The Liberation of Italy, 1815-1870 Part 16

Garibaldi had nothing more to do except to pay a last visit to Admiral Mundy, whose flagship still lay at anchor in the bay. This duty was performed in the grey dawn of the 9th of November. 'There is the ship which is to carry me away to my island home,' he said, pointing to an American merchant vessel, 'but, Admiral, I could not depart without paying you a farewell visit. Your conduct to me since our first meeting at Palermo has been so kind, so generous, that it can never be erased from my memory; it is engraven there indelibly--it will last my life.'

On leaving the flagship he rowed straight to the American vessel, which soon afterwards steamed out of the bay. The parting salute fired by the guns of the _Hannibal_ was all the pomp that attended his departure. Several hours later the people of Naples knew that their liberator had gone to dig up the potatoes which he had planted in the spring.

By Cavour's advice, Victor Emmanuel offered Garibaldi a dukedom and the Collar of the Annunziata, which confers the rank of cousin to the King, besides riches to support these honours. He refused everything, and returned to Caprera poorer than when he left it.

CHAPTER XVI

BEGINNINGS OF THE ITALIAN KINGDOM

1860-1861

Beginnings of the Italian Kingdom--The Fall of Gaeta--Political Brigandage--The Proclamation of the Italian Kingdom--Cavour's Death.

The Neapolitan army retreated, as has been already stated, beyond the Garigliano. Capua, isolated and surrounded, could render no material service to the royal cause; it capitulated on the 2nd of November, though not until the town had been bombarded for forty-eight hours.

The siege was witnessed by Victor Emmanuel, who said to General Delia Rocca: 'It breaks my heart to think that we are sending death and destruction into an Italian town.' Two days after the surrender of Capua, Cialdini threw a bridge over the Garigliano near its mouth, an operation covered by the guns of Admiral Persano's squadron. His first attempt on the 29th of October had met with a decided repulse, another proof that this last remnant of the Neapolitan army was not an enemy to be despised. The second attempt, however, was successful; part of the Neapolitans fell back upon Gaeta, and the other part fled over the Papal frontier.

Gaeta, the refuge of the Pope and the fugitive Princes in 1848, now became the ultimate rock of defence of the Bourbon dynasty. The position of the fortress is extremely strong and not unlike Gibraltar in its main features. A headland running out into the sea and rising to a height of three or four hundred feet, it is divided by a strip of sand from the sh.o.r.e-line. The princ.i.p.al defences were then composed of a triple semi-circle of ditches and ramparts one higher than the other. Had the country been flat the difficulties of the siege would have been much increased; its hilly character allowed Cialdini to fix his batteries on heights which commanded the top of the Gaeta hill.

But to profit by this, the Piedmontese were obliged to make fourteen miles of roads by which to bring up their artillery. For a month, 10,000 out of the 20,000 besiegers were at work with the spade. The defending force amounted to 11,000 men, and was commanded by General Ritucci. From the first, it was certain that the obstinate stand made at Gaeta could only result in what Lord John Russell called a useless effusion of blood; nevertheless it seems to have been prompted by a real belief that Francis would still recover his kingdom. The precedent of his father's return from Gaeta may have strengthened the King's illusion; every day he received highly-coloured reports of a gathering reaction, and as the French fleet in the bay prevented Admiral Persano from attacking from the sea, he believed that the time which he could hold out was indefinite. This policy of the French Government need not have greatly cheered him, as its motive was less to help Francis than to prepare the way, by hampering the Piedmontese, for a little fishing in troubled waters. Prince Murat, descendant of the _Beau Sabreur_, was busy writing proclamations to remind the world that if Francis were impossible and Victor Emmanuel 'wanted finish,'

there was an eligible young man ready to sacrifice the charms of the Boulevards for the cares of kingship.

On the representations of the British Government the Emperor withdrew his fleet in January, advising Francis II. to renounce a hopeless resistance. But at this eleventh hour the King had adopted the principle of 'no surrender,' and he meant to stick to it. It is difficult to blame him; at anyrate, much more serious is the blame due to the methods of warfare which he was to adopt or to approve thereafter. His young Queen, who was frequently seen on the ramparts encouraging the artillerymen at their guns, had probably much to do with his virile resolution. The fortress was now attacked by land and by sea, and the bursting of a powder-magazine inside the walls hastened its doom. On the 15th of January the Neapolitans laid down their arms, the King having left his dominions by sea. The first act of the conquerors in the half-ruined town was to attend a ma.s.s for the repose of the souls of the brave men, friends and foes, who had fallen during the siege. Noisy rejoicings would have been unseemly, for the vanquished were fellow-countrymen.

The telegram announcing the fall of Gaeta went to Caprera; Garibaldi read it, and a weight was taken off his mind. 'Civil war is at an end,' he announced to the little party round the supper-table; 'Cialdini with our army is in Gaeta; now the Italians will not cut one another's throats any more.' Later in the evening he seemed so depressed that they thought him ill; Colonel Vecchj went to his bedside to discover what was the matter. He found him reading the _Times_, and inquired why he had become so suddenly sad. After a pause, Garibaldi said: 'Poor boy! Born at the foot of a throne and perhaps not by his own fault, hurled from it. He too will have to feel the bitterness of exile without preparation.' 'Is that all?' asked Vecchj. 'Do you think it nothing?' was the answer. 'Why then,'

persisted Vecchj, half in jest, 'did you go to Marsala?' 'It was the duty of us all to go,' Garibaldi said quickly, 'else how could there have been one Italy?'

Francis II. would have been happy had he found counsellors to persuade him to keep pure such t.i.tles to sympathy as he then possessed.

Decorum, if not humanity, should have urged him to retire, surrounded by the solitary flash of glory cast on his fallen cause by the brave defence of Gaeta. But the revolution, the new Islam, if it could not be conquered must be made to suffer for its triumph. Hence the exiled King was advised to call in murder, pillage and rapine as accomplices. The political brigandage which followed the downfall of the King of the Two Sicilies began after the battle of the Volturno and extended over five years. Its effect on the general situation was nil; it hara.s.sed and distracted the Italian Government and created the odious necessity of using severe repressive measures, but it never placed the crown in danger. One effect it did have, and that was to raise all over Italy a feeling of reprobation for the late dynasty, which not all the crimes and follies of the two Ferdinands and the first Francis had succeeded in evoking. How many bright lives, full of promise, were lost in that warfare which even the sacred name of duty could not save from being ungrateful and inglorious! Italians who have lost their children in their country's battles have never been heard to complain; nowhere was the seemliness of death for native land better understood than it has been in the Italy of this century, but to lose son or brother in a brigand ambush by the hand of an escaped galley-slave--this was hard. The thrust was sharpened by the knowledge that the fomenter of the mischief was dwelling securely in the heart of Italy, the guest of the Head of the Church. From Rome came money and instructions; from Rome, whether with or without the cognizance of the authorities, came recruits. The Roman frontier afforded a means of escape for all who could reach it, however red their hands were with blood. What further evidence was needed of the impossibility of an indefinite duration of this state within a state?

King Francis held back at first, but his uncle, the Count of Trapani, who openly abetted the brigand partisans, drew him more and more into collusion with them and their works. The Belgian ecclesiastic, Mgr. de Merode, who had then an influence at the Vatican not possessed even by Antonelli, looked, unless he was much belied, with a very kind eye upon the new defenders of throne and altar. Efforts have been made to represent the war as one carried on by loyal peasants. No one denies that every peasants' war must a.s.sume, more or less, an aspect of brigandage; nevertheless there have been righteous and patriotic peasants' wars, such as that of the Klephts in Greece. The question is, Whether the political brigandage in South Italy had any real affinity with the wars of the Klephts, or even of the Carlists? And the answer must be a negative.

The partisan chiefs in the kingdom of Naples were brigands, pure and simple, most of whom had either been long wanted by the police, or had already suffered in prison for their crimes. They organised their troops on the strict principles of brigand bands, and proposed to them the same object: pillage. 'Lieut-General' Chiavone who had a mania for imitating Garibaldi, was the least bad among them; unlike his prototype, he did not like being under fire, but neither did he care to spill innocent blood. What, however, can be said for Pilone, 'commander of His Majesty's forces' on Vesuvius; for Ninco Nanco, Bianco dei Bianchi, Tardio, Palma; for Carusso, who cut the throats of thirteen out of fourteen labourers and told the one left to go and tell the tale; for the brothers La Gala, who roasted and ate a priest?

It was said that no horror committed during the Indian Mutiny was here without a parallel.

Of respectable Neapolitans who held responsible posts under the late _regime_ not one joined the bands, but they contained French, Austrian and Belgian officers, and one Prussian. A nephew of Mgr. de Merode, the young Marquis de Trazegnies, was with Chiavone; the Carlist, Jose Borjes, was with a scoundrel named Crocco. Borjes' case is a hard one.

He had been made to believe in the genuine character of the insurrection and thought that he was giving his sword to an honourable cause. The melancholy disillusion can be traced in the pages of a note-book which he kept from day to day, and which fell into the hands of the Italians when he was captured. The brief entries show a poetic mind; he observes the fertile soil, deploring, only, that it is not better cultivated; he admires the smiling valleys and the magnificent woods whose kings of the forest show no mark of the centuries that pa.s.sed over their fresh verdure. At first Borjes was pleased with the peasants who came to him, but as they were few, he was obliged to join Crocco's large band, and he now began to see, with horror, what kind of a.s.sociates he had fallen amongst. He had no authority; the brigands laughed at his rebukes; never in his life, he writes, had he come across such thieves. Before the enemy they ran away like a flock of sheep, but when it was safe to do so, they murdered both men and women. In desperation, Borjes resolved to try and get to Rome, that he might lay the whole truth before the King, but after suffering many hardships, he was taken with a few others close to the Papal frontier and was immediately shot. He died bravely, chanting a Spanish litany.

Borjes' journal notes the opposition of all cla.s.ses, except the very poorest and most ignorant. Was it to be believed, therefore, that this mountain warfare, however long drawn out, could alter one iota the course of events? If Francis II. supposed the insurrection to be the work of a virtuous peasantry, why did he allow them to rush to their destruction?

The task of restoring order was a.s.signed to General Cialdini. He found the whole country, from the Abruzzi to Calabria, terrorised by the league of native a.s.sa.s.sins and foreign n.o.blemen. The Modenese general was a severe officer who had learnt war in Spain, not a gentle school. If he exceeded the bounds of dire necessity he merits blame; but no one then hoped in the efficacy of half measures.

One element in the epidemic of brigandage, and looking forward, the most serious of all, was an unconscious but profoundly real socialism.

If half-a-dozen socialistic emissaries had a.s.sumed the office of guides and instructors, it is even odds that the red flag of communism would have displaced the white one of Bourbon. This feature became more accentuated as the struggle wore on, and after experience had been made of the new political state. The economic condition of a great part of the southern population was deplorable, but liberty, so many thought, would exercise an instantaneous effect, filling the mouths of the hungry, clothing the naked, providing firing in winter, sending rain or sunshine as it was wanted. But liberty does none of these things. The disappointment of the discovery did not count for nothing in the difficulties of that period; it counts for everything in the difficulties of this.

The reorganisation of the southern provinces proceeded very slowly. The post of Lieutenant-Governor was successively conferred on L.C. Farini, Prince Eugene of Carignano, and Count Ponza di San Martino; for a short time Cialdini was invested with the supreme civil as well as military power. None of these changes met with entire success. The government was sometimes too weak, sometimes too arbitrary; of the great number of Piedmontese officials distributed through the south, a few won general approval, but the majority betrayed want of knowledge and tact, and were judged accordingly. It was a misfortune for the new administration that it was not a.s.sisted by the steam power of moral enthusiasm which appeared and disappeared with Garibaldi. There is a great amount of certainty that the vast bulk of the population desired union with Italy; but it is equally certain that the new Government, though not without good intentions, began by failing to please anybody, and the seeds of much future trouble were planted.

On the 18th of February 1861, the first Italian legislature a.s.sembled at Turin in the old Chamber, where, by long years of patient work and self-sacrificing fidelity to principle, the possibility of establishing an Italian const.i.tutional monarchy had been laboriously tested and established. Only the deputies of Rome and Venice were still missing. The first act of the new parliament was to pa.s.s an unanimous vote to the effect that Victor Emmanuel and his heirs should a.s.sume the t.i.tle of King of Italy. The Italian kingdom thus const.i.tuted was recognised by England in a fortnight, by France in three months, by Prussia in a year, by Spain in four years, by the Pope never.

After the merging of Naples in the Italian body-politic, one of the th.o.r.n.i.e.s.t questions that arose was the disposal of the Garibaldian forces. The chief implored Victor Emmanuel to receive his comrades into his own army, a prayer which the King had not the power, even if he had the will, to grant, as in the const.i.tutional course of things the decision was referred to the ministers, who, again, were crippled in their action by the military authorities at Turin. Though it is natural to sympathise with Garibaldi in his eagerness to obtain generous terms for his old companions-in-arms, it may be true that his demand was not one that could be satisfied in its full extent. The volunteers were not inferior to the ordinary soldier; about half of them were decidedly his superior, but they were a political body improvised for a special purpose, and it is easy to see how many were the reasons against their forming a division of a conventional army like that of Piedmont. Nevertheless, the means ought to have been found of convincing them that their King and country were proud of them, that their great, their incalculable services were appreciated.

That such means were not found was supposed to be the fault of Cavour.

It was only in 1885, on the publication of the fourth volume of the Count's letters, that it became known how strenuously he had fought for justice. Military prejudice was what was really to blame; General Fanti, the Minister of War, even provoked Cavour into telling him 'that they were not in Spain, and that in Italy the army obeyed.' 'A cry of reprobation would be raised,' he wrote, 'if, while the Bourbon officers who ran away disgracefully were confirmed in their rank, the Garibaldians who beat them were coolly sent about their business.

Rather than bear the responsibility of such an act of black ingrat.i.tude, I would go and bury myself at Leri. I despise the ungrateful to the point of not feeling angered by them, and I forgive their abuse. But, by Heaven, I could not bear the merited blot of having failed to recognise services such as the conquest of a kingdom of 9,000,000 inhabitants.'

Cavour, in fact, did obtain something; much more than the army authorities wished to give, but much less than Garibaldi asked or than the Count would doubtless have given had not his hands been tied. And, doubtless, he would have given it with more grace.

As it was, the volunteers were deeply offended and sent their griefs by every post to Caprera. Garibaldi, who refused every favour and honour for himself, was worked up into a state of fury by what he deemed the wrongs of his faithful followers, and in April he arrived unexpectedly at Turin to plead their cause before the Chamber of Deputies. Perhaps by a wise presentiment he had refused to stand for any const.i.tuency; but when Naples elected him her representative, almost without opposition, he submitted to the popular will. At Turin he fell ill with rheumatic fever, but on the day of the debate on the Southern Army he rose from his bed to take his seat in the Chamber.

The case for the volunteers was opened, and this is worthy of note, by Baron Ricasoli, aristocrat and conservative. Afterwards Garibaldi got up--at first he tried to make out the statistics and particulars which he had on paper, but blinded by pa.s.sion and by fever, he threw down his notes and launched into a fierce invective against 'the man who had made him a foreigner in his own birthplace and the government which was driving the country straight into civil war.' At the words 'civil war' Cavour sprang to his feet, unwontedly moved, and uttered some expressions of protest, which were lost in the general uproar.

When this was quieted, Garibaldi finished his speech in a moderate tone, and then General Bixio rose to make that n.o.ble appeal to concord which, had he done nothing else for Italy, should be a lasting t.i.tle to her grat.i.tude. 'I am one of those,' he said, 'who believe in the sacredness of the thoughts which have guided General Garibaldi, but I am also one of those who have faith in the patriotism of Count Cavour. In G.o.d's holy name let us make an Italy superior to the strife of parties.' He might not be making a parliamentary speech, he added, but he would give his children and his life to see peace established--words flowing so plainly from his honest heart that savage indeed would have been the enmity which, for the time, at least, was not quelled. Cavour grasped the olive branch at once; all his momentary ire vanished. He made excuses for his adversary; from the grief which he had felt himself when he advised the King to cede Savoy and Nice, he could understand the general's resentment. He had always been, he said in general terms, a friend to the volunteers.

What he did not even remotely suggest was the dissension which existed between himself and his military colleague on the subject of the Garibaldians. The least hint would have gained for Cavour any amount of applause and popularity; but he preferred to bear all the blame rather than bring the national army into disfavour. Garibaldi replied 'that he had never doubted the Count's patriotism;' but at the end of the three days' debate he declared himself dissatisfied with the Ministerial a.s.surances touching the volunteers in particular and the country's armaments as a whole. As Cavour left the Chamber after the final night's sitting, he remarked to a friend--all his fine equanimity returned: 'And yet, and yet, when the time comes for war, I shall take General Garibaldi under my arm and say: "Let's go and see what they are about inside Verona!"'

Cialdini tried to stir up the quarrel anew by a letter full of foolish personalities; but to this sort of attack Garibaldi was impervious. It mattered nothing to him that a man should make rude remarks about his wearing a red shirt. He admired the victor of Castelfidardo as one of Italy's best soldiers. He was, therefore, perfectly ready to embrace Cialdini at the King's request before he left Turin for Caprera. It cost him more to consent to an interview of reconciliation with the Prime Minister in the royal presence, because his disagreement with Cavour was purely political and impersonal, and was rooted more deeply in his heart than any private irritation could be; but he did consent, and the interview took place on the 23rd of April. Probably Victor Emmanuel in after days was never gladder of anything he had done than of having caused his two great subjects--both his subjects born--to part for the last time in this mortal life in peace.

On one other memorable occasion the man who, at twenty-two, said that he meant to be Prime Minister of Italy, and who now, at fifty-one, was keeping his word, filled with his presence the Chamber of which he seemed to incarnate the life and history--which may be said to have been his only home, for Cavour hardly had a private life. Very soon the familiar figure was to vacate the accustomed place for ever.

An obscure deputy put a question on the 25th of May, which gave Cavour the opportunity of expounding his views about Rome still more explicitly than in the previous autumn. It was impossible, he said, to conceive Italian unity without Rome as capital. Were there any other solution to the problem he would be willing to give it due consideration, but there was not. The position of a capital was not decided by climatic or topographical reasons: a glance at capitals of Europe was sufficient to certify the fact; it was decided by moral reasons. Now Rome, alone out of the Italian cities, had an undisputed moral claim to primacy. 'As far as I am personally concerned,' he said, 'I shall go to Rome with sorrow; not caring for art, I am sure that among the most splendid monuments of ancient and modern Rome I shall regret the sedate and unpoetic streets of my native town.' It grieved him to think that Turin must resign her most cherished privilege, but he knew his fellow-citizens, and he knew them to be ready to make this last sacrifice to their country. Might Italy not forget the cradle of her liberties when her seat of government was firmly established in the Eternal City!

He went on to say that he had not lost the hope that France and the Head of the Church would yield to the inexorable logic of the situation, and that the same generation which had resuscitated Italy would accomplish the still grander task of concluding a peace between the State and the Church, liberty and religion. These were no formal words; Cavour's whole heart was set on their realisation. He did not doubt that the knot, if not untied, would be cut by the sword sooner or later. He felt as sure as Mazzini felt that this would happen; but more than any man of any party he had reckoned the cost of ranging the Church with its vast potential powers for good, for order, for public morality, among the implacable enemies of the nascent kingdom. And, therefore, his last public utterance was a cry for religious peace.

Always an immense worker, in these latter months Cavour had been possessed by a feverish activity. 'I must make haste to finish my work,' he said; 'I feel that this miserable body of mine is giving way beneath the mind and will which still urge it on. Some fine day you will see me break down upon the road.' On the 6th of June, after two or three days of so-called sudden illness, he broke down upon the road.

Fra Giacomo, faithful to his old promise, administered the sacraments to the dying minister, who told Farini 'to tell the good people of Turin that he died a Christian.' After this his mind rambled, but always upon the themes that had so completely absorbed it: Rome, Venice, Naples--'no state of siege,' was one of his broken sayings that referred to Naples. It was his farewell protest against brute force in which he had never believed. 'Cleanse them, cleanse them,' he repeated; cleanse the people of the South of their moral contagion; that, not force, was the remedy. He was able to recognise the King, but unable to collect the ideas which he wished to express to him.

Cavour's death caused a profound sensation in Europe, and in Italy and in England awakened great sorrow. Hardly any public man has received so splendid a tribute as that rendered to his memory in the British Houses of Parliament. The same words were on the lips of all: What would Italy do without him? Death is commonly the great reminder that no man is necessary. Nations fulfil their destinies even though their greatest sons be laid under the turf. And Italy has fulfilled her destinies, but there are Italians who believe that had Cavour lived to complete his task, although his dream of an Eirenicon might never have been realised, their country would not have pa.s.sed through the _selva selvaggia_ of mistakes and humiliations into which she now entered.

CHAPTER XVII

ROME OR DEATH

1861-1864

Cavour's Successors--Aspromonte--The September Convention--Garibaldi's Visit to England.

There were two possible successors to Cavour, the Tuscan, Bettino Ricasoli, and Urban Rattazzi, a Piedmontese barrister. The first belonged to the right, the second to the left centre in the Parliamentary combinations. Cavour had no very close personal relations with either, but he knew their characters. Rattazzi formerly held ministerial office under him, and the long Tuscan crisis of 1859, looked at, as he looked at it, from the inside, gave him opportunities of judging the Iron Baron who opposed even his own will on more than one occasion in that great emergency. Ricasoli was rigid, frigid, a frequenter of the straightest possible roads; Rattazzi, supple, accommodating, with an incorrigible partiality for umbrageous by-ways.

He was already an 'old parliamentary hand,' and in the future, through a series of ministerial lapses, any one of which would have condemned most men to seclusion, he preserved his talent for manufacturing majorities and holding his party together. Choosing between these two candidates, Cavour before he died gave his preference to Ricasoli, who was charged by the King with the formation of a ministry in which he took the Treasury and the Foreign Office.

Ricasoli was without ambition, and he rather under than over-rated his abilities, but he went to work with considerable confidence in his power of setting everything right. A perfectly open and honest statesman ought to be able, he imagined, to solve the most difficult problems. Why not, except that the world is not what it ought to be? In home politics he offended the Party of Action by telling them plainly that if they broke the law they would have to pay the cost, and he offended his own party by refusing to interfere with the right of meeting or any other const.i.tutional right of citizens, whether they were followers of Mazzini or of anybody else, as long as they kept within legal bounds. He wrote an elaborate letter to Pius IX., in which he sought to persuade the Pontiff of the sweet reasonableness of renouncing claims which, for a very long spell, had cast nothing but discredit on religion. Ricasoli's att.i.tude towards the Temporal Power was unique in this century. Like Dante's, his hatred of it was religious. He was a Catholic, not because he had never thought or studied, but because, having thought and studied, he a.s.sented, and from this standpoint he ascribed most of the wounds of the Church to her subordination of her spiritual mission to material interests. He encouraged Padre Pa.s.saglia to collect the signatures of priests for a pet.i.tion praying the Pope to cease opposing the desires of all Italy; 8943 names were affixed in a short time. The only result of these transactions was that Cardinal Antonelli remarked to the French Government that the Holy See would never come to terms with robbers, and that, although at war with the Turin Cabinet, 'the Pope's relations with Italy were excellent.' More harmful to Ricasoli than the fulminations of the Vatican was the veiled but determined hostility of Napoleon III. Cavour succeeded in more or less keeping the Emperor in ignorance of the degree to which their long partnership resembled a duel. He made him think that he was leading while he was being led. With Ricasoli there could be no such illusions. Napoleon understood him to be a man whom he might break, not bend. He thought it desirable to break him, and Imperial desires had many channels, at that time, towards fulfilment.

The Ricasoli ministry fell in February 1862, and, as a matter of course, Rattazzi was called to power. The new premier soon ingratiated himself with the King, who found him easier to get on with than the Florentine _grand seigneur_; with Garibaldi, whom he persuaded that some great step in the national redemption was on the eve of accomplishment; with Napoleon, who divined in him an instrument. Meanwhile, in his own mind, he proposed to eclipse Cavour, out-manoeuvre all parties, and make his name immortal. This remains the most probable, as it is the most lenient interpretation to which his strange policy is open.