ped from violence in
Sicily with some difficulty. At Naples he was imprisoned and put on his
trial by the government, but was acquitted and released in January 1821;
and King George IV. conferred on him a knight commandership of the
Hanoverian order.

The rising of the Greeks against the Turks, which began at this time,
had his full sympathy from the first. But for some years he had to act
only as the friend of the insurgents in England. In 1827 he took the
honourable but unfortunate step of accepting the commandership-in-chief
of the Greek army. At the point of anarchy and indiscipline to which
they had now fallen, the Greeks could no longer form an efficient army,
and could look for salvation only to foreign intervention. Sir Richard
Church, who landed in March, was sworn "archistrategos" on the 15th of
April 1827. But he could not secure loyal co-operation or obedience. The
rout of his army in an attempt to relieve the acropolis of Athens, then
besieged by the Turks, proved that it was incapable of conducting
regular operations. The acropolis capitulated, and Sir Richard turned to
partisan warfare in western Greece. Here his activity had beneficial
results, for it led to a rectification in 1832, in a sense favourable to
Greece, of the frontier drawn by the powers in 1830 (see his
_Observations on an Eligible Line of Frontier for Greece_, London,
1830). Church had, however, surrendered his commission, as a protest
against the unfriendly government of Capo d'Istria, on the 25th of
August 1829. He lived for the rest of his life in Greece, was created
general of the army in 1854, and died at Athens on the 30th of March
1873. Sir Richard Church married in 1826 Elizabeth Augusta
Wilmot-Horton, who survived him till 1878.

See _Sir Richard Church_, by Stanley Lane Poole (London, 1890); _Sir
Richard Church in Italy and Greece_, by E.M. Church (Edinburgh, 1895),
based on family papers (an Italian version, _Brigantaggio e societa
segrete nelle Puglie, 1817-1828_, executed under the direction of
Carlo Lacaita, appeared at Florence in 1899). The MS. Correspondence
and Papers of Sir Richard Church, in 29 vols., now in the British
Museum (Add. MSS. 36543-36571), contain invaluable material for the
history of the War of Greek Independence, including a narrative of the
war during Church's tenure of the command, which corrects many errors
in the published accounts and successfully vindicates Church's
reputatio