CHAPTER X
THE REVIVAL OF PIEDMONT
1850-1856
Restoration of the Pope and Grand Duke of Tuscany—Misrule at Naples—The Struggle with the Church in Piedmont—The Crimean War.
The decade from 1849 to 1859 may seem, at first sight, to resemble an interregnum, but it was an evolution. There is no pause in the life of nations any more than in the life of individuals: they go forward or they go backward. In these ten years Piedmont went forward; the other Italian governments did not stand still, they went backward. The diseases from which they suffered gained daily upon the whole body-politic, and even those clever foreign doctors who had been the most convinced that this or that remedy would set them on their feet, were in the end persuaded that there was only one place for them—the Hospital for Incurables. After the fall of Rome, Pius IX. issued a sort of canticle from Gaeta, in which he thanked the Lord at whose bidding the stormy ocean had been arrested, but he did not even so much as say thank you to the French, without whom, nevertheless, the stormy ocean would have proceeded on its way. To all suggestions from Paris that now that victory had been won by force the time was come for the Sovereign to give some guarantee that it would not be abused, [ [Pg.184] the Pope turned a completely deaf ear. 'The Pope,' said M. Drouyn de Lhuys, 'prefers to return to Rome upon the dead bodies of his subjects rather than amidst the applause which would have greeted him had he taken our advice.' That advice referred in particular to the secularisation of the public administration, and this was exactly what the Pope and the ex-Liberal Cardinal Antonelli, now and henceforth his most influential counsellor, were determined not to concede. They had grown wise in their generation, for a priest whose ministers are laymen is as much an anomaly as a layman whose ministers are priests. The French government desired that the Statute should be maintained, and demanded judicial reforms and an amnesty for political offenders. None of these points was accepted except the last, and that only nominally, as the amnesty of the 18th of September did not put a stop to proscriptions and vindictive measures. Count Mamiani, whose stainless character was venerated in all Italy, and who had devoted all his energies to the attempt to save the Papal government after the Pope's flight, was ruthlessly excluded, and so were many other persons who, though liberal-minded, had shown signal devotion to the Holy See. All sorts of means were used to serve the ends of vengeance; for instance, Alessandro Calandrelli, a Roman of high reputation, who held office under the republic, was condemned to death for high treason, and to twenty years at the galleys, on a trumped-up charge of theft, which was palpably absurd; but the Pope, while quashing the first sentence, confirmed the second, and Calandrelli would have remained in prison till the year of grace 1870, as many others did, but for the chance circumstance that his father had been a friend of the King of Prussia, who took up his cause so warmly that after two years he was [Pg.185] let out and sent to Berlin, where the King and A. von Humboldt received him with open arms.
These were the auspices under which Pius IX. returned to Rome after seventeen months' absence. A four-fold invasion restored the Temporal Power, which Fénelon said was the root of all evil to the Church, but which, according to Pius IX., was necessary to the preservation of the Catholic religion. The re-established régime was characterised by Lord Clarendon at the Congress of Paris as 'the opprobrium of Europe.' The Pope tried to compensate for his real want of independence (for a prince who could not stand a day without foreign bayonets, whatever else he was, was not independent) by laughing at the entreaties of France to relieve that advanced nation from the annoyance of having set up a government fit for the Middle Ages. He rated at its correct value the support of Napoleon, and believing it to be purely interested, he believed in its permanence. The President had thought of nothing in the world but votes, and he thought of them still. The Roman Expedition secured him the services of M. de Falloux as minister, and won over to him the entire Clerical Party, including Montalembert and the so-called Liberal Catholics. Thus, and thus only, was the leap from the Presidential chair to the Imperial throne made possible. The result was flattering, but still there are reasons to think (apart from Prince Jérôme Napoleon's express statement to that effect) that Napoleon III. hated the whole business from the bottom of his soul, and that of his not few questionable acts, this was the only one of which he felt lastingly ashamed. Seeing that the communications of his ministers failed in their object, he tried the expedient of writing a private letter to his friend Edgar Ney, couched in the [Pg.186] strongest terms of disapproval of the recalcitrant attitude of the Papal Government. This letter was published as it was intended to be, but in the Roman States, except that its circulation was forbidden, no notice was taken of it. Though the incident may be regarded as a stroke of facing-both-ways policy, the anger expressed was probably as sincere as any of Napoleon's sentiments could be, and the letter had the effect of awakening the idea in many minds that something of the former Italian conspirator still existed in the ruler of France. The question arose, What sort of pressure would be needed to turn that germ to account for Italy?
In the kingdom of Naples, where the laws, to look at them on paper, were incomparably better than those in force in the Roman States, the administration was such as would have disgraced a remote province of the Turkish Empire. The King's naturally suspicious temperament was worked upon by his courtiers and priests till he came to detect in every Liberal a personal antagonist, whose immunity from harm was incompatible with his own, and in Liberalism a plague dangerous to society, which must be stamped out at all costs. Over 800 Liberals were sent to the galleys. The convictions were obtained, in a great proportion of cases, by false testimony. Bribes and secret protection in high quarters were the only means by which an innocent man could hope to escape; 50,000 persons were under police supervision, to be imprisoned at will. The police often refused to set at liberty those whom the judges had acquitted. The government had a Turkish or Russian fear of printed matter. A wretched barber was fined 1000 ducats for having in his possession a volume of Leopardi's poems, which was described as 'contrary to religion and morals.'
[ [Pg.187] What was meant by being an inmate of a Neapolitan prison was told by Mr Gladstone in his two 'Letters to the Earl of Aberdeen,' which the latter sent to Prince Schwarzenberg, the Austrian Prime Minister, with a strong appeal to him to make known their contents to the King of the Two Sicilies, and to use his influence in procuring a mitigation of the abuses complained of. Prince Schwarzenberg did nothing, and it was then that the 'Letters' were published. The impression created on public opinion was almost without a parallel. The celebrated phrase, 'The negation of God erected into a system of government,' passing into currency as a short history of Bourbon rule at Naples, kept alive the wrathful feelings which the 'Letters' aroused, even when these ceased to be read. Some small errors of fact (such as that of stating that all the prisoners were chained, whereas an exception was made of those undergoing life sentences) were magnified by the partisans of Ferdinand II.; but the truth of the picture as a whole was amply confirmed from independent sources. Baron Carlo Poerio (condemned to nineteen years' imprisonment) was chained to a common malefactor, the chain never being undone, and producing in the end a disease of the bone from which he never recovered. His case was that of all the political prisoners in the same category with himself. Luigi Settembrini and the others on whom sentence of death had been passed, but commuted into one of life imprisonment, were not chained, but they were put to associate with the worst thieves and assassins, while their material surroundings accorded with the moral atmosphere they were forced to breathe.
The Neapolitan prisoners did more than suffer for freedom; they delivered the name of their country from being a reproach among the nations. They showed what men the South of Italy can produce. Those [Pg.188] who wish to know what types of probity, honour and ideal patriotism may grow out of that soil, which is sometimes charged with yielding only the rank weeds planted by despotism, may read the letters and memoirs of the noble Poerios, of Settembrini, gentlest but most fearless of human souls, of the Calabrian Morellis, all patriots and martyrs; of the Duke of Castromediano, who lately, in his old age, has set down a few recollections of the years he spent at the Neapolitan galleys. He records in these notes what he calls the most perilous moment in his life. It was when he was summoned, with six fellow-prisoners who had asked for and obtained freedom, to hear, as he feared, his own pardon pronounced. For pardon was equivalent to dishonour; it was granted either in consequence of real submission and retraction, or in order to be able to blacken the character of the pardoned man by falsely asserting that such submission had been made. His fear was groundless. He had been led out, perhaps, in the hope that the example of the others would prove contagious. He was not pardoned. As he returned to his prison, he thanked Divine Providence for the chains which left him pure.
Strange to tell, Ferdinand II. rendered one considerable service to the national cause; not that he saw it in that light, but the service was none the less real because its motive was a narrow one. Austria proposed a defensive league between the Italian Sovereigns: defensive not only with the view to outward attack, but also and chiefly against 'internal disorder.' Piedmont was to be invited to join as soon as she had renounced her constitutional sins, which it was sanguinely expected she would do before very long. Meanwhile Parma, Modena, Tuscany and Rome embraced the idea with enthusiasm, but the King of [Pg.189] the Two Sicilies, who dimly saw in it an opening for interference in his own peculiar governmental ways, boldly declined to have anything to do with it. And so, to Prince Schwarzenberg's serious disappointment, the scheme by which he had hoped to create an absolutist Italian federation, came to an untimely end.
The Grand Duke of Tuscany timidly inquired of the Austrian premier if he might renew the constitutional régime in his state. Schwarzenberg replied with the artful suggestion that he should hear what the Dukes of Modena and Parma, the Pope, and King Ferdinand had to say on the subject. Their advice was unanimously negative: Cardinal Antonelli going so far as to declare that Constitutionalism in Tuscany would be regarded as a constant menace and danger to the States of the Church. The different counsels of Piedmont, conveyed by Count Balbo, weighed little against so imposing an array of opinion, backed as it was by the Power which still stabled its horses in the Convent of San Marco. The Tuscan Statute was formally suspended in September 1850.
From that day forth, Tuscany sank lower and lower in the slough. To please the Pope, havoc was made of the Leopoldine laws—named after the son of Maria Theresa, the wise Grand Duke Leopold I.—laws by which a bridle was put on the power and extension of the Church. The prosecution and imprisonment of a Protestant couple who were accused of wishing to make proselytes, proclaimed the depth of intolerance into which what was once the freest and best-ordered government in Italy had descended.
The ecclesiastical question became the true test question in Piedmont as well as in Tuscany, but there it had another issue.
[ [Pg.190] It had also a different basis. In Piedmont there were no Leopoldine laws to destroy; what was necessary was to create them. To privileges dating from the Middle Ages which in the kingdom of Sardinia almost alone had been restored without curtailment after the storm of the French Revolution, were added the favours, the vast wealth, the preponderating influence acquired during Charles Felix' reign, and the first seventeen years of that of Charles Albert. Theoretically, the Statute swept away all privileges of classes and sects, and made citizens equal before the law, but to put this theory into practice further legislation was needed, because, as a matter of fact, the clergy preserved their immunities untouched and showed not the slightest disposition to yield one jot of them. The Piedmontese clergy, more numerous in proportion to the population than in any state except Rome, were more intransigent than any ecclesiastical body in the world. The Italian priest of old days, whatever else might be said about him, was rarely a fanatic. The very nickname 'Ultramontane' given by Italians to the religious extremists north of the Alps, shows how foreign such excesses were to their own temperaments. But the Ultramontane spirit had already invaded Piedmont, and was embraced by its clergy with all the zeal of converts. There was still a Foro Ecclesiastico for the arraignment of religious offenders, and this was one of the first privileges against which Massimo d'Azeglio lifted his 'sacrilegious' hand. To go through all the list would be tedious, and would demand more explanation regarding the local modes of acquisition and tenure of religious property than would be interesting now. The object of the Siccardi laws, as they were named after the Minister of Grace and Justice who introduced them, and of the stronger [Pg.191] measures to which they led up, was to make the priest amenable to the common law of the land in all except that which referred to his spiritual functions; to put a limit on the amassment of wealth by religious corporations; to check the multiplication of convents and the multiplication of feast days, both of which encouraged the people in sloth and idleness; to withdraw education from the sole control of ecclesiastics; and finally, to authorise civil marriage, but without making it compulsory. The programme was large, and it took years to carry it out. The Vatican contended that it was contrary to the Concordat which existed between the Holy See and the Court of Sardinia. Massimo d'Azeglio replied that the maintenance of the Concordat, in all its parts, meant the ruin of the state; that he had tried every means of conciliation, made every effort towards arriving at a compromise, and that since his endeavours had failed in consequence of the refusal of the Vatican to abate pretensions which it neither could nor did enforce in Austria, Naples or Spain, heaven and the world must judge between Rome and Piedmont, between Cardinal Antonelli and himself.
The struggle throughout was bitter in the extreme, but its most striking incident was the denial of the last Sacraments to a member of the Government, the Minister of Agriculture, Santa Rosa, who happened to die soon after the passing of the Act abolishing the Foro Ecclesiastico. Santa Rosa was a sincerely religious man, but he resisted all the attempts of the priest to extort a retractation, and died unabsolved rather than leave a dishonoured name to his children. The popular indignation excited by this incident was in proportion with the importance attached to outward observances of religion in Catholic countries; the government had to protect the Archbishop of [Pg.192] Turin from violence, while, at the same time, they sent him for a month to the Citadel for having forbidden his clergy to obey the law on the Foro Ecclesiastico. He and one or two of the other bishops were afterwards expelled from the kingdom. An unwelcome necessity, but whose was the fault? In other countries, where the privileges claimed by the Piedmontese clergy had been abolished for centuries, did the bishops dictate revolt against the law? If not, why should they do so in Piedmont?
The successor of Santa Rosa in the ministry was Count Cavour, who thus in 1850 for the first time became an official servant of the state. When D'Azeglio submitted the appointment to the King, Victor Emmanuel remarked that, though he did not object to it in the least, they had better take care, as this man would turn them all out before long. This man was, in fact, to stand at the helm of Piedmont, with short intervals, till he died, and was to carve out from the block of formless marble, not the Italy of sublime dreams, which, owing her deliverance to her sons alone, should arise immaculate from the grave a Messiah among the nations, but the actual Italy which has been accomplished; imperfect and peccable as human things mostly are, belonging rather to prose than to poetry, to matter than to spirit, but, for all that, an Italy which is one and is free.
COUNT CAVOUR
Fifty years ago a great English writer pointed out what the real Italy would be, if it were to be; 'The prosperity of nations as of individuals,' wrote Mr Ruskin in one of his earliest papers, 'is cold and hard-hearted and forgetful. The dead lie, indeed, trampled down by the living; the place thereof shall know them no more, for that place is not in the hearts of the survivors, for whose interest they have made way.[Pg.193] But adversity and ruin point to the sepulchre, and it is not trodden on; to the chronicle, and it does not decay. Who would substitute the rush of a new nation, the struggle of an awakening power, for the dreamy sleep of Italy's desolation, for the sweet silence of melancholy thought, her twilight time of everlasting memories?'
There is the case, stated with beautiful lucidity, of the somewhat ghoulish dilettantism which, enjoying tombs, would condemn all mankind to breathe their atmosphere. It is not, however, in order to discuss that view that the passage is quoted, but because of its relevancy to what Cavour attempted and what he did. Never was there a mind which cherished fewer illusions. He believed that the pursuit of the unattainable was still more a political crime than a political blunder. He was, in this, what is now called an opportunist, and he was also an opportunist in believing that though in politics you can choose your aim, you can very rarely choose your means. He held (and this was the reason that he was so profoundly hated by men of very different parties) that to accomplish great changes you have to make sacrifices, not only of the higher sort, but, in a certain sense, also of the lower. As he thought that the Austrians could not be expelled from Italy for good and all without foreign help, he contemplated from the first securing that foreign help, though no one would have been more glad than he to do without it. He thought that Italian freedom could not be won without a closer alliance with the democratic party than politicians like D'Azeglio, who had the fear of the ermine, of tarnishing its whiteness, would have ever brought themselves to acquiesce in, and he therefore immediately took steps to establish that alliance. Cavour had no faith in the creation of ideally perfect [ [Pg.194] states, such as the Monarchy of Dante or the Republic of Mazzini, but he did think that a living land was better than a dead one, that the struggle of an awakening power, the rush of a new nation, was infinitely to be preferred to the desolation of dreamy sleeps, sweet silences, and everlasting memories that spelt regrets.
It may be possible now to see clearly that if no one had tried for the unattainable, Cavour would not have found the ground prepared for his work. The appreciation of his rank among Italian liberators rests on a different point, and it is this: without a man of his positive mould, of his practical genius, of his force of will and force of patience, would the era of splendid endeavours have passed into the era of accomplished facts? If the answer to this is 'No,' then nothing can take from Cavour the glory of having conferred an incalculable boon on the country which he loved with a love that was not the less strong because it lacked the divinising qualities of imagination.
An aristocrat by birth and the inheritor of considerable wealth, Cavour was singularly free from prejudices; his favourite study was political economy, and in quiet times he would probably have given all his energies to the interests of commerce and agriculture. He was an advocate of free trade, and was, perhaps, the only one of the many Italians who fêted Mr Cobden on his visit to Italy who cared in the least for the motive of his campaign. Cavour understood English politics better than they have ever been understood by a foreign statesman; his article on Ireland, written in 1843, may still be read with profit. Before parliamentary life existed in Piedmont, he took the only way open of influencing public opinion by founding a newspaper, the Risorgimento, in which he continued to write for [Pg.195] several years. In the Chamber of Deputies he soon made his power felt—power is the word, for he was no orator in the ordinary sense; his speeches read well, as hard hitting and logical expositions, but they were not well delivered. Cavour never spoke Italian with true grace and ease though he selected it for his speeches, and not French, which was also allowed and which he spoke admirably. His presence, too, did not lend itself to oratory; short and thickset, and careless in his dress, he formed a contrast to the romantic figure of D'Azeglio. Yet his prosaic face, when animated, gave an impressive sense of that attribute which seemed to emanate from the whole man: power.
It needed a more wary hand than D'Azeglio's to steer out of the troubled waters caused by the ecclesiastical bills, and to put the final touches to the legislation which he, to his lasting honour be it said, had courageously and successfully initiated. In the autumn of 1852 D'Azeglio resigned, and Cavour was requested by the King to form a ministry. He was to remain, with short breaks, at the head of public affairs for the nine following years.
At this time the government of Lombardy and Venetia was vested in Field-Marshal Radetsky, with two lieutenant-governors under him, who only executed his orders. Radetsky resided at Verona. Politically and economically the two provinces were then undergoing an extremity of misery; the diseases of the vines and the silkworms had reached the point of causing absolute ruin to the great mass of proprietors who, reckoning on having always enough to live on, had not laid by. Many noble families sank to the condition of peasants. The taxation was heavier than in any other part of the Austrian Empire; in proof of [Pg.196] which it may be mentioned that Lombardy paid 80,000,000 francs into the Austrian treasury, which, had the Empire been taxed equally, would have given an annual total of 1,100,000,000, whereas the revenue amounted to only 736,000,000. The landtax was almost double what it was in the German provinces. Italians, however, have a great capacity for supporting such burdens with patience, and it is doubtful whether the material aspect of the case did much to increase their hatred of foreign dominion. Its moral aspect grew daily worse; the terror became chronic. The possession of a sheet of printed paper issued by the revolutionary press at Capolago, on the lake of Lugano, was enough to send a man to the gallows. These old, badly printed leaflets, with no name of author or publisher attached, but chiefly written in the unmistakable style of Mazzini, can still be picked up in the little booksellers' shops in Canton Ticino, and it is difficult to look at them without emotion. What hopes were carried by them. What risks were run in passing them from hand to hand. Of what tragedies were they not the cause! In August 1851, Antonio Sciesa, of Milan, was shot for having one such leaflet on his person. The gendarmes led him past his own house, hoping that the sight of it would weaken his nerve, and make him accept the clemency which was eagerly proffered if he would reveal the names of others engaged in the patriotic propaganda. 'Tiremm innanz!' ('come along') he said, in his rough Milanese dialect, and marched incorruptible to death. On a similar charge, Dottesio and Grioli, the latter a priest, suffered in the same year, and early in 1852 the long trial was begun at Mantua of about fifty [Pg.197] patriots whose names had been obtained by the aid of the bastinado from one or two unhappy wretches who had not the fortitude to endure. Of these fifty, nine were executed, among whom were the priests Grazioli and Tazzoli, Count Montanari of Verona, and Tito Speri, the young hero of the defence of Brescia. Speri had a trifling part in the propaganda, but the remembrance of his conduct in 1849 ensured his condemnation. He was deeply attached to the religion in which he was born, and his last letters show the fervour of a Christian joined to the calmness of a stoic. If he had a regret, it was that he had been unable to do more for his country; but here too his simple faith sustained him. Surely the Giver of all good would not refuse to listen to the prayers of the soul which passed to Him through martyrdom. 'To-morrow they lead me forth,' he wrote. 'I have done with this world, but, in the bosom of God, I promise you I will do what I can.' So did this clear and childlike spirit carry its cause from the Austrian Assizes to a higher tribunal.
In the spring of 1853 there was an attempt at a rising in Milan from which the mass of the citizens stood aloof, if they even knew of it till it was over; an attempt ill-considered and not easily justified from any point of view, the blame for which has been generally cast on Mazzini; but though he knew of it, he was unwilling that its authors should choose the time and mode of action which they chose. He was, moreover, misinformed as to the extent of the preparations, since no Milanese of any standing gave his support to the plan.
On the plea that the Lombard emigration was concerned in the abortive movement, which was by no means consistent with facts, the Austrian Government sequestered the landed property of the exiles and voluntary [Pg.198] emigrants, reducing them and their families (which in most instances remained behind) to complete beggary. Nine hundred and seventy-eight estates were placed under sequestration. The Court of Sardinia held the measure to be a violation of the amnesty, which was one of the conditions of the peace of 1850. The Sardinian Minister was recalled from Vienna, and the relations between the two governments were once more on a footing of open rupture.
Not less important was the moral effect of the sequestrations in France and England, but particularly in England. They acted as the last straw, coming as they did on the top of the flogging system which had already enraged the English public mind to the highest degree. The Prince Consort wrote in March to his brother: 'To give you a conception of the maxims of justice and policy which Austria has been lately developing, I enclose an extract of a report from Turin which treats of the decrees of confiscation in Italy. People here will be very indignant.' He goes on to say (somewhat too broadly) that the English upper classes were till then thoroughly Austrian, but that she had succeeded in turning the whole of England against her, and there was now no one left to defend her.
Austria, through Count Buol, complained that she was 'dying of legality,' but England took the Sardinian view that the sequestrations directly violated the treaty between the two Powers. In the Austrian Note of the 9th of March, it was distinctly declared that Piedmont would be crushed if she did not perform the part of police-agent to Austria. Cavour's uncowed attitude at this crisis was what first fixed upon him the eyes of European diplomacy.
In the course of the summer, the Duke of Genoa, Victor Emmanuel's brother, paid a visit to the English Court, where the Duke of [Pg.199] Saxe-Coburg was also staying, by whom he was described as 'one of the cleverest and most amiable men of our time.' Sunny Italy, adds Duke Ernest, seemed to have sent him to England so that by his mere presence alone, in the prime of his age, he might make propaganda for the cause of his country. The Queen presented her guest with a handsome riding-horse, and when he thanked her in warm and feeling terms, she spoke the memorable words, the effect of which spoken at that date by the Queen of England can hardly be imagined: 'I hope you will ride this horse when the battles are fought for the liberation of Italy.'
The battle-day was indeed to come, but when it came the sword which the young Duke wielded with such gallantry in the siege of Peschiera would be sheathed for ever. The Prince Charming of Casa Savoia died in February 1855, leaving a daughter to Italy, the beloved Queen Margaret.
In the space of a few weeks, Victor Emmanuel lost his brother, his mother, and his wife. The King, who felt keenly when he did feel, was driven distraught with grief; no circumstance was wanting which could sharpen the edge of his sorrow. The two Queens, both Austrian princesses, had never interfered in foreign politics; what they suffered they suffered in silence. But they were greatly influenced by the ministers of the religion which had been a comfort of their not too happy lives, and they had frequently told Victor Emmanuel that they would die of grief if the anti-papal policy of his government were persisted in. Now that they were dead, every partisan of the Church declared, without a shadow of reticence, that the mourning in which the House of Savoy was plunged was a clear manifestation of Divine wrath. Victor Emmanuel had been brought up in superstitious surroundings; it was hardly possible that he should listen to these [ [Pg.200] things altogether unmoved. But on this as on the other occasions in his life when he was to be threatened with ghostly terrors, he did not belie the name of 'Re Galantuomo,' which he had written down as his profession when filling up the papers of the first census taken after his accession—a jest that gave him the title he will ever be known by. Harassed and tormented as the King was, when the law on religious corporations had been voted by the Senate and the Chamber, and was presented to him by Cavour for signature, he did his duty and signed it. The commentary which came from the Vatican was the decree of major excommunication promulgated in the Consistory of the 27th of July against all who had approved or sanctioned the measure, or who were concerned in putting it into execution.
The law was known as the 'Rattazziana,' from Urbano Rattazzi, whom Cavour appointed Minister of Grace and Justice, thereby effecting a coalition between the Right Centre, which he led himself, and the Left Centre, which was led by Rattazzi; an alliance not pleasing to the Pure Right or to the Advanced Left, but necessary to give the Prime Minister sufficient strength to command the respect, both at home and abroad, which can only be won by a statesman who is not afraid of being overturned by every whiff of the parliamentary wind. The 'Legge Rattazziana' certainly aimed at asserting the supremacy of the state, but in substance it was an arrangement for raising the stipend of the poorer clergy at the expense of the richer benefices and corporations, and save for the bitter animosity of Rome, it would not have excited the degree of anger that descended upon its promoters. In a country where the Church had a rental of 15,000,000 francs, there were many [Pg.201] parish priests who had not an income of £20; a state of things seen to be anomalous by the best ecclesiastics themselves, but their efforts at conciliation failed because the Holy See would not recognise the right of the civil authority to interfere in any question affecting the status or property of the clergy, and this right was the real point at issue.
In these days, Cavour came to an understanding with a friendly monk in order that when his last hour arrived, he should not, like Santa Rosa, go unshriven to his account. In 1861, Fra Giacomo performed his part in the agreement, and was duly punished for having saved his Church from a scandal which, from the position of the great minister, would have reached European dimensions.
Cavour's work of bringing into order the Sardinian finances, which, from the flourishing state they had attained prior to 1848, had fallen into what appeared the hopeless confusion of a large and steadily increasing deficit, is not to the ordinary observer his most brilliant achievement, but it is possibly the one for which he deserves most praise. It could not have been carried through except by a statesman who was completely indifferent to the applause of the hour. During all the earlier years that he held office, Cavour was extraordinarily unpopular. The nickname of 'la bestia neira' conferred on him by Victor Emmanuel referred to the opinion entertained of him by the Clerical party, but he was almost as much a 'bestia neira' to a large portion of the Liberals as to the Clericals or to the old Piedmontese party. His house was attacked by the mob in 1853, and had not his servants barred the entrance, something serious might have occurred. Happily the King and the majority in the Chamber and in the country had, if not much love for Cavour, a profound conviction that he could not be done without, and that, consequently, he must be allowed to do [Pg.202] what he liked. Thus the large sacrifices he demanded of the taxpayers were regularly voted, and Cavour could afford to despise the abuse heaped upon himself since he saw his policy advancing to maturity along a steady line of success.
When, in 1854, Cavour resolved that Piedmont should join France and England in the coming war with Russia, it seemed to a large number of his countrymen that he had taken leave of his senses, but the firm support which in this instance he found in the King enabled him next year to equip and despatch the contingent, 15,000 strong, commanded by General La Marmora, which not only won the respect of friends and foes in the field, but offered an example of efficiency in all departments that compared favourably with the faulty organisation of the great armies beside which it fought. Its gallant conduct at the battle of the Tchernaja flattered the native pride, and when, in due time, 12,000 returned of the 15,000 that had gone forth, the increased credit of Piedmont in Europe was already felt to compensate for the heavy cost of the expedition.
Among the Italians living abroad, Cavour's motives in taking part in the Crimean War were, from the first, better understood than they were at home. Piedmont, by qualifying for the part of Italian advocate in the Councils of Europe, gave a guarantee of good faith which patriots like Daniel Manin and Giorgio Pallavicini accepted as a happy promise for the future. It was then that a large section of the republican party frankly embraced the programme of Italian unity under Victor Emmanuel. They foresaw that a repetition of the discordant action of 1848 would end in the same way. Manin wrote to Lorenzo Valerio in September 1855: 'I, who am a republican, plant the banner of [Pg.203] unification; let all who desire that Italy should exist, rally round it, and Italy will exist.' The ex-dictator of Venice was eking out a scanty livelihood by giving lessons in Paris; he had only three years left to live, and was not destined to see his words verified. But, poor and sick and obscure though he was, his support was worth legions.
It was not the first time that Italian republicans had said to the House of Savoy: If you will free Italy we are with you; but the circumstances of the case were completely changed since Mazzini wrote in somewhat the same language to Charles Albert a quarter of a century before. Both times the proposal contained an ultimatum as well as an offer, but Manin made it without second thoughts in the strongest hope that the pact would be accepted and full of anticipatory joy at the prospect of its success; while by the Genoese republican it was made in mistrust and in the knowledge that were it accepted (which he did not believe), its acceptance, though bringing with it for Italy a state of things which he recognised as preferable to that which prevailed, would bring to him personally nothing but disappointment and the forfeiture of his dearest wishes.
It is difficult to say what were at this date Cavour's own private sentiments about Italian unity. Though he once confessed that as a young man he had fancied himself Prime Minister of Italy, whenever the subject was now discussed he disclaimed any belief in the feasibility of uniting all parts of the peninsula in one whole. He even called Manin 'a very good man, but mad about Italian unification.' It wanted, in truth, the prescience of the seer rather than the acumen of the politician to discern the unity of Italy in 1855. All outward facts seemed more adverse to its accomplishment than at any period since [Pg.204] 1815. Yet it was for Italy that Cavour always pleaded; Italy, and not Piedmont or even Lombardy and Venetia. He invariably asserted the right of his King to uphold the cause of all the populations from the Alps to the Straits of Messina. If he adopted the proverb 'Chi va piano va sano,' he kept in view the end of it, 'Chi va sano va lontano.' In short, if he did not believe in Italian unity, he acted in the same way as he would have acted had he believed in it.
It is evident that one thing he could not do. Whatever was in his thoughts, unless he was prepared to retire into private life then and there, he could not proclaim from the house-tops that he espoused the artichoke theory attributed to Victor Amadeus. There were only too many old diplomatists as it was, who sought to cripple Cavour's resources by reviving that story. The time was not come when, without manifest damage to the cause, he could plead guilty to the charge of preparing an Italian crown for his Sovereign. 'The rule in politics,' Cavour once observed, 'is to be as moderate in language as you are resolute in act.'
At the end of 1855, Victor Emmanuel, with Cavour and Massimo d'Azeglio, paid a visit to the French and English Courts. He was received with more marked cordiality at the English Court than at the French. No Prince Charming, indeed, but the ideal of a bluff and burly Longobard chief, he managed to win the good graces of his entertainers, even if they thought him a trifle barbaric. The Duchess of Sutherland declared that of all the knights of St George whom she had ever seen, he was the only one who would have had the best of it in the fight with the dragon. The Queen rose at four o'clock in the morning to take leave of him. Cavour was so much struck by the [ [Pg.205] interest which Her Majesty evinced in the efforts of Piedmont for constitutional freedom, that he did not hesitate to call her the best friend his country possessed in England.
It is not generally known, but it is quite true, that Victor Emmanuel wished to contract a matrimonial alliance with the English royal family. He did not take Cavour into his confidence, but a high English personage was sounded on the matter, a hint being given to him to say nothing about it to the Count. The lady who might have become Queen of Italy was the Princess Mary of Cambridge. The negotiations were broken off because the young Princess would not hear of any marriage which would have required her living out of England.
The Congress which met in Paris in February 1856 for the conclusion of the peace between the Allies and Russia was to have far more momentous results for Italy than for the countries more immediately concerned in its discussions, but, contrary to the general impression, it does not appear that these results were anticipated by Cavour. He even said that it was idle for Sardinia to send delegates to a congress in which they would be treated like children. Cavour feared, perhaps, to lose the ground he had gained in the previous year with Napoleon III., when the Emperor's rather surprising question: 'Que peut-on faire pour l'Italie?' had suggested to the Piedmontese statesman that definite scheme of a French alliance, which henceforth he never let go. In any case, when D'Azeglio, who was appointed Sardinian representative, refused at the last moment to undertake a charge for which he knew he was not fitted, it was only at the urgent request of the King that Cavour consented to take his place. When once in Paris, however, he [ [Pg.206] warmed to the work, finding an unexpectedly strong ally in Lord Clarendon. He won what was considered in all Europe a great diplomatic triumph, by getting a special sitting assigned to the examination of Italian affairs, which had as little to do with the natural work of the Congress as the affairs of China. The chief points discussed at the secret sitting of the 8th of April were the foreign occupations in Central Italy, and the state of the Roman and Neapolitian governments, which was stigmatised by Lord Clarendon in terms much more severe than Cavour himself thought it prudent to use. Count Buol, the chief Austrian representative, grew very angry, and his opposition was successful in reducing the sitting to a mere conversation; but what had been said had been said, and Cavour prepared the way for his future policy by remarking to everyone: 'You see that diplomacy can do nothing for us; the question needs another solution.' Lord Clarendon's vigorous support made him think for a moment that England might take an active part in that other solution, and with this idea in his mind he hurried over the Channel to see Lord Palmerston, but he left England convinced that nothing more than moral assistance was ever to be expected from that quarter. The Marquis Emmanuel d'Azeglio, who for many years represented Sardinia, and afterwards Italy, at the Court of St James, has placed it on record that the English Premier repeatedly assured him that an armed intervention on behalf of Italian freedom would have been much to his taste, but that the country would not have been with him. It is certain that Cavour would have preferred an English to a French alliance; as it was not to be had, he reposed his sole hopes in the Emperor Napoleon, who had not the French people [ [Pg.207] really more with him in this matter than Lord Palmerston had the English—nay, he had them less with him, for in England there would have been a party of Italian sympathisers favourable to the war, and in France, there was no one except Prince Napoleon and the workmen of Paris. But the French Emperor was a despotic sovereign, and not the Prime Minister of a self-governing country. After all, some good may come out of despotism.
Upon Cavour's return to Turin, he received not only the approval of the King and Parliament, but also congratulations from all parts of Italy. His position had gained immensely in strength, both at home and abroad. Yet the power of the Clerical party in Piedmont was still such that, in the elections of 1857—the first that had taken place since the legislation affecting the Church—they obtained seventy seats out of a total of two hundred. Cavour did not conceal his alarm. What if eight years' labour were thrown away, and the movement of the State turned backward? 'Never,' he said, 'would he advise a coup d'état, nor would his master resort to one; but if the King abdicated, what then?' Victor Emmanuel said to his Prime Minister: 'Let us do our duty; stand firm, and we shall see!' He often declared that, sooner than beat a retreat from the path he had entered on, he would go to America and become plain Monsù Savoia; but he never lost faith in the predominating patriotism and good sense of his subjects; and at this time, as at others, he proved to be right. The crisis was surmounted. On the one hand, some elections were invalidated where the priests had exercised undue influence; and, on the other, Rattazzi, who was especially obnoxious to the Clerical party, retired from office. Cavour thus found himself still able to command the Chamber.