That evening, the terms of the armistice were communicated to the Chamber. As was natural, they evoked the wildest indignation, a part of which fell undeservedly on the King. Twenty thousand Austrians were [Pg.170] to occupy the district between the Po, Sesia and Ticino and half the citadel of Alessandria. The excitement rose to its height when it was announced that the Sardinian Fleet must be recalled from Venetian waters, depriving that struggling city of the last visible sign of support from without. The Chamber sent a deputation to the King, who succeeded in persuading its members that, hard though the terms were, there was no avoiding their acceptance, and that the original stipulations were harder still.
On the 29th, Victor Emmanuel took the oath to observe the Statute, to exercise the royal authority only in virtue of the laws, to cause justice to be fairly and fearlessly administered, and to conduct himself in all things with the sole view to the interest, honour and prosperity of the nation.
A trifling accident occurred which might have been far from trifling; one of the ornaments of the ceiling of the Palazzo Madama, where the Parliament assembled, fell close to the King. As it was of great weight, it would have killed anyone on whom it had fallen. 'Never mind that,' said the King in Piedmontese dialect to Colonel Menabrea, who was near him, 'it will not be the last!'
The ministry which held office under the late King resigned; a new one was formed, in which General Delaunay was President of the Council, and Gioberti minister without a portfolio. The King was advised to dissolve the Chamber, which had been elected as a war parliament, and was ill-constituted to perform the work now required. General La Marmora had orders to quell the insurrection at Genoa, the motive of which was not nominally a change of government, but the continuance of the war at all costs. Its deeper cause lay in the old [Pg.171] irreconcilability of republican Genoa with her Piedmontese masters, breaking out now afresh under the strain of patriotic disappointment. Like the 15th of May at Naples, the Genoese revolution was a folly which can hardly be otherwise described than as a crime; it happened, however, that in Piedmont there was a King who had not the slightest intention of turning it into an excuse for a royal hark-back. Austria and France offered Victor Emmanuel their arms to put down the revolution, but, declining the not exactly disinterested attention, he made a wise choice in La Marmora, who accomplished the ungrateful task with expedition and humanity. An amnesty was granted to all but a very few participators in the revolt. On the brief black list when it was submitted to the King was the name of the Marquis Lorenzo Pareto, who at one time had held the Foreign Office under Charles Albert. As Colonel of the Genoese National Guard, his responsibility in joining the insurrection was judged to be particularly heavy; but the King refused to confirm his exclusion from the amnesty. 'I would not have it said,' he objected, 'that I was harsh to one of my father's old ministers.'
The conception of Victor Emmanuel as a bluff, easy-going monarch is mistaken. Very few princes have had a keener sense of the royal dignity, or a more deeply-rooted family pride, or, when he thought fit to resort to it, a more decisive method of preventing people from taking liberties with him. But he knew that, in nearly all cases, pardon is the best of a king's prerogatives.
An instance to the point happened when he came to the throne. Two officers of the royal household had caused him annoyance while he was Duke of Savoy by telling tales of his unconventionality to his easily-scandalised father. To them, perhaps, he owed the condign [Pg.172] punishment he had undergone for the famous promenade under the Porticoes. At anyrate, they had procured for the Duke many bad quarters-of-an-hour, but the King, when he became King, chose to be completely oblivious of their conduct, and they remained undisturbed at their posts. To those who pointed to King Leopold of the Belgians, or to any other foreign example of a loyal sovereign who understood the needs of his people as a model for Victor Emmanuel to imitate, he was in the habit of replying: 'I remember the history of my fathers, and it is enough.'
'The Persians,' says the Greek historian, 'taught their children to ride and to speak the truth.' In a land that had seen as much of enthroned effeminacy and mendacity as Italy had seen, a prince fond of manly exercise and observant of his word was more valuable than a heaven-sent genius, and more welcome than a calendar saint. Piedmont only could give such a prince to Italy. Its kings were not Spaniards who, by way of improvement, became lazzaroni, nor were they Austrians condemned by a fatal law to revert to their original type; they were children of the ice and snow, the fellow-countrymen of their subjects. All their traditions told of obstinacy and hardihood. They brought their useful if scarcely amiable moral qualities from Maurienne in the eleventh century. The second Count of Savoy, known as Amadeus with the Tail, son of Humbert of the White Hands, founder of the House, went to the Holy Roman Emperor with such a body of retainers that the guards refused them entrance to the Council Chamber. 'Either I shall go in with my Tail or not at all,' said Humbert, and with his Tail he went in. This was the metal of the race. Even at the time when they were vassals of the Empire, they expected to dictate rather than to obey. They studiously married into all the great royal houses of Europe. [Pg.173] Though they persecuted their Vaudois subjects, who were only in 1848 rewarded by emancipation for centuries of unmerited sufferings and splendid fidelity, yet the Princes of Savoy had from the first, from the White-Handed Humbert himself, held their heads high in all transactions with the Holy See, between which and them there was an ever-returning antagonism. Not to the early part of the nineteenth century, when the rebound from revolutionary chaos did not suffice to denationalise the Kings of Sardinia, but sufficed to ally them with reaction, ought we to turn if we would seize the true bearings of the development of the Counts of Maurienne into Kings of Italy. At that moment the mission of Piedmont, though not lost, was obscured. What has rather to be contemplated is the historic tendency, viewed as a whole, of both reigning house and people. No one has pointed out that tendency more clearly than the anonymous author of a pamphlet entitled Le Testament politique du Chevalier Walpole (published at Amsterdam in 1769), who was able to draw the horoscope of the House of Savoy with a correctness which seems almost startling. He was not helped by either sympathy or poetic imagination, but simply by political logic. Sardinia, he said, was the best governed state in Europe. Instead of yielding to the indolent apathy in which other reigning families were sunk, its princes sought to improve its laws and develop its resources according to the wants of the population and the exigences of the climate. Finance, police, the administration of justice, military discipline, presented the picture of order. From the nature of the situation, a King of Sardinia must be ambitious, and to satisfy his ambition he had only to bide his time. Placed between two great Powers he could choose for his ally whichever would give him the most, and by playing this mute rôle, it was impossible that he would not [Pg.174] hereafter be called upon to play one of the most important parts in Europe. Italy was the oyster disputed by Austria and France; might it not happen that the King of Sardinia, becoming judge and party, would devour the oyster and leave the shells to the rival aspirants? It was unlikely, added this far-seeing observer, that the Italian populations should have got so innured to their chains as to prefer the harsh, vexatious government of Austria to the happy lot which Sardinian domination would secure to them, but even if they had become demoralised to this extent, they could not resist the providential advance of a temperate, robust and warlike nation like Piedmont, led by a prince as enlightened as the King (Charles Emmanuel) who then reigned over it.
The metaphor of the oyster recalls another, that of Italy being an artichoke which the House of Savoy was to devour, a leaf at a time. Whether or not a Duke of Savoy really invented this often-quoted comparison, it is certain that power was what the rulers of Piedmont cared for. They were no more a race of scholars and art patrons than their people was a people of artists and poets. There is a story to the effect that one Duke of Savoy could never make out what poetry was, except that it was written in half lines, which caused a great waste of paper. The only poet born in Piedmont found the country unlivable. Recent research among the archives at Turin revealed facts which were thought to be not creditable to certain princely persons, and a gleaning was therefore made of documents to which the historical student will no longer have access. The step was ill advised; what can documents tell us on the subject that we do not know? Did anyone suppose that the Savoy princes were commonly saints? Sainthood has been the privilege of the women of the family, and they have kept it [ [Pg.175] mostly to themselves. But peccable and rough though the members of this royal house may have been, very few of them were without the governing faculty. 'C'est bien le souverain le plus fin que j'ai connu en Europe,' said Thiers of Victor Emmanuel, whose acquaintance he made in 1870, and in whom he found an able politician instead of the common soldier he had expected. The remark might be extended back to all the race. They understood the business of kings. A word not unlike the 'Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento' of Virgil was breathed over the cradle at Maurienne. If it did not send forth sons to rule the world, its children were, at least, to be enthroned in the capital of the Cæsars, and to make Italy one for the first time since Augustus.
From April to August 1849, the peace negotiations dragged on. The pretensions of Austria were still exorbitant, and she resisted the demand which Piedmont, weak and reduced though she was, did not fear to make, that she should amnesty her Italian subjects who had taken part in the revolution. Unequal to cope with the difficulties of the situation, the Delaunay ministry fell, and Massimo d'Azeglio was appointed President of the Council. This was a good augury for Piedmont; D'Azeglio's patriotism had received a seal in the wound which he carried away from the defence of Vicenza. Honour was safe in his hands, whatever were the sacrifices to which he might be obliged to consent.
Some pressure having been put on Austria by France and England, she agreed in July to evacuate Alessandria, and to reduce the war indemnity from 230,000,000 francs to 75,000,000, which Piedmont undertook to pay, onerous though the charge was in her deplorable financial condition. But the amnesty question was the last to be [Pg.176] settled, and in this Piedmont stood alone. France and England gave her no support; The other powers were against her. The Piedmontese special envoy at Milan, Count Pralormo, wrote to Prince Schwarzenberg on the 2nd of July that his Government could not give up this point. It was a conscientious duty so universally and strongly felt, that they were readier to submit to the consequences, whatever they might be, than to dishonour themselves by renouncing it. In other words, they were ready to face a new war, abandoned to their fate by all Europe, to undergo a new invasion, which meant the utter destruction of their country, rather than leave their Lombard and Venetian fellow-countrymen to the revenge of Austria. Count Pralormo added that he was speaking not only in the name of the ministry, but of the King and the whole nation. The risk was no imaginary one; there were many in Austria who desired an excuse for crushing the life out of the small state which was the eternal thorn in the side of that great Empire. Few remember now the sufferings of Piedmont for Italy, or the perils, only too real, which she braved again and again, not from selfish motives—for the Piedmontese of the old, narrow school, who said that their orderly little country had nothing to gain from being merged in a state of 25,000,000 were by no means in error—but from genuine Italian fellow-feeling for their less happy compatriots beyond their confines.