Italian Yesterdays, vol. 2

by Mrs. Hugh Fraser

Lord William promised the Neapolitans a similar code, if they would only restore Ferdinand—Lord William was always rather free with his promises—and the Government of Naples, finding the horrid thing in their midst, proscribed the society and threatened with most dreadful punishments any one who mentioned the word constitution. Whereupon the Carbonari dropped down into Calabria and proceeded to shout it aloud, among them young Capobianco.

As it has been said, his town was practically inaccessible, so that, despairing of his capture, General Janelli made a pretence of refusing to believe in his association with the Carbonari; after several ineffectual efforts to entrap him (for Capobianco had a native mistrust of authority under any guise save that of the Church), he one day invited him to dinner upon the occasion of a public festival in Cosenza. Capobianco hesitated, but finally made up his mind to attend, feeling that he would be safe if he took unfrequented byways and surrounded himself with a dependable escort.

He would feel safe, he told himself, in Cosenza, for he intended to arrive when the banquet should be already begun and leave before it was over, and, in the house of the General, he would be in the company of all of the authorities of the province, whose presence he seems to have conceived to be a safeguard, for some reason or another.

So he went and was royally entertained. Healths were drunk, compliments were exchanged, and Capobianco proposed to depart, followed by the salutations of the General. He got no further than the ante-room, though, where the gendarmes were waiting for him. They seized him and dragged him off to prison, where the next morning he was tried by a military commission, condemned, and publicly beheaded before mid-day in the Square.

When this was bruited abroad, some of the “patriots” fled to Sicily and the Bourbons, to breathe, as we are told, “the free atmosphere of Sicily under the Bourbons!” and Joachim’s unpopularity began to assume the proportions of a menace.

Still, however, the better elements were upon his side, perhaps from expediency,—for Murat’s servants would receive short shrift at Ferdinand’s hands should that monarch return,—but they gave Joachim some very good advice among them, even if some of it is rather too subtle. Napoleon’s hands were too full to allow of his interference, and he, in his dealings with the Allies, invariably quoted fifty thousand Neapolitan troops as part of his own force. The Allies knew better, though. Two fatal defects in a ruler are over-craftiness and inconsistency. Murat had both. At one time, as it has been seen, he hastened to pardon those who had conspired against his life; a year later he allowed his own resentment against the Carbonari to lead him into an attempt to crush them by a severity which merely drove them in on each other and made a solid body out of a straggling mob. Before this, with an ideal the meaning of which very few of them understood, the Carbonari—the leaders of the movement, that is to say—were fighting the clouds; but the harrying they received gave them a definite grievance and one that was shared, for purely personal reasons, by thousands who would otherwise never have joined the movement at all.

The craftiness which Murat conceived to be policy delivered him into the hands of men far cleverer than himself, whose life’s business it was to overreach one another.

He was a brave man and a most excellent soldier, but those were not qualities that could help him in the thimble-rigging, knife-in-the-boot game of Napoleonic statecraft, played by men who had not an illusion remaining about each other, and who, with the possible exception of the Russians, had each and all betrayed their neighbours over and over again.

Murat, at Ollendorf upon the shores of Ulm, received several very polite and pressing invitations to an alliance from the Austrian Commissioner, Count von Mier, and he had listened to them, as one of his contemporaries says, without disdain. Wishing, though, to get an idea of what his own people might think of such a suggestion, he consulted two or three of his ministers and generals on the subject. The result did not help him much, for they all held different opinions. One held that France’s welfare was that of Naples, and that with the return of the Bourbons to Paris everything that the Revolution and the Empire had done for Italy would he wiped out; another, that Murat’s duty was to establish himself firmly and hold fast to his throne, whatever might happen to his own people and the Emperor. Upon one point they were all agreed and that was that Murat’s first and most imperative duty was to so order his relations with the Powers as to exclude any possible chance of Ferdinand’s return; it was as to the best way of attaining that desired condition of things that they differed.

“The old and the new era,” said one, advocating the continuance of the existing alliance with France, “are at war with one another, and the victory cannot for the present be assigned to any particular state or people. Should the new triumph, all the social institutions of Europe will, in twenty years’ time, be established upon the basis of the Civil polity introduced by the French; but, if the old, all progress will be arrested and the new States be thrown back towards the hated condition of the past.”