CHAPTER XXII
The news of Nelson’s victory on the Nile was received with jubilation in England–but still more so, perhaps, in Naples. Its king, Ferdinand IV,200 had come to the throne in 1759 at the age of eight. He and his queen, Maria Carolina–daughter of the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria and elder sister of the unfortunate Marie Antoinette–were an ill-assorted couple. Ferdinand–‘the scoundrel king’, as he was universally known, ‘il rè lazzarone’–was a childish boor who loved only hunting and horseplay, possessed not a shred of natural dignity and boasted of never having read a book. The Queen was comparatively intellectual, acutely conscious of her rank yet surprisingly tolerant of her insufferable husband,201 to whom she was to bear eighteen children; though herself only sixteen years old at the time of her marriage, it was not long before she was effectively running the kingdom, her foreign policy being dictated by her understandable detestation of the French Revolution and all it stood for.
Ever since 1797, to Maria Carolina, to her subjects and even to King Ferdinand, French intentions in south Italy had been only too clear. In Rome on 22 December of that year, the local Jacobins staged an armed demonstration against the Pope, in the course of which a twenty-seven-year-old French officer named Léonard Duphot was shot by a papal corporal. The French ambassador, Napoleon’s elder brother Joseph, refused to listen to the Vatican’s explanations and reported to the Directory that one of his country’s most brilliant young generals had been murdered by the priests. As a result General Louis Berthier was ordered to march on Rome. He met with no opposition and on 10 February 1798 occupied the city. Five days later the new republic was proclaimed in the Forum. Pope Pius VI, aged eighty, was abominably treated–his rings were torn forcibly from his fingers–and was carried off to France, where he was to die miserably at Valence in August 1799.202
What was Naples to do? The French were now on its very doorstep; what was to prevent them from crossing the frontier, and who could stop them if they did? With Napoleon’s seizure of Malta in June 1798 the threat loomed still larger. No wonder that the Neapolitans rejoiced at the news of the Battle of the Nile, or that when Nelson himself arrived on his flagship Vanguard towards the end of September he was accorded a hero’s welcome–with, on the 29th, a magnificent fortieth-birthday banquet for 1,800 guests, given at Palazzo Sessa by the British Minister, Sir William Hamilton, and his wife, Emma. But the party, as far as Nelson was concerned, was not a success. On the following morning he wrote to Lord St Vincent:
I trust, my Lord, in a week we shall all be at sea. I am very unwell, and the miserable conduct of this Court is not likely to cool my irritable temper. It is a country of fiddlers and poets, whores and scoundrels. I am, etc.
Indeed, the next three months were a nightmare. The Austrian field marshal Baron Karl Mack von Leiberich arrived in early October to assume command of the Neapolitan army of 50,000 men, who duly marched north, a quivering King among them. Needless to say, they proved quite incapable of stopping the French advance, and by early December more and more of them, officers and men alike, had shed their uniforms and returned to their homes. The Queen–her sister’s dreadful fate always in her mind–wrote several times to Lady Hamilton deploring their cowardice, but when her husband deserted in his turn there were no more letters on the subject. On 18 December there arrived a despatch from an utterly demoralised Mack, confessing that his army–which had not yet fought a single battle–was now in full retreat and imploring Their Majesties to leave while there was still time. ‘I do not know,’ wrote Nelson to the Minister at Constantinople, ‘that the whole Royal Family, with 3,000 Neapolitan émigrés, will not be under the protection of the King’s flag this night.’
And indeed it was, though thanks to atrocious weather and the usual Neapolitan confusion, the Vanguard did not leave Naples until the evening of the 23rd. On Christmas Eve Nelson recorded that ‘it blew harder than I have ever experienced since I have been at sea’. On board, there was general panic. Of the distinguished passengers, only Emma Hamilton kept her head; Sir William was found in his cabin with a loaded pistol in each hand–since, he explained to his wife, he was determined not to perish with ‘the guggle-guggle-guggle of salt water in his throat’. Little Prince Albert, aged six, died of exhaustion in Emma’s arms; but at two in the morning on the 26th the vessel finally dropped anchor in the harbour of Palermo, and a few hours later His Sicilian Majesty made a formal entry into his kingdom’s second capital.
The King and Queen settled as best they could into what passed for the royal palace. Nelson, meanwhile, moved in with the Hamiltons. He was desperately tired, and not yet completely recovered from a head wound sustained at Aboukir Bay; he was quarrelling with the Admiralty, and his relationship with his wife was also giving him cause for serious concern. He desperately needed emotional support, and Emma Hamilton gave it him. Her long experience as a courtesan did the rest. It was in Sicily that their celebrated affair began.
When the French troops under General Jean-Etienne Championnet arrived in Naples in mid-January, they found the populace a good deal more spirited than the army. The mob–the so-called lazzaroni–was prepared to attack the invaders tooth and nail, and for three days there was bitter house-to-house fighting. In the end the lazzaroni had of course to give in, but not before they had stormed and gutted the royal palace. They had done so with a clear–or almost clear–conscience. Had not their king abandoned them? And besides, would he not have preferred his treasures to go to his own subjects rather than to his French enemies? When at last peace was restored, a French officer remarked that if Bonaparte had been there in person he would probably have left not one stone of the city standing on another; it was fortunate that Championnet was a moderate and humane man. Quietly and diplomatically he established what was known as the Parthenopean Republic203 on the French Revolutionary model. It was officially proclaimed on 23 January 1799 and acquired a number of loyal Italian adherents–though it was perfectly obvious to all that it had been the result of conquest, and that the French army of occupation was its only support.
To Queen Maria Carolina, life in Sicily was ‘worse than death’. She and her husband, she believed, had been dishonoured and disgraced. The winter of 1798–99 was perishingly cold, with snow on the ground–a rare phenomenon in Palermo–and the royal apartments possessed neither fireplaces nor even carpets. The news of the sack of the royal palace in Naples had caused her deep distress. Worst of all, perhaps, her husband had turned against her, blaming her for forcing him into that shameful campaign and for saddling him with the hopeless General Mack. But her spirit was undaunted; she dreamed only of counter-revolution and enthusiastically welcomed a proposal for just such an operation, despite the fact that it came from a most improbable quarter.
Cardinal Fabrizio Ruffo was already over sixty. He had been papal treasurer to Pope Pius VI, but in Rome all his suggested reforms had been rejected as too radical. He had consequently retired to Naples, from where he had duly followed the court to Palermo. He now proposed a landing in his native Calabria, first to defend it from any further French advance–as well as from Italian republicanism–and ultimately to recover Naples for its king. This would, he emphasised, be nothing less than a Crusade, and he had no doubt whatever that all his fellow Calabrians would rally to the Cross.
Ruffo landed as planned on 7 February, with eight companions. Eighty armed lazzaroni joined him almost at once, and by the end of the month the strength of the ‘Christian Army of the Holy Faith’ had risen to 17,000. He was a born leader, and quickly won their love and trust; in 1799, wrote his secretary–biographer Sacchinelli, ‘there was not a miserable peasant in all Calabria but had a crucifix on one side of his bed, a gun on the other.’ On 1 March the Cardinal was able to establish his headquarters in the important city of Monteleone. Catanzaro followed, and then Cotrone. Admittedly, he had his problems. His ramshackle army was totally without discipline, his ‘Crusaders’ comporting themselves no better than their medieval predecessors; Cotrone, for example, was delivered over to a sack from which it never recovered. Such atrocities could not but damage his reputation, though he personally was mild and merciful, always preferring peaceful conversion to violence. But his momentum was unstoppable, and his successes encouraged other, similar movements throughout south Italy. He himself, having recovered the whole of Calabria, marched eastwards into Apulia, where he had similar success. By the beginning of June he was at the gates of Naples–which, thanks to a blockade of the bay by a British fleet under Rear Admiral Sir Thomas Troubridge, was by now on the brink of starvation.
On 11 June, hearing of the Cardinal’s approach, the people of Naples broke out in open rebellion. There was fighting throughout the city. Desperate for food, mercilessly bombarded by the French from the Sant’ Elmo, Nuovo and Ovo castles, the lazzaroni fell on every Jacobin that they could lay their hands on, French or Italian, with unbridled barbarity. There are accounts of unspeakable atrocities: of dismemberment and cannibalism, of severed heads paraded on pikes or kicked around like footballs, of women suspected of Jacobinism being subjected to ghastly humiliations. The horrified Cardinal did what he could, but many of his own men had plunged joyfully into the bloodbath; in any case, against mob hysteria he was powerless. The orgy of destruction continued for a week. Negotiations were seriously impeded by the inability of the commanders of the three castles to communicate with one another, and it was only on the 19th that the French formally capitulated, St Elmo alone still holding out. Even then there were problems: the King and Queen–and of course the Hamiltons–insisted that no mercy be shown to any of the Jacobin survivors, while Ruffo and his friends saw all too clearly the danger of bringing home a royal couple who thought only of revenge.
Nelson, understandably but most unfortunately, took the monarchist side. Politically he was extraordinarily naive, his knowledge of the situation in Naples being limited to the highly tendentious opinions that he had picked up from the King and Queen and the Hamiltons. He spoke not a word of any language but his own. As a down-to-earth, right-wing English Protestant he mistrusted the Cardinal, and on his arrival in Naples had no hesitation in overruling him, insisting–as his friends also insisted–on unconditional surrender. Some 1,500 rebels, whom Ruffo had saved from the mob and to whom he had given refuge in the municipal granaries, marched out according to the terms of the capitulation, expecting safe conduct to their homes. They were seized by the new royalist government, and many of them were executed. Was Nelson guilty of betraying them? Probably not. All that we know of his character suggests that he would never knowingly have done such a thing, but the Hamiltons’ influence was paramount and he always accepted their point of view.
He has also been condemned, with a good deal more justification, for his treatment of Commodore Francesco Caracciolo, the former senior officer of the Neapolitan navy who had transferred his allegiance to the republicans. After ten days on the run in disguise, Caracciolo had been found hiding in a well and was brought before Nelson on the Foudroyant. At ten in the morning of 30 June he was court-martialled, at noon he was found guilty of high treason and condemned to death, and at five in the afternoon he was hanged from the yardarm. There his body remained until sunset–it was virtually midsummer–when the rope was cut and it fell into the sea. He had been allowed no witnesses for his defence, no priest to hear his last confession. His request to be shot rather than hanged was refused outright. Traitor he may have been, but he had deserved better than that. Why had Nelson allowed it? Simply because of his infatuation with Emma. With a ship and the ocean beneath him he was invincible, infallible; on land he was literally out of his element, and when in the arms of his mistress little better than a child.
Leaving Maria Carolina in Palermo, the King returned to Naples in the first week of July, but he did not stay there long. Never, during his forty years on the throne, had he believed that he had enemies in the city; now he knew that he did, and the knowledge had shaken him to the core. Henceforth he preferred the safety of Palermo, where he could still fool himself that he was popular. On 8 August he sailed back into its harbour with Nelson on the Foudroyant. The Queen came on board, and the two together then made their formal disembarkation to a salute of twenty-one guns before driving in state to a Te Deum in the cathedral.
For Ferdinand and Maria Carolina, for the Hamiltons and for Nelson, life now continued much as it had before–except that there was no longer any cogent reason to stay in Palermo. The Queen yearned for Naples; the King, on the other hand, had worked himself up about it until dislike had turned to detestation. Never, he said, would he willingly go back. The Hamiltons, while from the political point of view advocating return, were in fact perfectly content where they were. Sir William, being accredited personally to Ferdinand, was required to remain with him, and Naples may well have held poignant memories since his second collection of Greek vases had been lost in a shipwreck in August 1798.
The saddest fate was Nelson’s. He was to remain ashore in Palermo until June 1800, ten months in which his infatuation with Emma Hamilton not only sapped his morale but even seems to have affected his conscience and his sense of duty. For the first half of that period he was acting Commander-in-Chief, Mediterranean, but he left virtually all the work to his subordinates. He was not there to intercept Napoleon Bonaparte when he slipped out of Egypt; had he made the effort and succeeded, history might have taken a very different turn. His colleagues grew increasingly concerned for him and disturbing reports even reached London, where the Admiralty began to lose patience and the First Lord, Lord Spencer, very nearly relieved him of his command. In January 1800 his superior, Lord Keith, returned to duty and ordered Nelson to join him in an inspection of the blockade of Malta, but the admiral returned almost at once to Palermo, where Emma–now shamelessly pregnant–received him publicly with open arms.
He and the Hamiltons were back in Malta in April 1800, though their voyage savoured more of a pleasure cruise than a serious naval visit. At that moment Sir William received his letters of recall, so finally in July all three of them sailed for England–since Keith had refused Nelson a battleship, he commandeered ships from the blockade of Malta without permission–taking with them on the first leg of the journey Queen Maria Carolina, who was on her way to visit her family in Vienna. They landed her at Livorno, where they ran into General Sir John Moore, on his way to Egypt. ‘It is really melancholy,’ he noted, ‘to see a brave and good man, who has deserved well of his country, cutting so pitiful a figure.’
The Hamiltons finally settled in London, where Nelson’s daughter Horatia was born the following January. On the very same day he was named second-in-command of the Baltic fleet, an appointment which very probably saved his reputation and his career.