With this verdict the present writer is in complete accord. Nelson is to be censured for his moral breach and any neglect of duty which may be traceable to it, but to condemn him to infamy is to forget his subsequent career and to consign to the flames many other great figures of history.
CHAPTER XI
The Neapolitan Rebels and their French Allies
(1799)
“Speedy rewards and quick punishments are the foundation of good government.”
Nelson.
In the middle of March 1799 Troubridge returned from the Levant, his command there having been given to Sir Sidney Smith. Vexatious as was the arrangement to both Nelson and Lord St Vincent, it had one point of importance in its favour—and was to have far-reaching results later—in that it enabled the Admiral to send the trusted captain with several vessels to blockade Naples. Troubridge was to “seize and get possession” of the islands of Procida, Ischia, and Capri, to use his influence with the inhabitants there and elsewhere, “in order to induce them to return to their allegiance to his Sicilian Majesty, and to take arms to liberate their Country from French tyranny and oppressive contributions.” On the 3rd April, Troubridge was able to tell Nelson that “All the Ponza Islands have the Neapolitan flag flying. Your Lordship never beheld such loyalty; the people are perfectly mad with joy, and are asking for their beloved Monarch.” That Nelson’s hands were “full,” as he wrote to his brother, is sufficiently evident. He had become “a Councillor and Secretary of State,” to use his own words, and his public correspondence, “besides the business of sixteen Sail of the Line, and all our commerce, is with Petersburg, Constantinople, the Consul at Smyrna, Egypt, the Turkish and Russian Admirals, Trieste, Vienna, Tuscany, Minorca, Earl St Vincent and Lord Spencer.” Moreover, he was now Commander-in-Chief of the Neapolitan Navy, and had been promoted to Rear-Admiral of the Red. His health during this trying period was far from good. He complained to his friend the Duke of Clarence of being “seriously unwell,” and he told Lord St Vincent, “I am almost blind and worn out, and cannot, in my present state, hold out much longer.” He seemed to be growing more despondent daily, the good news of the success of the Austrian arms in Italy “does not even cheer me.”
Victory no longer attended the French cause in the northern part of the peninsula, and the forces of the Republic were to evacuate it and to join the main French army. On the 7th May, Ferdinand’s kingdom was relieved of its unwelcome visitors, save only the garrisons which were left at Capua and Caserta, and at the Castle of St Elmo. The internal condition of the State, however, was still far from settled. Commodore Caracciolo, representing the Jacobins, commanded a miniature fleet in Naples Bay; Cardinal Ruffo led a nondescript band called by the high-sounding title of “the Christian Army,” against the Neapolitan republicans, who were in some force. The unhappy position of the Royal Family at this time is well described by the Queen in a letter to the Marquise d’Osmond, mother of the Comtesse de Boigne. It is from the Appendix to the first volume of the “Recollections” of the last-named that the extract is taken. The communication is dated from Palermo, the 2nd May 1799.
“We continue to live between hope and dread:” she says, “the news varies every day. We are expecting help from Russia: if it comes it will be of the greatest service to us. The English render us the greatest services. Were it not for them both Sicilies would be democratised, I should be dead of grief or drowned in the sea, or else, with my dear family, imprisoned in a castle by our rebellious subjects. You can read in the gazettes, without my naming them to you, how many ungrateful subjects we have. It suffices to tell you that in their writings and their ingratitude they have surpassed their foster-mother France, but with us the classes are different. Here it is the class which has the most to lose which is the most violent; nobles, bishops, monks, ordinary lawyers, but not the high magistracy, nor the people. The latter are loyal, and show it on every occasion.... My dear children have behaved like angels in all our unfortunate circumstances. They suffer every kind of privation they did not know before, without complaining, out of love for me, so that I may notice nothing. They are always good-humoured, though they have no amusements.”
While Troubridge was clearing the way for the return of the royal exiles to Naples, Nelson received the startling intelligence that the Brest fleet of nineteen sail-of-the-line had not only escaped but had been seen off Oporto making for the Mediterranean. So far as it went, the news was correct enough, but the French ships numbered twenty-five instead of nineteen. Nelson’s despondency and ill-health vanished; he lost not an instant in making his arrangements. Troubridge was recalled from Naples, and the “band of brothers” were ordered to join Rear-Admiral Duckworth off Port Mahon, Nelson’s belief being that the first item on the French naval programme was the recovery of Minorca. Shortly afterwards he came to think that Sicily was the object of the enemy, whereupon he cancelled his former instructions and made the island of Maritimo the rendez-vous. This station he reached on the 23rd May with seven ships, which he hoped to bring up to sixteen, Duckworth having decided to wait for Lord St Vincent and not to reinforce Nelson. Ball, who had been ordered to abandon the blockade of Malta, had not arrived, and the delay filled the Admiral with anxiety. “I can only have two queries about him—either that he has gone round to Messina, imagining that the French Fleet were close to him, or he is taken. Thus situated,” he writes to Lord St Vincent, “I have only to remain on the north side of Maritimo, to keep covering Palermo, which shall be protected to the last, and to wait intelligence or orders for regulating my further proceedings.