One thing is certain: that, of the Neapolitan Loyalists, the Cardinal alone was for the carrying out of the arrangements with the rebels which had been interrupted by the arrival of our fleet. What the Admiral urged, that Buonaparte would have considered such a treaty abrogated by the arrival of an overwhelming force, is beyond dispute. It is also beyond dispute that the Cardinal had not a man of his own army with him in this matter. Only he, and the commander of some Russian forces, who was none too anxious to play into the hands of the British, and Captain Foote, who had been cajoled into giving his signature to that of which he did not approve, stood for the treaty.
The next morning the Cardinal came on board himself, and was received with proper ceremony and a salute of thirteen guns. The interview, at which Sir William and My Lady were present to interpret, lasted for hours; and I have it from the Journal, which we have found so correct wherever we had the opportunity of testing it by our own private knowledge, that “... the Cardinal and myself have begun our career by a complete difference of opinion. He will send the rebels to Toulon. I say they shall not go.” “We came very near high words,” writes the Admiral. “I used every argument in my power to convince him that the treaty and armistice was at an end by the arrival of the fleet; and this the Cardinal had come with the determination not to see.”
The Cardinal went as he came. “On the 27th,” says the Journal, “the rebels came out of the castles as they ought, and as, I hope, all those who are false to their King and their country will, to be hanged, or otherwise disposed of, as their Sovereign thought proper.”
They were placed in transports and brought under the sterns of the men-of-war, where we could see the leaders—as they were discovered by information—having irons put on them to be brought for safe custody to one of the men-of-war. They were embarked altogether in fourteen polacres, a kind of craft much used on the Italian coast.
In the matter of the capitulation the rebels clearly protracted the negotiation for twenty-one days with the idea that the French fleet would arrive and ipso facto cancel the treaty. This provision was perfectly natural, for unless the English fleet arrived, Captain Foote, with his weak squadron, and the Cardinal, with his rough levies, had hardly the means of reducing such strong places as the Citadel and the Castles. Therefore, unless the English fleet arrived, Captain Foote did well enough in getting such strong places on terms. When the English fleet did arrive, I have no doubt that what did actually happen was what both French and rebels expected to happen. And if it had not happened, they would have laughed at the simplicity of the English in feeling bound by an arrangement which no French commander would have entertained under the circumstances. And neither Captain Foote nor the Cardinal had any more power to conclude a treaty than a serjeant commanding a picket of a regiment would have to make arrangements binding on his Colonel. Moreover, as the capitulation was not to take effect until the forts were evacuated, and evacuation of the forts had not commenced when the Admiral proclaimed the treaty at an end, it never came into effect at all.
The same day the Admiral landed thirteen hundred men from his own ships and those of Her Most Faithful Majesty to besiege the French in St. Elmo, giving the command to Captain Troubridge, and appointing second in command Captain Ball of His Majesty’s ship Alexander, the same that had had the command at Malta. With them went Will, of which going I shall have much to say anon; but here I shall go a little out of the order to describe an event which has had far more importance conferred on it than it deserved, by a malignant Opposition having made it their dagger to stab our great and good Admiral in the back. I refer of course to the affair of Prince Caracciolo.
It was not more than nine o’clock on the morning of the 29th, when a barca full of villainous-looking Calabrians—“the Christian Army” they were called—pulled alongside. In their midst was a short, thickset man, with his hands bound behind him, in such rags, so emaciated, so smothered in dirt, with his hair and beard so clotted, that I did not at first recognise our old enemy of the Trattoria at Resina.
These Christian Calabrians had found him hidden in a cave. He had been one of the chief in authority in the Castle of Uovo, until it became certain that the English fleet was approaching and not the French, whereupon he fled incontinently, knowing that our Admiral, though he was in every other respect the most kind-hearted of men, had only one recipe for mutineers—the yard-arm. But he had reckoned without his host in thinking to get away. The Calabrians, led by innumerable local chiefs, had really fought very well in their advance up the Peninsula, though it is true that they had not met many “regulars”; and now that the approach of our fleet had paralysed the enemy, they were engaged on a duty for which their training thoroughly fitted them—the hunting-out of fugitives skulking in the mountains, which is the whole history of brigandage.
As soon as Captain Hardy was informed who the prisoner was, he was at once released from his bonds and conducted to an officer’s cabin, where he was given every means of freshening his appearance, and had a proper meal, of which he seemed in great want, placed before him. But of this he refused to partake, showing a spirit in his last hours which might have saved him and brought him great honour if he had shown only a part of it at the beginning.
The Admiral at once issued the following order to Count Thurn, Commodore and Commander of His Sicilian Majesty’s frigate Minerva:—