Among the curious taxes levied at Brescia during the six months after its fall was one of £500 for 'the expenses of the hangman.' Count Martinengo escaped after the Austrians were in possession of the town through the courageous assistance given to him by a few young men of the working class. Camozzi's band of Bergamasques, which started for the relief of the sister city, was driven back with loss.
The end was come, but woe to the victors.
Following the Italian flag to where it still floated, we pass from Brescia in the dust to Rome still inviolate, though soon to be assailed by the bearers of another tricolor. A few days after Novara, [Pg.146] the Triumvirate issued a proclamation, in which they said: 'The Republic in Rome has to prove to Italy and to Europe that our work is eminently religious, a work of education and of morality; that the accusations of intolerance, anarchy and violent upturning of things are false; that, thanks to the republican principle, united as one family of good men under the eye of God, and following the impulse of those who are first among us in genius and virtue, we march to the attainment of true order, law and power united.' Englishmen who were in Rome at the time attest how well the pledge was kept. Peace and true freedom prevailed under the republican banner as no man remembered them to have prevailed before in Rome. The bitter provocation of the quadruple attack was not followed by revengeful acts on the parts of the government against those who were politically and religiously associated with him at whose bidding that attack was made. Nothing like a national party was terrorised or kept under by fear of violence. 'That at such a time,' writes Henry Lushington, who was not favourable to Mazzini, 'not one lawless or evil deed was done would have been rather a miracle than a merit, but on much concurrent testimony it is clear that the efforts of the government to preserve order were incessant, and to a remarkable degree successful.' He adds that the streets were far safer for ordinary passengers under the Triumvirs than under the Papacy.
Of great help in quieting the passions of the lower orders was the people's tribune, Ciceruacchio, who had not put on black cloth clothes, or asked for the ministry of war, or of fine arts, according to the usual wont of successful tribunes. Ciceruacchio had the sense of humour of the genuine Roman popolano, and it never came into his [Pg.147] head to make himself ridiculous. His influence had been first acquired by works of charity in the Tiber floods. Being a strong swimmer, he ventured where no one else would go, and had saved many lives. At first a wine-carrier, he made money by letting out conveyances and dealing in forage, but he gave away most of what he made. He opposed the whole force of his popularity to a war of classes. 'Viva chi c'ia e chi non c'ia quattrini!' [[4]] was his favourite cry. Once when a young poet read him a sonnet in his honour he stopped him at the line 'Thou art greater than all patricians,' saying that he would not have that published: 'I respect the nobility, and never dream of being higher than they. I am a poor man of the people, and such I will always remain.'
When the siege came, Ciceruacchio was invaluable in providing the troops with forage, horses, and even victuals, which he procured by making private sorties on his own account during the night; his intimate knowledge of every path enabling him to go unobserved. He planned the earthworks, at which he laboured with his hands, and when fighting was going on, he shouldered a musket and ran with his two sons, one of them a mere child, to wherever the noise of guns directed him. No picture of Rome in 1849 would be complete without the burly figure and jocund face of Angelo Brunetti.
The republican government found Rome with a mere shadow of an army; the efforts to create one had been too spasmodic to do anything but make confusion worse confounded by changes and experiments soon abandoned. Perseverance and intelligence now had a different result, and the little army, called into existence by the republic, proved admirable in discipline, various and fantastic as were its components.
[ [Pg.148] Towards the end of April, Garibaldi, who had been stationed at Rieti, was ordered to bring his legion to Rome. Those who witnessed the arrival saw one of the strangest scenes ever beheld in the Eternal City. The men wore pointed hats with black, waving plumes; thin and gaunt, their faces dark as copper, with naked legs, long beards and wild dark hair hanging down their backs, they looked like a company of Salvator Rosa's brigands. Beautiful as a statue amidst his extraordinary host rode the Chief, mounted on a white horse, which he sat like a centaur. 'He was quite a show, everyone stopping to look at him,' adds the sculptor Gibson, to whom these details are owed. 'Probably,' writes another Englishman, 'a human face so like a lion, and still retaining the humanity nearest the image of its Maker, was never seen.' Garibaldi wore the historic red shirt, and a small cap ornamented with gold.
The origin of the red shirt might have remained in poetic uncertainty had it not been mentioned a few years ago in a volume of reminiscences published by an English naval officer. The men employed in the Saladéros or great slaughtering and salting establishments for cattle in the Argentine provinces wore scarlet woollen shirts; owing to the blockade of Buenos Ayres, a merchant at Monte Video had a quantity of these on his hands, and as economy was a great object to the government, they bought the lot cheap for their Italian legion, little thinking that they were making the 'Camicia Rossa' immortal in song and story.
The coming to Rome of the 1200 legionaries aroused private fears in the hearts of the more timid inhabitants, but Garibaldi knew how to keep his wild followers in hand, and gallant was the service they rendered to Roman liberty.
[ [Pg.149] That liberty was now on the eve of its peril. The preliminaries of the French intervention in Rome are tolerably well known; here it suffices to say that every new contribution to a more precise knowledge of the facts only serves to confirm the charge of dissimulation, or, to use a plainer and far better adapted word, of dishonesty, brought against the French government for their part in the matter. White, indeed, do Austria, Spain and Naples appear—the avowed upholders of priestly despotism—beside the ruler of republican France and his ministers, whose plan it was not to fight the Roman republic: fighting was far from their counsels, but to betray it. It is proved that the restoration of the Temporal Power was the aim of the expedition from the first; it is equally proved that the French sought to get inside Rome by distinct disclaimers of any such intention. 'We do not go to Italy,' they said, 'to impose with our arms a system of government, but to assure the rights of liberty, and to preserve a legitimate interference in the affairs of the peninsula.' They adopted a curious method of assuring the rights of liberty.