to Athens, and even before the revolution he had
48
THE INTERREGNUM 49
been mentioned as a possible successor to Otho.
More important were the hopes of substantial
favours to come from Great Britain in the event
of a British Prince being selected. The British
Government would present him, it was said, with
the Ionian Islands as a coronation gift, and might
even persuade, or compel, the Turks to add Epeiros
and Thessaly thereto. In any case British capital
would surely follow him, and the resources of
Greece would be thus developed in a way that
would have been impossible under the impecunious
Bavarians. Similarly at present it is the dream
of the Albanians to find a Prince belonging to an
affluent nation which will bring them the latest
inventions and improvements of civilization with-
out expense to themselves.
But the Greek supporters of the British Prince
were met by an official British refusal. It was
contrary to the protocol of February 3, 1830, that
a member of any reigning family of the three
protecting Powers should occupy the Greek throne,
and this prohibition excluded both Prince Alfred
and the Duke of Leuchtenberg, the Russian and
French candidate, who was nephew of Alexander
II of Russia. Moreover, the Prince of Wales
was then unmarried, so that Prince Alfred was
only one degree removed from the succession to
the British Crown, while he was actually heir-
presumptive to the Duchy of Saxe-Coburg, to
which he ultimately succeeded. Queen Victoria
also refused her consent ; but, in spite of all these
4
50 A HISTORY OF THE GREEK PEOPLE
denials, the result of the plebiscite of " outer " as
well as " autochthonous " Hellenes, which was
held for the election of a king, gave 230,016 votes
for the British Prince as against 2,400 for the
Russian Duke, and only 93 for a Republic. There
were several scattered votes, but not one for a
Bavarian. Despite the ratification of this popular
vote by the National Assembly, in the hope that
the British Government would recognize the
accomplished fact, it maintained its refusal, but
promised to find a king somewhere else. The
promise was hard to fulfil, for not every suitable
candidate wanted to undertake the romantic but
difficult task of reigning over Greece.
After fruitless application to the inevitable house
of Saxe-Coburg, the British at last found a king in
Prince Christian William Ferdinand Adolphus
George, second son of Prince Christian of Schleswig-
Holstein (who a few months later became King
Christian IX of Denmark), and then a lieutenant
in the Danish navy. Once again a youth for
the new king was only seventeen had been chosen
to occupy a throne, for which ripe experience
seemed to be the first essential. It was arranged
that his title should be " George I, King of the
Hellenes," that his heirs should belong to the
Orthodox Church, and that the Ionian Islands
should be added to his kingdom, on condition
so a secret Anglo-Danish treaty provided that
he promised not to encourage insurrections against
Turkey. Otho had refused to sacrifice the much
THE INTERREGNUM 51
worse governed Greek subjects of Turkey as the
price of liberating the much better governed Greek
subjects of Great Britain. Generous pecuniary
provision, partly at the expense of the Ionian
Government, was made for the new king. That
Government was to be asked to devote 10,000 a
year to his maintenance, while each of the three
Powers relinquished in his favour 4,000 a year out
of the sums due to them by the Greek Government.
Meanwhile, during these lengthy negotiations,
Athens was in a state of civil war. The Assembly
was divided into the rival factions of " the
mountain " and " the plain." Athens, fond of
imitating Paris fashions, had already had, like
Paris in 1848, her " days of February " ; she now,
like Paris in 1830, had her " days of July." The
palace was bombarded, the National Bank be-
sieged, and some 200 persons fell in a conflict
which the representatives of the Powers ascribed
to *' culpable ambitions " the ambitions of the
rival leaders to be in office at the time of the
young King's arrival. At last, on October 30, he
arrived, accompanied by a Danish political adviser,
Count Sponneck, whose tactlessness soon won for
him the unpopularity of Otho's Bavarian Regents.
But King George quickly emancipated himself
from his Danish privy councillor and placed his
complete confidence in his native Ministers.
No one in 1864 could have predicted that this
young lieutenant, with no previous knowledge of
the country and no experience of affairs, would
52 A HISTORY OF THE GREEK PEOPLE
have succeeded, as he did succeed, in the difficult
task before him. But King George possessed a
royal quality more valuable than genius, diligence
or commanding ability tact. Placed over an
extremely democratic people he was at once
democratic and dignified ; with rare exceptions
he never interfered with the policy of his Ministers
at home, while abroad, during his annual journeys
to " Europe," as the Greeks call the West, he was
their best Ambassador. His family connections
were an immense asset to his country ; he never
allowed personal considerations to prevent him
from working cordially with a Minister whom he
might not like, but whom his people supported.
Like every Greek ruler, he had in his fifty years'
reign his ups and downs : twice, in 1897, after the
disastrous war against Turkey, and in 1909, at the
time of the Military League, he needed all his
skill ; but he lived to witness not only the union
with the Ionian Islands and the annexation of
Thessaly and Arta, but the great triumph of 1912.
The Ionian Islands, which were the first addition
to the Greek kingdom, differed from the latter
and from its subsequent accretions in the important
fact that only one of them, Santa Mavra (the
ancient Leukas), had been for any long period
under Turkish rule, which Corfu, for example,
had never known. Consequently they had been
spared that material decay which is implied in
the proverb that " the grass never grows where
the Turk's horse has trod." Corfu had been for
THE INTERREGNUM 53
more than four centuries under Venetian rule
prior to 1797, and Venice had, and still has, left
her mark on the architecture, the speech and the
manners and customs of the Corfiotes. After the
(except in the case of Santa Mavra) long Venetian
occupation, the Seven Islands and their continental
dependencies, Butrinto, Parga, Preveza and
Vonitza, were annexed by the French, who sought
to excite enthusiasm by recalling, at Bonaparte's
orders, " Greece, Athens and Sparta " in their
proclamations, by " planting the tricolour on the
ruins of the palace of Ulysses " at Ithake, and
by talking of liberty to the newly-emancipated
Ionian peasants.
The popularity of the French soon waned ;
their liberal policy in putting Jews on the pro-
visional council offended Corfiote anti-Semites ;
their sarcasms about St. Spyridon, the patron-
saint of the island, wounded religious suscepti-
bilities and outweighed the real improvements,
such as the establishment of the first Greek press in
Corfu, " that of the nation," and the greater
security of life under French rule. When Russia
and Turkey made an unholy alliance against
France, the (Ecumenical Patriarch bade the faithful
lonians join those strange allies against " the
atheistical nation of the French." The success
of this combination led, on March 21, 1800, to
the erection of the islands into a "Septinsular
Republic," a vassal of, and tributary to, the Porte,
and guaranteed by Russia and Turkey, which
54 A HISTORY OF THE GREEK PEOPLE
were to send troops thither only for defensive
purposes. The continental dependencies were
ceded to the Porte. The " Septinsular Republic,"
despite its lamentable failure, its frequent changes
of constitution, and its indulgence in revolution,
saw the foundation of the first Greek public school
in Corfu, and forms a landmark in the history of
the Greek people as " the first autonomous Greek
state of modern times." Its first attempt at a
federal constitution with a local council of nobles
in each island, and a central senate, presided over
by an Archon, at Corfu, was a venture in aristoc-
racy, and its brief career was ended, after the
treaty of Tilsit, in 1807, by a second French
annexation. Napoleon reconsidered Corfu exclu-
sively from the standpoint of his strategic
plans as " more important than Sicily," and this
second French administration was purely military.
France, however, spent 60,000,000 /res. on the
islands in seven years, and founded an academy
at Corfu ; but British cruisers and the continental
blockade injured Corfiote trade, the Corfiote
nobles were excluded from office, and their olives
the staple product of the islands-cut down for
the fortifications without compensation. Mean-
while, in 1809, the British took the four southern
islands ; by 1810 Corfu and Paxo alone remained
to the French, and before the middle of 1814 all
the islands were in British hands. The Corfiotes
received the British with enthusiasm ; as yet there
was no counter-attraction in the shape of a Greek
THE INTERREGNUM 55
state. The future gaoler of Napoleon, Sir Hudson
Lowe, organized the southern islands ; Sir James
Campbell was the popular Governor of Corfu.
The principle of Nationality was held in small
repute by the statesmen who recast the map of
Europe in 1815. The Convention of November 5
created " The United States of the Ionian Islands "
under the protection of the British Crown. The
new Ionian state was wholly insular ; it consisted
of the seven islands and their small, dependent
islets, tacitly including therefore Saseno, l in the
bay of Valona, of which we have recently heard so
much in connection with the Albanian question.
This, like most diplomatic arrangements, was a
compromise. The British plenipotentiaries at the
Congress of Paris had asked for the complete
sovereignty over the islands and also over their
former continental dependencies. The Russian
delegate, Capo d'Istria, a Corfiote by birth, who
had taken an active part in the agitated politics
of the islands, would yield to Great Britain nothing
beyond a protectorate over both parts of the state,
the insular and the continental. To this the
British answered that, if they could not have full
sovereignty, they would, at least, have nothing
to do with the continental dependencies, a pro-
tectorate over which would have brought them
into collision with the Turks, to whom the Russo-
Turkish Convention of 1800 had ceded them, and
1 See the Author's article on Saseno in The Morning
Post, May 11, 1913.
56 A HISTORY OF THE GREEK PEOPLE
who or, rather, whose independent satrap, All
Pasha of Joannina had conquered all the four,
except the famous Parga. The actual settlement
was unsatisfactory to the British, who were thereby
placed in a position peculiarly exposed to criticism
from people who were adept critics. " Liberated
nations," wrote Bismarck, " are not grateful but
exacting," and the lonians had not been fully
liberated. Whether they could have governed
themselves, however, in 1815, may be doubted,
and that is the best defence of the British pro-
tectorate, which certainly benefited them more
than their protector. Meanwhile, the islanders
welcomed with joy the decision of Europe, and,
with incongruous taste, a still surviving Ionic
temple was erected at Corfu to the rough, but
benevolent soldier, " King Tom " (as Sir Thomas
Maitland was called), who became the first Lord
High Commissioner of a group of islands steeped
in the haze of Homeric story and imbued with
long years of Venetian refinement and state craft,
alien to the straightforward, blunt but just,
British system.
A constitution was, of course, the first British
measure ; but the Conservative charter of 1817,
which remained in force till 1849, was intentionally
so framed as to give to the lonians the shadow,
while reserving to the High Commissioner (or
Harmostes, as the Greeks classically styled him,
with a characteristic allusion to the Spartan
governors appointed by Lysander in the subject
THE INTERREGNUM 57
Greek cities), the substance of power. Ionian
constitutional history since 1800 had not been
encouraging, and perhaps the paternal statute
of 1817 was the wisest instalment of liberty under
the circumstances in a time of general reaction
for this was the year of the " Sidmouth circular "
and the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act
even in England. " King Tom " took as his model
the second aristocratic Constitution of the Sept-
insular Republic, which the Russian plenipo-
tentiary, the Zantiote Count Mocenigo, had drawn
up for his fellow-islanders in 1803. He first
nominated a " Primary Council " of eleven Greeks
under the presidency of a Corfiote noble, who was
both a patriot and an Anglophil, for the purpose
of summoning a Constituent Assembly, composed
of the eleven councillors and twenty-nine others
elected by the islands from a double list of candi-
dates, prepared by the " Council," which then
submitted to this Assembly a draft constitution.
The islands were thereby endowed with a " Legis-
lative Assembly " of eleven ex officio and twenty-
nine elected members, chosen in the above manner,
and a " Senate " of six, of whom the President
was an Ionian noble, appointed by the Crown,
that is, by the High Commissioner, and the others
were elected by, and from, the members of the
" Legislative Assembly," subject to his veto.
Of these five elected senators, four represented
the larger islands, while the fifth represented by
rotation the three smaller. The High Commissioner
58 A HISTORY OF THE GREEK PEOPLE
had also the prerogatives of summoning extra-
ordinary sessions of the Legislature, which normally
met in the capital of Corfu only every other year,
and of dissolution ; upon him depended the re-
nomination of his " Highness," the President of
the Senate, the chief native official of the insular
state ; the approval of the High Commissioner,
who resided in Corfu, was needed to confirm the
nomination by the Senate of the local " Regents "
of the other six islands, and the " Regents " could
not act without that of his " Residents " in their
respective domains. He and his nominee, the
President of the Senate, were ex officio members
of the " Supreme Council of Justice," of whose
four legal members the two lonians were elected
by the Senate with his sanction, and the two
British appointed by the Crown. The press was
strictly official, for the High Commissioner and
the Senate could hinder the establishment of any
private press, and for long the only Ionian news-
paper was the official Gazette, and that printed in
Italian. Indeed, Greek was not compulsory in
the public offices till 1852, and English was the
language of the postal, police and sanitary depart-
ments, and Italian till 1849 that of the legislature.
Yet when the writer visited Corfu in 1914, the
Jubilee of the Union with Greece, an old Corfiote
protested strongly against the employment of
Italian even in private conversation.
Thus, the Constitution of 1817 left the High
Commissioner practically supreme, and the polity
THE INTERREGNUM 59
aristocratic, as it had been before. Maitland's
system was to create a large bureaucracy to
provide posts for the educated natives and so
keep them contented, to flatter Ionian vanity by
titles and orders, but to break up large estates,
to save the peasants from money-lenders, and to
begin those fine roads which the Greeks allowed
to fall into disrepair after the protectorate. He
was no sentimentalist or Philhellene, but a
benevolent ruler, who tried to improve the people
without sympathizing with their national ideals.
But he and all his successors understood the
importance of recognizing the predominance of
the Greek Church, and of paying profound respect
to the processions of St. Spyridon a policy
repeated by the British " Harmosts " in Cyprus.
The troubles which the Italians have had with
the Orthodox Church in Rhodes illustrate the
sound statesmanship of our administrators in
this respect. Qui mange du Pape, en meurt applies
with equal force to the Oriental " pope."
Maitland's indifference to national sentiment
caused him to settle on purely material grounds
a burning question of patriotism which, although
unduly magnified by poets and Anglophobe
historians like Pouqueville, was a blow to British
prestige, and long did us harm in the Greek world.
Parga, immortalized in the verse of Byron, lies
on the Epeirote coast opposite Paxo, and formed
one of those continental dependencies of the
Ionian Islands which the Convention of 1800 had
60 A HISTORY OF THE GREEK PEOPLE
ceded to Turkey. It had, however, been garrisoned
by the French during their second occupation of
the islands, and remained in their hands till, at
the invitation of the inhabitants, it was occupied
by the British in 1814. The natives wanted to
be reunited with the Islands, with which they had
been united from 1401 to 1797, for no Christian
community would willingly expose itself to the
tender mercies of the savage " Lion of Joannina,"
Ali Pasha, whose treatment of the brave Souliotes
and the heroic leap of their women and children
from the rock of Zalongo were still fresh in all
Epeirote memories. They apparently thought
that their wishes had been granted by the British
Government, which, in 1815, had expressly re-
nounced the continental dependencies. Accord-
ingly, when Turkey demanded the execution of
the treaty of 1800, Maitland proceeded to hand
over Parga on the ground that its cession was a
treaty right, that no " assurance of a more per-
manent connection " with Great Britain had been
given in 1814, and that the retention of Parga
would involve an annual expense of 50,000.
In 1819, however, Parga, which had never
known Turkish rule, was the only free Greek
community in the world, and this fact, combined
with the touching devotion of the inhabitants
to their beloved home, aroused an interest out of
all proportion to the importance of the place, the
exact position of which was so little known to
British politicians that two speakers in the debate
THE INTERREGNUM 61
at Westminster thought it was an island ! The
Parguinotes were informed that they would receive
compensation and a free passage to the Ionian
Islands, but Maitland greatly reduced the Corfiote
valuation of their property, and, although an
international treaty enjoined the cession, the
substitution of the Turkish for the British flag
on " Parga's shore " in 1819 was not an incident
upon which either British or Greeks could look
with pride. The exiles settled in a suburb of
Corfu, and deposited the sacred pictures and
other things belonging to their old church at
Parga in the garrison-church of that town " until
the day when the old home " should " once more
be free." That day came during the first
Balkan war, when the Greeks captured Parga
on January 21, 1913.
The maintenance of neutrality during the War
of Independence was a strain upon Ionian loyalty,
which was increased when a Greek kingdom arose
to exercise a magnetic attraction upon the islanders.
But while the long war devastated Greece, the
islands profited from the neutral policy of their
protector and the losses of their co-nationalists.
For the destruction of the Moreote currant-fields
doubled those of Cephalonia an island always
the " Achilles' heel " of the protectorate. For
the people of that democratic island, where the
nobles and the peasants detested each other,
and both complained that Britain spent too much
money on Corfu, were more enterprising and more
62 A HISTORY OF THE GREEK PEOPLE
troublesome than the placid descendants of the
Phaiakians, whose delicious climate and luxuriant
vegetation invite to repose. But the currants
of Cephalonia and the sister-islands of Zante and
Ithake proved a blessing to the Corfiotes also, for
out of the increased revenue which they produced,
Maitland's successor, Sir Frederick Adam, was
able to make the existing aqueduct and continue
his predecessor's policy of material improvements,
but no longer by forced labour but by a cattle-
tax. Nor were the British benefits merely
material. In 1824 a warm Philhellene, who went
so far as to be baptized a member of the Orthodox
Church, founded an " Ionian Academy " and
Lancastrian schools, while the Ionian Government
spent a considerable annual sum on education.
The natural result was the same as at Athens
the preparation of a generation of critics hostile
to the Government ; for in Greece education and
politics go hand in hand.
Still, except for a few anti-British agitations in
Santa Mavra and Zante, there was as yet no strong
movement against the protectorate. The admin-
istration of Adam's successor, Lord Nugent, a
man of Liberal views, encouraged the Liberal
party ; but the famous Corfiote historian,
Mustoxidi, in a memorandum to Lord John
Russell, the Colonial Secretary, published in 1841,
in consequence of the Conservative system of the
next High Commissioner, Sir Howard Douglas,
declared independence to be outside the range of
THE INTERREGNUM 63
practical politics, agreed that the lonians would
rather be protected by the British than by any
other foreigners, and merely demanded Liberal
reforms, such as a free press, annual sessions,
and a more democratic method of election. Like
Maitland, Douglas in his own way benefited the
islands : he did much, even at the cost of creating
a national debt, for the schools, roads, prisons
and the water-supply of Corfu. He was specially
popular with the landowners, he laid the founda-
tions of a new code, and made the study of Greek
compulsory for British officials. But he came
into conflict with the (Ecumenical Patriarch, and
his seizure of the papers of Mustoxidi and of two
members of the Capo d'Istria family (who had
inherited the former Greek President's dislike of
Great Britain), on suspicion of complicity with the
" Phil-Orthodox Society," made him unpopular
with others. He was succeeded by a Liberal,
Mackenzie, but it was reserved for a Tory peer,
Lord Seaton, who followed Mackenzie in 1843, to
work a complete revolution in the islands and thus
by his drastic reforms to pave the way for their
union with Greece.
Occupied at first with roads and agriculture,
he was inspired by the spirit of revolution which
passed over Europe in 1848, to introduce a free
press, to recognize the Assembly's right of voting
extraordinary expenditure, and to allow the free
election of all municipal authorities, as an instal-
ment of a democratic reform of the Assembly.
64 A HISTORY OF THE GREEK PEOPLE
A riot, culminating in a peasant rising in Cepha-
lonia, had occurred just before the freedom of
the press was permitted, and the publication of
numbers of newspapers, mostly directed against
the protectorate, fanned the discontent always
latent in that island. While Seaton arrested two
Cephalonian politicians for a press attack, he
disregarded advice from home to advance with
Whig caution, and, in 1849, proclaimed the reform
of the Constitution of 1817. Henceforth the
Assembly, consisting of forty-two members, was
to be elected by ballot by an electorate more than
tripled ; yet the High Commissioner was to
nominate the senators from among the members
of the Assembly, which was still to be summoned
biennially. These intended checks had no effect
in preventing what the Ionian democrats and
Unionists chiefly sought a means of declaiming
against the protectorate. Both the Assembly
and the press were now at their disposal, even
though in the first Assembly elected under Seaton's
scheme, the " Radicals " were only eleven, while
the less advanced " Reformers " formed the
majority, and a small " Subterranean " party
still advocated the protectorate. But the
Radicals, if few, were loud and popular ; in
Cephalonia they held the majority of the seats ;
in Zante they were also powerful ; in aristocratic
Corfu they had little influence. For these reasons
some had thought that it might have been wiser to
make Cephalonia the official capital. Meanwhile,
THE INTERREGNUM 65
Seaton had been succeeded by Sir Henry Ward,
who had to face a second peasant rising in that
island. The new High Commissioner proclaimed
martial law, and some English Liberals were
scandalized at the flogging of peasants and the
execution of the ringleaders among them " Father
Brigand," a priest by one who had been a
Liberal Member of Parliament. These Cepha-