An incident of a darker nature occurred soon after, which cast a gloom over every heart, and made one remember that more than mere threats and passing alarms are connected with martial law and its inexorable rigour. The prohibition against possessing or secreting any species of weapon, necessarily issued by the Austrians on first entering the country, was still in activity, and the penalty for transgressing it was death. It entered into the heart of a reckless, abandoned woman, the wife of a poor, honest, elderly artisan, to have recourse to this enactment to rid herself of her husband, and make way for a younger and more attractive suitor. Unknown to him, she had in her possession a sword belonging to his son by a former marriage, a youth who had served in the Guardia Civica, but was then absent from Ancona; and one day, after some angry words had passed between them, she thrust the weapon into a mattress, hurried to the main guard, and denounced her husband as having concealed arms in his house. A party of soldiers at once repaired to the spot, a search was instituted, the fatal sword soon discovered, and the miserable man, franticly protesting his innocence, was carried off to confinement. His known good conduct, his harmless demeanour, availed him nothing; and the next morning, the terror-stricken captive, almost senseless, and so strongly convulsed that he was obliged to be propped up to receive the soldiers' fire, was shot in the courtyard of the prison—the accusation of his guilty wife having been considered sufficient to convict him. I have heard that the woman went mad from remorse; but this sounds too like the retributive winding-up of a tragedy to be implicitly believed. Such, however, was currently reported to be the close of a tale of horror, which, frightful as it appears, has had but too many counterparts wherever the Austrians have held sway.
Almost more terrible than death to the keen sensibility of the south was the infliction of the stick, applied for minor infractions of martial law. A blow to an Italian is the deepest degradation. He is taught to regard it as such from his earliest childhood. The school-boys are never flogged or caned; even home discipline never goes beyond a mild schiaffo, i. e. a slap on the face. For a man, a gentleman, to be subjected to corporal punishment, was an outrage never to be forgotten. Two young men of good family underwent this cruel indignity in Ancona. A few ounces of powder and shot, and a broken bayonet, were found in their lodgings. The latter belonged to a musket which its owner, who was in the Guardia Civica, gave up at the general disarmament; as it was broken, he had inadvertently kept it back, little dreaming of the consequences. The other culprit protested he fancied the ammunition was innocuous so long as he had no fire-arms. But these reasons availed nothing. They were conveyed under a guard to the citadel, and there underwent their sentence. Out of very shame, their friends kept what had occurred as secret as possible, and I believe they left the country. But the anguish, the bitterness, the hatred which this incident aroused, are indescribable.
Still one must be just. Insolent, tyrannical as are the Austrians, crushing everything beneath the iron heel of military despotism, it would be gross partisanship to pass over in silence the anarchy and bloodshed which preceded their occupation of Ancona, on which they founded the justification of their severities.
The people of the Marche have always been noted for their propensity for assassination—an imputation which, far from denying, I have often heard the lower orders excuse, with the remark that, since there was no other way in the Papal States for the poor to obtain redress, it became a necessity to take the law into their own hands.
Before the accession of Pius IX. these acts of vendetta (their perpetrators would have scouted their being termed murders) were astonishingly frequent, while, through the indolence or connivance of the police, they commonly escaped detection. During the first golden period of the new pontificate, however, in the universal concord which prevailed, the stiletto seemed rusting in its sheath; but ere long, amid the disturbances and ferment brought upon Italy by the spread of democracy, these evil tendencies revived in Ancona with tenfold vigour.
Political animosity was now brought into play, and suffered to give a colour to the most lawless excesses. A band of twenty or thirty of the lowest dregs of the populace formed a league for the extirpation of the enemies of freedom. Self-styled the Infernal Association, they met every night to decree what lives were to be offered up to the public good, and then became themselves the executioners of the doom they had pronounced. It was in January, 1849, that the existence of this self-instituted tribunal was first whispered about the town, and that three or four assassinations every week attested its reality; from which time its members went on increasing in audacity and thirst for blood till the month of April, when the strong remonstrances of the foreign consuls compelled the Government to employ adequate means for its suppression.
It is the greatest blot on the reputation of Mazzini, who, as chief Triumvir, held power during that eventful winter which succeeded the Pope's flight to Gaeta, that he did not instantly use prompt and vigorous measures for the punishment of these wretches. He did not, as was asserted by the Austrians, organize the Infernal Association—it was already in being when the Roman Republic was proclaimed, and the materials of which it was formed had their origin in long-gone-by years of corruption, national debasement, and misrule. But he suffered it to exist, fancying that by striking terror into the supporters of the Papacy, the Republic would be strengthened; a most miserable adaptation of the miserable maxim that means are justified by the end.
A word in disapprobation of the existing authorities, or of regret for the Pope, was laid hold of by the assassins as a pretext for their awards. At last, emboldened alike by their immunity from all judicial control, and the palsy of fear which had fallen upon the inhabitants, they ceased to wait for the shades of night to perpetrate their crimes, and stabbed or shot at their victims in broad daylight. These men were all well known by sight and by name (one amongst them, by the by, was of English parentage, but had been educated by the Jesuits at Loretto), and used to stand in groups on the Piazza, laying down the law on all the political intelligence of the day, and causing the passers-by to tremble at their frown. The relations of those they had murdered were forbidden to wear mourning; and a gentleman who, a few days after the assassination of his brother, appeared abroad with a crape-band round his hat, was threatened with a similar fate unless it was instantly removed.
A diary kept by one of my cousins, a girl of fifteen, during this time, is really a curious document, being full of entries like the following:—“18th March. We are now in the midst of anxiety and confusion; one or two assassinations occur every night. 30th.—Sad news has come! The Piedmontese have been defeated at Novara by the Austrians. This so enraged the assassins that they went about seizing all the papers which had brought the intelligence; and murdered the Marchese Nembrini at the Casino because he ventured to expostulate with them. Four other people were stabbed last night. 3rd April.—Seven people stabbed, three of whom died immediately; their bodies remained out in a pouring rain all night.”
And so on: but not to multiply horrors, and yet give a really faithful portraiture of this extraordinary state of things, I will simply transcribe verbatim a conversation I held one evening with a lively young Roman, whom family affairs occasionally brought to Ancona. It was at a somewhat ponderous accademia, or concert, held at one of the most precise and old-fashioned houses, where the women sat immovably round the room, and the men crowded helplessly together in the centre, that he contrived to get behind my chair, and startled me by saying,—