by Tom Anderson
The task of Captain Robert Brathwaite was to use his ship of the line to impress upon the minds of the Neapolitans that, regardless of the Trafalgar and Bermuda debacles, Britain was still the predominant naval power. In this he was partially successful, but the Raisonnable had another, unintended effect. Perceiving that Naples’ own navy was somewhat outdated and outclassed by the larger and heavier-gunned ships of Spain, Britain and France, King Charles decided to implement a naval renewal programme. In this he might have been unsuccessful, save for the fact that his formerly domineering wife, Maria Luisa of Parma, had died two years earlier.[12]
Charles was well aware that Naples did not have the resources or manpower to truly match the great powers’ navies, but his thought was that at least a few large sail ships of the line, as opposed to the present force which relied mainly on galleys, might be enough to persuade the great powers that attacking Naples was slightly more trouble than it was worth. He was determined to continue his policy of neutrality, safeguarding his throne from any future Austrian intervention. Such an intervention had taken place during the First War of Supremacy, and the kingdom had been an Imperial Hapsburg possession until the First War of the Polish Succession, twenty years later. By focusing solely on Italy, Charles hoped to advance foreign-policy goals that centred around minimising the influence of expansionist Piedmont, pushing for the transfer of Parma from Spain to Naples, and eventually ejecting the Hapsburgs from Tuscany. Of course, in the event all these plans were rudely torn up by the intervention of the French Revolution a few years later.
However, it was on this trip that Nelson first entered the city of Naples and encountered Sir John Acton. He was a fellow Englishman and a fellow sailor, but had spent most of his life fighting under the flags of France, Spain or Tuscany against the Barbary pirates. Acton had distinguished himself in an attack on Algiers in 1775 – though, as with all such successful attacks, the pirates seemed to rise from the ashes and resume their own raids a few years later. Nonetheless, the operation had earned him a privileged place at the Tuscan court. Eventually Charles had tempted Acton away from Tuscany in order to instead engage in reorganising the Neapolitan navy.
Nelson was at first repelled by the idea that a fighting Englishman would spend his time with foreigners rather than serving his country in a time of war. However, he was soon won over by Acton’s charismatically-told tales of his battles and, in particular, his monologues on galley warfare. This was one area in particular in which Nelson had faced problems since arriving in the Mediterranean, but Acton’s knowledge – conveyed over a table at a court dinner in the Caserta Palace – soon led to Lieutenant Nelson’s keen mind proposing new ideas and tactics to tackle Mediterranean piracy. Acton was impressed, and attempted to lure Nelson away from the Royal Navy with promises of a highly paid career, but the stubborn patriot was offended and decamped from the city soon afterwards.
Nelson was soon to return though, initially in 1792 aboard his new command Habana. On this visit, he reached a rapprochement with Acton, who was by now de facto prime minister of Naples under King Charles. More significantly, Nelson also became acquainted with Charles’ daughter Princess Carlotta, who remained unwed; her father was still considering his options in a diplomatic marriage. Just what passed between the princess and Nelson remains hotly debated, but it is certain that she began to argue his corner in the court.
By the year 1800, in which Nelson resigned from the peacetime Royal Navy and finally came to Naples to take Acton up on his offer, the kingdom’s navy had been considerably improved. As well as the ships of the line that had been built, the fleet had been swelled by a number of galleys and galliots from the navy of the Republic of Venice, which had fled the rape of its home port and mostly ended up in Neapolitan Bari. The Venetian commander, Admiral Grimani, had pledged the support of his ships to Naples if Charles promised to fight to liberate Venice. Although Charles liked to entertain the idea of doing so (and then, of course, keeping the Terrafirma on a tight leash as a puppet state), Naples was in no position to consider such a thing. Though still protected behind the Papal States and Tuscany at this point, the kingdom and its people knew their peace was fragile. Lazare Hoche’s Italian Republic, after chasing the Austrian army of Archduke Ferdinand all the way to the Brenner Pass, had turned its attention once more to the south.
Grand Duke Carlo of Tuscany, in support of his fellow Hapsburgs, had sent an army that liberated Lucca, Modena and Mantua from Hoche’s rule while the latter’s army was engaged in the north. That, Hoche decided, could not be tolerated. Starting in August 1800, Hoche attacked the Tuscan-occupied regions and, by the end of the 1800 campaign season, had driven the Tuscans from them. However, in the process he had sustained considerable casualties, and thus 1801 was the first year to see newly raised Italian regiments fighting alongside his French veterans. The Italians bore a green version of the Bloody Flag with an inverted fasces, and soon the flag of the Italian Republic became a red-green vertical bicolour in recognition of this.[13]
The Tuscans appealed for help from Naples, and Charles hesitated. On the one hand, fighting in someone else’s country was always better than fighting in your own, as would assuredly happen if Tuscany was conquered; on the other, the last thing he wanted was for his own army to become trapped and encircled in Tuscany, leaving Naples itself undefended.
In the end caution won out and he chose the latter option. Tuscany would face Hoche alone. The Tuscans fought hard, knowing the fate of Piedmont and Venice, but in the end succumbed. By August 1801, Hoche was standing in the Palazzo Vecchio of Florence, acknowledged as rightful ruler of Tuscany by terrified local dignitaries. The incident was witnessed by the eight-year-old Giovanni Tressino and recorded in his diary: “Monsieur ’Oche informed us that his motto is ‘Deeds, not words’, and it only took him an hour to explain what this meant.” This may be the first example of the acerbic, satirical wit that would make Tressino famous in the nineteenth century.[14]
The conquest of the southern half of the Grand Duchy, the former Republic of Siena, followed more slowly. The Tuscan army faced more and more of Hoche’s fresh Italian recruits, many of whom were as green as the banners they carried. Yet the idea of a united republican Italy was nonetheless a rallying cry for some, for all the darkness of the Violation of Venice. The fact that Hoche had distanced himself from the excesses of Robespierre and Lisieux also helped. Girolamo Acciaioli, a veteran in Hoche’s Italian brigades, reflected in 1822: “It was not truly for a cause that we fought, or at least none save the wide-eyed idealists. But nor was it for the cynical things, pay, loot, women. It was for Hoche. His charisma… it was like a shared delusion, you felt that you could march anywhere. To Calabria. To Paris. To the moon.”
By the start of 1802, the Tuscan army and their Grand Duke had retreated to the port of Follonica. There they were surrounded by Hoche’s Franco-Italian armies, which laid siege to the town. To their backs was the sea. The Tuscan fleet remained loyal and fought a pitched battle, the Battle of Elba, with Hoche’s own ships, which were mostly drawn from what had been the Republic of Genoa. The Tuscans emerged victorious, but it was a Pyrrhic victory, with too few undamaged ships to evacuate much of the trapped army.
It was at this point that Naples intervened, partly on Horatio Nelson’s insistence. His patronage by Princess Carlotta had helped him reach a high position in the court’s favour, and indeed it could be said that in truth the Kingdoms of Naples and Sicily were now run by three Englishmen: Acton, Hamilton and Nelson. Native Neapolitan politicians, jealous of this favour, attempted to whip up popular sentiment against three foreign heretics being endowed with such power. In this, however, they were largely unsuccessful: Naples’ own political elite were mostly disciples of Bernardo Tanucci, strong Enlightenment anti-clericalists whose ideas were unpopular with the common people.
Nelson argued that the remnants of the Tuscan army could be absorbed to supplement the Neapolitan fighting force, just as the Venetian fleet had. Acton ag
reed, and persuaded King Charles to authorise an intervention. On February 4th 1802, the Neapolitan fleet under Nelson sailed unopposed into the battered harbours of Follonica and evacuated what remained of the Tuscan army, including Grand Duke Carlo himself. Hoche’s forces, whose commanders had half suspected something like this, attempted to drive off Nelson’s force using shore batteries armed with hot shot. Although two Neapolitan galleys were burned, Nelson’s Siracusa was able to silence the batteries by a swift descent upon the cove and an attack by marines – one of Acton’s introductions to the Neapolitan navy which Nelson had then refined. The result was both that most of the Tuscan army was successfully brought back to Naples, and that Nelson’s reputation was cemented into popular imagination. The size of his ego and his talent for self-publicism doubtless helped. Here was a man who could challenge Lazare Hoche on his own ground.
Uncharacteristically, Hoche used 1802 as an opportunity to ask for assistance from Paris. Although he still officially refused to recognise Lisieux’s regime, the Italian and French Republics had been growing closer together once more since the Treaty of Savoy and the partition of Switzerland. Hoche demanded new, trained French troops, arguing that he was expecting a renewed attack from Austria and needed additional troops to both defend against it and to hold down the rebellious countryside. Lisieux was suspicious of Hoche’s intentions, but recognised that a collapse of the Italian Republic would remove a useful buffer state for his plan to isolate France from the rest of Europe. L’Administrateur therefore elected to send Hoche perhaps a third of what he had asked for.
It transpired that Hoche had, of course, been lying through his teeth. Although an Austrian attack did come over the Brenner Pass in 1802, it was a decidedly half-hearted affair and easily beaten back by some of Hoche’s more experienced Italian troops. Just as well, for that was all that he had left in Tyrol and Venetia. The bulk of his army – his French veterans, his Italian recruits, and the new troops from Lisieux – was assembling in Tuscany.
Ready for a southern thrust against the Papal States.
The resulting war could fill a book by itself, for all its brevity; Rome burned in November. Hoche had surmised that his Italian troops might be reluctant to attack papal institutions, and so had requested troops from Lisieux. He knew, though he had not foreseen La Nuit Macabre, that Lisieux was trying to get rid of his Sans-Culottes. He was therefore unsurprised to learn that the troops he had received were among the most fanatical Jacobins there were, on a par with Lascelles’ army in Bavaria. They would have no compunctions against attacking the Church; indeed, they would revel in it.
Hoche’s prediction was perfectly accurate, but he had perhaps not thought through the consequences. Contrary to the more civilised way of war often adopted in verdant Italy, the new Jacobin troops practiced la maraude and terrorised the countryside. Churches and town halls were burnt, with priests and local mayors and nobles summarily hanged or beheaded in the street.
In a move that was later criticised, King Charles again hesitated and did not intervene in the war until Ancona and Civitavecchia had already been taken. Neapolitan-Tuscan forces marched to war in October, but it was already too late; by the time they entered Latina and glimpsed the spires of the Eternal City in the distance, those spires were on fire.
Indeed Hoche’s Jacobin horde had torched the city of Rome rather than attempting to besiege it. Hoche himself was, at the time, in Bologna, supervising the new Italian regiments coming down from the former Venetian Terrafirma. He therefore did not personally witness the atrocities. It is certain that he would have chosen to be there if it were possible, for such a politically and strategically important phase of the war. But Hoche had fundamentally underestimated just how fast the Jacobins, using their Guerre d’éclair doctrine, could go.
Facing the destruction of all he held dear, the aged Pope Benedict XV attempted to flee the city, but was recognised in the street. The Jacobins fought a pitched street battle in the burning ruins of Rome with the Swiss Guard, finally emerging triumphant. Benedict XV was beheaded beneath the pillars of what was left of the Temple of Vespasian in the Forum, mere hours before that too crumbled before the flames sweeping through the city. Perhaps one-third of the College of Cardinals escaped the conflagration; the Church lost not only its leader, but a large part of its administrative apparatus. In the resulting confusion, Jansenist movements (particularly Meridian ones) profited from the lack of a central directing voice.
Hoche was furious when he learned of the Roman holocaust. Nothing could have been calculated better to provoke outrage against him from all Italians and Catholics, including those in his own army. Always paranoid, he even suspected Lisieux of having deliberately engineered the incident on purpose. Yet, though Hoche’s army was undoubtedly weakened by the defection or desertion of parts of his Italian regiments after the Rape of Rome, we should not undervalue the courage and success of the Neapolitan-Tuscan army. Starting with the Battle of Frosinone in February 1803, the Republican armies were halted, and then driven back northwards. An attempt by Hoche himself to drive into Neapolitan territory was defeated at Teramo, though when the Neapolitan general attempted to press his advantage, Hoche successfully withdrew his army and held his position against attack at Ascoli Piceno. He remained perhaps the finest general of his generation, even when his political position was wobbling dangerously.
Nelson approved of Hoche’s difficulties, but now had a warning for the court in Caserta. He pointed out that the French had taken Minorca from Spain under the conditions of the Peace of Cadiz, and that the steam fleet of Admiral Lepelley was in dock at the base there. Though the Neapolitans were slowly grinding northward, their whole army (and that of Tuscany in exile) was committed. If the French used their steam navy to transfer troops from Spain and land in Calabria or descend on Salerno, the Neapolitans would have little to stand in their way.
Nelson further pointed out that there was a way around this. The French fleet at Minorca must be… neutralised.
On the face of it, it was an absurd suggestion, even for him. The Neapolitan fleet had so far managed to remain almost undamaged throughout the Jacobin Wars, but despite Nelson’s training improving the standard of the crews, it could still not stand up to the revolutionary new tactics that the French steam engines allowed. He would not have wanted to try such an attack with the finest crews of the Royal Navy itself.
However, Naples did have one advantage. While the French had used their fleet to bypass the Spanish and land troops in Catalonia, they had not pressed south along the Spanish coast. The Spanish fleet in Valencia had thus survived, and elements of it had fled upon the signing of the Peace of Cadiz. Some ships belatedly passed through the Pillars of Heracles and followed Infante Charles into American exile, but others came to fellow-Bourbon Naples. They were swiftly incorporated into Nelson’s navy, but one ship in particular had caught his eye. Her name was Cacafuego, a classically scatological Catalan name, and she was an experimental ship.[15] Her designer and captain, a Catalan who had served in the Portuguese East India Company, was named Josep Casanova i Llussà. He had been impressed by the use of war rockets by Mysore and Arcot, and upon returning home to Spain had petitioned the Spanish Admiralty to consider a new design of warship capable of firing rockets. Although the Spanish Admiralty was even more conservative than its British counterpart, Casanova was able to obtain some funding due to his family connections, and the result was the Cacafuego.
She was based on the design of a fifth-rate frigate, but with the mizzenmast removed to allow space for the launch assembly. This was a block of parallel iron tubes, made like thin cannon barrels, with the fuses attached to a complex system that Casanova had designed himself. This allowed the rockets to be fired individually or together. The rocket storage and the launcher were mounted in a segregated area of the deck, surrounded by wire grids and asbestos for fire safety.[16] The ship retained a gun deck, and its conventional armament was chiefly carronades for short-range defence. The Caca
fuego’s intended use meant that it should only be engaging the enemy at a very long distance, and such weapons would only be used if things went badly wrong.
Though Nelson was broadly sceptical of new technology, he had been impressed when Casanova demonstrated the rockets against an old hulk in Salerno harbour; though erratic in flight, the very unpredictability of the rockets made them an effective terror weapon, and their gunpowder warheads meant they were incendiary against the sails and varnished wood of a ship’s deck in a way which ordinary roundshot, except land-based hot shot, was not.
The plan was almost outrageously bold – after all, Naples was not yet actually at war with France, though they were fighting French Jacobins under Lisieux’s command. It was eventually approved reluctantly by Charles for two reasons. Firstly, Nelson had the favour of the King’s daughter. Secondly, the rumour – helped along by the Englishman himself – that if he was not given approval, he would do it anyway. He had developed enough of a sense of loyalty from his Neapolitan crews that they would follow him into the gates of hell themselves. Wisely, Charles acquiesced.
On the night of June 15th 1803, most of the Neapolitan fleet approached the Balearic Islands. Though Nelson did not know it, the people there were generally Carlista in their sympathy and resented both Philip’s victory in the civil war and the presence of the French. In any case, this helped, for the Majorcan fishing boats that spotted the Neapolitans on the horizon were not too inclined to inform the authorities.