The fleet that had left Naples had been widely dispersed by the storms – some ships being blown back to Calabria, others north to Sardinia. However, late on Christmas night the Vanguard finally reached Palermo. The Queen disembarked at once: King Ferdinand waited until morning and at nine o’clock, after a good breakfast, landed with his hunting dogs in that part of his kingdom still under his command.
4
The only general in Mack’s army who had shown both courage and competence was Roger de Damas. Mack’s dispatch to Damas ordering him to retreat had been intercepted by treacherous officers. As a result, he had found himself surrounded by superior French forces. Imposing complete silence on his men, and leaving the campfires burning to deceive the enemy, he evacuated his entire regiment in the dark, and after a long march north, reached the town of Monterosi. ‘He slipped out of my hands,’ wrote the French General Kellerman, ‘like a piece of soap.’
Damas continued the march north, pursued by the armies of Kellerman and Macdonald. Kellerman’s forces caught up with him at the town of Montalto, but were beaten back. In this engagement, Damas was wounded – his jaw shattered by grapeshot. He withdrew into the fortress of Orbetello on the Tuscan coast. Disabled by his wound, he had no choice but to resign his command. He decided to join the court in Sicily, and asked Scarpia to go with him.
Scarpia, during the few weeks of action against the French, had formed a close bond with his commander: Damas was the man he would like to have been, and might have been had he not married Paola di Marcisano. As they bivouacked at night, Damas would tell of his exploits – joining the Russians under Prince Potemkin to fight the Turks on the Black Sea, then serving in the Prince de Condé’s army of émigrés fighting the Jacobins on the Rhine. His amorous adventures, about which he talked freely, were as intriguing as his exploits on the field. Damas was cultured and witty, and if a little conceited, the conceit was justified. The calm with which he marshalled his men, the strict discipline he enforced which enabled them to escape encirclement by the French, his insouciance as the heads or limbs of men standing next to him were blown off by a cannonball or their bodies lacerated by grapeshot, and the stoicism he showed now that half his jaw was shot away, had greatly impressed Scarpia, who hitherto had had little experience of major campaigns.
It was clear that Damas had become equally attached to Scarpia, their camaraderie one of the few happy bi-products of the cruel war. Moreover, both Scarpia and Spoletta had proved indispensable to Damas, because they spoke the language of the Neapolitan conscripts who, despite their inexperience and lack of training, had shown great courage and endurance. The soldiers would now be shipped back to Naples by Nelson. Scarpia therefore agreed to go with Damas to Sicily.
The two men, accompanied by Spoletta, landed at Messina. From here Damas was carried on a litter to Palermo, where he received a hero’s welcome. King Ferdinand and Queen Maria Carolina, General Acton and Admiral Nelson all congratulated him on his extraordinary achievement in escaping encirclement by the French. Damas disliked the two Englishmen, blaming them for the disastrous war. But King Ferdinand was in no position to dispense with either: it was a British fleet at Palermo, and a British garrison at Messina, that protected him from the French.
Moreover, Nelson’s position in the affections of Queen Maria Carolina was stronger than ever. Soon after Damas’s arrival in Sicily, she gave an extravagant reception in Nelson’s honour with effigies in a Temple of Victory of Nelson, his mistress Emma Hamilton, and her mari complaisant, Sir William Hamilton. The eight-year-old Prince Leopold, Ferdinand and Maria Carolina’s second son, escorted the British admiral into the temple and placed a crown of laurels upon his head. The king then announced that he had made Nelson the Duke of Brontë, with estates that brought in eight thousand ducats a year.
While Nelson was being lionised in Palermo, a French frigate left the port of Alexandria in Egypt with an all-important passenger bound for Toulon. Bonaparte had had enough of his adventure in the Levant: political confusion in Paris demanded his return to France. Had Nelson been alert at his post, the future French emperor might have been captured and the course of history changed. ‘Bonaparte should build a shrine to Lady Hamilton,’ Damas later wrote in his memoirs. ‘She should head the list of all the happy chances that led him to the throne.’
Thirteen
1
On the mainland of Italy, the abandoned subjects of King Ferdinand and Queen Maria Carolina continued to fight the French. For a moment they seemed to have the advantage over the invaders, but the Austrian commander, General Mack, and the viceroy appointed by King Ferdinand, General Pignatelli, decided that the war was lost. They asked for an armistice. General Championnet was astonished: he had been on the point of ordering a tactical retreat. His terms for a cessation of hostilities were harsh, and, though accepted by the king’s representatives, were, when announced in Naples, rejected by the common people. The impoverished lazzaroni seized arms from the regular troops and stormed the fortresses overlooking the city – the Castel Nuovo, the St Elmo, Carmine and Ovo castles. Their arsenals were expropriated and all their prisoners set free – political prisoners and common criminals alike. An armed band set off to arrest General Mack, who, forewarned, surrendered to Championnet. General Pignatelli fled to Sicily dressed as a woman.
In the city of Naples, the mob now chose its own leaders: Paggio, a flour merchant, and Michele il Pazzo – Michael the Mad. It plundered the houses of republicans and attacked anyone who looked like a Jacobin. The middle classes were dismayed. Feeling that a republic would be preferable to anarchy, a number changed sides. The Patriotic Society asked Championnet to send his soldiers into the city and through subterfuge took from the lazzaroni the fortresses that overlooked the city. The lazzaroni continued to resist, fighting the French from street to street, facing grapeshot, mounted dragoons, cannonades from the ‘patriots’ in the St Elmo fortress and fire from republicans in the upper storeys of their homes. There was slaughter on both sides – a thousand French, three thousand lazzaroni.
After three days of fighting, it became clear to the surviving lazzaroni that they could not win. The time had come to quit. The king was gone: why leave his possessions to be plundered by the French? The mob broke into the royal palace and stripped it bare. Michele il Pazzo was taken prisoner, but instead of being shot by the French, he was reassured by Championnet: they had come as liberators, not conquerors. A guard of honour was placed before the shrine of St Gennaro.
*
In the midst of the fighting, on 22 January, the republicans in St Elmo had planted a Liberty tree in the courtyard of the castle, raised a tricolour over the ramparts and proclaimed a republic. A poetess, Eleonara Pimentel, who had joined her brothers in the fortress, composed a Hymn to Liberty. To establish a pedigree in classical antiquity, the republic was named after the pagan Greek settlement that had preceded the city of Naples, Parthenope. Names of those who it was thought should now govern this Parthenopean Republic were sent to General Championnet – the first being Carlo Lauberg, a defrocked priest, who had returned with the French wearing a French uniform and with a wife.
A Te Deum was sung in the cathedral to celebrate the founding of the republic and a Tree of Liberty planted in front of the royal palace, now renamed the National Palace. All the royal emblems – the crowns and fleurs-de-lis – were hacked off the building. The city was lit up for three nights of celebrations. There were impassioned speeches, wild dancing and impromptu civic weddings which, wrote the republican historian Pietro Coletta, ‘had rather the character of bacchanalian orgies than civil ceremonies’. The lazzaroni were quiescent, while the bourgeois republicans, released from the dungeons of the Bourbons, or free to leave the homes where they had been hiding for so long, put on their finest clothes and took their places in the loggias in the San Carlo Opera, now the National Theatre, to listen to an opera by Tritto composed for the king’s birthday, Nicaboro in Jucatan.
2
News t
hat half their kingdom was now a republic reached King Ferdinand and Queen Maria Carolina in Palermo at the end of January 1798; so too the report of the execution of Gennaro Valentino. Unable to formally mourn the death of her young favourite, the queen’s grief festered and sharpened her desire for revenge. Scarpia and Damas, though used to the death of friends on the field, were incensed that Championnet had broken the promise of a safe conduct and executed a fellow soldier in cold blood. Scarpia was particularly affected – the young Valentino had seemed a younger and better self – and his heart hardened towards the Jacobins and the French.
In Palermo, further reports that senior officers hitherto loyal to the king such as the Prince of Moliterno and the Duke of Rocaromana had gone over to the republic dispersed the euphoria that had come with the feting of Nelson. A thin layer of snow had settled on the city, and the royal family shivered in their draughty, ill-furnished palace. Only the king remained in good health and good spirits. Queen Maria Carolina, depressed and herself unwell, had to tend sick children and a daughter-in-law dying of consumption. She also knew that, for the first time in their marriage, her husband had lost faith in her judgement. It was she who had advised him to attack the French; she who had sent for Mack; and it was therefore she who was responsible for their present plight.
The position of the royal family in Palermo was not only uncomfortable but precarious: the Sicilians might be loyal to their monarch but they disliked his Neapolitan entourage and so Ferdinand felt obliged to replace some of his Neapolitan ministers with Sicilians. Acton was still responsible for foreign affairs: alliances were formed with Russia and Turkey, and Britain remained the guarantor of the safety of the royal family, but Nelson’s fleet was required in other parts of the Mediterranean, leaving only one warship in the harbour at Palermo. Charred hulks were all that was left of the once fine Neapolitan navy, and its dashing admiral, Francesco Caracciolo, with no role to play, was given permission to return to Naples to secure his property from the republicans and the French. Once there, he deserted the king and offered his services to the Parthenopean Republic.
The hopes of the Bourbons were for the spring, when military campaigns against the French would resume. The Russians had promised to send a fleet into the Mediterranean and land troops in Italy. The Turks were now allies, and the British remained implacable in their war against those whom Nelson called ‘the enemies of the human race’. Austria, too, was stirring from its pusillanimous inertia. It was possible that an Austrian army with Russian support might defeat the French forces in northern Italy. In the meantime, there was little to do but wait.
*
There was one man, however, who was not prepared to wait, seeing more at stake than the ousting of foreign invaders and the restoration of legitimate monarchs to their thrones. Cardinal Fabrizio Ruffo, Comptroller of the Palace of Caserta and the Royal Colony of Leucio, had fled with the court from Naples to Palermo. However, Ruffo was more than the holder of a minor office in the court of the King and Queen of the Two Sicilies; he was also a prince of the Roman Catholic Church and saw with dismay in the establishment of the Parthenopean Republic a far greater catastrophe than the transfer of power from the Bourbon monarchs and their favourites to republican lawyers, doctors, disaffected aristocrats and defrocked priests. What alarmed Ruffo was not the sequestration of estates or the removal of royal emblems from public buildings, but the supplanting with the Tree of Liberty of the Cross of Christ.
The Catholic Church had been the religion of the state throughout Italy since the reign of the Roman Emperor Constantine in the fourth century. With the collapse of the imperial administration in the Dark Ages, it was the Church that had filled the void – its literate priests replacing the imperial magistrates, its bishops the prefects, and at the apex of the administration of the Western Empire not a new Caesar but the Pope. At a time when the forefathers of the Bourbons and Habsburgs were mere chieftains of barbarian clans, popes such as Leo and Gregory had defended the integrity of Christendom. When the followers of Muhammad who had swept over North Africa, Syria, Palestine, the Iberian peninsula, the Balkans and all that now constituted the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, it was the popes who had called upon Christians to resist them, and reconquer the lost nations for the Holy Catholic Faith.
What was the French Revolution but another assault on Christendom under a new guise? Satan, who had seduced the faithful with the zeal of a Muhammad, the unworldliness of a Cathar parfait, the evangelical fervour of a Luther, now misled with promises of liberty, equality and fraternity. Where deceit failed, apostasy was enforced by terror – the Saracen’s scimitar, the Protestant’s pike or the Jacobin’s guillotine. And there was always concupiscence, a favoured tool of Satan to achieve his ends.
Ruffo was no fanatic. He could understand that in this life it was hard to distinguish the wheat from the chaff; that there were some who sincerely believed that liberty, equality and fraternity could contribute to human happiness and lead to a better life. He recognised the great disparities in the distribution of God’s gifts in this world; but the way to redress the imbalance was through the giving of alms, not social revolution.
Ruffo also had an attribute beyond his zeal that distinguished him from most of those in the court of King Ferdinand and Queen Maria Carolina: he was a Calabrian. The estates of his brother, the Duke of Baranello, lay just on the other side of the Strait of Messina at Bagnara; Ruffo had been born at San Lucido, another of his family’s domains. He knew and loved his people and had been kept well informed by dispatches from the clergy on the mainland and knew that there was no popular support for the Parthenopean Republic. ‘It is clear, Your Eminence,’ wrote the Bishop of Ottavini, ‘that with good leadership the invaders would have been repulsed. But the army was led by foreigners with no love of our patria.’ Another described how, in his diocese which abutted that of Naples, a number of the leading citizens, hitherto loyal to the king, were declaring themselves republicans and replacing crucifixes with Liberty trees. ‘Human nature is weak, Your Eminence. They see whose hand now fills the trough. The Jacobin poison is spreading and will spread further in the wake of the French.’
*
Early in February, Ruffo sent for Scarpia. They had met frequently following Scarpia’s arrival in Palermo with Roger de Damas – either at court, or at the receptions of the Princess Calamatina, and once at Scarpia’s villa in Bagheria, when Scarpia had given a reception in honour of the man who had raised him from obscurity in Rome. Now Scarpia was summoned to the episcopal palace in Palermo where Ruffo was residing, and was shown by his secretary into the cardinal’s private apartments.
Ruffo was standing by his desk, and when he looked up, Scarpia noticed that his usually placid features were flushed and his eyes, normally expressing no more than curiosity, benevolence and a measure of affection, were enlivened by some sort of excitement. ‘Ah, Baron,’ he said. ‘I am glad you are here.’ Ruffo did not offer Scarpia a chair, or sit down himself. ‘I have just come from the king and will leave tomorrow.’
‘Leave?’
‘For Italy. I have persuaded the king, the queen and General Acton that we must act now, not await the spring. I intend to cross the Strait of Messina and raise the standard of revolt in the name of our Holy Faith. I have alerted our people at Bagnara.’
‘But with what forces?’
‘With no forces but that force that is invincible – trust in the providence of Almighty God.’
‘Let me go with you.’
The cardinal smiled. ‘Of course. I knew I could count on you. Your mother is from Basilicata. Your brother has estates at Barca. Would his people respond to an appeal?’
‘Without a doubt.’
‘I thought as much. The peasants are loyal,’ said Ruffo. ‘They are loyal to the king, but above all to God and His Church. The Jacobin poison has infected Naples and some towns, but it has not yet spread to Calabria or the Abruzzi. There is every chance that we can check it before it does. Enough of th
ese Austrian, Swiss and German generals. If we, their natural leaders, call upon the people, they will follow us to victory or death.’
‘Your Eminence can count on me.’
‘I leave tomorrow, but you must send first to Barca to prepare the ground. Then sail to Sapri and go from there to Barca. Once you have raised a force, send word to me at Bagnara so that we can coordinate our tactics. The king has made me his viceroy. I have full powers to act in his name.’
*
On 7 February 1799, Cardinal Ruffo landed on the coast of Calabria with two clerics and four retainers. He was met by members of his family and escorted to Bagnara, where he was met by an enthusiastic crowd. The next morning, during Mass in the packed parish church, he preached his crusade. Cries of Una guerra santa and Viva il re came from the congregation. In the days which followed, volunteers came from all over Calabria; priests and friars, eager to serve this prince of the Church – their congregations, incited by sermons to take up arms against the atheistic republicans; soldiers from the disbanded baronial armies; landowners and peasants loyal to the Bourbons; and a fair number of thieves and bandits who saw the possibility of plunder in this holy war.
Ruffo named his ragbag force il Armate della Santa Fide in Gesu Cristo – the Army of the Holy Faith in Jesus Christ. These sanfedisti had white crosses sewn onto their sleeves, and wore the red cockades of the Bourbons on their hats. Ruffo led his army out of Bagnara towards the towns of Gioia Tauro and Rosarno, which opened their gates. Horses, arms and provisions were provided at Monteleone. At Mileto, the cardinal told the magistrates, officials and prominent citizens of the holy purpose of his crusade; of the powers that had been conferred upon him by the king; of the terrible consequences of resistance, and the advantages of acquiescence – among them six years of exemption from taxes and a share in the property expropriated from the rebellious republicans. The city opened its gates and the cardinal led a solemn procession through the streets to the church, where a Te Deum was sung to thank God for this early triumph.
Scarpia Page 26