The Neapolitan monarchy’s previous constitutional freedoms were abolished in the zeal to cleanse the kingdom of revolutionaries. Yet even after order had been restored, Ferdinand was afraid to return to Naples, despite Maria Carolina’s desire to do so immediately. The frustrated Lord Nelson wrote, “Plain common sense points out that the King should return to Naples, but nothing can move him.” One reason for this was the disagreement between the royal spouses as to how the kingdom should be ruled, going forward. As Nelson put it, “[T]he King and Her Majesty do not, at this moment, draw exactly the same way.”
After more than thirty years of marriage, Ferdinand had finally decided to put his foot down. From a man who had cared for nothing but the pursuit of his own personal pleasures, he became a martinet, parsimonious about household accounts, the one thing in his life over which he could assert full control. Maria Carolina groused, “We are all kept so sparingly as to lack everything.”
The queen was disgusted with her husband, as well as with the prevailing political climate in Naples. She hated Sicily, which was more of a backwater than Naples had been before she’d given it a healthy dose of Viennese sophistication three decades earlier. Ever the mother hen, Maria Carolina gloomily declared, “Were it not for my daughters, I should wish to bid adieu to the world, and retire to a convent, there to terminate my days, a desire prompted by circumstances in which I am placed.” Between her melodramatic lines could be read the balance of her message: There was no longer a place in her life for her husband.
Ferdinand felt the same way about her. After decades, he wanted to reign on his own, even if the results might be less successful. The Count de Damas had observed that Maria Carolina’s power over her husband was entirely dependent on his taste for her, waning if his head had been turned by another woman. According to Damas, the reason the king returned to his wife in the wake of one of his frequent infidelities was not because he missed her, but because he’d tired of the tedium of governing. In the count’s opinion, the queen championed so many ill-conceived plans because she advanced an agenda without taking the time to analyze the consequences of her actions, aware that she might forfeit her window of influence with her spouse if she didn’t act quickly. Many of Maria Carolina’s governmental errors were due to this perpetual race against time and her struggle with Ferdinand’s caprices. Damas observed, “His brain becomes exalted when he sees a glove well stretched over a beautifully shaped arm. . . . The Queen has spent her life leading the King and Acton by seduction, holding out her glove before one, her arm before the other, and always ending in doing what she wanted, but without being able to modify the effervescence of her character by reasoning. . . . In one of her last letters she wrote to me: ‘I have always foreseen that as I grew older my power would diminish. . . .’”
In the spring of 1800, Sir William Hamilton was relieved of his post as ambassador to the court of Naples after thirty-six years, in part because England had perceived that he (and the ambassadress) had actively meddled in Neapolitan foreign affairs and influenced governmental policy. Having made the decision to return with her children to Austria, Maria Carolina asked to tag along on their journey home, traveling with Lord Nelson and the Hamiltons as far as Vienna. Ferdinand remained in Sicily.
Maria Carolina stayed in Austria for two years, driving her son-in-law Emperor Francis II crazy with her political interference, which he blamed for another round of hostilities between Austria and France, known as the Second Coalition.
After the wife and child of Naples’s Crown Prince Francesco died of consumption, the Neapolitan Bourbons chose to form a political alliance with the Spanish branch of the family, in order to shore themselves up against the French. But Spain had become a pariah throughout Europe after signing a treaty with the French Republic in 1795. Without Maria Carolina’s consent, Ferdinand brokered a double union with the Spanish for two of their children—Francesco and “Toto,” the Princess Maria Antoinetta, who at the time was still in Austria with her mother.
The queen was extremely upset about her husband’s matchmaking behind her back. She had no love for his family and had wanted her children to marry “respectable Austrians” instead. She failed to recognize that their son and heir had fallen in love with his Spanish cousin, the infanta, and wanted to wed her. It upset her all the more that Francesco was willing to remarry “only ten days after the death of his virtuous wife. . . .”
Yet Ferdinand’s unsanctioned interference in the nuptials of their children was still not enough to drag Maria Carolina back to Sicily. “I am waiting for the King to express in writing his desire to see me again, so as not to hear him tell me the next day: ‘Chi ti ha chiamato’ [who summoned you]—depressing to one who returns with intense repugnance,” she insisted, even as her Austrian relatives couldn’t wait for her to depart.
Ferdinand finally sailed back to Naples in June 1802, but Maria Carolina, who was recovering “stoically” from an “excruciating operation” for a hemorrhoid infection, did not join him there until August.
The amnesty guaranteed to the Neapolitan Jacobins after the revolution in 1799 encouraged many of them to remain in Naples, and attracted many more. The rebels had spent the intervening years regrouping and recommencing their antiroyalist activities.
Consequently, the queen dreaded the welcome she might receive in her adopted kingdom, averring, “I leave [Austria] as one condemned to death and certainly to torment for the rest of my life. . . . I shall attend the Council [of State]; I shall deliver my opinion; but my door will be closed to every class and rank, as I do not wish to be accused of dealing with spies.” Writing from Trieste, en route to Naples, she lamented, “[U]nless I had children to marry, no force human or divine would have brought me back.” Clearly she anticipated no romantic reconciliation with her husband. A friendship grounded on their mutual affection for their children was the most she could hope for. When their daughter Maria Luisa died in childbirth a few weeks after the queen’s arrival, the couple bonded over their grief.
By 1803, Napoleon’s complex system of pacts, cease-fires, and armistices had failed, and he began to gobble up European territories like Pac-Man. That spring, with utter disregard for his treaty with Naples, he occupied two of their ports, Brindisi and Taranto. The rest of the continent seemed uninterested in helping to defend the kingdom from falling entirely and becoming a dependent of the French Republic. Ferdinand wanted to return to Sicily, but the queen was certain that if they were to quit Naples now, another revolution would erupt as soon as they left the shore.
Finally, swallowing every ounce of pride, Maria Carolina wrote to Bonaparte directly, asking him to relieve the Neapolitans of the burden of supporting his troops. Sources differ with regard to the emperor’s reaction; Harold Acton writes that he assured the queen of his strict neutrality, while other historians claim that Bonaparte never deigned to reply. The queen complained to her eldest daughter, now Empress of Austria, “[I]t is as if we were assaulted on the public highway” by France.
Yet Maria Carolina seemed to be the only one fuming over the intolerable burdens imposed upon them. Her husband still had his own priorities in order. Baron Alquier, the French Republic’s envoy to Naples, wrote, “Amid heavy taxation and financial distress, all is being prepared for the great hunts at Persano, which absorb from three to four hundred thousand francs.”
On January 2, 1805, Napoleon finally responded to the queen’s scathing assaults with a blistering scolding. Did she think he was unaware of her machinations to regain Naples? “I have in my possession several of Your Majesty’s letters, which leave no doubt as to your real secret intentions. However great Your Majesty’s hatred of France, how is it possible, after all your experiences, that the love of your husband, children, family and subjects does not counsel a little more prudence and a policy more compatible with your interests? Cannot Your Majesty, whose mind is so distinguished among women, cast off the prejudices of your sex? Must you
treat affairs of state like affairs of the heart? You have already lost your kingdom once: twice you have caused a war which has nearly ruined your father’s family. Do you wish to cause a third?”
In the wake of Bonaparte’s triumph over the combined forces of two emperors—Czar Alexander and Francis II of Austria—on December 26, 1805, the Treaty of Pressburg dissolved the Holy Roman Empire founded by Charlemagne. The Hapsburg crown lands were united into a single empire. Maria Carolina and Ferdinand’s son-in-law Francis, no longer the Holy Roman Emperor Francis II, was given a new title: His Imperial and Apostolic Majesty The Emperor of Austria Francis I. And he was also no longer the autocrat he had been. Although on paper Francis got to retain his lands, for all intents and purposes he was now a Napoleonic puppet, and the Hapsburg domains were really a part of Bonaparte’s vast empire.
Having crushed Austria, Napoleon looked southward, vowing “to punish the Queen of Naples, and to cast from the throne that guilty woman who has so often and with so much effrontery profaned every law, human and divine.”
On January 23, 1806, for the second time in a decade, Ferdinand fled to Palermo before the advancing French army could force him to do so. The rest of the royal family, including Maria Carolina, remained in Naples. The queen channeled her mother’s indomitability as she prepared for the French onslaught. She organized the kingdom’s resistance movement, an activity that finally renewed her spirit even as she tamped down her terror and continued to pack up the royal treasures.
Maria Carolina bade farewell forever to the city of Naples on February 11, addressing the court after Mass that day, her voice choked with tears. Then she and her daughters, daughter-in-law, and granddaughters, along with their entourages, boarded a frigate for Sicily. But they suffered another disastrous shipwreck, in which nearly all of their precious possessions were lost at sea. After that, Maria Carolina was compelled to dismiss most of the family’s attendants, lacking the funds to pay their wages.
Napoleon conquered Naples almost as soon as the queen departed. Although the kingdom was known as the Two Sicilies, and Palermo was the sister capital to Naples, the emperor declared that Ferdinand and Maria Carolina had abandoned their thrones and forfeited their crowns. Napoleon then appointed his brother Joseph Bonaparte king of Naples “[b]y the legitimate right of conquest.”
Times had changed since the rebellion and counterrevolution of 1799. The self-indulgent and lazy Neapolitans, not political by nature, were sick of bloodshed and revolt. According to Count Roger de Damas, the general who had commanded the monarchs’ vanquished troops, “The feeble, the discontented, the indifferent, and the timid look upon Joseph Bonaparte as a king; and a people grows more readily accustomed to a change of dynasty than to a republican constitution. . . . If habit is a second nature, that will be the only thing that will make the people desire their former masters.”
Ferdinand was still warming the Sicilian throne, but with a catch. He remained king of Sicily at the sole discretion of his British allies, who’d been keeping a weather eye on the Neapolitan royal family for the past few years. In Whitehall’s misogynistic view, Maria Carolina had meddled once too often in political affairs for their amusement. Although they were content to permit the far less competent Ferdinand to keep his throne as their puppet king in the Mediterranean, the queen was warned to keep her nose out of politics.
The Neapolitan royal marriage now rebooted to endure Palermo 2.0. Maria Carolina shut herself in the Colli Palace and dosed herself with increasing amounts of opium to dull the pains of neuralgia. But the king—resigned to the loss of Naples, according to the new British ambassador to Sicily, Hugh Elliot—went hunting every day, delighted to enjoy the pleasures of the great outdoors without the burden of ruling.
The monarchs could run, but they couldn’t seem to escape from tragedy. Illness was even crueler to Ferdinand and Maria Carolina than imperial France. In May of 1806, their daughter “Toto” succumbed to TB, although Maria Carolina was convinced that Toto’s jealous mother-in-law, the queen of Spain, had poisoned her. The following April, the sovereigns’ oldest girl, Teresa, empress of Austria, died of a chill ten days after bearing her fourteenth child, who also expired after three days. Teresa’s death hit the queen particularly hard; she was Maria Carolina’s first child, her closest tie to her homeland, and the one she had counted on to mother her younger siblings after the queen herself had passed on. When Emperor Francis remarried only ten months later, it broke Maria Carolina’s heart that Francis and Teresa’s dozen surviving children immediately fell in love with their stepmother.
Clearly, the queen was dismayed by the younger generation’s short memories and lack of respect. The next suitor who came calling for a daughter’s hand was the duc d’Orléans—son of the turncoat who had sided with the French Revolutionaries, changing his name to Philippe Égalité, and voting to execute Maria Carolina’s brother-in-law, Louis XVI. Much as Her Majesty loved to see her daughters make good marriages, Louis Philippe was the last man on earth she would have wanted the Princess Maria Amalia to wed. But the young couple genuinely fell in love, and the queen took a liking to the duc, despite her intentions to despise him. Only on the condition that Louis Philippe tell her everything about her beloved sister’s final years would she forgive him for his family’s betrayal of hers.
Named for her paternal grandmother, the twenty-eight-year-old Maria Amalia was the last of Ferdinand and Maria Carolina’s daughters to marry. Her 1809 wedding to Louis Philippe marked the final time her parents were together in an official, formal capacity. By now, Ferdinand blamed his wife for every ill that had befallen him. If there had ever been any love between the spouses, there was no longer a trace of it.
Whatever specific transgressions Napoleon referred to when he denigrated Maria Carolina, they could not have been worse than his own. Adulterer and arch-hypocrite, he toppled monarchs while besmirching their reputations. Yet when he wished to shore up his self-actuated imperial status, he sought a bride from the same royal house he had impugned, ingratiating himself with the relatives and descendants of the very people he had made his career by destroying.
In 1810, another embarrassing marriage took place when Emperor Francis of Austria sacrificed his daughter Marie Louise, Ferdinand and Maria Carolina’s first grandchild, on the altar of peace. He yoked her to Napoleon Bonaparte, thereby making Marie Louise empress of France. Maria Carolina would never accept this spawn of the French Revolution as one of the family, and it was a further affront to both the Hapsburgs and the Bourbons that Napoleon attempted to legitimize his claim to France’s imperial throne by wedding the daughter of a genuine emperor. Ironically, Joachim Murat, Napoleon’s brother-in-law, and by then the king of Naples, was against the imperial remarriage as well. Now that Maria Carolina and Ferdinand were Napoleon’s grandparents-in-law, Murat feared it would hinder his own plans to conquer Sicily.
But Marie Louise quickly enchanted her husband and implored him to leave Sicily alone and not add it to his conquests. And so, to impress his new bride, Boney obliged her, on behalf of his “grandmother, the Queen of Sicily.”
Some people, however, don’t appreciate favors. Maria Carolina viewed her Sicilian subjects as country bumpkins, second-class compared to the Neapolitans, who were already inferior to the Austrians. She was clearly biding her time until she and her husband could reclaim the throne of Naples. Yet Ferdinand had become cozy with his English puppet-masters. By 1812, they were so tired of the queen’s meddling in governmental affairs that William Bentinck, Britain’s minister on the island, gave Ferdinand an ultimatum: If you want to retain our aid, abdicate in favor of your son Francesco and banish your wife from the kingdom.
On January 16, 1812, Ferdinand signed the deed of appointment, naming Francesco his vicar-general in Sicily with the words “. . . I yield and transfer to you with the ample title of ‘Alter Ego’ the exercise of all the rights, prerogatives, pre-eminences, and powers which could b
e exercised by myself. . . .” It had been agreed between Ferdinand and Bentinck that Francesco had the keys to the kingdom as long as he remained free of his mother’s influence.
Having quit the palace, the royal spouses dwelled apart. Maria Carolina relocated to Santa Croce, a mile or so from Palermo. Ferdinand retired to Ficuzza, twenty-four miles from the capital, where he lived in sin with his mistress, the Princess of Partanna, a former lady-in-waiting to the queen.
By agreeing to cede his power to his son, Ferdinand was ultimately able to squeeze himself out from under the pressure of Bentinck’s British thumb. The queen was not so fortunate. Maria Carolina reacted as one might expect to Bentinck’s demand for her banishment, confronting him when he delivered the news. “Was it for this that I helped Nelson to win the Battle of the Nile? For this, that I brought your army to Sicily? General, is this your English honor?” she railed. Her reputation had been undeserved. She had “been poisoned” with a “burning, incessant, persistent calumny. . . . They have represented me as cruel—after I had saved hundreds of ungrateful people! They have portrayed me as ambitious. Yes, so I am, if it is ambitious to defend the crown received from God.”
Her bitterness was boundless. “I have been deprived of the government of my own country, of the dignity of my character, of the affection of my husband and children!” the queen told Bentinck. “But he has never been a father—he has never been a sovereign, and cannot therefore have the feelings of insulted majesty. And then I am accused of treason because I wish to recover my just rights as a sovereign, a wife, and a mother.”
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