NEVERTHELESS Church fought on, ‘to sink or swim’ he said ‘with the cause of Greece.’ He conducted and funded* guerilla warfare in mountains north of the Gulf of Corinth, pinning down the Turks in Missolonghi and Nafpaktos, and rekindling the revolt across western Greece at the head of a militia of ‘wild and headstrong chieftains’* no one else could command.
Small thanks did he receive. In 1829, Kapodistrias sidelined him so his brother Agostino could lead the victory parades,* and tried to hand the lands Church had liberated back to the Turks.* In 1834, Tsar Nicholas I vetoed his appointment as Russian envoy; in 1843, Church’s mediation averted a potentially bloody constitutional crisis,* but the reconciled parties then dismissed him as the army’s Inspector-General.
Re-appointment to an emeritus generalship in 1854 was scant recognition for the burden of debt and danger Church had borne; but when he died in 1873, his grave in Athens acknowledged his selfless sacrifices ‘to rescue a Christian race from oppression, and make Greece a nation.’
‘He spent all his own money,’ said his nephew, E. M. Church, ‘and then was forced into the ruinous step, in his simplicity in money matters, of contracting loans in the Ionian Islands, on the authority of the National Assembly but in his own name, for the support of his army.’ Kapodistrias reimbursed only a small part of it and Church suffered financial embarrassment for years afterwards.
At Church’s funeral, it was said that ‘Wild and headstrong chieftains who proved unmanageable to all others readily and willingly submitted to his command, for he was known to be just, and to thirst after no power.’ Some Philhellenes in the West were patronising towards them, calling them ‘whiskered ragamuffins’ and the like, but in many ways they were the real heroes of the Revolution.
Victory was assured on September 14th, 1829, when the Russian and Ottoman Empires signed the Treaty of Adrianople. Greek independence was internationally recognised on May 7th, 1832, with the Treaty of Constantinople.
Kapodistrias was content to see the new Greece as little more than the Peloponnese. The wider borders (for which Church must take a great deal of the credit) were recognised by the London Protocol of 1830; for the process by which Greece came to her modern-day borders, see the map above.
King Otto, a Bavarian parachuted in as the first King of Greece, had been deadlocked with the Greek Government over the new constitution, and Church brokered a compromise before things got out of hand. Ioannis Kolettis became Prime Minister in February 1844, and he and Otto then rid themselves of Church at the first opportunity, replacing him with one of Kolettis’s favourites. It was Kolettis who had intrigued so ruthlessly against Manto Mavrogenous.
