When the court first removed to that island, the discontent of the lower orders was general; and on its breaking out into violence at Messina and elsewhere, the marquis Artali subdued the spirit of the people by cruelties which no remonstrances of the British could stop. The British, indeed, were not popular; and they soon lost the favour of the imperious queen, who entered into secret dealings with Napoleon. The reckless extravagance of the court, rendering necessary an excessive taxation, completed the disgust of the nation; and the barons, in their parliament of 1810, besides protecting themselves and others by refusing the supplies, except on conditions which made the collection of them all but impossible, voluntarily aided the popular cause, by abolishing many of their own feudal privileges.
Matters were coming to a bloody crisis, when Lord William Bentinck, the new ambassador at Palermo, executed the resolutions of the English government. The queen was forced to consent that her husband should resign his power to his son, as vicar or regent, while Bentinck was named captain-general of Sicily. Parliament was summoned in 1812, and framed a charter which, after violent resistance from Caroline, was ratified by the prince-vicar.
The history of Sardinia, during the French reign on the mainland, possesses neither interest nor importance enough to detain us long. Its king, Charles Emmanuel, weary of the world, abdicated in 1802 and retired to Rome, where he lived many years in devotional exercises, receiving a pension from Napoleon on his seizure of the city, and becoming a Jesuit when that order was restored. His brother and successor, Victor Emmanuel, held his island-crown by the same tenure as his Sicilian neighbour, or, in other words, by the protection of the English fleet.[d]
THE RISE OF NATIONAL SPIRIT
When Francis II of Austria renounced the imperial German crown on the 6th of August, 1806, Austria seems to have renounced its authority over Italy, though that country had hitherto found its main support in Austrian rule. In all encroachments of Austria in Italy, outside of its own province, the Italians later took it as a precedent that in 1806 Austria of itself renounced the ancient rights of the Holy Roman Empire.
The political convictions had for long been blunted, the political passions concerning the contributions and frauds of French proconsuls and their tools subsided as the fire of a burnt-out house. The more dangerous Italians were made barons and counts, and Melzi, prominent for his character and intellect, had been made a duke. The rage which still smouldered in individuals over the degradation of Italy is shown in the writings of Count Alfieri, who was born in Piedmont, 1743, and died at Florence, 1804; and of Niccolo Ugo Foscolo, born of a Greek mother, in Venice, 1772, and deceased in London, 1827. While far from stainless themselves, these men were panegyrists of patriotic celibacy and suicide, and possessed a sort of volcanic genius, that urged them on to write something great. Classic antiquity, stalking about in a phenomenally high cothurnus, was their religion. Alfieri declared that the papacy was irreconcilable with the freedom of Italy; both writers arrived at a certain desperate calm out of sheer admiration for England. To teach the Italian people to feel their political misfortune was their mission, and in its performance they remained the grand-masters of the desperate party. Some of the youth of Italy ignited their negative patriotism, their hatred of the tyrant and disdain of the lower classes at the fire of these doctrines; but for all their straining after effect both poets possessed more genuine patriotic passion than was ever evinced by their imitators, and were heroes of patriotic virtue compared to many who coldly traded on the passions of others.
Alfieri
A lasting after-effect of the republic was the complete abolition of feudal rights, which gave the Lombard and Venetian nobles a position of singular freedom.
[1805-1806 A.D.]