In Piedmont the king, loyally welcomed home, put back everything to the position in which it was before the disturbances; the old dispossessed nobles were restored to their places in the civil and military service, and the carrière ouverte aux talents was closed. In Lombardy and Venice Austrian officials held a tight rein, and a watchful secret service (sbirri) prowled about ready to pounce on plotting youth like owls upon field mice. In Parma and Modena the eye of the Austrian government was always peering and peeping. In Tuscany Austrian influence also was dominant; but the Grand Duke was a gentle, kindly, paternal person, and his subjects were placidly content, for the old Tuscan fire had died out, and no Tuscan was so crazy as to dream of revolution or of a united Italy. In the Papal States the reaction was complete; the Inquisition was restored, the Jesuits recalled, the civil service limited to priests. But in Naples the reaction was worst. The despicable Ferdinand, who dropped his number IV of Naples to become Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies, restored the old régime, and swept away the autonomy of Sicily, which had had a separate parliament for hundreds of years, and since 1812 a constitution also. Ferdinand humbly followed every hint from Austria. The will of Austria was supreme from Venice to Naples, and behind Austria was the conservative judgment of the ruling classes of all Europe, still frightened by the Revolution. European nobles and landowners agreed that the riotous desires of the middle class and proletariat for political privileges must be crushed down.
CHAPTER XXXV
THE REAWAKENING (1820-1821)
Outwardly despotism had been triumphantly reëstablished, and Popes, princes, and privileged persons in general made a gallant attempt to pretend that the French Revolution and the Napoleonic upheaval had never taken place. Nevertheless, the quiet on the surface did not extend underneath. Inwardly the new ideas and aspirations were fermenting from Piedmont to Calabria. The Carbonari (Charcoal-burners), a secret society organized against despotism, plotted for freedom and for constitutions. Their members were thickest in the Kingdom of Naples, but spread throughout Italy. The spark necessary to set ablaze this hidden discontent came from Spain. There a successful rebellion obtained a constitution. The thrill stirred Naples. A company of soldiers under two young lieutenants rebelled (1820), many joined them, a general put himself at their head. The army would not fight them. The insurgents demanded a constitution, with a parliament, a free press, trials according to law, etc. The dastardly king was frightened into promises, but as the insurgents were not content with promises, he granted a constitution, and solemnly swore to maintain it. These revolutionary tumults, however, had alarmed the comfortable, conservative ruling classes and their leaders, the Emperors of Austria, Prussia, and Russia. An Imperial conference was held at Laybach (1821), and Ferdinand attended. The new constitution, indeed, forbade him to leave the kingdom without permission from parliament, but he had obtained leave by promising to argue in favour of the new régime. Whatever his arguments were the Holy Alliance disregarded them, and charged Austria with the duty of restoring despotism in Naples. Austria obeyed. An overpowering army easily scattered the Neapolitan constitutionalists and put Ferdinand back. The constitution, parliament, free press, and all the other obnoxious revolutionary institutions were brushed away, and Ferdinand, having hung up in church a lamp of gold and silver as an offset to his perjury, inflicted punishment on the late rebels as fast as he could.
Meanwhile the North had felt the thrill. In Lombardy the hawk-eyed government pounced down on possible conspirators. Silvio Pellico, the pathetic author of "Le Mie Prigioni" (My Prisons), and his friend Maroncelli, were arrested and put into prison (1820), there to stay for ten years. A little later Confalonieri, head of the Milanese nobility, and a group of gentlemen were seized and sent to prison. They were set free only in 1836, on the accession of a new Emperor. Some of them, Castillia, Foresti, and Albinola, then sought refuge in the United States. I quote from the unpublished diary of an American to show what kind of men these conspirators were: "Castillia is an Italian, of an honourable Milanese family. At the age of twenty-three he, with other noble and brave Italians, lovers of their country, was thrown into the dungeons of Spielberg (Moravia) by Austrian despots, and there chained and confined, sometimes in total solitude, enduring the sharpest privations and basest ignominies for seventeen years. Then on the accession of a new Emperor they were released and exiled to America—they were men of superior intelligence and education, honourable gentlemen, true-hearted, loving men—Castillia possessed all the virtues that one can name and in their most attractive forms."
What these gentlemen suffered for love of their country may be read in "Le Mie Prigioni." Pellico himself was a Christian saint. After years of solitary confinement he and Maroncelli were put together. Maroncelli had a tumour on his leg, which grew so painful that whenever it was necessary to move Pellico helped him. "Sometimes to make the slightest shift from one position to another cost a quarter of an hour of agony." The wound was frightful and disgusting. I quote from Pellico: "In that deplorable condition Maroncelli composed poetry, he sang and talked, and did everything to deceive me and hide from me a part of his pain. He could not digest, or sleep; he grew alarmingly thin, and often went out of his head; and yet, in a few minutes gathered himself together and cheered me up. What he suffered for nine months is indescribable. Amputation was necessary; but first the surgeon had to get permission from Vienna. Maroncelli uttered no cry at the operation, and when he saw the leg carried off said to the surgeon, 'You have liberated me from an enemy, and I have no way to thank you.' By the window stood a tumbler with a rose in it. 'Please give me that rose,' he said to me. I handed it to him, and he gave it to the old surgeon, saying, 'I have nothing else to give you in testimony of my gratitude.' The surgeon took the rose and burst into tears." Such was the character of the men who plotted for the freedom of Italy.
The Papal States likewise had been quivering. Lord Byron was in Ravenna at the time. He enrolled in the Carbonari, and sent a thousand louis to the Neapolitan Constitutional Government with an offer to serve wherever and in whatever capacity they should desire. His letters and diary help us to understand the situation.
BYRON TO MURRAY, HIS PUBLISHER