Italian Yesterdays, vol. 2

by Mrs. Hugh Fraser

Of all Napoleon’s kinglings, Bernadotte alone contrived to keep his crown, and that may very well have been because Napoleon did not choose him, but only acceded to the popular demand when he let him reign.

Murat came to the throne of the Two Sicilies in 1808, when poor unlucky Joseph was compelled, much against his will, to go to Spain. Joachim was not always popular; indeed, that would have been impossible, in the condition of things which prevailed in 1810 and 1811. He could not always be on the spot, and in his absence he had to trust to his government. This being made up of Neapolitans—both Liberal and otherwise—and of the Frenchmen who had come in with him, did not trust itself, and the King’s authority came to be decentralised beyond all control from the throne. His life was conspired against several times. Once in particular a plot was hatched to assassinate him while he was hunting in the woods of Mondragone, but one of the conspirators turned king’s evidence and the plotters were caught. When they were brought to trial, and their guilt was proved, their advocate was making the best he could of a bad job, when the presiding judge stopped the proceedings to read aloud a paper which he had just received from the King.

“I had hoped,” it said, “that those accused of conspiring against my person might have been proved innocent; but I have heard with regret that the Solicitor-General has demanded a heavy punishment against them all. Their guilt may perhaps be real, but I am desirous of still preserving a ray of hope that they may be innocent, and I hasten to stop the decision of the Tribunal and to pardon the accused. I order that upon receipt of this paper the trial be closed and the unhappy men set at liberty. As the trial concerns a foolish attempt upon my life, and the sentence is not yet pronounced, I do not offend against the law of the State, if without having received a recommendation to mercy I thus use the highest and best prerogative of the Crown.”

Murat set many public works on foot, notably during 1812. Roads and bridges and theatres were built, marshes drained and aqueducts constructed, the most noteworthy of which achievements were the Strada di Posilippo, the Campo di Marte, the observatory on the height of Miradone, and a lunatic asylum. This latter caused a good deal of surprise as well, for lunatics were not generally coddled in that fashion in the Naples of 1812.

In the middle of all this activity, Murat was recalled to Paris, and it was only after many months and many experiences that he set eyes upon his kingdom again. Had his advice, which was to halt the 1812 campaign at Smolensk and establish a settled government in Poland, been followed, it is possible and more than possible that the disastrous affair would have had a different termination, for Napoleon could have kept his communications open; but the Emperor, at that time, suspected Murat and Ney and Rapp, believing that a weariness of war and a desire to reap some of the fruits of their labour was at the bottom of the really excellent counsel that they offered him. And so he pushed on to Moscow, partly from impatience, partly to satisfy the gnawing appetite of the “folie de grandeurs” which had hold of him, partly because he did not trust his own men. “Ours is not an army of position,” he said. “It is an army of attack—not of defence.”

Murat’s conduct during the campaign was such as to extract an unwilling praise even from the Emperor, who was no believer in praise as an agent for anything but the rank and file. Only when Murat left the wreck of the army, the command of which Napoleon had entrusted to him, on the Oder, did the quarrel which the war had drugged into a false quiet break out again.

Napoleon, on hearing of Joachim’s return to his kingdom, wrote a frightful letter to Caroline, and this falling into her husband’s hands drew from him a reply which threatened to break up the relations between the two for all time, and it was only Caroline’s self-control and tact that healed the breach for the time being.

A common danger and the ties of their old comradeship drew them together again when Murat arrived in Bohemia, and then he fought stoutly and well. It is hardly credible and, were it not history, it would be absolutely inconceivable, that, while battling whole-heartedly for the French in Bohemia, Murat was engaged, through his government, in an attempt to unify Italy by the assistance of Great Britain, which was to supply twenty-five thousand men, who, with his own troops and the disaffected Italians in the ranks of the French garrisons, were to drive the Tricolour over the Alps. He contrived to persuade himself that he was honest in his intentions, too, by a process of reasoning peculiar to several of the Emperor’s lieutenants in those times. As Frenchmen they marched with the armies of France, and served her to the best of their splendid ability; as kings and grand dukes, they served their subjects, or thought they did, with equal enthusiasm. Bentinck, however, being an Englishman, failed to understand the presence of their separate political entities in one person, and withdrew, so that the unification of Italy, fortunately, one cannot but think, fell through, and Joachim returned to Naples in 1813.

It was then that the society, known as the Carbonari, who had appeared in the kingdom three years before, began to spread themselves in all classes of society, conspiring in the sweet Italian fashion, which conspires for the sake of the pure delight of intriguing. They had no definite aim. Their professed “raison d’être” was a vague dream of a vague constitution, “à l’Anglaise.” In such hands, of course, this would have been about as fruitful of any real liberty as the Commune, and none knew this better than Lord William Bentinck; but any stone will do to throw at the Devil, and Lord William hastened to communicate with the liberty-loving thieves, murderers, and brigands who represented the society of Naples. There were, to be sure, some honest men among them, whose hearts were stronger than their heads. There always are a few in these affairs, enticed in by flattery and utterly uninformed as to the real object of their associates, who are pushed to the front for the public to see.

Among these was a certain young gentleman, a man of fortune and courage—a captain of militia in his own town, which stood upon the summit of a high and precipitous mountain. His name was Capobianco (white-head) and, at the time when he came to the notice of the authorities, they had discovered the trafficking of the society with Lord William, who had been sending across volumes containing the new Sicilian laws which had been enacted in that island, under the Bourbons, or, to speak more accurately, had been forced upon the Bourbons by Lord William, under pain of being left to look after themselves and being compelled to fight for their own possessions. The conspirators must have been a simple-minded people, if they really believed that Ferdinand had promulgated anything of the kind without compulsion.