Cavour was not re-elected when Parliament was dissolved in January 1849; he was therefore not in the Chamber during the debates which preceded and followed the last desperate throw of Novara. A letter written by him six days after the battle shows what he thought of those events. The Conservative party, he says, which represented the great majority in the country, had been badly supported by it (an assertion as true now as then). The king threw himself into the arms of demagogues who thought that freedom and independence were to be won by phrases and proclamations. The army had been disheartened, the best officers kept inactive; twelve months' sacrifices of men and money placed them in a worse condition than before the Milan revolution. Self-love might, he concluded, warp his judgment, but he had the intimate conviction that, if he had held the reins of power, he could have saved the country without any effort of genius, and planted the Italian flag on the Styrian Alps. But his friends joined with his foes to keep him out of power, and he had passed his time in deploring faults which it would have been very easy to avoid.
Remembering what Cavour afterwards accomplished, these are words which should not be set lightly aside. Yet it is possible that the complete disaster into which Charles Albert rushed at Novara was the only thing to save the country and to lay the foundations of Italian unity. The king was more eager for war than the most unthinking democrat. Reviled by all parties, he sought the great conciliator, death. "The Italians will never trust me," he exclaimed. "My son, Victor, will be king of Italy, not I." When the death he would have chosen was denied him, he went away, a crownless exile. He could do no more.
It was necessary, as Charles Albert had seen, that the king who was to carry out the destinies of Italy should be trusted. Victor Emmanuel came to the throne with few advantages; he was unpopular, his private friends were said to be reactionaries, his brusque manners offended most people. He had practically no advisers in these critical moments, but the moral courage with which he refused the Austrian offers of lenient terms if he would repudiate the Statute and his father's word, won for him the nation's trust, which he never lost. Cavour, with all his genius, could not have made the kingdom of Italy if the Italians had doubted their king.
CHAPTER IV
IN PARLIAMENT
The condition of Italy, Cavour said, was worse at the end of the year's struggle than at the beginning. Such was the case, if the present only were looked at. When Austria resumed her sway in Lombardy and Venetia she resumed it by the right of the conqueror, a more intelligible, and in a sense a more legitimate, right than that derived from bargains and treaties in which the population had no voice. The House of Hapsburg was saved in Italy by one loyal servant, Radetsky, and in Hungary by the Ban of Croatia and 200,000 Russians. Besides the regained supremacy in the Lombardo-Veneto, Austria was more predominant in the centre and south than in the palmiest days of the Holy Alliance. A keen observer might have held that she was too predominant to be safe. Talleyrand always said that if Italy were united under Austria she would escape from her, not sooner or later, but in a few years. There was not political unity, but there may almost be said to have been moral unity. Even in Rome, in spite of the French garrison, Austrian influence counted for much more than French. When Victor Emmanuel gave the premiership to Massimo d'Azeglio, Cavour remarked that he was glad of the appointment, and equally so that D'Azeglio had not asked him to be his colleague, because in the actual circumstances it seemed to him difficult or impossible to do any good. D'Azeglio could not have offered Cavour a portfolio without undoing the effect of his own appointment, by which confidence in Victor Emmanuel was confirmed. The king was not sufficiently known for it to be wise to place beside him an unpopular man, a suspected codino, the nickname ("pig-tail") given to reactionaries. D'Azeglio, who was really prepared to go far less far than Cavour, was almost loved even by his political enemies, a wonderful phenomenon in Italy. His patriotism had been lately sealed by the severe wound he received at Vicenza. To rigid principles he added attractive and chivalric manners, which smoothed his relations with the young king, who, if brusque himself, did not like brusqueness in others.
Cavour retired, as became his wont, to enjoy the sweetness of rural leisure at Leri: for him the sovereign remedy to political disquietude. The well-cultivated fields, the rich grass lands, in the contemplation of which he took a peaceful but lively satisfaction, restored as usual his mental equilibrium, and brought back the hopefulness of his naturally sanguine temperament. Before long he was exhorting his friends to be of good cheer; while liberty existed in a single corner of the peninsula there was no need to despair; if Piedmont kept her institutions free from despotism and anarchy, these would be the means of working efficaciously for the regeneration of the country. To those who went to see him he said, rubbing his hands (a sure sign that he was regaining his spirits), "We shall begin again, and, profiting by past mistakes, we shall do better next time." Probably he foresaw that "next time" he would have the game in his own hands.
The king had done his part by proving his resolve to uphold the constitution, but all danger for liberty in Piedmont did not cease there. The members of the party which had ruled during the earlier years of Charles Albert's reign did not give themselves up for lost. They cherished the hope of using the constitution to overturn liberty. On the face of things, the moral to be drawn from recent history was for and not against them. They could say that the only patent consequence of the change of system was that the country had been plunged in disaster, that blood and money had been wasted with no other effect than a bankrupt exchequer, a beaten army, trade at a standstill, misery stalking through the land. This party, which was by no means weak, could reckon on the compact support of Savoy, where Italian patriotism was as scarce as true and chivalric attachment to the royal house was abundant. Above all, it had the support of the whole power of the Church, which, through its corporations and religious orders and its army of priests, exercised an influence in Piedmont unparalleled in Austria or in Spain. If the liberal institutions of the country were to be preserved, it was necessary to strike a blow at this party by weakening the arch on which it reposed. Religious toleration had been proclaimed in Piedmont as one of the first reforms, the concession having been obtained from Charles Albert by the Marquis Robert d'Azeglio, a conservative and a profoundly convinced Catholic, but a lover of justice and mercy, who esteemed it the happiest day of his life when, through his interposition, the faithful Vaudois were granted the rights of free citizens. But legislation had not yet touched the extraordinary privileges arrogated to itself by the Church. One of these, the Foro ecclesiastico, a special court for the judgment of ecclesiastical offenders against the common law, it was now proposed to abolish. It was a test measure—like throwing down the gauntlet. Cavour had been re-elected when the king dissolved Parliament by what is known as the Proclamation of Moncalieri, and in the debates on the Foro ecclesiastico for the first time he made his power felt in the Chamber. He spoke as one who had long thought out the subject and had chosen his policy: "Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, and to God the things which are God's."
At this first stage in the long struggle the Roman curia might have settled the matter in a friendly way, but it would not. Cardinal Antonelli replied to a respectful invitation, that "the Holy Father was ready to go to the ante-chamber of the devil's house to please the king of Sardinia, but he really could not go inside." Yet, at the same date, the Archbishop of Paris (Sibour) admitted to a Piedmontese visitor that the Sardinian Government had no option under the new institutions but to establish the equality of all citizens before the law, and in Austria they were laughing at the progressive monarchy in its laborious efforts to obtain reforms carried out in the despotic empire by Joseph II. The reason that Rome refused to treat was that she thought herself strong and Sardinia weak. Writers on this period have too readily assumed that the Church, by the law of its being, must always cry "no compromise!" Of course nothing can be more erroneous. The Church has yielded as many times as it thought itself obliged to yield. What other inference can be deduced from the strange and romantic story of the suppression of the Jesuits? and, to cite only one more instance, from the deposition of bishops for extra-canonical reasons conceded by Pius VII. to the First Consul? The curia thought that Victor Emmanuel would end at Canossa, but he ended instead in the Pantheon. It should be remembered, however, that the quarrel had nothing then to do with the dispute between pope and king on the broader grounds of the possession of Rome. That dispute was still in the darkness of the future. Sardinia had not given even moral support to the Roman Republic.
In Cavour's able speech of March 7, 1850, he observed that his friends, the Liberal Conservatives, feared the erection of the priesthood into a party hostile to the State. Peace was precious, but too heavy sacrifices might be made even to it. He himself trusted that in the long run the priesthood would recognise the necessity to modern society of the union of the two great moral forces, religion and liberty. Europe was threatened with universal revolution; only large and courageous reforms could stem the tide. M. Guizot might have saved the throne of Louis Philippe had he yielded to the demand for electoral reform. Why had there been no revolution in England? Because the Duke of Wellington in 1829, Lord Grey in 1832, and Sir Robert Peel in 1846, understood the exigencies of their epoch, proving themselves thereby to be the first statesmen of the time. Uninfluenced by the furious attacks on him as an Anglomane, Cavour took the first opportunity of reaffirming from his seat in Parliament the admiration for English methods which he had constantly expressed outside. He closed his speech by appealing to Government to persevere in its policy of large and fearless reforms, which, far from weakening the constitutional throne, would so strengthen its roots that not only would Piedmont be enabled to resist the revolutionary storm should it break around its borders, but also "gathering to itself all the living forces in Italy, it would be in a position to lead our mother-country to those high destinies whereunto she is called."