The main domestic event of the early period was the arrest and sham trial of Theodoros Kolokotronis, a hero of the Greek War of Independence and the de facto leader of the Russian Party, in 1834.

[1] As Otto was a minor, articles 9–10 of the treaty authorized his father, King Ludwig I of Bavaria, to form a three-member regency council that was to rule in his stead until 1 June [O.S.

[1][2] Further articles concerned the issue of a loan of 60 million francs by the Powers, and the sending of a Bavarian expeditionary force that was to replace the French troops then in Greece and begin the establishment of a regular Greek army.

The regency was particularly suspicious of the irregular soldiers who had fought the War of Independence, and failed to either recompense them with the public lands captured from the Turks, as promised, nor to provide them with employ by taking them into the army.

The regency tried to curtail their activity, especially through a system of "divide and rule" in making appointments to public office, and adopted an inflexibly confrontational stance whenever its decisions were challenged by the parties.

[15] The financial situation of Greece when Otto arrived was disastrous: the treasury was empty, the country owed large amounts to foreign lenders due to the loans contracted to finance the War of Independence, and much of the public lands had been illegally seized.

[16] The regency could look forward to the first part of the promised sixty-million-frank loan, which was finalized in July 1833, but even that was much reduced in practice due to commissions and the need to pay off previous debts.

[16] The regency thus set about a programme of reduction of expenses, restoring security and tranquility so that agriculture and commerce could resume, and ending tax evasion and the mismanagement of public funds.

[16] Due to the pressing financial needs, the regency continued the previous system of tax farming, but tried to limit abuses by requiring the presence of the—theoretically impartial—eparchs and ephors at the bidding process, by reducing the extent of the concessions to the level of individual communes rather than entire provinces, and by permitting the payment of the contracted sum in rates.

[18] When Otto arrived in Greece, the military forces established by Governor Ioannis Kapodistrias still existed on paper, numbering 5,000 irregulars and 700 men of the regular army, all of them veteran fighters of the War of Independence.

[22] In practice, the results of these measures were negative: the veterans of the War of Independence felt aggrieved, and matters became worse when the regency used military force to disband their camp at Argos, where they had assembled to protest.

[22] The backlash forced the regency to backpedal somewhat: on the occasion of Otto's birthday on 20 May, it issued an amnesty for those of the fighters of the War of Independence who had fled to Ottoman territory, but with the proviso of enlisting in the new regular army instead.

[24] Approval from the central government had to be sought even for some decisions on minor local matters, while a careful antagonism was set up between the prefectural/provincial and the municipal authorities: the former could veto the latter's initiatives, but the latter could in turn appeal to the Ministry of the Interior.

This, along with the almost complete collapse of the monasteries, which were almost emptied during the first years of the war, and the influx of clergy fleeing from Ottoman reprisals, destroyed the cohesion of the hierarchy; as a result, the fragmented priesthood became increasingly involved with the various political factions vying for power.

[26] The composition of the commission predetermined its recommendations: the lay members were in the majority, and Farmakidis, Trikoupis, Schinas and Vyzantios were known to have liberal views, and represented a small but influential intelligentsia that saw in the War of Independence a struggle for freedom not only from Ottoman tyranny, but also from the Patriarchate.

The liberal intelligentsia, educated in Western Europe, also distrusted the Church hierarchy, whom it regarded as uneducated, venal and reactionary; while the Patriarch, who was subject to both Ottoman and Russian influence, was to be prevented from interfering in the internal affairs of the Greek kingdom.

The monk Prokopios Dendrinos led popular protest, while the former Metropolitan of Adrianople sought to rally the Church hierarchy in opposition, with the assistance of the Russian ambassador, Gavriil Antonovich Katakazi,[26] himself a Phanariote Greek from Constantinople.

[15] The Orthodox hierarchy rejected the decrees and continued to insist on the primacy of canon law for its internal governance,[15] while in the heated political atmosphere of the period, the ecclesiastical issue quickly became another rallying point in the rebellions against the regency and Otto's later absolutist rule.

Fearful of both Russian-sponsored uprising and the concentration of power in Armansperg's hands, the other two regents pushed through the deportation of Frantz in late August, and on 6 September, had Kolokotronis and other leading officers linked to him and the Russian faction—including his son Gennaios and the generals Dimitris Plapoutas and Kitsos Tzavellas—arrested and imprisoned in the Acronauplia citadel.

[32] The big winner of the crisis was Kolettis, who moved to the Interior Ministry and quickly began dismissing adherents of the English and Russian parties from office, appointing men loyal to him instead.

[32] At the same time, Dawkins approached Katakazi, and the English and Russian parties entered into closer contact, rallying around the common purpose of securing a favourable outcome for the upcoming trial of Kolokotronis and his co-defendants.

[36] On 7 March 1834, Kolokotronis and Plapoutas were formally charged with having organized a conspiracy aiming at overthrowing the legal order, citing the letter to Nesselrode and the petition to the Tsar as evidence.

[36] The English Party publicly condemned the whole process, leading to the dismissal of Mavrokordatos—he too was safely sent away by being appointed ambassador to Russia and Bavaria[32]—as head of the government, and his replacement by Kolettis [el].

This was a typical example of Bavarian insensitivity to local peculiarities: where the regency saw in these buildings only a dangerous military asset that might be used to challenge its authority, to the Maniots these were their homes, whose destruction without recompense would leave them destitute.

[37] For a few months, the regency's local agent, the Bavarian officer Maximilian Feder, had managed to remain in control of the situation, through a judicious mixture of bribery and force, but this ended with the start of the trial, when the region erupted into revolt.

[36][38] The upshot of the affair was that the government ended up pouring into Mani twice the sums that it received from it in taxes,[38] and that the myth of the Bavarians' invincibility was broken, severely tarnishing the regency's prestige and authority and encouraging future revolts.

[43] The rebels issued a manifesto in which they bemoaned the tyranny imposed by the lack of a constitution, the harsh taxation, and the religious policies that attacked Orthodoxy, and demanded the abolition of the regency and the assumption of government by King Otto, the release of Kolokotronis and Plapoutas.

At the same time, several unemployed military commanders, led by the Roumeliot chieftain Theodoros Grivas and Hatzi Christos Voulgaris [el], eager to ingratiate themselves with the government and secure commissions, raised local irregular militias and attacked the rebels from the north.

The appointments of Andreas Zaimis, a declared enemy of Kolettis, and of the moderate philhellene Thomas Gordon as chairman of the court-martial, were aimed at limiting the reprisals to the main instigators, and succeeded in dismissing the notion of a wide-ranging Russian Party-led conspiracy.

As the end of the regency's term drew near, it became evident that Otto, due to his youth and inexperience, would need to appoint a prime minister to handle government matters on his behalf.