, the secret police, which had been gradually formed under the direction of Viaro and Gennatas, acquired additional power. It became, as in many countries on the continent of Europe, a terrible social scourge. The preference which the great body of the people had shown for a foreign sovereign filled the heart of Capodistrias with rage. He could not repress his feelings, and even to strangers he often inveighed bitterly against the ingratitude of his countrymen.

Yet he endeavoured to persuade the world that the Greeks viewed the nomination of Prince Leopold with dissatisfaction, if not with absolute aversion, and he succeeded so far as to create an impression that the Greeks were at least divided in opinion. He alarmed Prince Leopold with the fear of meeting an unfavourable reception. He attempted to disgust the prince by suggesting the necessity of his changing his religion, though it was well known that the Greek clergy were as eager to welcome a Protestant sovereign as the laity.

The condition of Greece at the time of Prince Leopold’s nomination explains the proceedings of Capodistrias. Most of the ablest and most influential men had been driven from the public service, and excluded from the assembly of Argos. The senate was composed of the president’s creatures. The government had not received a permanent organisation. No ad­ministration of justice gave a sure guarantee for life and property to private individuals. The people suspected that the country was retained in this provisional state to further the president’s schemes of personal ambition. The nomination of Prince Leopold took Capodistrias by surprise, while he was preparing to convince Europe that the Greeks would not accept a foreign sovereign, and to persuade Liberals that the constitutional governments of England and France ought to admit the principle of popular election. He knew how to manage that universal suffrage should elect him sovereign of Greece. When he found his hopes baffled, and saw himself without any national support, he acted like a diplomatist, and not like a statesman. Instead of convoking a national assembly and adopting a national policy, he played a game of personal intrigue. He accepted the protocol to thwart its execution. He violated the law of Greece to keep the conduct of the negotiations in his own hands, and he deceived the prince with false representations.

Prince Leopold, on the other hand, acted imprudently in accepting the sovereignty of Greece before he had made up his mind to assume the immediate direction of the government. And his resignation, after having accepted the sovereignty, deserves severe reprobation. Princes can only be punished for trifling with the fortunes of nations by the judgment of history. The British government also acted most injudiciously, both in pressing him to accept, and in permitting him to double about after accepting. The objections he made to the arrangements of the protocol ought to have warned Lord Aberdeen that the prince was not the man suitable for the contingency. Indeed, it seems strange that the unfriendly correspondence which preceded Prince Leopold’s nomination did not awaken a deeper sense of the responsibility due to the suffering inhabitants of Greece in the breasts both of the prince and of the British ministers.

If Prince Leopold really believed, as he wrote to Lord Aberdeen on the 3d February 1830, “that he could imagine no effectual mode of pacifying Greece without including Candia in the new state,” it was his duty to refuse the government of Greece until Candia formed part of his sovereignty. Yet he was content to give up Candia and accept the sovereignty on the 11th of the month. The Allies were fairly warned not to permit ulterior negotiations on questions concerning which they were determined to make no concessions, but they neglected the warning. In the correspondence between the British government and Prince Leopold, which was laid before parliament, the prince appears as a rhetorician and not a statesman, and as a diplomatist and not an administrator.

Even the dark picture Capodistrias drew of the state of Greece, and the difficulties likely to await the prince on his arrival, did not warrant Prince Leopold’s retiring from his engagement. But Prince Leopold all along trifled with the awful responsibility he had assumed. It was his duty, the moment he accepted the sovereignty of Greece, to invite some Greek who had acquired practical experience in public business during the Revolution, to attend his person and act as secretary of state. He ought immediately to have summoned a council of state, of which he might have invited Capodistrias to name a few members. With constitutional advisers, Prince Leopold would have found all his difficulties vanish. The bad faith of Capodistrias in his dealings with the prince is proved by the simple fact that he did not immediately send to London such men as Glarakes, Bizos, Psyllas, and Tricoupi, for he  hademployed them all in high office, and knew that, whatever might be their deficiencies, they were men of education and personal integrity. The president may be excused for trusting party leaders like Mavrocordatos, Metaxas, or Kolettes; but when the prince asked for a confidential adviser, it was insulting Greece to send Prince Wrede, a young Bavarian, who had arrived in the country after the termination of the war, and who knew very little more of the social and political condition of Greece than the Greeks knew of his existence. Indeed, Capodistrias himself knew only that the man he sent was called Prince Wrede, and had been recommended to General Heideck. It would have been almost impossible, among the foreigners then in Greece, to have selected a person so utterly incompetent to furnish  Prince Leopold either with information or counsel. Jealousy and duplicity, as usual, were too strong in the breast of Capodistrias to admit of his concealing them.

Prince Leopold, after wearying the Allies and tormenting the English ministers with his negotiations, resigned the sovereignty of Greece on the 17th May 1830. Whether he would have gained in Greece the honour he has won as a wise ruler on the throne of Belgium, cannot be known; but when we reflect how many years of anarchy he would have saved the Greeks, it must be owned that he would have served humanity well by estimating more accurately than he did estimate it the responsibilities lie incurred when he accepted the sovereignty of Greece.

The position of Capodistrias had been changed, and his power was shaken, by the nomination of Prince Leopold, nor did he recover his equanimity on the prince’s resignation. As often happens to successful intriguers, he found himself now embarrassed by his false pretences and provisional measures. He had told the Greeks that it was necessary to put an end to the Revolution. They re-echoed his own phrases, and clamoured for the establishment of permanent institutions, and, above all, for legal tribunals. Capodistrias was puzzled to find that the people to whom he looked for support, were thwarting his measures when they believed they were assisting him to gain popularity. The president’s firmness was further shaken by the French Revolution of July 1830, which placed Louis Philippe on the throne of France. This event encouraged the members of the constitutional opposition in Greece to commence an open and systematic hostility to his arbitrary measures. Shortly after this, he was still further alarmed by the insurrection in Poland, which he feared would prevent Russia from supporting the principles of the Holy Alliance against England and France. He was now compelled to hear his conduct arraigned. He was reproached with perpetuating anarchy in Greece, and with calumniating the Greeks as enemies of order. His administrative capacity was called in question, and his misgovernment was pointed out. But the mass of the nation wished reform, not change of government; and even his illegal proceedings were submitted to with patience. Viaro, it is true, became every day more hateful on account of his insolence; Agostino every day more ridiculous on account of his vanity.

Henceforward the government of the president became rapidly more tyrannical. Arrests were made without legal warrants. Spies were generally employed by men in office. Viaro, Mustoxidi, and Gennatas, collected round them a herd of Ionian satellites, who made a parade of the influence they exerted in the public administration. The partisans of Capodistrias began to believe that he would succeed in obtaining the presidency for life. Agostino, his younger brother, pretended to be his political heir. He acted the generalissimo of Greece, and formed a body-guard of personal dependants, who were better clothed and paid than the rest of the army. This conduct excited indignation among the veteran armatoli, who conceived a deep-rooted resentment against the whole Capodistrian family.

The Revolution established the liberty of the press, of which the Greeks had made a moderate and intelligent use. As early as 1824, political newspapers of different parties were published simultaneously at Mesolonghi, Athens, and Hydra. In 1825 the government found it necessary to establish an official gazette at Nauplia. Capodistrias silenced the press, and the Greeks, unable to discuss their grievances, resorted to force as the only means of removing them.

Polyzoides, a man of moderate opinions, a lawyer, and a Liberal, deemed the time favourable for the establishment of a political and literary newspaper of a higher character than any which had survived the hostility of the president’s government. There is no doubt that he contemplated strengthening the Liberal party, and gaining proselytes to the constitution. His conduct was strictly legal. By the law of Greece the press was free; but to comply with the police exigencies of a suspicious government, copies of the prospectus of the new paper, which was called the Apollo, were sent to the minister of public instruction, and to the president. Viaro, who acted as minister of justice, sent to inform the editor, that as no law existed regulating the publication of newspapers, the power of licensing their publication belonged to the government. The pretension was very Venetian, and in direct opposition to the law declaring the press to be free. Polyzoides resolved to obey the law; Viaro was determined to enforce his authority.

Early on the morning fixed for the publication of the Apollo, the chief of the police of Nauplia, followed by a strong guard, entered the printing-office and seized the press, then at work, without presenting any warrant. The editor sought redress from Viaro, and presented a petition to the senate, but his demands were neglected. It was evident that the will of Count Capodistrias was more powerful than the law of Greece. The president had himself inaugurated a new period of revolution. Men’s minds were excited, and the Liberal party was irritated. The state of public affairs, both in Greece and on the continent of Europe, caused information to be eagerly sought after from other sources than the government papers, and the Greeks waited anxiously for the result of the contest between Capodistrias and the Apollo. A law circumscribing the liberty of the press was passed hurriedly through the senate. But while Viaro was pluming himself on his victory, the Apollo made its appearance at Hydra on the 31st March 1831, and its publication was continued under the protection of the Albanian municipality of that island until the assassination of Capodistrias.

Maina had already resisted the president’s authority. Hydra now called the legality of his proceedings in question. The president attempted to apologise for his arbitrary acts, by pleading the provisional nature of his government. His greatest fear was publicity, he felt that his motives would not bear investigation better than his deeds. He had succeeded in silencing the press abroad, and it now braved him at home. The Courier of Smyrna had criticised his measures with freedom, and published his edicts with severe comments. By the intervention of the Russian minister at Constantinople, he obtained from the Othoman government an order to the editor to abstain from criticising the conduct of the president of Greece.

Capodistrias advanced in the path of tyranny; the Greeks prepared for open insurrection. Many persons were arrested on suspicion, and remained in prison without being accused of any offence or brought to trial. Some just and more unjust accusations were made against men who disapproved of the president’s conduct. Actions before provisional courts of judicature were commenced for official acts performed dur­ing the Revolution; yet no private individual was allowed to seek redress in the same courts for recent acts committed in violation of the president’s own laws by the president’s officials. Lazaros Konduriottes of Hydra, one of the most patriotic men in Greece, and one of the few whose public and private character was alike irreproachable, was accused of complicity with pirates. Several eminent men were exiled, and others only escaped the vexations of the police by seeking a voluntary banishment. Judges were dismissed from office because they refused to transcribe and pronounce illegal sentences at the suggestion of Viaro. Klonares, a man of some legal knowledge, and of an independent character, was dismissed for signing one of the addresses to Prince Leopold which had not been submitted to the president’s revision. Another judge publicly declared that he was driven from the bench because he refused to give an unjust decision in conformity with the desire of the Corfiot minister of justice. Sessines of Gastuni, the president of the senate, who had been raised to his high office on account of his servility, at last hesitated to support the tyranny of the president, and was instantly dismissed.

Extraordinary tribunals, which acted without fixed rules of procedure, whose members were destitute of legal knowledge, and removable at pleasure, and from whose judgments there was no appeal, were multiplied.

Insurrections followed. The president was particularly irritated by prolonged disturbances on the part of the students of Egin a, because these disorders drew attention to his vicious system of public education, and demonstrated the falsehood of the reports he had caused to be circulated in Western Europe.

His difficulties were increased by the disorder in his financial administration. Many of his partisans in the Morea were alienated by his allowing Kolokotrones to enrol an armed band of personal followers, as in the worst times of the Revolution, and collect the cattle­tax. Kolokotrones, as might have been foreseen, acted the part of a military tyrant. He not only persecuted his own personal enemies, but allowed a similar licence to the brigands who followed his banner. Greece was relapsing into a state of anarchy, and several provinces were at last in open revolt.

Maina paid no taxes, and the Maniats were only prevented from plundering Messenia by the presence of the French troops. Hydra had constituted itself an independent state, governed by its municipal magistrates. It collected the national revenues in several islands of the Archipelago, and maintained a part of the Greek fleet which espoused its cause. Syra, the centre of Greek commerce, made common cause with Hydra. Capodistrias had driven its merchants into open opposition, by attempting to fetter their trade with the restrictions of the Russian commercial system. A general cry was raised for the convocation of a national assembly, and the president perceived that he must either make concessions to regain his popularity, lay down his authority, or employ force to keep possession of his power. He chose the last, and instead of assembling the deputies of the nation, he commenced a civil war, trusting to the assistance of Russia for the means of crushing Hydra.

Some management was necessary to prevent the diplomatic agents of England and France in Greece from protesting against any employment of force. The president expected to succeed in re-establishing his authority in Syra without a contest, and the loss of Syra would undermine the power of Hydra; for the revenues of the customs were the principal resource of the opposition for the payment of their fleet. The best ships of Greece lay disarmed in the port of Poros, but Capodistrias had still a few ships at sea, and these might serve as a cover for obtaining succour to the Greek flag from the Russian admiral. The plan of making an attack, apparently with Greek ships, but in reality with Russian forces, was well devised, but it was betrayed to the Hydriots by one of the president’s confidants. The Hydriots determined to anticipate the attack.

Kanaris, who was a devoted partisan of the president, commanded the corvette Spetzas, which was fully manned, and lay at anchor in the port of Poros.

The municipal government of Hydra ordered Miaoulis with two hundred sailors to hasten to Poros, and take possession of the ships and arsenal. The brave old admiral departed immediately with only about fifty men, accompanied by Antonios Kriezes as his flag-captain, and by Mavrocordatos as his political counsellor. On the night of the 27th July 1831 he seized the arsenal and the disarmed ships, and, hoisting his flag in the Hellas, summoned Kanaris on board. That officer, refusing to surrender the corvette to an order of the municipality of Hydra, was put under arrest, and a party of Hydriots took possession of his ship.

The character of Capodistrias seemed to undergo a revolution when he heard that he had lost his fleet and arsenal. He no longer talked of the blessings of peace, of his own philanthropic feelings, and of the duties of humanity. He declared that he would wash out the stain of rebellion in the blood of his enemies. He called the Hydriots a band of barbarians and pirates, who assailed his authority because it had arrested them in a career of crime and pillage. He now spoke of law, to implore its vengeance, and of justice, to assert that the leaders of the opposition ought all to die the death of traitors. His expressions and his manner breathed a fierce desire to gratify his personal revenge.

The news of Miaoulis’s success reached Nauplia while the ministers of France and England, and the commanders of their naval forces, were absent. The Russian admiral, Ricord, who was at anchor in the port, was induced by Capodistrias to sail immediately to Poros with the ships under his command. At the same time, the president sent a battalion of infantry, two hundred regular cavalry, and a strong body of irregulars, by land, to assist in regaining possession of the town.

Admiral Ricord arrived and summoned Miaoulis to surrender the arsenal and the ships in the port to the Greek government; but Miaoulis replied that the municipality of Hydra was the only legally constituted authority to which he owed obedience until the meeting of the national assembly. He therefore referred the Russian admiral to the authorities at Hydra, adding that he was resolved to retain possession of the fleet and arsenal as long as the municipality of Hydra left him in command. Ricord threatened to use force; Miaoulis retorted that he knew his duty as well as the Russian admiral.

Affairs remained in this position for several days, when the commanders of the French and English naval forces entered the port accidentally before returning to Nauplia. They were consequently ignorant of the resolutions which might have been adopted by the residents of the Allied powers at Nauplia, and to prevent bloodshed they arranged with Ricord and Miaoulis that matters should remain in their actual condition until they should visit Nauplia and return with the decision of the Allies. It seemed at the time a strange proceeding, that both commanders should go to search for this decision, when the presence of one at least was required at Poros to watch the Russian admiral, who was guarding both the entrances into the port with a superior force, and could close them at any moment.

In the meantime, the residents of England and France, having returned to Nauplia, gave the president written assurances of the desire of their courts to maintain tranquillity in Greece under the existing government. But they excited the president’s distrust by speaking of conciliation, by recommending the convocation of a national assembly, and by refusing to order their naval forces to co-operate with Admiral Ricord in attacking the Hydriots.

The Russian admiral did not wait the return of the French and English commanders to commence hostilities. On the 6th of August a boat of the Russian brig Telemachus, which was guarding the smaller entrance, prevented a vessel bringing provisions from Hydra from entering the port. An engagement took place, in which both parties lost a few men, but the Russians succeeded in compelling the vessel to return to Hydra.

As soon as Capodistrias found that the English and French residents declined countenancing his schemes of vengeance, he sent off pressing solicitations to the Russian admiral to lose no time in recovering possession of the Greek fleet; and to the officers of the troops on shore to occupy Poros at every risk. He then pretended to listen to the counsels of the residents, and promised to convoke a national assembly. Some days later a proclamation was issued, dated 1st (13th) August, convoking the assembly on the 8th (20th) September.

The message of Capodistrias was received by Admiral Ricord as an order to attack Miaoulis, and his operations, in a military point of view, were extremely judicious. He formed a battery to command the town and the smaller entrance; and having by this cut off the communications of Miaoulis with a part of the Greek fleet, he ordered the Russians to take possession of the corvette Spetzas and a brig, which were anchored in Monastery Bay. At the same time the Greek troops attacked Fort Heideck, which was occupied by Hydriots. The Russians and the president’s troops were completely victorious. The corvette Spetzas was blown up, the brig was taken, and Fort Heideck was deserted by its garrison.

Miaoulis had now only thirty men on board the Hellas, and the other vessels under his orders were as ill manned.

On the day after the victory of the Russians, the inhabitants of Poros offered to capitulate, and it was arranged with Admiral Ricord that a hundred and fifty Greek regular troops should occupy the town, in order to save it from being plundered by the irregulars. During the night several vessels filled with the families of those who feared the vengeance of Capodistrias were allowed to pass the Russian squadron unmolested. On the 13th of August a hundred and fifty Greek regulars entered the town of Poros.

Admiral Ricord had promised to wait the return of Captains Lalande and Lyons. The Allied powers were bound by protocol to take every step relating to the pacification of Greece in concert. Miaoulis reposed perfect confidence in this arrangement until he was awakened from his security by the operations in Monastery Bay. And on the morning of the 13th August he observed that the Russian ships removed to stations which placed his ships under their guns. He sent an officer on board the Russian flag-ship to request Admiral Ricord to retain his previous position until the return of the French and English naval commanders, according to his promise; and he instructed the officer, in case the Russian admiral persisted in taking up a hostile position, to add that Miaoulis, though his crews were insufficient for defence, would destroy his ships rather than surrender them. Captain Phalangas was ordered to make a similar communication to Captain Levaillant of a French brig-of-war which had just entered the port. Levaillant urged the Russian admiral to wait the return of Lalande and Lyons, but without success. Miaoulis inferred that something extraordinary, and not favourable to the views of Capodistrias, must have occurred to induce Ricord to violate his promise. He knew that the president's object in getting possession of the Greek fleet was to enable the Russians to re-establish his power at Syra and Hydra under cover of the Greek flag. To save his country, he resolved to destroy the ships which might serve as cover for attacking it. At half­past ten, just as the Russian admiral had taken up his new position, a terrific explosion was heard, which was almost instantaneously followed by a second. Thick columns of smoke covered the Greek ships, and when they cleared away, the magnificent frigate Hellas, and her prize, the corvette Hydra, were seen floating as wrecks on the water. Miaoulis and their crews escaped in their boats to Hydra.

The troops of Capodistrias rushed into the town of Poros in defiance of the capitulation, and immediately took possession of the arsenal. They then commenced plundering the houses, as if the place had been a hostile city taken by assault after the most obstinate resistance. The inhabitants most hostile to the government of the president having carried off their movables to Hydra, only the innocent who trusted to Admiral Ricord’s assurance of protection remained. They were pillaged of all they possessed, and treated with inhuman cruelty. On this occasion, both officers and men behaved in the most disgraceful manner; and the sack of Poros is an indelible stain on the conduct of the Greek army, on the character of Capodistrias, and on the honour of Admiral Ricord. The Russian admiral might easily have put a stop to the cruelties which were perpetrated under his eyes, yet for twenty-four hours he permitted every crime to be committed with impunity. Justice was powerless, unless when some Poriot slew a soldier to defend the honour of his family. The historian is not required to sully his pages with a record of the deeds of lust and rapine which were committed by the Greek troops, but his verdict must be pronounced, as a warning to evil-doers. There is no scene more disgraceful to the Greek character in the history of the Revolution; and horrible tales of pillage, rape, and murder, then perpetrated, long circulated among the people. Anecdotes of cruel extortion and base avidity were told of several officers. When all was over, the troops returned to Nauplia and Argos with horses stolen from the peasants of Damala, which were heavily laden with the plunder of Poros.

The sack of Poros sowed the seeds of disorder in the Greek regular corps, and ruined the reputation of Capodistrias. General Gerard endeavoured in vain to bring back the army to a sense of duty, by blaming the conduct of the troops at Poros with great severity. Rhodios, the minister of war, who was a creature of Capodistrias, protected the worst criminals, and de­prived the reproaches of the French general of their influence. This conduct increased the insubordination which the licence at Poros had created.

Capodistrias was soon alarmed to find that even his own partisans spoke with indignation of the conduct of the Russian admiral and of the Greek troops. iHs enemies proclaimed that, in his eagerness to revenge himself on Miaoulis, he had given up the innocent inhabitants of a Greek town to pillage and slaughter. To withdraw public attention from the sack of Poros, he was now anxious to talk of a national assembly. The meeting of that assembly was inevitable, but the elections were not likely to be effected without some fierce contests. The president openly acted as the unscrupulous chief of an unprincipled party; but an avenging fate was at hand. He had indulged his appetite for a bloody vengeance; he was now sacrificed as a victim to private revenge.

The distinguished part which several members of the family of Mavromichales acted at the commencement of the Revolution, has been recorded in the earlier pages of this work. The best men of the house fell in battle. Kyriakoules and Elias are names which Greece will always honour. Petrobey, the chief of the family, though a man of no political capacity, was viewed by Capodistrias with ignoble jealousy. He enjoyed considerable influence in Maina, and Maina possessed a considerable degree of political independence. Capodistrias believed that centralisation was the direct path to order, and it was certainly the quickest way of increasing his personal authority. The influence of the family of Mavromichales appeared to be the principal obstacle to the success of his plans in Maina, and he removed its members from every official position which they occupied at his arrival in Greece. His persecutions constituted them the natural champions of the provincial franchises and fiscal immunities of the Maniats.

The lawless liberty that reigned in Maina was extremely offensive to the despotic principles of Capodistrias. He found both bad habits and criminal practices more powerful than either the local or the national government. Murder was legalised by written contracts. Bonds signed by living individuals were shown to the president, in which the penalty, in case of non-fulfilment, was a clause authorising the holder to murder the obligant, or two of his nearest relations. Capodistrias considered it to be his duty to put an end to a state of society so disgraceful to orthodox Christians in the nineteenth century. He imagined that the people of Main would aid him in his honourable enterprise, not reflecting that the deeds of vengeance which excited his indignation were considered by the native population as a necessary restraint on a ferocious and faithless race, in a region and among a class where the law was powerless. Murder in Maina answered the same purpose as duelling in other countries where the state of society was less barbarous, and assassination was a privilege of Maniat gentility.

Personal jealousy made Capodistrias select the family of Petrobey as the scapegoats for the sins of Maina. The acts of rapine on shore and of piracy at sea which other Maniats committed were overlooked, and all the strength of the Greek government was employed to crush the detested house of Mavromichales.

During the celebration of Easter 1830, Janni, the brother of Petrobey, commonly termed the King of Maina, in company with one of the bey’s sons, excited the people of Tzimova to revolt against the president’s government. Many complaints had been laid before the Greek government against the acts of violence and extortion committed by this king of misrule, which he found it no easy matter to explain. He therefore declared himself the champion of the privileges of Maina, in order to evade answering for his own misdeeds. The people were in this way induced to make his cause their own. Janni Mavromichales seized the customhouse, and collected the public revenues in order to pay the men who took up arms. But this revolt was soon suppressed by the president, who persuaded George Mavromichales, the second son of Petrobey, to hasten from Argos to Maina, with the assurance that all the disputes between the Greek government and the family of Mavromichales should be promptly and satisfactorily arranged if Janni would come in person to Nauplia. George believed Capodistrias; Janni believed George, and accompanied his nephew to the seat of government. The president soon violated his word. He put Janni under arrest, and ordered prosecutions to be commenced against both him and his son Katzakos, who had attempted to assassinate his own cousin  

In the month of January 1831, Katzakos escaped from Argos, and about the same time Petrobey left Nauplia to return to Maina in General Gordon’s yacht, which happened to sail for Zante. An insurrection had already broken out under the leading of Constantine, one of the bey’s brothers. The yacht, not being able to touch at Maina, landed the bey at Katakolo, where he was immediately arrested, and sent back to Nauplia as a state prisoner. He was now detained on a charge of treason, and a committee of the senate, with Viaro for chairman, prosecuted the action against him. He was accused of inciting a rebellion in Maina, and of deserting his duty as a senator. An extraordinary tribunal, with his prosecutor Viaro as president, was created to try him, and he was imprisoned as a criminal in Itch-kalé. About the same time Constantine Mavromichales was decoyed on board ship by Kanaris and carried to Nauplia, where he and George were placed under arrest.

Public sympathy was now strongly awakened in favour of the Mavromichales family. It was thought that Petrobey was severely treated, Constantine unfairly entrapped, and George unjustly detained. Constantine and George were allowed to walk about within the fortress of Nauplia, attended by two guards during the day. They were loud in their complaints. The mother of Petrobey, an old lady approaching her ninetieth year, petitioned the president to release the bey, who remained in prison untried. No proof could be found of his complicity in his brother’s insurrection, and it was not a crime for a senator to quit Nauplia without a passport. It was reported that both the Russian minister Baron Rückmann and Admiral Ricord advised the president to release Petrobey. It is certain that Capodistrias consented to allow the prisoner to dine on board the Russian flag-ship at Admiral Ricord’s invitation. It was generally supposed that this permission implied a pardon for past offences; and when Petrobey, on quitting Admiral Ricord’s table, was conducted back to prison, even the partisans of the president were astonished at his conduct. It seems that Admiral Ricord had assured several persons that he would persuade the president to release the bey, and that his interference irritated Capodistrias, who became frequently peevish and changeable after the affair of Poros. Constantine and George were exasperated and alarmed by what they supposed to be a sudden and unfavourable change in the president’s views.

Three days after Petrobey’s visit to Admiral Ricord, at early dawn on the 9th October 1831, Capodistrias walked as usual to hear mass in the church of St Spyridion. As he approached the low door of the small church, he saw Constantine Mavromichales standing on one side and George on the other. He hesitated for a moment, as if he suspected that they wished to address him, and would willingly have avoided the meeting. But after a momentary pause, he moved on to enter the church. Before he reached the door he fell on the pavement mortally wounded by a pistol-ball in the back of the head. In the act of falling he received the stab of a yataghan through the lungs, and he expired without uttering a word.

Two guards were in attendance on the Mavromichales, and two orderlies accompanied the president. The assassins attempted to save themselves by flight. The pistol of one of the orderlies wounded Constantine, who was overtaken and slain. His body was carried to the square, where it remained exposed naked to the insults of the populace for several hours. It was then dragged through the streets and thrown into the sea.

The whole town was alarmed by the report of the pistols; the news of the president’s assassination spread instantaneously, and the whole population poured into the streets. Yet George Mavromichales succeeded in escaping into the house of the French resident, though at a considerable distance from the scene of the murder. A furious mob followed close at his heels, and demanded that he should be delivered up. His pursuers proclaimed themselves the avengers of blood, and threatened to force open the doors of the French residency and tear the assassin to pieces. Baron Rouen informed them that France must protect the refugee until a formal demand was made for his surrender to justice by the lawful authorities. In a few hours the demand was made; but to save the criminal from the vengeance of the people, it was found necessary to convey him to the insular fort of Burdjee. His guilt was unquestionable, the proof was incontestable. He was condemned by a council of war, and executed on the 22d of October.

Greece had been depraved by the tyranny of Capodistrias; she was utterly demoralised by his assassination. She exchanged the sufferings of illegality for the tortures of anarchy.

The name of Capodistrias remained for some time a party spell, but time has proved the avenger of truth. His talents, his eloquent state papers, and his private virtues, receive their merited praise; but with all his sophistry, his cunning insinuations, and false pretences, they proved insufficient to conceal the wrongs which his vicious system of administration inflicted on Greece.

 

 

CHAPTER XVII.

ANARCHY. 9TH OCTOBER 1831 TO 1ST FEBRUARY 1833.