“I am now collecting a squadron to blockade Toulon, where troops are embarked for Egypt. I had a right to expect that the Turks and Russians would have taken care of things east of Kandia. I could have seen to Corfu. Troubridge was actually under sail when I heard that the Russians were there. I have had the charge of the Two Sicilies entrusted to me, and things have come to that pitch that I do not know that the whole Royal Family, with three thousand Neapolitan emigrés, will not be under the protection of the King’s flag this night. Notwithstanding the squadron I am sending to Egypt, at least two sail of the line and four frigates should assemble at St. Jean d’Acre; for I know that is the place where Buonaparte has ordered part of his fleet to go to if any accident should happen to our squadron.
“Naples, December 18th.—There is an old saying that ‘when things are at the worst, they must mend.’ Now, the mind of man cannot fancy things worse than they are here. But, thank God, my health is better, my mind was never firmer, and my heart is in the right trim to comfort, relieve, and protect those who it is my duty to afford assistance to. Whilst I live I will support the glory of our Gracious Sovereign and that of our country, and if I fall it shall be in a manner worthy of them.
“Naples, December 19th.—General Fortiguerra came here yesterday, and said that he had been with the King, and was desired by the King to fit out all his Navy in the port, and requested that I would allow some of the Portuguese seamen to be lent, in order to fit them out, as they understood Italian, and I understood that he was to prepare for the King’s departure; and to the last my reply was, that I could receive no orders from any but the King, but that His Majesty had not a more faithful subject than myself in his dominions.
“Dec. 19th (later).—Have had sail-makers making cots for the Royal Family, and painters painting the ward-room and offices under the poop. Have been getting ready for sea, and in the night time getting off the valuable effects of Her Sicilian Majesty.
“I see no help for it but Palermo, and shall make my dispositions. Dear Emma, who has the heart of a lion and the instinct of an admiral, was in here just now (I have judged to make my quarters at the Embassy as usual: any personal risk is far outbalanced by the confidence it inspires), and sees nothing else for it. She knows the Neapolitans, and does not value them but for hole-and-corner defence. When it comes to artillery they are nowhere, and Championnet brings guns! What a woman! She has been laying her preparations for a week, or two weeks past, and whenever it is necessary we shall take the Royal Family and treasure, I hear to the extent of two millions and a half, without ado. It only remains to save the ships, which it is doubtful if the Neapolitan marine wishes to save from the French. Naples will look after itself: it has quite enough traitors in it to make peace with any enemy. With the Court faction (some three thousand, including foreigners) embarked, no one would be hurt if the lazzaroni could keep quiet. But they hate the French, and they have a turbulence and adventurousness of spirit which comes very near great bravery; though they are hardly brave, for in the open with fair play they would not stand. Small bodies of Frenchmen will be cut off until the lazzaroni have been slaughtered in sufficient numbers for a lesson, and if I know anything of the French the lesson will be a severe one.
“Dear Emma, in the midst of all this turmoil and labour—for it is the labour of Hercules to do so much and not appear to be doing—she contrives to be just as affectionate and thoughtful as when we landed three months ago and there was not a cloud upon the horizon. Whenever I am disengaged, she contrives to be with me: she has so great a fear of being inhospitable to one who on any reasoning must soon sail. I do not find myself so afraid of her now.... No! I was never afraid of Emma—I was afraid of myself. Needlessly, I think. I should have known that such a steady flame of friendship will not set fire or consume. She has been like a mother to Josiah, and she has been like a mother to me, though so much younger. She says that all sailors are children—God’s children: not meaning by this that they are godly, though the roughest sailor is by nature of his calling apt to keep some notion of a Deity in his heart; but because God keeps them in some respects in a state of childhood, being so much cut off from the world in which others are offered the fruit of the tree of knowledge. She says to me, ‘You are a great conqueror, and yet you are a child, and I must take care of you.’ She says that she was wrote to when I first came to Naples, to take care of me from the ladies, which indeed she has done; so that, though there are some very beautiful young women among the English residents as well as at the Court, I am not in the train of any of them, but have been a stay-at-home when there were not public ceremonies. I am not afraid of myself now,—I know the quality of her affection. And if sometimes she is carried away by enthusiasm, I know that it is but the homage of a generous heart to a wounded man—who has won a victory. And I take it in the spirit in which it is offered.”
Chapter XVIII.—How the Neapolitans declared War, and how they waged it.
SOME Roman remarked of something, Fuit, which means “it has been,” and that correctly described the Kingdom of Naples at the time of which I am writing. The Admiral was grievously disappointed; the mischief came of the fact, so I have heard him say, that none of the people principally responsible for the movement were natives of the kingdom with whose forces they were acting. This does not, as he remarked, signify so much when the war is being carried on with money and mercenaries; but when a kingdom has to rely on an army which is no army in a Great Power’s sense of the word, and has no money to pay it, the result is deplorable. For carrying out the operations in which the Admiral delighted, such as his celebrated movement inside the French line at our great battle—an advantage snatched by discipline and daring from the teeth of destruction—Neapolitans are worse than useless, for they are braggarts and traitors, as well as cowards, and therefore one makes a mistake in employing them. Qualities of enduring fatigue and hardship, and managing to subsist upon a minimum of food and money, they have in a high degree, as they afterwards showed when they had no army to speak of, and no general, and no campaign, but were a nation in arms resisting an invader whose presence was always marked by rapine. The persons principally responsible for the ill-starred campaign to extirpate the French from Papal territory were a pair of Austrians—the Queen and her fine general, Mack; and three English—the Admiral, my Lady, and Sir John Acton. The root of it all was the Queen, who was in reality the King of the Two Sicilies. She, as the physicians say, had diagnosed the evil correctly; and because her diagnosis agreed with the Admiral’s, he had thrown his great influence into the scale to impress her very sensible views upon the Emperor, who was her nephew and son-in-law.
The Admiral, who was almost as far-seeing in politics as he was in sea-strategy, had recognised that Buonaparte was France, and that the policy of Buonaparte was to swallow the weak nations in order to use their resources against the Great Powers. Undoubtedly he had his eye on Naples, and undoubtedly Naples had resources as well as a position which would render her a very dangerous tool in his capable hands. The Queen did not think so much about Naples being a tool in his hands as about the prior evil of losing her kingdom; but she had a presentiment of this; and, besides, she hated the French worse than hell for the murder of her beautiful, innocent sister, Marie Antoinette. She was a masterful woman, of not a little capacity, and saw as clearly as the Admiral that France was only biding a favourable opportunity to seize her kingdom. The Admiral also believed it suicidal for Naples to leave the declaration of war to the French; but he had at the outset more correct views as to entering upon the contest. Before our Battle of the Nile it would have removed our principal difficulties to have the freedom of the Sicilian ports and the co-operation of the Sicilian Navy. Not that their ships counted in the fighting line. In the Admiral’s opinion neither the Sicilians, nor the Venetians, nor the Portuguese—hardly even the Spanish—signified in an action between two fleets. But we were obliged to waste a good deal of time owing to their fear of supplying us, and their treaty with the French that only two or four of our ships should enter a Sicilian port at one time. And had we had frigates, which they could have supplied us, for spying out the movements of the enemy, we should never have missed the French on our first voyage to Alexandria, and should in consequence have destroyed their transports, and their army, and Buonaparte, as well as their fleet. His first view, therefore, was that the Two Sicilies should wage their quarrel with the French by forming a base for the British, the only one of the great Powers left uncrippled in the war with the all-devouring Republic. He was right, moreover, in judging that the only immediate danger to be apprehended from the presence of the French force in the Papal States was the spread of their pernicious doctrines, and the formation of a base for the insurrection of the numerous disaffected persons in the Two Sicilies. The only person who had the power of driving the French out of Italy was the Emperor, who feared retaliation by a blow nearer home.