‘Oh daughter! most dearly beloved by him, your arms will receive him; your tears will bathe the tomb which shall contain his body; and the tears of the orphans of Greece will be shed over the urn containing his precious heart, and over all the land of Greece, for all the land of Greece is his tomb. As in the last moments of his life you and Greece were alone in his heart and upon his lips, it was but just that she (Greece) should retain a share of the precious remains. Missolonghi, his country, will ever watch over and protect with all her strength the urn containing his venerated heart, as a symbol of his love towards us. All Greece, clothed in mourning and inconsolable, accompanies the procession in which it is borne; all ecclesiastical, civil, and military honours attend it; all his fellow-citizens of Missolonghi and fellow-countrymen of Greece follow it, crowning it with their gratitude and bedewing it with their tears; it is blessed by the pious benedictions and prayers of our Archbishop, Bishop, and all our clergy. Learn, noble lady, learn that chieftains bore it on their shoulders, and carried it to the church; thousands of Greek soldiers lined the way through which it passed, with the muzzles of their muskets, which had destroyed so many tyrants, pointed towards the ground, as though they would war against that earth which was to deprive them for ever of the sight of their benefactor;—all this crowd of soldiers, ready at a moment to march against the implacable enemy of Christ and man, surrounded the funeral couch, and swore never to forget the sacrifices made by your father for us, and never to allow the spot where his heart is placed to be trampled upon by barbarous and tyrannical feet. Thousands of Christian voices were in a moment heard, and the temple of the Almighty resounded with supplications and prayers that his venerated remains might be safely conveyed to his native land, and that his soul might repose where the righteous alone find rest.’
‘When the funeral service was over,’ says Gamba, ‘we left the bier in the middle of the church, where it remained until the evening of the next day, guarded by a detachment of his own brigade. The church was crowded without cessation by those who came to honour and to regret the benefactor of Greece.
‘On the evening of the 23rd the bier was privately carried back by Byron’s officers to his own house. The coffin was not closed until the 29th April.
‘Immediately after death Byron’s countenance had an air of calmness, mingled with a severity that seemed gradually to soften. When I took a last look at him, the expression, at least to my eyes, was truly sublime.’
Soon after death, Byron’s body was embalmed, and a report of the autopsy will be found in the Appendix.
Millingen says:
‘Before we proceeded to embalm the body, we could not refrain from pausing to contemplate the lifeless clay of one who, but a few days before, was the hope of a whole nation, and the admiration of the civilized world. We could not but admire the perfect symmetry of his body. Nothing could surpass the beauty of his forehead; its height was extraordinary, and the protuberances under which the nobler intellectual faculties are supposed to reside were strongly pronounced. His hair, which curled naturally, was quite grey; the mustachios light-coloured. His physiognomy had suffered little alteration, and still preserved the sarcastic, haughty expression which habitually characterized it. The chest was broad, high-vaulted; the waist very small; the muscular system well pronounced; the skin delicate and white; and the habit of the body plump. The only blemish of his body, which might otherwise have vied with that of Apollo himself, was the congenital malconformation of his left foot and leg. The foot was deformed and turned inwards, and the leg was smaller and shorter than the sound one.’[25]
Trelawny arrived at Missolonghi on April 24, after the body had been embalmed. He states that Byron’s right leg was shorter than the other, and the right foot was the most distorted, being twisted inwards, so that only the edge could have touched the ground. The discrepancy between Trelawny’s statement and that of Millingen is probably due to the fact that nearly thirty-four years had passed before Trelawny’s book was written.
Trelawny wrote, from Fletcher’s dictation, full particulars of Byron’s last illness and death. It is presumably from these notes that Trelawny drafted his letter to Colonel Stanhope, dated April 28, 1814. In reference to that letter, Gamba says: