Scarpia

by Piers Paul Read

  *

  They walked arm in arm back towards the forum. As they saw the light of torches and heard voices, they stopped. Tosca tightened the belt beneath her bodice; Scarpia retied the ribbons at her shoulders and brushed pine needles off the back of her dress.

  ‘Will that do?’ he asked her.

  ‘Of course. And anyway, who cares? Let people think what they like.’

  ‘Tosca is invulnerable?’

  ‘Yes.’ She looked up at him again, her face suddenly severe. ‘And you must be invulnerable too. Do not fall in love with me, Scarpia. I have my life and you have yours. Tonight . . . this . . . has been a joy. But I belong to no one and the future is uncertain. We may never meet again. Farewell may be adieu.’

  Twelve

  1

  On 3 September 1798, a sloop flying the white ensign of the British navy sailed into the Bay of Naples. Two British officers, Captain Hoste and Captain Capel, were rowed ashore. They reported to the British ambassador, Sir William Hamilton, that a month before the British fleet had found and annihilated the French fleet off the coast of Egypt in Aboukir Bay. Bonaparte, whose army had defeated the Mameluks and taken Cairo, was cut off from France. The British were now masters of the Mediterranean.

  Sir William immediately took Captain Capel to the royal palace, where the king and queen were at dinner with their children. On hearing the news, King Ferdinand embraced his family. ‘Oh, my dears, you are now safe.’ Queen Maria Carolina laughed, wept, kissed her children, her husband, ran from the room, then returned, again burst into tears, and embraced all those around her. ‘Oh, brave Nelson! Oh God, bless and protect our brave deliverer! Oh, Nelson! Nelson! What do we not owe you! Oh, conqueror. Saviour of Italy.’

  Three days of celebration were proclaimed by the king. Emma Hamilton ordered a new dress embroidered with gold anchors. Sir William Hamilton wrote to Nelson: ‘Come here, for God’s sake, my dear friend, as soon as the service will permit you. A pleasant retreat is ready for you in my house, and Emma is looking out for the softest pillows to repose the few wearied limbs you have left.’ When Nelson reached Naples on the Vanguard on 22 September, he was greeted by a flotilla of five hundred boats and barges carrying musicians and choirs singing ‘Rule Britannia’ and ‘See the Conquering Hero’. The barge of the British ambassador, as it drew alongside the Vanguard, was saluted by a salvo of thirteen guns. Emma Hamilton, after greeting Nelson, fell in a swoon into his arms. The short, half-blind, one-armed rear admiral was enchanted. An hour later, a 21-gun salute proclaimed the arrival of the royal barge. King Ferdinand himself came aboard the Vanguard to congratulate the saviour of his family and throne.

  The British Embassy where Nelson stayed when he came ashore was illuminated by three thousand lamps spelling out his name. General Acton gave an official dinner in his honour, and Sir William a party at the British Embassy for eighteen hundred guests. Emma Hamilton arranged every detail of this reception and, after the arrival of their guest of honour, remained at his side throughout the evening, indispensable as an interpreter for her compatriot, who could speak no foreign language.

  After many months at sea, Nelson appreciated the attentions of such a beautiful woman. He had been touched when she had fainted into his arms on the deck of the Vanguard and, if he recalled from his earlier visit that Lady Hamilton was an accomplished actress, and that perhaps the swoon had been well rehearsed, it hardly detracted from the charm of her attentions. In the days which followed the reception, she continued to keep his company, and it quickly became evident that the services provided by Emma went beyond interpreting and entertaining the conquering hero. Her husband, Sir William Hamilton, raised no objection: if the battered admiral had lost an arm and an eye in the service of his country, he could hardly begrudge him the ministrations of his much younger wife.

  Nelson had a wife in England, but he was not in England, and in Naples the moral climate was more tolerant, and the hot sun heated the blood. Queen Maria Carolina, whose mother, the Empress Maria Theresa, had policed the chastity of her courtiers, was so besotted with the pretty adventuress from Cheshire that in her eyes she could do no wrong. Historians have wondered why a queen so proud of her lineage should befriend an English strumpet. The republican historian, Pietro Coletta, thought it simply a means to manipulate Nelson, but in fact there was no need: the Austrian queen and English admiral were of a like mind when it came to affairs of state. Queen Maria Carolina had been ill when Nelson first arrived on the Vanguard, but when she was well enough to receive him, they agreed that they should now stop the celebrations and pursue the war. Time was being lost. ‘The boldest measures are the safest,’ Nelson told the queen. The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies should abandon its policy of procrastination and wage war against the French.

  ‘The queen thinks as we do,’ wrote Nelson after this encounter, but what can be done with ‘a country of fiddlers and poets, whores and scoundrels’? However, it was not simply the easy-going nature of his subjects that caused King Ferdinand to hesitate before going to war. The British might now rule the waves, but on land it was a different matter. Lord Grenville in London advised Hamilton and Nelson against attacking the French without Austrian support. He was ignored. General Acton, Admiral Nelson and Queen Maria Caroline overcame the king’s doubts. A levy was imposed on the communes of the kingdom to raise 40,000 fresh troops.

  The regiments required officers. Baron Scarpia, in his villa in Bagheria, received a note from Cardinal Ruffo: ‘My dear son in Christ. The time has come. The king will have use for your sword.’ He sailed at once to Naples, where he was welcomed at court and given a commission, but not a command: it was still held that only soldiers from north of the Alps made competent generals. Scarpia was placed in a regiment led by a French émigré, Roger de Damas. To take overall command, a Bavarian general, Karl Mack, Baron von Leiberich, was dispatched from Vienna.

  Mack reached Naples on 16 October. ‘General,’ said Queen Maria Carolina, ‘you must be to us by land what my hero Nelson has been by sea.’ The army Mack was to command was assembled at the military base near the northern border of the Kingdom of Naples at San Germano. The whole court accompanied him to review the troops. Queen Maria Carolina, wearing a blue riding habit adorned with gold fleurs-de-lis, rode along the lines in a coach-and-four, followed by members of the nobility and the ambassadors of allied nations, among them Sir William Hamilton and his wife Emma sitting next to the victor of Aboukir Bay. Mack was impressed. ‘If only we had an enemy worthy of such a superb army,’ he told the queen.

  General Roger de Damas, Scarpia’s commander, was sceptical. The regiments might look formidable when drawn up on parade, but the soldiers were no more than peasants in uniform with no experience of manoeuvres and little of fighting beyond the pursuit of personal vendettas. Their commanders were foreign generals whose language they did not understand.

  At a council of war it was agreed that four thousand troops under General Naselli should be transported to Livorno by the British fleet to attack the French from the north, while Mack’s legions would invade the Roman Republic from the south. At the last moment, King Ferdinand heard from his son-in-law, the Emperor Francis, that Austria would not support him unless first attacked by the French. Again, he hesitated. Exasperated, Nelson told Ferdinand that it was too late to turn back. His choice was either to go to war, ready to die and trusting to God to aid his just cause, or to wait in Naples to be deposed and no doubt guillotined by the French. Ferdinand was persuaded. He issued a proclamation that was read from every pulpit of the kingdom appealing both to his people’s patriotism and their religious faith. He, Ferdinand, King of the Two Sicilies, was leading his army to Rome to oust the foreign tyrants, restore the Pope to the throne of St Peter, and secure for his people security and peace.

  2

  The invasion of the Roman Republic began at dawn on 22 November 1798, in heavy rain. No bridge had been built over the River Melfa, so the soldiers had to wade up to their necks in the cold
water. The Liberty trees were felled as they came upon them and the tricolours torn down, but there was no fighting: the French forces withdrew towards Rome. The carriages of King Ferdinand and General Acton, accompanying the army, became stuck in the mud; so too the cannon and baggage wagons. After three days of a slow advance, the vanguard of the army made contact with a French contingent, but the orders were only to fire if fired upon, and it was allowed to retreat unharmed. On the sixth day, the army reached the gates of Rome and found them open: the French had withdrawn from the city, leaving only a garrison of four hundred men in the Castel Sant’Angelo.

  On 29 November, King Ferdinand, accompanied by Mack and Acton, made a triumphal entry into the city. A throng of ecstatic Romans greeted their deliverer with cries of ‘Evviva il Re di Napoli’: bells were rung from all the churches. The king proceeded on horseback to the Palazzo Farnese, the splendid palace he had inherited from his grandmother, Elisabeth Farnese. From here he sent a letter to Pope Pius VI, exiled in a Cistercian monastery in Tuscany, urging him to return to Rome and reclaim his throne. He invited the cardinals and members of the Roman nobility to a reception to celebrate the liberation of their city: those who had shown republican sympathies had fled with the French.

  To prevent the Roman populace taking any revenge, the king sent troops to guard the ghetto – too late to save two Jews who were thrown into the Tiber and drowned. A young officer, Gennaro Valentino, who had dazzled his commanders in the first days of the campaign with his courage and solicitude for his men, was put in command of a hastily formed Roman militia to protect the ghetto and houses of known republicans from the mob. Scarpia, with the permission of General de Damas, sent a contingent under Spoletta to the Villa Larunda and himself took a troop to the Palazzo Marcisano. At both they found the owners absent: they were told by the servants that the Prince and Princess di Marcisano had gone to the country, while Prince Ludovico and Princess Paola had left with the French.

  So distracted were they by this lightning triumph that King Ferdinand, John Acton and General Mack forgot about General Naselli’s army in Tuscany which, for want of orders, remained encamped outside Livorno. Mack, taking the French withdrawal to mean that their forces were in disarray, determined to pursue and destroy them. Orders were given to be ready to march in two days. Damas with Scarpia as his interpreter inspected his troops and judged that they were unfit for battle. The baggage wagons had yet to reach Rome: the men remained soaked to the skin and many were barefoot, having lost their boots in the mud. Their muskets had rusted from the constant rain and the mules which pulled the cannon were as weak and exhausted as their human masters. ‘I tell you,’ Damas said to Scarpia, ‘the six days’ march from Naples has damaged this army more than a month of fighting in any war.’

  Mack was not to be deterred. Leaving Rome in the hands of a new governor, the Swiss General Burckhardt, a Council of Nobles and Gennaro Valentino’s Roman militia, he led his army out of Rome to the north on 3 December. It was split into four columns – that in the centre, which included the regiment of Roger de Damas, was commanded by Mack himself. The French general facing Mack was Jacques Macdonald, a descendant of Irish Jacobites, who had made his headquarters in Civita Castellan on the road to Loretto. An assault on Civita Castellan, a fortress surrounded by deep ravines, was the first of many reverses. Far from being in disarray, the French had simply regrouped, and now counter-attacked across a swathe of the peninsula. In numbers, the armies were evenly matched, but the French troops were both more experienced and better trained.

  There was another factor that worked in their favour. A number of the middle-ranking officers in the Neapolitan army were republican sympathisers who would later fight for the republican cause. They encouraged their men’s natural inclination to cut and run, and by 6 December the Neapolitan front had collapsed. The retreat quickly became a rout. King Ferdinand, afraid that he would be captured and guillotined, slipped out of Rome in disguise and fled back to Naples. The next day, the French reoccupied the city – entering from the north as the last contingents of the Neapolitan army were departing from the south.

  At a pourparler arranged under a flag of truce, the Neapolitan General Burckhardt offered to leave Gennaro Valentino in command of the Roman militia to preserve order during the interregnum. His offer was accepted. However, once the French had regained control of the city, Valentino was arrested and sent to the Castel Sant’Angelo. The French commander-in-chief, General Championnet, disowned the agreement made by his junior officers. He ruled that Valentino’s militia had not been a unit of Mack’s army, but a band of Roman partisans, and therefore its commander had none of the rights of a prisoner of war.

  Valentino was known to be a zealous Bourbonist and a favourite of Queen Maria Carolina. This made him all the more attractive to Championnet as a candidate for exemplary justice. After a peremptory trial, he was condemned to death. Championnet determined that the execution should be a public demonstration of the republicans’ implacable resolve. At midday on the last day of 1798, the young Neapolitan officer was led from the Castel Sant’Angelo to the Piazza Montecitorio, escorted by contingents of French soldiers and a military band. ‘When he arrived at the Piazza Montecitorio,’ wrote the diarist Antonio Galimberti, who witnessed the scene, patriots howled at him, shouting, ‘Death to the tyrant!’ He was quite fearless, and without a blindfold he knelt and took off his own hat and prepared for death holding a crucifix in his hand. At the first volley of shots he fell, struck in the forehead; a second volley was fired into him as he lay on the ground.

  The republican Monitore, in an account of the execution published the next day, acknowledged ‘the insane courage’ with which Don Gennaro Valentino had faced death.

  3

  General Championnet was not in Rome to witness Valentino’s execution. In early December he had been ordered by the Directory in Paris to pursue the retreating Neapolitans to their capital city. He met little resistance from the professional soldiers in the service of King Ferdinand. The Spanish commander of the well-stocked fortress at Civitella surrendered to the French without a fight. The fortress at Pescara, well provisioned and armed with sixty brass cannon and four mortars, was yielded by its royalist French commander, Colonel Picard, to his revolutionary fellow countryman, General Duhesme. The fortress at Gaeta, garrisoned by four thousand soldiers, seventy cannon, 20,000 muskets and provisions for a year, was surrendered by the Swiss Marshal Tschiudy to a feeble French force under General Rey.

  More resolute in resisting the French were the peasant irregulars and the destitute lazzaroni who rallied to defend their patria, the city of Naples. They called upon their patron saint, Gennaro, for assistance, but on 16 December the phial containing the dried blood of the saint was held aloft and failed to liquefy. Was Providence angry that so many blasphemous republicans remained in the city’s dungeons waiting for the French to set them free? A crowd gathered outside the royal palace, calling upon the king to give them arms to kill the Jacobins. One of the king’s envoys, mistaken for a Jacobin, was stabbed in front of the palace – his bleeding body shown to King Ferdinand when he appeared on the balcony as proof of the loyalty of his subjects.

  The sight of the mutilated corpse of his servant persuaded King Ferdinand that his people were quite as dangerous as the French, and that the time had come to withdraw to the other half of his kingdom, the island of Sicily. Nelson, returning from Livorno, and seeing at once that the war he had instigated was lost, ordered the evacuation of all British subjects and the royal family. Queen Maria Carolina sent chests filled with her clothes, jewels, plate and the royal treasure to Emma Hamilton at the British Embassy, which were duly shipped out to the British men-of-war. Sir William Hamilton chartered two Greek ships to carry his unique collection of antiquities, and the possessions of French émigrés. These joined the twenty merchant vessels and two Neapolitan men-of-war, the Archimede and the Sannita, commanded by the dashing Neapolitan naval commander, Admiral Caracciolo.


  Caracciolo assumed that the honour of conveying the royal family to safety would fall to him, but at nine o’clock on the night of 21 December, King Ferdinand and Queen Maria Carolina, with their children and grandchildren, left the royal palace by a secret passage, and were rowed not to the Sannita but to Nelson’s flagship, the Vanguard. The reason given was that Sannita was undermanned: as many as three hundred sailors had deserted. However, Caracciolo was mortified, and blamed his humiliation on Nelson.

  The fleet sailed on the night of the 23rd. King Ferdinand remained on deck, chatting with Sir William Hamilton and any British officers who could speak Italian or French about the prospects for shooting woodcock in Sicily. The wind grew stronger; the gale turned into a hurricane. Sails were shredded: the foreyard was lost. The crew of the Vanguard were told to prepare to fell the mainmast. The royal passengers, prostrate with seasickness, were cared for by Emma Hamilton. Her husband, the old ambassador, when the storm was at its worst, primed two pistols, saying he would rather blow out his brains than drown. The king’s loud voice was heard promising lavish gifts to St Gennaro and St Francis of Assisi if they would intercede to save him and his family. The Austrian ambassador, Count Esterhazy, threw a bejewelled snuffbox into the sea, not to placate Neptune but because inside the lid was a miniature of his naked mistress and he did not want it to be found on his sodden corpse.

  The storm continued throughout Christmas Day, and that evening the six-year-old Prince Carlo Alberto died in the arms of the ever-solicitous Emma Hamilton. When the queen was told, she said simply: ‘We will all soon join him.’ Nelson’s temper was not improved when the Sannita, captained by Admiral Caracciolo, drew close to the Vanguard and signalled an offer of help. Its sails trimmed, its masts intact, it was noted with some pride by King Ferdinand that the Neapolitan Caracciolo had mastered the seas better than Nelson.