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Edward Blaquiere, impetuous and often impecunious Irishman of Huguenot descent, English naval officer during the Napoleonic wars, and early apostle of liberalism, had numerous intellectual heroes, but two were especially memorable: Niccolo Machiavelli and Jeremy Bentham. He admired the Discourses on Livy and regretted that so few read this work instead of the Prince. For the regeneration of Italy in the early 19th century, Blaquiere believed that the task would be difficult but could be eased somewhat not only by the study of Machiavelli's Discourses but also by a ‘proper application of Mr. Bentham's principle of utility’, both of which ‘would shew the people of Italy that sound morals are the indispensable companions of good government’. Nevertheless, the joining of Machiavelli and Bentham reveals a good deal about Blaquiere, especially that conjunction of ruthlessness and political idealism which characterised his approach to politics.

The arrival of the first installment of the Greek loan in Zante at the end of April 1824 brought the doctrines of Edward Blaquiere and Leicester Stanhope into sharp conflict, a conflict which revealed most fully the differences between their two types of liberalism. Before Blaquiere had arrived in Greece, Stanhope had in a sense already thrown down the ideological gauntlet. In addition, though many of Stanhope's letters to John Bowring were circulated among the leading figures and read at meetings of the London Greek Committee, it is not clear how much of the correspondence was actually seen by Blaquiere who was travelling around Britain and absorbed in the completion of his own book, The Greek Revolution. The irritating conflicts between Stanhope and Byron were often personal. However, the complete opposition between Blaquiere and Stanhope was not the result of a clash of personalities, but rather an ideological one.

Jeremy Bentham, the theorist, was working on a different level and towards different objects from the ideologues Edward Blaquiere and Leicester Stanhope. However, one cannot account for the desires, motives, and interests that guide human action either by theory or by ideology alone. The failure of the expedition to Greece was not simply, or even primarily, a failure of liberalism to take root in that stony soil. Without the ideological commitment of John Bowring and Blaquiere, the London Greek Committee might never have been founded and no assistance of any consequence would have been forthcoming. It was in the general arrangements, prior to the departure of the expedition, that a seriously defective plan was agreed, and from that plan disaster followed with the inevitability of an ancient Greek tragedy.

This book is a study of British political ideas in the early 19th century. It deals specifically with the British involvement in the struggle for Greek independence roughly between 1821 and 1827. The ideas are examined, such as the evolution of constitutional thought from Montesquieu, the emergence of liberalism as a political ideology against a background of Whig and radical political ideas, and the response in Britain to movements towards national independence in the Mediterranean basin. Some of the characters that appear here, like Jeremy Bentham and Lord Byron, will be familiar, though they will not be presented in familiar ways. Others, like Edward Blaquiere and Leicester Stanhope, will be virtually unknown, and their importance to this study will surprise some readers. Still other members of the dramatis personae, like John Bowring, Joseph Hume, and John Cam Hobhouse, will be well known to historians of 19th-century for reform movements.