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      If the winter of 1826–27 probably saw philhellene stock plummet to its lowest mark, there was one man whose absence through it all had only added to his reputation. Over the last months there had admittedly been a growing bitterness over Greece’s missing admiral, but when on 17 March, ‘after wandering about the Mediterranean in a fine English yacht, purchased for him out of the proceeds of the loan’, as Finlay acidly and unfairly put it, Thomas Cochrane and the Sauveur at last arrived at Poros, all was forgiven in a surge of hope that the long-awaited Messiah had come.

      With stalemate at Phaleron, Athens on the brink of collapse, civil war in Nauplia, open conflict brewing between the islands and rival ‘governments’ multiplying by the week, there could never have been a time when Greece was more sorely in need of a Messiah. ‘This unhappy country is now divided by absurd and criminal dissensions,’ Sir Richard Church, another aspiring saviour who had been waiting in the wings of Greek history for even longer than Cochrane, wrote to him. ‘I hope, however, that your lordship’s arrival will have a happy effect, and that they will do everything in their power to be worthy of such a leader.’