Macdonald’s speech was met with enthusiastic applause. So intoxicated were the senators with their own ideals that they failed to see that they were being left in the lurch. On 7 May, leaving French garrisons in the St Elmo and the Castel Nuovo fortresses, General Macdonald departed from Naples and led his army north towards the frontier of the Roman Republic. The republicans in Naples reorganised their forces and prepared for the city’s defence. Stringent measures were taken to pre-empt a rising by the Bourbon enemy within.
A conspiracy by two brothers called Bacher was uncovered. The Bachers and their friends planned to seize the fortress of St Elmo and massacre prominent republicans. They would mark the doors of those to be killed and issue safe conducts to supporters of the king. Gerardo Bacher, the younger of the two brothers, gave one such safe conduct to a young woman he was courting, Luisa Sanfelice. She passed it on to her lover, a zealous republican, Ferdinando Ferri. Ferri went to the police and the conspirators were arrested. Luisa, who had only thought to save her lover from the pogrom, was declared the Saviour of the Republic and Mother of the Nation. These were titles she would later come to regret.
The successful suppression of the enemy within could not save the republic. A general, the Duke of Rocaromana, an early hero of resistance to the French who had gone over to the republic, now saw the error of his ways, threw himself at the mercy of Cardinal Ruffo and offered to serve as a private in the Army of the Holy Faith. The cardinal welcomed back this prodigal son and gave him command of all the forces in the Terra del Lavoro. The encirclement of the city was now complete. Pronio controlled the land around Capua; Fra Diavolo and Mammone had united their forces around Sessa and Teano, and Scarpia had secured the surrender of Cava and Salerno. All placed themselves under the authority of Cardinal Ruffo, whose coalition now included Neapolitans, Sicilians, Romans, Tuscans, English, Portuguese, Dalmatians, Russians and Turks – the Muslim soldiers an anomaly in the Army of the Holy Faith.
As the Bourbonists closed in on the city, the members of the Legislative Council attended a performance of Alfieri’s Timoleone at the Patriotic Theatre. Rumours circulated of French victories in northern Italy and the imminent arrival in the Bay of Naples of a French fleet carrying 30,000 men. Using the last of the depleted stocks of oil, the city was illuminated to celebrate these phantom French victories. There was a ball at the Fondo Theatre and on 2 June, after Cardinal Zurlo had excommunicated his rival, Cardinal Ruffo, a Te Deum was sung in the church of San Lorenzo even as a priest was shot for shouting ‘Long live the king’.
Cardinal Ruffo awaited an auspicious day to launch his assault. St Gennaro was out of favour for having appeared to favour the French, so Ruffo chose the feast of St Anthony of Padua, 13 June. After kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament, the cardinal mounted his horse and, dressed in his purple robes and carrying a drawn sword, led his troops towards the Maddalena Bridge. Seeing his advance, the members of the republican government retreated with their families into the Castel Nuovo and ordered the execution of the Bacher brothers: they were shot in the courtyard of the castle, together with three of their companions and eleven other Bourbonist prisoners.
As Ruffo’s troops advanced into the city, they were met with fusillades from the fortresses and, more effectively, from gunboats in the harbour commanded by Admiral Caracciolo. Unlike the Duke of Rocaromana, he had remained loyal to the republic. Only when the sea fort of Vigliena was captured by a contingent of Calabrian sanfedisti was Caracciolo forced to withdraw. The Carmine castle was also taken, which gave the cardinal control of the port.
With the republicans holed up in the fortresses, and the sanfedisti still on the outskirts of Naples, anarchy took hold of the city. The half-starved lazzaroni emerged from their cellars and turned on anyone who was or might be a Jacobin. Men and women were stripped, slaughtered, dismembered – their heads kicked around as footballs or held aloft on pikes, their flesh roasted to fill empty bellies. Women who were deemed republican sympathisers were stripped to see if a Tree of Liberty had been tattooed on their bodies, made to pose naked as Liberty, jeered at, pelted with filth, and raped.
There was now a momentary stalemate and, despite the extraordinary success of his venture, and being so close to victory, Cardinal Ruffo felt overwhelmed. He was dismayed by his failure to control the lazzaroni or even the Calabrians in his army, and his inability to move further into the city while the fortresses were in the hands of the enemy. In a dispatch to Acton, he wrote:
I am at the Maddalena bridge, and from all appearances the Ovo and Nuovo castles are about to surrender to the Russians and cavaliere Micheroux. I am so exhausted and worn out that I do not see how I shall be able to bear up if this goes on for another three days. Having to govern, or more precisely to curb, a vast population accustomed to the most resolute anarchy, and having to control a score of uneducated and insubordinate leaders of light troops, all intent on pillage, slaughter and violence, is so terrible and complicated a business that it is utterly beyond my strength. By now they have brought me 1,300 Jacobins; not knowing where to shelter them I have sent them to the granaries near the bridge. They must have massacred or shot at least fifty in my presence without my being able to prevent it, and wounded at least two hundred whom they dragged here naked. Seeing me horrified at this spectacle, they consoled me by saying that the dead men were truly arch-villains, and that the wounded were out-and-out enemies of the human race, well known to the population. I hope it is true, and thus I set my mind at ease a little. By dint of precautions, edicts, patrols and preachings, the violence of the people has considerably abated, thank God. If we obtain the surrender of the two castles, I hope to restore calm there entirely, because I shall be able to employ my troops with this object.
Cavaliere Antonio Micheroux, a Neapolitan officer who had been acting as liaison between the court in Palermo and the Russians and Turks, was sent by Cardinal Ruffo to parley with the republican General Massa in command of the Castel Nuovo and Colonel Méjean in command of the French garrison in the St Elmo. Their terms for surrender included immunity from arrest or prosecution for the republicans and passage for the French troops and any who chose to go with them from Naples to the port of Toulon. And a large sum of money for Méjean.
Cardinal Ruffo knew quite well that these terms would be rejected by his vengeful monarchs. ‘No pity must be shown,’ Queen Maria Carolina had written to him, ‘and the weeds that poison the rest must be hunted down, destroyed, annihilated and deported.’ But if clemency was anathema to the Bourbon monarchs, revenge affronted the Christian conscience of the cardinal. ‘What is the use of punishing?’ he had written to Acton. ‘Indeed, how is it possible to punish so many persons without an indelible imputation of cruelty?’
On 19 June, Ruffo accepted the proposed terms. The French would surrender to the Russian, Turkish and English troops and march out with full military honours. The Neapolitan republicans could choose between sailing to Toulon with the French or remaining unmolested in Naples. All their Bourbonist prisoners were to be released, but an archbishop, a bishop and two generals would remain as hostages to ensure that the provisions of the treaty were kept. The treaty was signed by Russian and Turkish representatives and, on the 23rd, by the senior British officer, Captain Foote.
Foote was aware, as was Cardinal Ruffo, that these lenient terms would not have been approved by Acton, Nelson or the Bourbon monarchs; but it made military sense to take control of the two fortresses overlooking the city in case a French fleet should arrive to relieve them. In the event, on the 24th, the day after the treaty had been ratified by Captain Foote, it was not a French fleet but eighteen British men-of-war that sailed into the Bay of Naples. On the quarterdeck of the flagship Foudroyant stood Admiral Nelson and Sir William and Lady Hamilton. Captain Foote, who had put his signature to the treaty with the republicans, went aboard and told his three compatriots what had been agreed. All three were incensed. Nelson told Foote that he had been misled by ‘that worthless fellow Ca
rdinal Ruffo who was endeavouring to form a party hostile to the interests of his sovereign’.
There now followed a struggle between Nelson and Ruffo as to whether or not the terms of the treaty should be respected. Ruffo was rowed out to the Foudroyant to explain to Nelson in French – the ‘Frog language’ that had to be interpreted by the Hamiltons – what factors had led him to enter into his commitments in the name of the king. At first, Nelson seemed to accept the treaty, but then on 28 June letters arrived from the king and queen in Naples telling him to abjure it. British warships turned their batteries on the boats that were to take the republicans to France. Those who had already boarded were surrendered and transferred in chains onto British men-of-war. The republicans protested to Cardinal Ruffo at this breach of the treaty. Ruffo sent Micheroux to protest to Nelson. Nelson ignored him. He had a note from King Ferdinand that authorised him, if necessary, to arrest Ruffo. Ruffo was now powerless, and nothing demonstrated that impotence more than the treatment of Admiral Caracciolo.
*
Unlike the Duke of Rocaromana, who had deftly changed sides, Caracciolo had remained loyal to the republic to the end. Ever conciliatory, Ruffo had sent him a message advising him to flee, and offering him a safe conduct through the encircling army. Instead of accepting this offer, Caracciolo had hidden on his mother’s estate close to Naples, but had been betrayed by one of the servants. At nine in the morning of 30 June, he was brought aboard the Foudroyant. At ten, Nelson convened a court martial under an Austrian, Count Thurn, and five Neapolitan officers. Caracciolo was found guilty of treason and sentenced to be hanged. Nelson ordered that the sentence should be carried out that afternoon on Caracciolo’s own flagship, the Minerva. Caracciolo asked that, as an officer, he be shot rather than ignominiously hanged. The request was relayed to Nelson, who refused. At five, Caracciolo was hanged from the yardarm of the Minerva. He was forty-seven years old.
It was said later that Lady Hamilton was rowed around the Minerva to see the body dangling before it was cut down and, weighted with shot, dropped into the sea. Charles Locke, the British consul, dining on the Foudroyant that night, described how Emma Hamilton fainted when the roast pig was decapitated before her because, she said, it reminded her of Caracciolo; but, upon recovering, she ‘ate heartily of it – aye, and even of the brains’.
*
On 10 July, King Ferdinand sailed into the Bay of Naples on a Neapolitan warship with General Acton. The king refused to set foot on dry land, but over the next five weeks re-imposed his rule from the deck of the Foudroyant. Ruffo made one last appeal for the treaty he had signed in the name of the king to be respected. His request was ignored. He offered his resignation, but rather than accept it the king made him Captain General of the Realm and President of the Supreme Council. These were empty roles that left Ruffo powerless to prevent Ferdinand taking revenge on the defeated republicans. A high court was set up, the Giunta di Stato, to try the political prisoners – most of them intellectuals, professionals, academics and cultured members of the nobility. Pietro Coletta claimed that 30,000 were held in Naples alone and ‘about three hundred of the first men in the kingdom perished’. Harold Acton wrote that, of the arrested eight thousand, 105 were condemned to death, 222 to life imprisonment, 322 to shorter terms in gaol, 288 to deportation and 67 to exile. The rest were set free.
The effect of the exemplary sentences was greater than the numbers suggested. General Orenzo Massa was hanged: so too Eleonara Pimentel, the feminist firebrand who had edited the republican news sheet, the Monitore. Luisa Sanfelice, whose rash warning to her lover of the Bachers’ conspiracy had led to the brothers being shot in the last days of the republic, was sentenced to death. Her execution was postponed because she was pregnant, but after the birth of her baby, despite many appeals for clemency, she too was hanged. No exceptions were made for gender, age, rank or distinction. Noblemen, scholars, even bishops were hanged, their executions delighting delirious crowds of lazzaroni. Ruffo’s fear that punishing the republicans would lead to the imputation of cruelty was well founded. Roger de Damas later described the Giunta di Stato as ‘a tribunal of blood’, while later histories such as that of Pietro Coletta canonised the victims of the Bourbons’ vendetta as martyrs of the republican cause.
If there were punishments, so, too, were there rewards. Cardinal Ruffo, according to Coletta, was given properties that brought in a revenue of 50,000 ducats, a salary of 24,000 ducats as Captain General of the Realm, and a stipend of 9,000 ducats to be held in perpetuity by his family. The Russian Tsar Paul sent him the Order of Saints Andrew and Alexander with a letter praising him for restoring a kingdom to its legitimate monarch. The cavaliere Micheroux, who had arranged the surrender of the fortresses, was enriched and made a marshal. The leaders of the royalist insurgents such as Fra Diavolo, Mammone and Pronio were rewarded and given the rank of colonel in the Neapolitan army. Scarpia too was made a colonel, awarded the Order of Constantine, made a baron of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and given estates close to those of his brother at Barca.
5
In the few moments of repose in the course of the campaign that had now ended, Vitellio Scarpia had thought of little besides tactics, logistics and how to hold together his fractious force of family retainers, arrogant noblemen, priests, peasants, bandits, turncoat soldiers, legitimist zealots and anarchic adventurers. The heightening of the senses and the pulsing of the blood that could be so exhilarating in battle was tempered by the knowledge that he was leading many men to their death. The youth who fought with such bravado in the morning was a corpse by sunset. The next day another took his place.
Scarpia led his soldiers, in the vanguard of any assault on a city, a pistol in one hand, a drawn sword in another and Spoletta a pace or two behind him. He led not simply to set an example and inspire those behind him but because he felt his life had little value. Who would mourn him if he was killed? His parents were now both dead. His brother and sister hardly knew him and his wife and children were estranged. Scarpia would never take his own life, but he minded less than most the thought that he might lose it. At each encounter he expected to be killed or badly wounded like Damas, and every evening felt almost bemused to find that he was both alive and unhurt.
Now the task was done. The God-given order had been restored. The foreign Jacobins had left the kingdom and the domestic Jacobins were in chains. The sanfedisti could now enjoy both their spiritual and material rewards, but, perversely, Scarpia was in no mood to do so. Once again rich, further ennobled and bedecked with medals and decorations, Scarpia felt neither triumphant nor even content. Like Cardinal Ruffo, he felt dishonoured by the king’s rejection of an agreement made in his name. The thought of so many of the country’s intelligentsia, who had been promised their liberty, being abused, tortured and some hanged, disturbed Scarpia and, awakened by nightmares, he relived the terrors of the war that had just come to an end.
Scarpia was familiar with irregular actions; he had fought the brigands in the Papal States, but these actions had been mere skirmishes, the shots fired as at game, while in many of the assaults on the recalcitrant cities he had found himself in an abattoir. In the papal army, his motives and those of his men had been to do their duty and earn their pay. With the sanfedisti, motives had been less uniform and frequently confused. Cardinal Ruffo’s reasoning was clear. All men and women were destined to die and after death faced an eternity either in Heaven or in Hell. Outside the Church there was no salvation: thus all who would discredit and abolish religion were doing the work of Satan. They must be defeated by fair means or foul.
Did the end justify the means, however? Some of Scarpia’s men were inspired not by devotion to God or to their Bourbon king, but by greed, loathing and lust – a terrible joy in killing and plunder, in the hacking off of limbs and heads and seeing blood spurt from bodies, of trampling on corpses, of breaking into homes, scooping up coins, jewels, fine clothes, anything silver or gold, feeling a particular hatred for the
republicans in the towns they had taken because they were literate – doctors, chemists, writers, bankers, scholars – and taking revenge for their disdain by raping their wives and daughters.
Time and again, Scarpia gave orders that women were to be well treated, and sent to convents for their safety. Spoletta, whose task was to relay these orders to the men, received them with a smile. He did not dispute them, but, Scarpia suspected, was the first to ignore them. Threatened punishments were no deterrent, because the urge to rape came with the bloodlust of battle. And knowing that Scarpia was not immune to these feelings, Spoletta would bring before him some lovely, trembling woman on the pretext that she merited interrogation, leaving her for Scarpia to enjoy what Spoletta regarded as the legitimate spoils of war.
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