Poerio was born at Naples in 1803. He afterwards became a lawyer, and for some time during the troubled reign of Ferdinand was, at least when at liberty, the leader of the “Left” in the Neapolitan Parliament. The term “a chequered life” might fairly be used as expressive of such a career; were it not that his undertakings, having all the same end in view, in which he was almost incessantly engaged, and the perpetual series of arrests and imprisonments which he suffered, imparted as it were, a melancholy uniformity to his career. In 1831 the crown of Italy was offered by the patriots of the Romagno to Ferdinand II. That monarch, probably feeling an innate disability to govern constitutionally, or otherwise than according to the dictates of his own will, a condition doubtless affixed to the tender, declined the proffered gift. What he might have done had he accepted, must remain in the realm of conjecture; his refusal to lend his aid to the settlement of the country’s deplorably unsettled state caused plot upon plot to spring up on all sides. The name Liberali was now first given to the opponents of the King. These were unceasing in preaching to the people, according to their light, the blessings of Constitutional Government. If their skill in politics, as may reasonably be supposed, was small, their honesty and love of country were large; and assuredly no form which they may have conceived, however crude, could have equalled in weakness and depravity the various petty tyrannies by which their country was distracted. Amongst these Liberali, the most active and beyond doubt the most able, was Carlo Poerio. It is worthy of remark that when, in 1847, Pius IX. had achieved his reputation as the first reformer of Italy, the only two men of note who disbelieved in him were Poerio and King Ferdinand II. After the breaking out of the Sicilian Revolution on the 12th of January, 1848, at the time he was a prisoner, Poerio’s fortunes took a more favourable turn. Freed from his bondage, he was made Prime Minister, and subsequently Minister of Public Instruction. His aspirations, however, were too modest to assume such dignity—his aim was to be no more than a simple Member of Parliament, and in two months he had retired from all official life. But his days of freedom were destined to be but of short duration. On the 19th of July, 1849, he was again arrested, and confined in the Castel dell’ Ovo, and from thence removed to the “Vicaria.” From this he was on the 1st of February, 1850, taken in chains to the Arsenal, and with Michele Pironti sent as a common convict to Nisida.
Were we to relate all the adventures of Poerio, interesting and important as they are, it would be properly considered an interpolation in our biography. A great and melancholy portion of the story is best told in his own words. He was asked, on his way to the dungeons, how he was, and he answered Fò questa cura di ferro da parecchi anni, e mi sento più forte (I have now been taking this iron remedy for several years, and feel much stronger). In a future chapter we shall have still more to say respecting this martyr of liberty; but let us pass to those later years of his life, when tardy success hardly requited such loving patriotism, and barely compensated for his great misfortunes. In 1859, when he came out of prison, he was elected member for Arezzo, but steadily refused to accept a place in the Cabinet, although much pressed by Cavour. He died on the 28th of April, 1867.
Luigi Settembrini, though standing many rungs of the political ladder lower than Poerio, was nevertheless a hardy and enthusiastic patriot. Mr. Gladstone wrote of him in his letters to Lord Aberdeen (hereafter to be mentioned) as one in a sphere by some degrees narrower, but with a character quite as pure and fair as Poerio’s. Settembrini was born at Naples, the 17th of April, 1813. His father was a lawyer, and, like his son, a patriot, and had fought for his country in the stirring days of 1820-1. Of Luigi’s private life we may say that he was a teacher of Italian literature and an eminent classical scholar. In 1848 he, together with Poerio, was tried on the trumped-up charge of being member of a secret society. This charge was further supported by a letter concocted by the police, so gross and palpable a forgery that the very judges in the case considered it more prudent to reject it as evidence. With Poerio and forty more he was capitally convicted. The sentence was not executed, yet he was reserved for a fate as hard—perpetual imprisonment upon a remote sea-girt rock.
Although Settembrini was in the above case most unjustifiably, nay, iniquitously, convicted, and barbarously punished, it is well known that he was, as a matter of fact, an ardent supporter of the society called “Giovine Italia,” an association which, had the sagacity of its directors been more, and the audacity of its purposes less, might have given some trouble to the then rulers of Italy. When the King of Naples, as has been said, charged Pius IX. with being at the head of Young Italy, he probably made use of the most scurrilous phrase, by way of accusation, which occurred to him. The “Giovine Italia,” however, was an established fact, albeit the association numbered not the Pope amongst its members, nor was it under the special protection of the Church. Tyranny has this superiority over luckless poverty that it renders those on whom it presses dangerous as well as ridiculous. This peculiar form of danger, the Secret Society, which tyranny calls into existence, is commonly less formidable to the powers against which it is organised than to the causes which it is intended to protect. Had the modest programme of the “Giovine Italia” been carried into execution, a despotism would have been created more unbearable than the yoke of Austria, the Vatican, and King Bomba united. The prime object of this society was to abolish all Princes then reigning in Italy—including, of course, the Pope—and not only to drive the Austrians out of the country, but the French from Corsica and the English from Malta. When these laudable ends had been accomplished, a great Military Republic was to be established under a supreme Dictator, residing at Rome, with ten consuls to govern the ten divisions into which the whole of Italy was to be parcelled out. Each province or division was to be under a colonel, its Municipal Government being administered by a captain. To each division, subject to the officers thereof, was to belong a treasurer, himself also a military man. In addition to these officers an order was to be instituted entitled “Apostoles,” whose duty it should be to act as dictatorial or consular agents, and to settle and arrange matters in general.
The regulations for the internal conduct of the Society show a certain skill of organization, coupled with a good deal of the childishness of bugbear solemnity usually appertaining to such associations. The following will serve as specimens of some of the more important of these regulations:—“No meetings of members to be allowed, and no conversation between members more than two in number at any one time. Oaths to be sworn on a skull and dagger. The Republican flag to be a white skull on a black field, and the motto Unità, Libertà, Indipendenza. The dress to be black, and the arms a musket and bayonet, with a side dagger. Drilling to form a principal and constant duty.”
Although a Secret Society of this description is a standing monument of folly and wickedness, yet it is hardly possible, considering the state of things in Italy at the time of which we write, not to feel some compassion and make some allowance for the conspirators of “Giovine Italia.” Their great idea—the Unity of Italy—had been set forth by Dante according to a poet’s conception. Macchiavelli had planned its execution as a statesman. The love of country was extended by the patriotic subject of the kingdom of the Two Sicilies to every comer of his native land. The dream—if dream it may be called—has found its accomplishment in reality within our own time, but happily not by the agency nor after the ideas and programme of “Young Italy.”
In the early part of 1851 Mr. Gladstone made his memorable visit to Naples; Si natura negat facit indignatio versum. The great statesman possessed a nature particularly averse to revolutionary sentiments or prejudices, and a more impartial judge betwixt King and People never existed. Shortly after his arrival he had “supped full of horrors,” and he longed to express his inward feelings on the palpable absence of justice in the actions of the Neapolitan Government, and the cruelties practised on the persons of hapless political offenders, many wrongfully condemned—cruelties of which he was an unwilling and shocked witness. His observations resulted in the two celebrated letters to Lord Aberdeen. The general character of the administration is well summed up in a pithy sentence quoted in the first, E la negazione di Dio eretta a sistema di governo. (This is the negation of God erected into a system of government.)
Mr. Gladstone, with his usual moderation and desire of accuracy, declines, in these letters, to decide, and shows himself willing to give Ferdinand the benefit of all doubt on the subject. He even records an instance of “a direct and unceremonious appeal to the King’s humanity, which met with a response on his part evidently sincere.” His account of the prisons of Naples inclines us to refer our readers to this correspondence rather than to transfer his description to our own pages. Suffice it to say, that he calls them “the extreme of filth and horror,” the Vicaria “that charnel-house,” in which, amongst other iniquities, even proper medical assistance was withheld from the sick prisoners.