The World полностью

In Manchester, on 16 August 1819, a crowd of 60,000 demanded reform of the franchise. Cavalry charged the crowd, killing seventeen and wounding over 400 – the Peterloo Massacre (only in Britain could eighteen deaths be called a ‘massacre’ or be compared to Waterloo) – which sparked more protests. Anxious to suppress radical propaganda, Liverpool cracked down with his Six Acts, which in February 1820 provoked a conspiracy to kill and behead the prime minister and prince regent. Police spies betrayed the thirteen conspirators, who were arrested in a raid by the early police force, the Bow Street Runners. Five of the conspirators, including William Davidson, son of a British planter in Jamaica and a black woman, were hanged, then after their death beheaded. Britain held on, but the pressure for reform was becoming unstoppable. In Europe, Metternich and his allies found it hard to repress a soaring spirit of freedom and sense of nation that combined into the thrilling, brooding movement of the Romantics.

On 6 March 1821, a Greek officer in the Russian army, Prince Alexander Ypsilantis, leader of a secret Greek organization, Filiki Etaireia, rode across the border from Russian Kishnev into Ottoman Jassy to announce a Greek revolution. ‘The hour has come,’ he wrote. ‘The enlightened peoples of Europe eagerly await the liberty of the Hellenes.’ In the following months, Greeks rebelled against the Ottoman sultan across the Greek world, which encompassed Phanar in Constantinople, Moldavia and Wallachia, as well as mainland Greece.^* The sultan cracked down: the Phanariots were publicly beheaded, the Orthodox patriarch was hanged from his own gate, the Greeks routed and massacred. But in Greece itself a medley of klepht brigands and Phanariot princes fought on – a spur to Romantic revolution. A thousand philhellenes rushed to fight for Greece – most famously the outrageous Romantic poet Lord Byron.

A lame, curly-haired, poetic celebrity, described as ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’ by one of his female lovers, delighted Romantics with his epic of the adventures of wild young man Childe Harold and had shocked British bourgeois by having affairs with boys and girls, culminating it was said in the seduction of his half-sister. In the wake of the ensuing outcry, he left to support Italian radicals in Italy, where he lived the Romantic dream, defining man as ‘Half dust, half deity, alike unfit / To sink or soar’. He hated Metternich and Liverpool.^* If the words were by Byron, the music was by Beethoven, whose wild-haired, half-mad, deaf genius personified tempestuous Romanticism. In May 1824, he premiered his Symphony No. 9, a celebration of freedom, using Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’, that could only be a criticism of Metternich’s system. ‘All men shall be brothers!’^*

In August 1823 the thirty-five-year-old Byron arrived in Cephalonia, Greece. Early the next year on the mainland, accompanied by his small Byron Brigade, he took joint command of Greek forces while falling passionately in love with his Greek page. The Romantic hero was planning an attack on Lepanto when he unromantically perished of dysentery. The rebellion intensified, watched with alarm by the Ottoman sultan and with uneasiness by Metternich, Liverpool and the new Russian tsar Nicholas I, a brother of Alexander. On his succession in December 1825, Nicholas – an imperious and magniloquent, strappingly good-looking, pewter-eyed martinet – faced a coup by liberal officers. It was a moment when Russia could have taken another route. Instead Nicholas crushed it with artillery and hangings. He took no chances at home, founding the first Russian political police, the Gendarmes, and the secret police, the Third Section of his personal chancellery, which started with just 416 employees. Such covert bureaucrats increasingly were not only tools of state power but represented its fearsome mystique too.

Starting with Alexander and continuing with Nicholas, the Romanov family beat the odds of biology by producing four conscientious, capable emperors in a row. Contemptuous of Britain’s chattering Parliament, loathing liberal views, despising his millions of Jews, Nicholas, a torchbearer for Russian autocracy, nationalism and Orthodoxy, embraced a mission of empire. Using his total command to outplay the inconsistent western democracies, he was an adept player of the World Game, crushing a Polish rebellion in 1830, seizing back the Caucasus from Persia, fighting a long war against Chechen jihadists and plotting to seize Constantinople.

His first chance came when Sultan Mahmud II recruited the dynamic Egyptian ruler Mehmed Ali to crush the Greek rebels. Mehmed dispatched his talented son Ibrahim the Red – named for his beard and his ferocity – to Greece where he systematically slaughtered the rebels, breaking the rebellion. The Greeks appealed to the Russians, the French and the British, who were all now sympathetic, for different reasons.