Interesting Facts relating to the Fall and Death of Joachim Murat, King of Naples; the Capitulation of Paris in 1815; and the Second Restoration of the Bourbons: Original Letters from King Joachim to the Author, with some Account of the Author, and of his Persecution by the French Government. By Francis Macirone, late Aid-de-camp to King Joachim; Knight of the Order of the Two Sicilies, &c. &c. London: Ridgways, 1817.
‘Come, draw the curtain; shew the picture.’
February 2, 1817.
We have here a pretty peep behind ‘the dark blanket’ of Legitimacy. We thank Mr. Macirone for having introduced us once more to the old lady of that name in her dressing-room. What a tissue of patches and of paint! What a quantity of wrinkles and of proud flesh! What a collection of sickly perfumes and slow poisons, with her love-powders and the assassin’s knife placed side by side! What treacheries and lies upon her tongue! What meanness and malice in her heart! What an old hypocritical hag it is! What a vile canting, mumbling, mischievous witch! ‘Pah! and smells so.’ The very wind that kisses all it meets, stops the nose at her. We wonder how any prince should take a fancy to such an old rotten demirep! Yet this is the heroine of all heroines (Mr. Southey will tell you in hobbling illegitimate verse), a greater heroine than even his Joan of Arc—the heroine of Leipsic, of Saragossa, and of Waterloo! It is indeed the same. Look at her again, look at her well, look at her closely, and you will find that it is ‘that harlot old,’
‘The same that was, that is, and is to be;’—
the mother of abominations, the daughter of lies. Dig up the bones of a few of her wretched favourites you may, in Carmelite dresses or any other trumpery; but can you dig up the bones of the men that she has murdered, from the earliest time? can you collect the blood of the millions of men that she has sacrificed in the last twenty-five years alone, and pour it into the Thames, while our merchant-men ride freighted with gold upon the gory stream, and the Editor of The Times (without being called to account for it) applauds with the ‘sweet thunder’ of his pen the proud balance of our exports and our imports, blood and gold? or can you collect the sighs and dried-up tears of wretches that she, Legitimacy, has doomed to pine without a cause in dungeons, to prove that she is the dread sovereign of the human heart? or the groans and shrieks of victims stretched on the rack, or consumed by slow fire, to prove that the minds of men belong to her? or the cries of hunger and pinching cold, the sweat, the rags, the diseases, the emaciated wan looks, by which she proves that the bodies of men are her’s? or can you conjure up the wide spreading desolation which she breathes from her nostrils, the famine and pestilence which she scatters before her for her sport and wantonness, the ruins of cities and of countries which she makes her throne, and from which, amidst the groans of the dying and the dead, she utters, laughing, the sacred doctrine of ‘millions made for one!’—One thing contents us, and sits light upon our hearts, that we have always seen through her disguises: we have known her from first to last, though ‘she has changed shapes with Proteus,’ and now gone by the name of Religion, now of Social Order, now of Morality, now been personified at Guildhall as Trade and Commerce, or sat in the Speaker’s chair as the English Constitution (the most impudent trick of all)—under none of these respectable alias’s and swindling characters, nor when she towered above the conflagration of Moscow, dressed in a robe of flame-coloured taffeta, or sat perched as Victory on the crests of British soldiers, nor when she hovered over the frightened country as the harpy of Invasion; no, nor at any other time did we ever take her for any thing but what we knew she was, the patron-saint of tyrants and of slaves; an adulteress, an impostor, and a murderess. The world, whom she has juggled, begin to find her out too: it will hardly ‘stand now with her sorceries and her lies, and the blood of men, with which she has made herself drunk’; and we may yet live to see her carted for a bawd.
Having thus vented the overflowings of our gall against the old lady above-mentioned, we shall proceed to a detail of some of her fraudulent transactions, as they are stated with great clearness and command of temper, in Mr. Macirone’s ‘Interesting Facts.’ Interesting indeed! But no more comments for the present. We have not time to grace our narrative or confirm our doctrine of ‘the uses of legitimacy,’ by giving Mr. Macirone’s history of the treatment of his family by the Holy See, which brought his father to this country, and eventually led to his connexion with Murat. It appears that his grandfather, the head of a noble and wealthy family at Rome, was ruined in a large concern, and then robbed of his right by Monsignore Banchieri, treasurer to the Pope, a ‘gentleman and man of honour’ in those times; and that, though the tribunals awarded him reparation, the decisions in his favour were constantly defeated by the interposition of the papal power. The consequence was, that the elder Macirone, after a fruitless struggle of several years with legitimate power and injustice, died of grief and chagrin, and his family were dispersed in various directions: his eldest son came to England and married an English lady, of which union our author was the issue. This short episode shews what Legitimacy, that is, a power above the law, and accountable only to heaven for its exercise, its use or its abuse, always was, and always will be. These tricks were played long before the French revolution, and with a million other tricks of the same legitimate, that is, lawless kind, produced it.—We have here an account of some of the tricks resorted to by the wielders and abettors of mild paternal sway to restore the old right to do wrong with impunity, and to put down the principles and partizans of the revolution, as an example of successful rebellion against power held in contempt of the people, and exercised in disregard of law. Mr. Macirone, a native of England, went to Italy at the age of fifteen, and remained there from 1803 till 1812. Part of this time he was detained as an English prisoner. He was afterwards employed as an aid-de-camp to Murat, and gives the following narrative of his transactions with the Allies:—
1. A Treaty of Alliance, offensive and defensive, was signed between Austria and Naples, on the 11th of Jan. 1814, and the Austrian Plenipotentiary declared that England was ready to accede to a similar Treaty with King Joachim.—2. A Convention was signed by Lord William Bentinck with the Neapolitan Government, which opened the ports of Italy to the British fleet, and placed affairs on a footing of perfect peace.—3. Murat, on the strength of these engagements, opened the campaign in concert with the Allies, when instantly objections were made to the ratification of the Treaty with Austria, not by Austria, but by England, on some pretence of the territorial indemnifications to be granted to Murat at the expense of the Pope.—4. Murat assented to the proposed modifications, and Lord W. Bentinck declared, that the English Government now agreed entirely to the Treaty between Austria and Naples.—5. This declaration of Lord W. Bentinck was confirmed by a declaration of Lord Castlereagh, that it was only from motives of delicacy to the King of Sicily that the English Government delayed the conclusion of a special and separate Treaty with Naples, that a Treaty of Indemnities to the King of Sicily and of Peace with King Joachim might go hand in hand.—6. Murat now joined the campaign of 1814, and turned the scale against France and Napoleon.—In this state of things, Mr. Macirone observes,—
‘A variety of circumstances had now combined to induce the King to doubt the sincerity of the Allies. The Emperor of Austria had delayed for many days the transmission of the ratification of the Treaty of the 11th January. Ferdinand of Sicily had published an order of the day to some Sicilian troops about to land at Leghorn, in which they were informed that they were going to recover his kingdom of Naples, which he had never ceded, and never would cede. The English general, Lord William Bentinck, had landed with these troops, under instructions to excite a revolution in Italy, and had insisted on the maintenance of a position (Tuscany) which intercepted the communication between the Neapolitan army and Naples; propositions at the same time were made in a foreign camp to Neapolitan generals and other officers, for the expulsion of the then reigning dynasty from the throne of Naples. The doubts which these circumstances had excited were removed by a declaration of General Sir Robert Wilson, at Bologna; that he considered the letter of Lord Castlereagh, containing the promise of a formal treaty, as of equal value and force with a treaty already signed. And that neither the executive authority, nor the parliament, would hesitate to recognize the validity of such an engagement. Indeed, it was in his opinion more imperative, if possible, than a regular treaty, because it connected an appeal to honour with an obligation on good faith. From that moment the King again made the most zealous efforts in the common cause.’—p. 20.
Alas! Sir Robert, ‘How little knew’st thou of Calista!’ as a body may say. But you have in part redeemed your errors, and revenged the trick that was thus put upon your preux chevalier notions of honour!—One would think there was shuffling and paltering and evasion and cant and cunning enough in the foregoing part of this transaction. What follows is worse. After the campaigns which so providentially delivered France and Europe from the hands of illegitimate into those of legitimate power en plein droit, and while the immortal congress was yet assembled at Vienna, ‘Prince Talleyrand, on the part of King Louis,’ says Mr. Macirone, ‘was indefatigable in his exertions to induce the Austrian government to withdraw their alliance from the King of Naples, from whom the allied powers had so recently received the most efficient support. The Austrian government being warmly urged to undertake the holy war of legitimacy against its ally, the King of Naples, at length expressed its willingness to comply, but alleged the exhausted state of the finances of the country. This difficulty was, it is said, immediately removed by the British ministers, who offered to defray all the expense of the expedition, and moreover to furnish a British fleet, in preference to a French fleet, as proposed by Talleyrand in his famous note, which fleet should act in concert with and assist the movements of the Austrian forces.’