Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (32 page)

It was founded in 1824, with Guilford as its President. He lavished upon it books, scientific equipment, manuscripts and works of art, and for a time it really was the prime centre of higher learning in the Greek-speaking world. For a generation nearly all the doctors, lawyers, academics and senior civil servants of the Greek kingdom were its alumni. It had faculties of theology, jurisprudence, philosophy and medicine, a library of 25,000 volumes and a worthy collection of antiquities. Its students wore brightly coloured tunics, like ancient Greeks, with red leather buskins to the knee, while the enthusiastic earl, who generally lived on campus, wore his purple robe and gold headband on all occasions, and was often to be seen attending dinner parties disguised in effect as Sophocles or Plato.

The British at Corfu were vastly amused by this eccentric scholar—‘very pleasant’, Napier called him, ‘addressing every person in a different language, and always in that which the person addressed did not understand’: and though by 1858 there were seldom more than twenty students to each faculty of his foundation, most young Ionians now going to Athens for their higher education, still the Corfiotes had never forgotten him, maintaining a flattering statue of him,
sub
fusc
, in a garden off the esplanade.

Less happily remembered was ‘King Tom’ Maitland, in death as in life the bane of the Corfiote liberals. He was the first Lord High Commissioner, and it was he who devised the original constitution, and set the authoritarian style of the Protectorate. He had created ‘a liveried Senate and a sham Assembly’, complained one group of Ionian liberals in a memorandum to London, ‘to jingle the bells of liberty as they danced in the fetters of slavery’. He had even adopted the Venetian anti-treason measure called High Police, instinct with all the secrecies of the Ten, which enabled him legally to do almost
anything to almost anybody. Joseph Hume the English radical had called his government ‘more odious than the tyranny of Turkey or Persia … a disgrace to England’.

Maitland was a breezy and bibulous old Highlander, rough of tongue and uncouth of habit, a famous valetudinarian, very dirty, very rude, very queer and at heart very kind. ‘Who the devil are you?’ was the first thing he said, when he met one of his subordinates for the first time. ‘I hope you’re not such a damned scoundrel as your predecessor.’ He once entered the assembly of Septinsular Senators, who met at that time in his drawing-room, wearing only a shirt, a red nightcap and slippers, and after taking a supercilious look at the assembled politicians, expostulated in his loud Scottish voice ‘Damn them! Tell them all to go to hell!’—and went back to bed. When he died during a visit to Malta, so the diarist Private Wheeler recorded, the Corfiotes gave him a sort of vicarious funeral, with a coffin before the altar in the church of St Mark’s, thousands of candles and dirges sung all day: while the soldiers of the garrison ‘drank a glass in memory of King Tom, got as drunk as lords and went to bed happy as princes’.

King Tom’s memory was all over Corfu, to the embarrassment one imagines of that stately liberal, Mr Gladstone. He was a friend of John Nash the architect, and though he thought ‘gratuitouseducation the greatest of all humbugs’, nevertheless had a taste for good design. He laid out the handsome esplanade beside the sea, at once a parade ground, a promenade, a sports field and an arena for imperial ceremonials. He built the porticoed hall of the Legislative Assembly. Above all he built the palace of St Michael and St George, one of the two official residences of the Lord High Commissioners.
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This was a majestic affair—embellished with the seven emblems of the Protectorate, attended by guard rooms and belvederes, vaguely classical in style, distinctly imperial in manner, and built of Maltese sandstone by especially imported Maltese craftsmen.
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Gardens surrounded it, with palms, cypresses and orange trees—‘our awnges’,
as one Lady High used to call them, according to Edward Lear—and there was a large ornamental pool in front, and a triumphal arch with Britannia in a barque.

The opening of this building had been a marvellously jolly occasion, still remembered nostalgically by elderly Corfiotes. There were boxing and wrestling matches in the great square outside, and inter-island athletic contests made dazzling with local costumes. Outside the palace a stream of competitors tried all day to climb a 40-foot greased pole to grab the pigskin of wine, the goat, the lamb or the doubloon suspended from the top. Greek horsemen galloped around the square, plucking rings from lines, brigandish Albanians wrestled, and at the concluding tournament all the competitors were in antique dress or local costume. No wonder King Tom, whatever his political offences, seems to have commanded a certain affection among his subjects: for when he died they erected an elegant Ionian rotunda in his honour, with his name all around it in the vernacular
Thomas Maitland of Great Britain
, just as he would have wished it.
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In the prime of the Septinsular Union the Ionians had been a favourite port of call for well-heeled British tourists. With their heavenly spring climate and their picturesque peasantry, their incomparable views of sea and mountain shore—with the mass of Albania looming so thrillingly across the water, and the fireflies wavering in the dark moat of the Corfu fortress—with their scents of sage and orange blossom and wild flowers, the dappled shade of their great olive groves, the limpid blue of their coves—with the Paxiots casting flies from cliffs to catch swallows, and the Corfiotes processing with the embalmed body of St Spyridon, and the Zantean watchmen alert in their elevated branch-houses among the vineyards—with the Greek wind curling the Ionian waves, the flying caiques of the
treacherous island waterways, the old Venetian hugger-mugger towns and the sacred sites of Homeric legend—with all these pleasures actually supervised by the British flag, the Ionians were perhaps the most inviting possessions of the entire Empire.

Moreover they were obligingly situated on the flank of the Grand Tour, enabling British philhellenes, surfeited with the ouzos and moussakas of their addiction, to drop off for a week or two of claret and mutton chops. Lord High Commissioners were plagued by well-connected visitors with letters of introduction and classical educations, and sometimes tremendous grandees put into harbour in their yachts, to hobnob with the admiral and set society a’blush. Turnock’s Royal Hotel was a fashionable rendezvous, and ‘an English house’ came to mean a house with a bathroom, suitable for letting to milords.
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Byron, who once thought of buying Ithaca, spent some weeks on Cephalonia on his way to Missolonghi: emissaries from all parts of Greece came to visit him there, and he became so attached to Charles Napier as to mention him on his deathbed.
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Albert Edward, the Prince of Wales, also visited Cephalonia. He gave a dinner party on his yacht in the harbour of Argostoli, and throughout the evening the bands of his six attendant warships played in turn, plus one on shore. The young Disraeli sailed into Corfu once, with his disreputable friend James Clay, and strutted around the island dressed as a Greek pirate, in a blood-red shirt, red slippers and a blue striped jacket. Edward Lear came several time—he was offered a job as director of an art school in Corfu, but thought it a ‘very small tittle-tattle place’ where the British lived ‘very sklombitiously’. Lord Cochrane, the Scottish commander of the Greek revolutionary navy, often sailed glamorously into port for sustenance or entertainment—he had already been thrown out of the Royal Navy and the House of Commons for alleged corruption, had commanded the infant fleets of Chile and Brazil, was reported to be earning a vast
salary from the Greek insurgent government, and was all in all a very dashing fellow.

Not all of them were much excited by the heroic elements of the place. When the poet Aubrey de Vere visited the islands in the 1840s he drew the attention of one fellow-countryman to the great white rock on Levkas from which in legend the poetess Sappho hurled herself to her death in the Ionian Sea. ‘Yes,’ the Englishman replied, ‘I have heard it was the scene of a distressful accident.’

As a military station the Ionians retained their eighteenth-century manner to the end In the early years the Ionian Army, as the garrison was called, included many soldiers who had commuted some punishment into a long-service engagement (later they were posted to a special regiment in Sierra Leone), but many well-known British regiments also did a tour of duty in the islands. The officers and their wives loved it, contemptuous though they generally were of the Greeks. We see them in old pictures serenely promenading the esplanade at Corfu with swagger-sticks and parasols, while at the beauty spot called Pelleka, so Ansted sourly suggested, ‘large deposits of oyster shells and broken champagne bottles will clearly indicate to fixture generations the important uses and sacred character of the place’. The more boisterous officers loved to gallop over Corfu on perilous paper-chases, or shoot wildfowl on the great lake of Buteinto. The more cultivated relished its classical associations. RICARDUS EDMUNDUS SOOTT, said a pedantic tombstone in the Corfu cemetery, PRAEFECTUS ARTIFICUM BORUM MILITARIUM VERNACULE QUI ROYAL ENGINEERS DICINTUR.
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The private soldiers generally seem to have been drunk. They used to drink, Private Wheeler said, ‘until they could put their
fingers in their throats and dabble in it’. They were allowed to buy liquor only in designated grog-shops, called canteens, whose proprietors served them dreadful concoctions of dregs and tailings. The men accepted the stuff fatalistically—it was one of the very few imperial stations where wine was the normal soldiers’ booze. ‘Damn all canteens’, they used to say, according to one contemporary observer, ‘come on though, bloody
cattivo
, no goodo the vino, you son of a bitch—give us another touch’—and so they would spend their evenings, drinking and cursing and laughing, until at last, penniless, sick and blind drunk, they staggered vomiting home to barracks. When a reforming officer once angrily overturned a barrel of hooch in the gutter, the soldiers rushed out of the canteen and scooped it up with their mugs.

Still, the military aesthetic was always powerful in the British Ionians. When Edward Lear was looking out of his window one day a regiment of foot came marching by, and their colonel saluted him so smartly that Mr Lear, ‘not liking to make a formillier nod in presence of the hole harmy’, saluted back and got paint all over his whiskers.

In earlier years the British mixed freely and on equal terms with the islanders, and local leaders were loaded with favours. The Order of St Michael and St George, later to become the general order of chivalry, was founded specifically to award services to the Crown in Malta and the Ionians—a powerful instrument of supremacy, King Tom its inventor and first Grand Master thought, ‘and certainly the cheapest that we can make use of in these parts’. The first knights of the Order, later to embrace a thousand Sir Reginalds and Sir Georges, all had names like Sir Platos or Sir Athanasius.
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Just as in eighteenth-century India the English had sometimes gone in official procession to Hindu temples, so in the Ionians the British played statutory parts in both Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic
ceremonies. The commanding general, with his staff and corps commanders, carried huge candles in the Orthodox Passion procession: four British colonels held a silken canopy over the officiating priest in the Catholic procession, preceded by a file of infants dressed as cherubim: and when the patron saint of Corfu, St Spyridon, was removed from his sepulchre each year and placed upright before the high altar in his church, the British national anthem was played, and British soldiers stood guard around him, cheerfully accepting gratuities from devotees who wished to kiss the holy feet.

Sometimes Englishmen married islanders, and some English families settled for good in the islands.
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A thin but recognizable veneer of English manners had been laid upon the archipelago. They ate apple chutney on Corfu, and drank ginger beer out of stone bottles, and measured in yards and pints. They enthusiastically played cricket, with minor adjustments to the rules and terminology. ‘How’s That?’ was not only an appeal, but also a verdict of Out, full toss was called
Bombada
‚ bowled was
apo
xila
. Teams from the British Army or the Royal Navy often played the Byron Cricket Club on the gravel pitch in front of the palace, and cricket crowds of unfamiliar vitality greeted the events of the game with groans, wild cheers and transient brawls. A character called
The Lord, in tail-coat and top-hat, had even found his way into the immemorial Karaghiosis cycle of puppet-plays, where his behaviour was ineffably imperial.
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