To Make Greece a Nation
A headstrong Irish boy became part of the Greek resistance movement that won independence in 1832.
1821-1830
King George III 1760-1820 to Queen Victoria 1837-1901
From Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.
Sir Richard Church CB, GCH (1784-1873), the Irishman (Ireland was at that time part of the United Kingdom) who went to Greece to fight Napoleon, and returned in 1826 to help deliver his adopted home from Turkish rule. Here he is seen in the uniform of a General in the Greek Army, to which he was re-appointed in 1854 in belated recognition of his support for the country’s independence.
Introduction
At sixteen, Richard Church (1784-1873) ran away from home in Cork and enlisted in the British Army. He made a name for himself liberating the Ionian Islands from Napoleon in 1809, and formed two new Greek regiments there in British pay. So when a favourite recruit wrote to him in 1826, pleading for help, he could hardly refuse.
IN 1821 the Greeks, chafing under four centuries of harsh rule by the Turkish Ottoman Empire, raised a revolt. By 1824 it was losing momentum, and in desperation rebel leader Theodoros Kolokotronis, a former British recruit in the Ionian Islands, wrote to his old commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Richard Church, now in London. ‘Come!’ Kolokotronis pleaded, ‘Come! and take up arms for Greece!’*
Ignoring the advice of friends, in March 1827 Church reached Argolis* days before fellow-Briton Admiral Thomas Cochrane, only to find that there were two competing rebel governments. Church and Cochrane refused to help until they united; and Greece’s first President, Ioannis Kapodistrias, rewarded them with command of the army and navy respectively.
But Greek and foreign commanders already on the ground paid scant heed. Not ten days had passed, before insubordination and miscommunication duped Cochrane into a botched relief of the besieged Athens acropolis.* Church watched helplessly as the garrison was massacred, and his army scattered to the four winds.
Another alumnus of Church’s Ionian brigades — there were about two thousand of his former trainees scattered around Greece — was Nikitas ‘Nikitaras’ Stamatelopoulos: see The Most Unkindest Cut of All. On Britain and the Ionian Islands, see The United States of the Ionian Islands.
A region of the eastern Peloponnese across the Saronic Gulf from Athens.
A French colonel, Charles Nicolas Fabvier (1782-1855), signed an appeal from the besieged garrison in the Athens acropolis saying ‘we will wait five days longer, and we can hold out no more’, and threatening to take matters into their own hands. This proved to be an exaggeration of their condition but it forced Cochrane, who had no reason to doubt it, to act.
