Part 68

"DEAR MOTHER,--I am enabled to keep twenty-five followers, Albanian soldiers, with whom I have joined the most enterprising of the Greek captains and most powerful--Ulysses. I am much with him, and have done my best during the winter campaign, in which we have besieged Negropont, to make up for the many years of idleness I have led. I am now in my element, and the energy of my youth is reawakened. I have clothed myself in the Albanian costume and sworn to uphold the cause.

"Everything here is going on as well as heart can wish. Great part of Greece is already emancipated. The Morea is free, and we are making rapid progress to the westward. Lord Byron spends £5000 a year in the cause and maintains five hundred soldiers. This will in the eyes of the world redeem the follies of youth.

"Your affectionate son, "EDWARD TRELAWNY."

Trelawny and Odysseus desired to get Lord Byron to be with them, but this plan was frustrated by the death of the poet on April 19th, 1824.

Colonel Stanhope proposed a congress of the civil and military leaders, so as to effect a reconciliation between the two embittered elements that were weakening the resistance against the common enemy, the Turk. Odysseus consented to attend this meeting at Salona, and Trelawny also agreed to be present. Mavrocordato looked on Trelawny with suspicion as intimate with Odysseus and as his brother-in-law, and he foisted upon him an English spy named Fenton, and an accomplice of the name of Whitcombe, with secret instructions to make away with him.

After returning from Salona, Trelawny was with Odysseus in Eastern Greece, carrying on the war in guerilla fashion without any great results.

In the autumn he was at Argos, whence a letter (certainly his, though unsigned) was sent to his brother Lieutenant Harry Trelawny, R.N.

"... To give you an idea of the misery existing here is beyond all expression. The town is nothing more or less than a chaos of ruins; not a house inhabitable. The fever making great havoc, people actually falling down in the streets. The stench of the place is so great I am obliged to remove my quarters to the once famous Argos, not more than an hour's walk from Agamemnon's tomb, which I have not yet seen. The scenery is beautiful; perfectly romantic. I am now living in a house without doors or windows, every man armed.

"The Commissioners are both sick. Mr. Bulwer has proposed to raise a body of fifty men, but I am afraid it will all evaporate in smoke, like all his undertakings here. I am much afraid nothing is to be done: they look on all foreigners as intruders. Many of the French have behaved most shamefully, but, as I told you before, I will exert every effort. All my hopes are placed in Colonel Gordon's arrival.

"YOUR BROTHER."

* * * * *

The Commissioners referred to were Henry Lytton Bulwer (Lord Dalling) and J. H. Browne, sent out by the Greek Committee in London, when it was too late, to ascertain whether the Greek Provisional Government was sufficiently firmly established, and sufficiently trustworthy, to warrant the paying over to it of that part of the loan raised in England on their behalf not already advanced. The loan was of £800,000, but from this 56.4 per cent was deducted, so that the whole amount to be forwarded to the Greek Government would be only £348,000.

Odysseus was beset with difficulties, as the Provisional Government refused to furnish him with men or money. Trelawny made vain attempts to raise funds.

Ultimately Odysseus made a truce for three months with Omer Pasha, of Negropont, but being regarded with suspicion on both sides, he endeavoured to make his escape, and left Trelawny in charge of the cave and its contents. It was at this time that Fenton, the hired spy, in May, 1825, made the attempt to assassinate Trelawny. He took the opportunity when Trelawny's back was towards him to shoot him.

Odysseus was compelled to surrender to the Government, was carried off to Athens, where he was strangled by order of Mavrocordato.

Trelawny's wounds were so dangerous that he suffered for three months before he could be said to have recovered, and he then escaped from the cavern and landed in Cephalonia in September, 1825, bringing his Albanian wife with him. During the next two years he was engaged in a lawsuit about his wife, whom he treated with brutality, so that she left him and retired to a convent, with purpose ultimately to proceed to Paxo, where lived her sister. Whilst in the convent she was delivered of a child which she sent to Trelawny to be put out to nurse, as they objected in the convent to have the infant there. Trelawny sent it to a woman who undertook to rear it, but it died, whereupon, as Mr. H. Robinson of Zante wrote to Toole on 22nd November, 1827, "he sent the dead body to the Castle Monastery, where she (his wife) was, in a box with her things and a message from him. The wife knew not what was in the box and refused to open it, and there it lay until putrid.

"An examination took place with all the fuss which the courts make about suspicione d'infanticido, and ended by T. being fined two dollars for improperly removing a dead body."

In or about the month of July, 1829, Signora Trelawny made petition to the Lord High Commissioner to the following effect:--

"It is perhaps known to Your Excellency that at about the age of thirteen I was given in marriage to Signor Trelawny, my family urging that I should live happily with one brought up in the courtesy and good-breeding of his country; but, as my experience proved, he failed to treat me with that consideration and nobility of character which distinguish the men of his nation. The nature of the long-continued treatment which I have had to endure at the hands of the said Signor Trelawny is not unknown, and at the last, it is perhaps within Your Excellency's recollection that he brought grief to my very eyes by sending me while in the convent, with cunning and brutality, the dead body of my daughter and his."

She then stated that Zante had become lonely for her, as her brothers and mother had gone to Greece. She wanted to go to Paxo to her sister, but the custom of Zante obliged a wife separated from her husband to live in a convent.

She continued: "I venture humbly to ask Your Excellency if, being the wife of an Englishman, I ought to be subject to the custom of the island in which I chance to find myself a resident. Should an Englishwoman be subjected to such treatment as I am?... I promise Your Excellency that, in whatever place or situation I find myself, I will conduct myself always as is proper for the wife of an English gentleman; and though he himself may be wanting in dignity of behaviour, I will do neither him nor myself the dishonour of imitating him.

"TERSITZA PHILIPPA TRELAWNY."

* * * * *

This petition and the letter of Mr. Robinson suffice to show that the story of Trelawny sending his dead child in a box to its mother is not to be rejected as a fable, as it has been by the author of the notice on Edward John Trelawny in the Dictionary of National Biography. The poor unfortunate girl, then aged seventeen, obtained a separation from her husband a mensa et thoro, by a sentence of the Ecclesiastical Court, and by definitive sentences of the courts of law in Zante and Corfu she was entitled to an aliment from her husband of twenty-five dollars a month, for the payment of which Mr. Barff, the banker of Zante, and Mr. Stevens, of Corfu, were securities. But this was the result of much litigation, causing Trelawny annoyance and angering him to the last degree.

In the autumn of 1828 he visited England, but returned to the Continent in the spring of the following year, feeling out of his element at home. "To whom am I a neighbour?" he wrote, "and near whom? I dwell amongst tame and civilized human beings with somewhat the same feelings as we may guess the lion feels when, torn from his native wildness, he is tortured into domestic intercourse with what Shakespeare calls 'forked animals,' the most abhorrent to his nature." He rambled about; set up a harem in Athens, bought a Moorish girl to be his concubine, wrote his Adventures of a Younger Son, and sent the MS. in 1830 to Mrs. Shelley, and it was published in three volumes in 1831, with some excisions of grossness and licentiousness, which the publisher insisted on having removed. As already said, no reliance can be placed on this autobiography as a narrative of the facts of his life, except only of his boyhood, for, as Lord Byron said of Trelawny, "he could not speak the truth even if he wished to do so."

When the book appeared, the Athenæum considered the hero--Trelawny himself--"a kind of ruffian from his birth," as he had painted himself, leaving out the villainies and brutalities of which he had been guilty.

He was thrice married, and behaved badly to all three wives. He could not be faithful and generous even to his friends. With Byron he had been most intimate, yet when Byron died he wrote to Mary Shelley: "It is well for his name, and better for Greece, that Byron is dead.... I now feel my face burn with shame that so weak and ignoble a soul could so long have influenced me. It is a degrading reflection, and ever will be. I wish he had lived a little longer, that he might have witnessed how I would have soared above him here, how I would have triumphed over his mean spirit." Trelawny soaring!--as a vulture only in quest of carrion.

And when, in 1858, he published his Recollections of Shelley and Byron, thirty-four years after the death of the latter, he painted Byron in the harshest colours; and one can hardly escape feeling that this was prompted by jealousy of the esteem in which the world held Byron for his genius. He himself possessed all the bad qualities that he despised in Byron, but did not recognize in himself the superadded brutality which Byron was too much a gentleman to show.