STANHOPE, Colonel Leicester, Greece, in 1823 and 1824; being a series of letters, and other documents, on the Greek revolution, written during a visit to that country. ...... Illustrated with several curious fac similes. To which is added, the life of Mustapha Ali.
London: Sherwood, Jones, and Co.
1824.
8vo., hand-coloured frontispiece portrait of Mustapha Ali, 6 facsimiles of documents (5 folding and one double-page), xiii + (3) + 368pp., contemporary calf, neatly rebacked and labelled to match, gilt lines and lettering, tips of boards worn, mid-19th century armorial bookplate of Anne Elinor Prevost. A very good copy indeed.
First edition.
Leicester Fitzgerald Charles Stanhope, 5th Earl of Harrington, (1784-1862) was an army officer who had held the post of deputy quarter-master general in India from 1817 to 1821. He was added to the half-pay list in 1823. In the same year he presented himself before the London Greek Committee as a liberal and a follower of Bentham and volunteered to be the Committee's agent in Greece, an offer which was immediately accepted.
"Stanhope saw the Greeks as Eastern people, similar to the Indians with whom he was familiar. Referring to them as ‘natives’ and ‘children’, Stanhope felt that they needed firm and authoritative guidance to set up an independent constitutional republic. These views brought him into conflict with most philhellenes, who had an idealized and romantic vision of the Greeks, and with many Greeks themselves, whose main aim was independence, not the establishment of a constitutional liberty.
In November 1823 Stanhope met Byron at Cefalonia, in the Ionian Islands, and the following month at Missolonghi, on the western approaches to the Gulf of Cornith, he met Mavrocordato, the leader of the western Greeks, whom most outsiders regarded as the natural leader of a new state, but whom Stanhope regarded as just one among many factional leaders and one misguidedly willing to consider the imposition on Greece of a foreign monarch. At Missolonghi Stanhope sought to establish schools and particularly a free press, and was dismayed and irritated by the lack of enthusiasm for these projects shown by Mavrocordato and his ally Byron. In 1824 Stanhope approached Odysseus, leader of the eastern Greeks, then in control of Athens, in the hope of uniting the Greek factions. Odysseus, described by St Clair as ‘the most unusual Benthamite ever to burn a village or slit a throat’ (St Clair, 191), responded readily, if insincerely. Stanhope used his time to establish a school and another newspaper, earning the nickname the Typographical Colonel. He hoped to bring the parties together at a conference in Salona, getting them to form a unified constitutional government to receive the first instalment of the committee's loan, thereby blocking Mavrocordato's plans to gain control over the loan. Mavrocordato was persuaded by Byron just before his death to attend the conference, but ultimately neither he nor Odysseus did. Canning recalled Stanhope, possibly in deference to requests by Turkey, or possibly because his actions were undermining the position of Mavrocordato, who was seen as Britain's main ally. He left for England from Zante on the Florida with Byron's body in May 1824, leaving the country in a state of chaos, the leaders divided, and the loan inaccessible in the hands of the bankers, since there was then no one in the country who could authorize its release.
Stanhope's letters to the Greek Committee were rapidly published as Greece in 1823 and 1824 (1824) to try to answer the inevitable criticism. William Parry in The Last Days of Lord Byron (1825) saw Stanhope's antipathy to Byron as the root of the trouble, and this account made a lasting impression." [Elizabeth Baigent in ODNB]. See also F. Rosen, Bentham, Byron and Greece (1992): and W. St. Clair, That Greece might still be free (1971).
