William Julius Millingen (1800-78)
arrived in Cephallonia in November 1823, sent out as a physician on behalf of the
London Greek Committee and the Society of Friends. He carried a letter of
recommendation to Byron who, taken with the young man, appointed him physician to
the brigade he was to assemble in Missolonghi. Millingen proceeded immediately to
the mainland, where he witnessed all the fraught events concerned with Byron's last
days.
Upon the receipt of the first
Greek loan in 1824 Alexander Mavrocordatos made Millingen physician to the Greek
forces and took him to Athens. As the nation slipped into civil war Millingen, now
a government official, observed the political chaos that ensued when the various
chieftains converged on Athens in pursuit of the new-found wealth. In January of
1825 Millingen accompanied Mavrocordatos and a disunited band of Greek fighters to
Navarino in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent the landing of Ibrahim Pasha's
forces.
When the Greek forces were routed
Millingen was taken prisoner and offered the position of personal physician to the
Egyptian pasha, a consideration he was in no position to refuse. Several
unsuccessful diplomatic appeals were made to secure his liberty before he was
finally released in November 1826 at the behest of Stratford Canning, British
ambassador to the Porte. The Greek Revolution was then at its nadir. For reasons
which are unclear but which presumably involved professional advancement, Millingen
then settled in Constantinople where he became court physician to five successive
sultans, an archaeologist, and something of a public figure.
Memoirs of the Affairs of Greece (1831) is one of the better accounts of the
war: Millingen was on personal terms not only with the Missolonghi philhellenes but
with leading figures in the Greek government and, during his stint with Ibrahim,
with the Ottoman leadership as well. While he had been a partisan of Byron and
Mavrocordatos, Millingen the memoirist could look on the affairs of 1823-26 from
the perspectives of all concerned in the Revolution. Indeed he is critical of all
concerned, lending his narrative a credibility lacking in the more ideologically
driven accounts. His awareness of the complex political context and particularized
descriptions of persons, places, and manners render his narrative the more
plausible.
Aware that his censorious remarks
about the Greeks would prejudice their cause, Millingen refrained from publication
until the war for independence had been won. His graphic descriptions of the
self-interested and often vicious behavior of the warring parties, and of attitudes
and customs repulsive to liberal sensibilities, were not calculated to win friends
in either the East or the West. Byron alone emerges as a disinterested promoter of
civic virtue. Millingen reports that it was through Byron's unblinking eyes that he
first came to see affairs in Greece for what they were.
Like Byron, Millingen was a
thoroughgoing cosmopolitan: his family background was Anglo-Dutch-French and prior
to his medical training in Edinburgh he lived mostly on the Continent. His fluency
in languages is apparent from his biography. Like his father (a friend and
correspondent of Samuel Rogers) he was an connoisseur of classical antiquities and
a highly cultured man. He had friends in high places, as appears both from his
letters of recommendation mentioned at the beginning of the narrative and from his
letters of appeal printed at the end. That Greeks, Egyptians, and Turks would all
vie for his services suggests something of his skills at diplomacy as well as
medicine.
Millingen did not publish his
memoirs to turn a profit; his motives, as stated in his preface, were to add his
personal observations to the historical record and to defend his reputation from
the charge of political apostasy. The Memoirs is carelessly printed and
suffers from the remote author's inability to correct proofs. It appeared in
December 1830—poor timing since this corresponded with the publication of the
second volume of Thomas Moore's biography of Byron. The Literary Gazette and
Monthly Review offered excerpts with little critical comment, while
other reviews merely reprinted anecdotes from Millingen in their reviews of Moore.
The Literary Gazette did,
however, follow up with a vitriolic attack on Millingen written by Edward John
Trelawny, then resident in Florence. Trelawny, like Sir Leicester Stanhope, had
supported Odysseas Androutsos in his conflict with the Greek government. When
Odysseas went over to the Turks Mavrocordatos or his allies tried to have him and
Trelawny assassinated. The source of Trelawny's animosity is thus apparent. In the
Literary Gazette he serves up unflattering anecdotes of Millingen and
Mavrocordatos drawn from an account of Byron “written on his coffin by me ...
Mesolonghi, April 29, 1824.” Despite this close proximity to his subject,
scholars have been inclined to regard Millingen as the more reliable witness.
David Hill Radcliffe
