After wandering hither and thither, and suffering severe hardships, the column reached the republic of San Marino. The brave hospitality of that Rock of freedom prevented Garibaldi from falling into the clutches of the Austrians, who surrounded the republic. He treated with the Regent for the immunity of his followers, who had laid down their arms; and, in the night, he himself escaped with Anita, Ugo Bassi, Forbes, Ciceruacchio and a few others. They hoped to take their swords to Venice, but a storm arose, and the boats on which they embarked were driven out of their course. Some of them were stranded on the shore which bounds the pine-forest of Ravenna, and here, hope being indeed gone, the Chief separated from his companions. Of these, Ugo Bassi, and an officer named Livraghi, were soon captured by the Austrians, who conveyed them to Bologna, where they were shot. Ciceruacchio and his sons were taken in another place, and shot as soon as taken. The boat which contained Colonel Forbes was caught at sea by an Austrian cruiser: he was kept in Austrian prisons for two months, and was constantly reminded that he would be either shot or hung; but the English Government succeeded in getting him liberated, and he lived to take part in more fortunate fights under Garibaldi's standard.

Meanwhile, Anita was dying in a peasant's cottage, to which Garibaldi carried her when the strong will and dauntless heart could no longer stand in place of the strength that was finished. This was the 4th of August. Scarcely had she breathed her last breath when Garibaldi, broken down with grief as he was, had to fly from the spot. The Austrians were hunting for him in all directions. All the Roman fugitives were proclaimed outlaws, and the population was forbidden to give them even bread or water. Nevertheless—aided in secret by peasants, priests and all whose help he was obliged to seek—Garibaldi made good his flight from the Adriatic to the Mediterranean, the whole route being overrun by Austrians. When once the western coast was reached, he was able, partly by sea and partly by land, to reach the Piedmontese territory, where his life was safe. Not even there, however, could he rest; he was told, politely but firmly, that his presence was embarrassing, and for the second time he left Europe—first for Tunis and then for the United States.

While the French besieged Rome, the Austrians had not been idle. They took Bologna in May, after eight days' resistance; and in June, after twenty days' attack by sea and land, Ancona fell into their hands. In these towns they pursued means of 'pacification' resembling those employed at Brescia. All who possessed what by a fiction could be called arms were summarily slaughtered. At Ancona, a woman of bad character hid a rusty nail in the bed of her husband, whom she wished to get rid of; she then denounced him to the military tribunal, and two hours later an English family, whose house was near the barracks, heard the ring of the volley of musketry which despatched him. Austria had also occupied the Grand Duchy of Tuscany; and when, in July, Leopold II. returned to his state, which had restored him by general consent and without any foreign intervention, he entered Florence between two files of Austrian soldiery, in violation of the article of the Statute to which he had sworn, which stipulated that no foreign occupation should be invited or tolerated. The Grand Duke wrote to the Emperor of Austria, from Gaeta, humbly begging the loan of his arms. Francis Joseph replied with supreme contempt, that it would have been a better thing if Leopold had never forgotten to whose family he belonged, but he granted the prayer. Such was the way in which the House of Hapsburg-Lorraine, that had done much in Tuscany to win respect if not love, destroyed all its rights to the goodwill of the Tuscan people, and removed what might have been a serious obstacle to Italian unity.

Austria, unable alone to cope with Hungary, committed the immeasurable blunder of calling in the 200,000 Russians who made conquest certain, but the price of whose aid she may still have to pay. Venice, and Venice only, continued to defy her power. Since Novara, the first result of which was the withdrawal of the Sardinian Commissioners, who had taken over the government after the Fusion, Venice had been ruled by Manin on the terms which he himself proposed: 'Are you ready,' he asked the Venetian Assembly, 'to invest the Government with unlimited powers in order to direct the defence and maintain order?' He warned them that he should be obliged to impose upon them enormous sacrifices, but they replied by voting the order of the day: 'Venice resists the Austrians at all costs; to this end the President Manin is invested with plenary powers.' All the deputies then raised their right hand, and swore to defend the city to the last extremity. They kept their word.

It is hard to say which was the most admirable: Manin's fidelity to his trust, or the people's fidelity to him. To keep up the spirits, to maintain the decorum of a besieged city even for a few weeks or a few months, is a task not without difficulty; but when the months run into a second year, when the real pinch of privations has been felt by everyone, not as a sudden twinge, but as a long-drawn-out pain, when the bare necessities of life fail, and a horrible disease, cholera, enters as auxiliary under the enemy's black-and-yellow, death-and-pestilence flag; then, indeed, the task becomes one which only a born leader of men could perform.

The financial administration of the republic was a model of order and economy. Generous voluntary assistance was afforded by all classes, from the wealthy patrician and the Jewish merchant to the poorest gondolier. Mazzini once said bitterly that it was easier to get his countrymen to give their blood than their money; here they gave both. The capable manner in which Manin conducted the foreign policy of the republic is also a point that deserves mention, as it won the esteem even of statesmen of the old school, though it was powerless to obtain their help.

The time was gone when France was disposed to do anything for Venice; no one except the Archbishop of Paris, who was afterwards to die by the hand of an assassin, said a word for her.

In the past year, Lord Palmerston, though he tried to localise the war, and to prevent the co-operation of the south, abounded in good advice to Austria. He repeated till he was tired of repeating, that she would do well to retire from her Italian possessions of her own accord. If the French did not come now, he said, they would come some day, and then her friends and allies would give her scanty support. As for Lombardy, it was notorious that a considerable Austrian party was in favour of giving it up, including the Archduke Ranieri, who was strongly attached to Italy, which was the land of his birth. As for Venice, Austria had against her both the principle of nationality, now the rallying cry of Germany, and the principle of ancient prescription which could be energetically invoked against her by a state to which her title went back no farther than the transfer effected by Buonaparte in the treaty of Campo Formio. These were his arguments; but he was convinced, by this time, that arguments unsupported by big battalions might as well be bestowed on the winds as on the Cabinet of Vienna. From the moment that Radetsky recovered Lombardy for his master, the Italian policy of the Austrian Government was entirely inspired by him, and he was determined that while he lived, what Austria had got she should keep. It was thus that, in reply to Manin's appeal to Lord Palmerston, he only received the cold comfort of the recommendation that Venice should come to terms with her enemy.

The Venetian army of 20,000 men was reduced by casualties and sickness to 18,000 or less. It always did its duty. The defence of Fort Malghera, the great fort which commanded the road to Padua and the bridge of the Venice railway, would have done credit to the most experienced troops in the world. The garrison numbered 2500; the besiegers, under Haynau, 30,000. Radetsky, with three archdukes, came to see the siege, but, tired with waiting, they went away before it was ended. The bombardment began on the 4th of May; in the three days and nights ending with the 25th over 60,000 projectiles fell on the fort. During the night of the 25th the Commandant, Ulloa, by order of Government, quietly evacuated the place, and withdrew his troops; only the next morning the Austrians found out that Malghera was abandoned, and proceeded to take possession of the heap of ruins, which was all that remained.

After the beginning of July, an incessant bombardment was directed against the city itself. Women and children lived in the cellars; fever stalked through the place, but the war feeling was as strong as ever—nay, stronger. Moreover, the provisions became daily scarcer, the day came when hunger was already acutely felt, when the time might be reckoned by hours before the famished defenders must let drop their weapons, and Venice, her works of art and her population, must fall a prey to the savage vengeance of the Austrians, who would enter by force and without conditions.

And this is what Manin prevented. The cry was still for resistance; for the first time bitter words were spoken against the man who had served his country so well. But he, who had never sacrificed one iota to popularity, did not swerve. His great influence prevailed. The capitulation was arranged on the 22nd, and signed on the 24th of July. Manin had calculated correctly; on that day there was literally nothing left to eat in Venice.

In the last sad hours that Manin spent in Venice all the love of his people, clouded for an instant, burst forth anew. Not, indeed, in shouts and acclamations, but in tears and sobs; 'Our poor father, how much he has suffered!' they were heard saying. He embarked on a French vessel bound for Marseilles, poor, worn out and exiled for ever from the city which he had guided for eighteen months; if, indeed, no spark of his spirit animated the dust which it was the first care of liberated Venice to welcome home. The Austrians broke up his doorstep on which, according to a Venetian custom, his name was engraved. Another martyr, Ugo Bassi, had kissed the stone, exclaiming:

'Next to God and Italy—before the Pope—Manin!' The people gathered up the broken fragments and kept them as relics, even as in their hearts they kept his memory, till the arrival of that day of redemption which, in the darkest hour, he foretold.



CHAPTER IX

'J'ATTENDS MON ASTRE'

1849-1850

The House of Savoy—A King who keeps his Word—Sufferings of the Lombards—Charles Albert's Death.

Circumstances more gloomy than those under which Victor Emmanuel II. ascended the throne of his ancestors it would be hard to imagine.

An army twice beaten, a bankrupt exchequer, a triumphant invader waiting to dictate terms; this was but the beginning of the inventory of the royal inheritance. The internal condition of the kingdom, even apart from the financial ruin which had succeeded to the handsome surplus of two years before, was full of embarrassments of the gravest kind. There was a party representing the darkest-dyed clericalism and reaction whose machinations had not been absent in the disaster of Novara. Who was it that disseminated among the troops engaged in the battle broadsides printed with the words: 'Soldiers, for whom do you think you are fighting? The King is betrayed; at Turin they have proclaimed the republic'? There were other broadsides in which Austria was called the supporter of thrones and altars. The dreadful indiscipline witnessed towards the end of, and after the conflict was due more to the demoralising doctrines that had been introduced into the army than to the insubordination of panic. There was another party strengthened by the recent misfortunes and recruited by exiles from all parts of Italy, which was democratic to the verge of republicanism in Piedmont and over that verge at Genoa, where a revolution broke out before the new King's reign was a week old. Constitutional government stood between the fires of these two parties, both fanned by Austrian bellows, the first openly, the second in secret.

Victor Emmanuel was not popular. The indifference to danger which he had shown conspicuously during the war would have awakened enthusiasm in most countries, but in Piedmont it was so thoroughly taken for granted that the Princes of the House of Savoy did not know fear, that it was looked on as an ordinary fact. The Austrian origin of the Duchess of Savoy formed a peg on which to hang unfriendly theories. It is impossible not to compassionate the poor young wife who now found herself Queen of a people which hated her race, after having lived since her marriage the most dreary of lives at the dismallest court in Europe. At first, as a bride, she seemed to have a desire to break through the frozen etiquette which surrounded her; it is told how she once begged and prayed her husband to take her for a walk under the Porticoes of Turin, which she had looked at only from the outside. The young couple enjoyed their airing, but when it reached Charles Albert's ears, he ordered his son to be immediately placed under military arrest. The chilling formalism which invaded even the private life of these royal personages, shutting the door to 'good comradeship' even between husband and wife, may have had much to do with driving Victor Emmanuel from the side of the Princess, whom, nevertheless, he loved and venerated, to unworthy pleasures, the habit of indulgence in which is far easier to contract than to cure.



The King's address at this time was not conciliatory, and, indeed, it never lost a bluntness which later harmonised well enough with the reputation he gained for soldierly integrity, but which then passed for aristocratic haughtiness. His personal friends were said to belong to the aristocratic or even the reactionary party. In the perplexities which encompassed him, he could not reckon on the encouragement of any consensus of good opinion or confidence. He was simply an unknown man, against whom there was a good deal of prejudice.

Radetsky did not refuse to treat with Charles Albert, as has been sometimes said, but the intolerably onerous terms first proposed by him showed that he wished to force the abdication which Charles Albert had always contemplated in the event of new reverses of fortune. Radetsky was favourably disposed to the young Duke of Savoy, as far as his personal feeling was concerned, a fact which was made out in certain quarters to be almost a crime to be marked to the account of Victor Emmanuel. The Field-Marshal did not forget that he was the son-in-law of the Austrian Archduke Ranieri; it is probable, if not proved, that he expected to find him pliable; but Radetsky, besides being a politician of the purest blood-and-iron type, was an old soldier with not a bad heart, and some of his sympathy is to be ascribed to a veteran's natural admiration for a daring young officer.

On the 24th of March, Victor Emmanuel, with the manliness that was born with him, decided to go and treat himself for the conditions of the armistice. It was the first act of his reign, and it was an act of abnegation; but of how much less humiliation than that performed by his father twenty-eight years before, when almost on the same day, by order of King Charles Felix, the Prince of Carignano betook himself to the Austrian camp at Novara, to be greeted with the derisive shout of: 'Behold the King of Italy!' Little did Radetsky think that the words, addressed then in scorn to the father, might to-day have been addressed in truthful anticipation to the son.

The Field-Marshal took good care, however, that nothing but respect should be paid to his visitor, whom he received half-way, surrounded by his superb staff, all mounted on fine horses and clad in splendid accoutrements. As soon as the King saw him coming, he sprang from his saddle, and Radetsky would have done the same had not he required, owing to his great age, the aid of two officers to help him to the ground. After he had laboriously dismounted, he made a military salute, and then embraced Victor Emmanuel with the greatest cordiality. The King was accompanied by very few officers, but the presence of one of these was significant, namely, of the Lombard Count Vimercati, whom he particularly pointed out to Radetsky.

While observing the most courteous forms, the Field-Marshal was not long in coming to the point. The negotiations would be greatly facilitated, nay, more, instead of beginning his reign with a large slice of territory occupied by a foreign enemy for an indefinite period, the King might open it with an actual enlargement of his frontier, if he would only give the easy assurance of ruling on the good old system, and of re-hoisting the blue banner of Piedmont instead of the revolutionary tricolor. The moment was opportune; Victor Emmanuel had not yet sworn to maintain the Constitution. But he replied, without hesitation, that though he was ready, if needs be, to accept the full penalties of defeat, he was determined to observe the engagements entered into by his father towards the people over whom he was called to reign.

One person had already received from his lips the same declaration, with another of wider meaning. During the previous night, speaking to the Lombard officer above mentioned, the King said: 'I shall preserve intact the institutions given by my father; I shall uphold the tricolor flag, symbol of Italian nationality, which is vanquished to-day, but which one day will triumph. This triumph will be, henceforth, the aim of all my efforts.' In 1874, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Novara, Count Vimercati wrote to the King of Italy from Paris to remind him of the words he had then spoken.

When the King started for his capital, Radetsky offered to draw up his troops as a guard of honour over the whole extent of occupied territory between Novara and Turin. The offer was declined, and Victor Emmanuel took a circuitous route to avoid observation. His journey was marked throughout by a complete absence of state. Before he arrived, a trusty hand consigned to him a note written in haste and in much anguish by the Queen, in which she warned him to enter by night, as he was likely to have a very bad reception. On the 27th of March he reviewed the National Guard in the Piazza Castello on the occasion of its taking the oath of allegiance. The ceremony was attended by Queen Maria Adelaide in a carriage with her two little boys, the Princes Umberto and Amedeo. There was no hostile demonstration, but there was a most general and icy coldness.

That evening, the terms of the armistice were communicated to the Chamber. As was natural, they evoked the wildest indignation, a part of which fell undeservedly on the King. Twenty thousand Austrians were to occupy the district between the Po, Sesia and Ticino and half the citadel of Alessandria. The excitement rose to its height when it was announced that the Sardinian Fleet must be recalled from Venetian waters, depriving that struggling city of the last visible sign of support from without. The Chamber sent a deputation to the King, who succeeded in persuading its members that, hard though the terms were, there was no avoiding their acceptance, and that the original stipulations were harder still.

On the 29th, Victor Emmanuel took the oath to observe the Statute, to exercise the royal authority only in virtue of the laws, to cause justice to be fairly and fearlessly administered, and to conduct himself in all things with the sole view to the interest, honour and prosperity of the nation.

A trifling accident occurred which might have been far from trifling; one of the ornaments of the ceiling of the Palazzo Madama, where the Parliament assembled, fell close to the King. As it was of great weight, it would have killed anyone on whom it had fallen. 'Never mind that,' said the King in Piedmontese dialect to Colonel Menabrea, who was near him, 'it will not be the last!'

The ministry which held office under the late King resigned; a new one was formed, in which General Delaunay was President of the Council, and Gioberti minister without a portfolio. The King was advised to dissolve the Chamber, which had been elected as a war parliament, and was ill-constituted to perform the work now required. General La Marmora had orders to quell the insurrection at Genoa, the motive of which was not nominally a change of government, but the continuance of the war at all costs. Its deeper cause lay in the old irreconcilability of republican Genoa with her Piedmontese masters, breaking out now afresh under the strain of patriotic disappointment. Like the 15th of May at Naples, the Genoese revolution was a folly which can hardly be otherwise described than as a crime; it happened, however, that in Piedmont there was a King who had not the slightest intention of turning it into an excuse for a royal hark-back. Austria and France offered Victor Emmanuel their arms to put down the revolution, but, declining the not exactly disinterested attention, he made a wise choice in La Marmora, who accomplished the ungrateful task with expedition and humanity. An amnesty was granted to all but a very few participators in the revolt. On the brief black list when it was submitted to the King was the name of the Marquis Lorenzo Pareto, who at one time had held the Foreign Office under Charles Albert. As Colonel of the Genoese National Guard, his responsibility in joining the insurrection was judged to be particularly heavy; but the King refused to confirm his exclusion from the amnesty. 'I would not have it said,' he objected, 'that I was harsh to one of my father's old ministers.'

The conception of Victor Emmanuel as a bluff, easy-going monarch is mistaken. Very few princes have had a keener sense of the royal dignity, or a more deeply-rooted family pride, or, when he thought fit to resort to it, a more decisive method of preventing people from taking liberties with him. But he knew that, in nearly all cases, pardon is the best of a king's prerogatives.

An instance to the point happened when he came to the throne. Two officers of the royal household had caused him annoyance while he was Duke of Savoy by telling tales of his unconventionality to his easily-scandalised father. To them, perhaps, he owed the condign punishment he had undergone for the famous promenade under the Porticoes. At anyrate, they had procured for the Duke many bad quarters-of-an-hour, but the King, when he became King, chose to be completely oblivious of their conduct, and they remained undisturbed at their posts. To those who pointed to King Leopold of the Belgians, or to any other foreign example of a loyal sovereign who understood the needs of his people as a model for Victor Emmanuel to imitate, he was in the habit of replying: 'I remember the history of my fathers, and it is enough.'

'The Persians,' says the Greek historian, 'taught their children to ride and to speak the truth.' In a land that had seen as much of enthroned effeminacy and mendacity as Italy had seen, a prince fond of manly exercise and observant of his word was more valuable than a heaven-sent genius, and more welcome than a calendar saint. Piedmont only could give such a prince to Italy. Its kings were not Spaniards who, by way of improvement, became lazzaroni, nor were they Austrians condemned by a fatal law to revert to their original type; they were children of the ice and snow, the fellow-countrymen of their subjects. All their traditions told of obstinacy and hardihood. They brought their useful if scarcely amiable moral qualities from Maurienne in the eleventh century. The second Count of Savoy, known as Amadeus with the Tail, son of Humbert of the White Hands, founder of the House, went to the Holy Roman Emperor with such a body of retainers that the guards refused them entrance to the Council Chamber. 'Either I shall go in with my Tail or not at all,' said Humbert, and with his Tail he went in. This was the metal of the race. Even at the time when they were vassals of the Empire, they expected to dictate rather than to obey. They studiously married into all the great royal houses of Europe. Though they persecuted their Vaudois subjects, who were only in 1848 rewarded by emancipation for centuries of unmerited sufferings and splendid fidelity, yet the Princes of Savoy had from the first, from the White-Handed Humbert himself, held their heads high in all transactions with the Holy See, between which and them there was an ever-returning antagonism. Not to the early part of the nineteenth century, when the rebound from revolutionary chaos did not suffice to denationalise the Kings of Sardinia, but sufficed to ally them with reaction, ought we to turn if we would seize the true bearings of the development of the Counts of Maurienne into Kings of Italy. At that moment the mission of Piedmont, though not lost, was obscured. What has rather to be contemplated is the historic tendency, viewed as a whole, of both reigning house and people. No one has pointed out that tendency more clearly than the anonymous author of a pamphlet entitled Le Testament politique du Chevalier Walpole (published at Amsterdam in 1769), who was able to draw the horoscope of the House of Savoy with a correctness which seems almost startling. He was not helped by either sympathy or poetic imagination, but simply by political logic. Sardinia, he said, was the best governed state in Europe. Instead of yielding to the indolent apathy in which other reigning families were sunk, its princes sought to improve its laws and develop its resources according to the wants of the population and the exigences of the climate. Finance, police, the administration of justice, military discipline, presented the picture of order. From the nature of the situation, a King of Sardinia must be ambitious, and to satisfy his ambition he had only to bide his time. Placed between two great Powers he could choose for his ally whichever would give him the most, and by playing this mute role, it was impossible that he would not hereafter be called upon to play one of the most important parts in Europe. Italy was the oyster disputed by Austria and France; might it not happen that the King of Sardinia, becoming judge and party, would devour the oyster and leave the shells to the rival aspirants? It was unlikely, added this far-seeing observer, that the Italian populations should have got so innured to their chains as to prefer the harsh, vexatious government of Austria to the happy lot which Sardinian domination would secure to them, but even if they had become demoralised to this extent, they could not resist the providential advance of a temperate, robust and warlike nation like Piedmont, led by a prince as enlightened as the King (Charles Emmanuel) who then reigned over it.

The metaphor of the oyster recalls another, that of Italy being an artichoke which the House of Savoy was to devour, a leaf at a time. Whether or not a Duke of Savoy really invented this often-quoted comparison, it is certain that power was what the rulers of Piedmont cared for. They were no more a race of scholars and art patrons than their people was a people of artists and poets. There is a story to the effect that one Duke of Savoy could never make out what poetry was, except that it was written in half lines, which caused a great waste of paper. The only poet born in Piedmont found the country unlivable. Recent research among the archives at Turin revealed facts which were thought to be not creditable to certain princely persons, and a gleaning was therefore made of documents to which the historical student will no longer have access. The step was ill advised; what can documents tell us on the subject that we do not know? Did anyone suppose that the Savoy princes were commonly saints? Sainthood has been the privilege of the women of the family, and they have kept it mostly to themselves. But peccable and rough though the members of this royal house may have been, very few of them were without the governing faculty. 'C'est bien le souverain le plus fin que j'ai connu en Europe,' said Thiers of Victor Emmanuel, whose acquaintance he made in 1870, and in whom he found an able politician instead of the common soldier he had expected. The remark might be extended back to all the race. They understood the business of kings. A word not unlike the 'Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento' of Virgil was breathed over the cradle at Maurienne. If it did not send forth sons to rule the world, its children were, at least, to be enthroned in the capital of the Caesars, and to make Italy one for the first time since Augustus.

From April to August 1849, the peace negotiations dragged on. The pretensions of Austria were still exorbitant, and she resisted the demand which Piedmont, weak and reduced though she was, did not fear to make, that she should amnesty her Italian subjects who had taken part in the revolution. Unequal to cope with the difficulties of the situation, the Delaunay ministry fell, and Massimo d'Azeglio was appointed President of the Council. This was a good augury for Piedmont; D'Azeglio's patriotism had received a seal in the wound which he carried away from the defence of Vicenza. Honour was safe in his hands, whatever were the sacrifices to which he might be obliged to consent.

Some pressure having been put on Austria by France and England, she agreed in July to evacuate Alessandria, and to reduce the war indemnity from 230,000,000 francs to 75,000,000, which Piedmont undertook to pay, onerous though the charge was in her deplorable financial condition. But the amnesty question was the last to be settled, and in this Piedmont stood alone. France and her. The Piedmontese special envoy at Milan, Count Pralormo, wrote to Prince Schwarzenberg on the 2nd of July that his Government could not give up this point. It was a conscientious duty so universally and strongly felt, that they were readier to submit to the consequences, whatever they might be, than to dishonour themselves by renouncing it. In other words, they were ready to face a new war, abandoned to their fate by all Europe, to undergo a new invasion, which meant the utter destruction of their country, rather than leave their Lombard and Venetian fellow-countrymen to the revenge of Austria. Count Pralormo added that he was speaking not only in the name of the ministry, but of the King and the whole nation. The risk was no imaginary one; there were many in Austria who desired an excuse for crushing the life out of the small state which was the eternal thorn in the side of that great Empire. Few remember now the sufferings of Piedmont for Italy, or the perils, only too real, which she braved again and again, not from selfish motives—for the Piedmontese of the old, narrow school, who said that their orderly little country had nothing to gain from being merged in a state of 25,000,000 were by no means in error—but from genuine Italian fellow-feeling for their less happy compatriots beyond their confines.

At last, when the armistice concluded on the morrow of Novara had been prolonged for five months, the treaty of peace was signed. Prince Schwarzenberg offered to further reduce the indemnity, 75,000,000 to 71,000,000, but D'Azeglio having agreed to the former figure, preferred to abide by his agreement. He thought, probably, that he would thus gain some concession as to the amnesty, and, in fact, Austria finally consented to pardon all but a small number of the persons compromised in the late events. D'Azeglio still stood out, but finding that there was no shadow of a chance of obtaining more than this, he reluctantly accepted it. The great mass, the hundred thousand and more fugitives who had left their homes in Lombardy and Venetia, were, at any rate, promised a safe return. The city of Venice, as yet undominated, though on the brink of her fall, was totally excluded. The list of those whose banishment from Lombardy was confirmed, comprises the noblest names in the province; with the exception of a few who were excluded from the amnesty on the score that, before the revolution, they were Austrian functionaries, nearly every unpardoned Lombard was noble: Casati, Arese, Borromeo, Litta, Greppi, Pallavicini, and the Princess Cristina Belgiojoso of Milan, the two Camozzis of Bergamo, and G. Martinengo Cesaresco of Brescia.

It must not be imagined that this amnesty ushered in a reign of oblivion and mildness. It seemed, rather, that Austria, afraid of the moral consequences of the return of so many unloving subjects, redoubled her severity. The day following the promulgation of the amnesty was the 18th of August, the Emperor of Austria's birthday. In the morning, placards dissuading the citizens from taking part in the official rejoicings were to be seen on the walls of Milan. The persons who put these up were not caught, but in the course of the day a crowd, consisting of all classes, made what the official report called 'a scandalous and anti-politic demonstration,' raising revolutionary cries, and even saying uncomplimentary things of His Majesty, and worse still, of the Austrian soldiers. During this 'shameful scene,' of which the above is the Austrian and hence the most highly-coloured description, the military arrested at hazard some of the crowd, who, by a 'superior order,' were condemned to the following pains and penalties:—

1. Angelo Negroni, of Padua, aged thirty, proprietor, forty strokes;

2. Carlo Bossi, watchmaker, aged twenty-two, forty strokes;

3. Paolo Lodi, of Monza, student, aged twenty-one, thirty strokes;

4. Giovanni Mazzuchetti, Milanese, barrister, aged twenty-four, thirty strokes;

5. Bonnetti, Milanese, lithographer, aged thirty-one, fifty strokes;

6. Moretti, Milanese, domestic servant, aged twenty-six, fifty strokes;

7. Cesana, artist, aged thirty-two, forty strokes;

8. Scotti, shopkeeper, of Monza, fifty strokes;

9. Vigorelli, Milanese, proprietor, fifty strokes;

10. Garavaglia, of Novara, aged thirty-nine, thirty strokes;

11. Giuseppe Tandea, Milanese, aged forty, twenty-five strokes;

12. Rossi, Milanese, student, thirty strokes;

13. Carabelli, workman, forty strokes;

14. Giuseppe Berlusconi, fifty strokes;

15. Ferrandi, bookseller, thirty strokes;

16. Ernestina Galli, of Cremona, operatic singer, aged twenty, forty strokes;

17. Maria Conti, of Florence, operatic singer, aged eighteen, thirty strokes.

There were other sentences of imprisonment in irons and on bread and water, but the roll of the bastinado, extracted from the official Gazzetta di Milano may be left to speak for all the rest, and to tell, with a laconicism more eloquent than the finest rhetoric, what the Austrian yoke in Italy really meant.

A few days after, the military commandant sent the Milanese Municipality a bill for thirty-nine florins, the cost of rods broken or worn-out, and of ice used to prevent gangrene, in the punishment administered to the persons arrested on the 18th of August. Sixty strokes with the Austrian stick were generally enough to prove fatal. Women were flogged half-naked, together with the men, and in the presence of the Austrian officers, who came to see the spectacle.

When the treaty of peace with Austria was signed, there arose a new difficulty; the Sardinian Chamber of Deputies refused to approve it. Some of the deputies asked why they should be called upon either to accept or reject it, on which they were reminded of the 75,000,000 francs indemnity, funds for the discharge of which could not be legally raised without a parliamentary vote. The reluctance to share in an odious though necessary responsibility made these novices in representative government anxious to throw away the greatest, if not the sole guarantee of constitutional freedom. Brofferio, by far the ablest man of the extreme radical party, who had opposed all peace proposals as long as Rome and Venice still resisted, now advised his friends to bow before the inevitable. But they did not comply, and the ministers had no other alternative than to resort to a fresh appeal to the country.

The crisis was serious, because no amount of loyalty on the part of the head of the state can save liberty when the representatives of a nation, taking the bit between their teeth, set themselves deliberately to work to make government impossible. People are too fond of talking of liberty as if it were something locked up in a box which remains safe as long as the guardian of the box does not steal it or sell it. Liberty is in the charge of all and at the mercy of all. There were not wanting persons who blamed the new dissolution as unconstitutional, and who called the proclamation of Moncalieri which announced it an act of despotism and of improper interference with the independence of the electors. It is hardly too much to say that it was this royal proclamation that saved Piedmont. The King appealed to Italy and to Europe for judgment on the conduct of the late Chamber. Having signed, he said, a 'not ruinous' treaty with Austria, which the honour of the country and the sanctity of his word required to be faithfully executed, the majority sought to make that execution legally impracticable. He continued: 'I have promised to save the nation from the tyranny of parties, whatever be the name, scope and position of the men who constitute them. These promises I fulfil by dissolving a Chamber which had become impossible, and by convoking the immediate assemblage of another parliament; but if the electors of the country deny me their help, not on me will fall henceforth the responsibility of the future; and if disorders follow, let them complain, not of me, but of themselves. Never, up till now, has the House of Savoy had recourse in vain to the faithfulness, wisdom and honour of its peoples. I have therefore the right to trust in them on the present occasion, and to hold for certain that, united together, we shall save the constitution and the country from the dangers by which they are menaced.'

The Proclamation produced a great effect, and the parliament which met on the 20th of December contained a working majority of men who were not only patriotic, but who were also endowed with common sense. When the ratification of the peace came on for discussion, there was, indeed, one deputy who spoke in favour of immediate war, which, in a fortnight, was to effect the liberation, not only of Lombardy and Venetia, but also of Hungary, a speech worth recalling, as it shows how far madness will go. The debate concluded with a vote authorising the King's government to fully carry out the treaty of peace which was concluded at Milan on the 6th of August 1849, the ayes being 137 against 17 noes. Piedmont had learnt the bitter but useful lesson, that if you play and lose, you must pay the cost.

He who had played and lost his crown had already paid the last fee to fortune. Charles Albert was now a denizen of the Superga—of all kings' burial places, the most inspiring in its history, the most sublime in its situation. Here Victor Amadeus, as he looked down on the great French army which, for three months, had besieged his capital, vowed to erect a temple if it should please the Lord of Hosts to grant him and his people deliverance from the hands of the enemy. Five days later the French were in flight. All the Alps, from Mon Viso to the Simplon, all Piedmont, and beyond Piedmont, Italy to the Apennines, can be scanned from the church which fulfilled the royal vow.

To the Superga the body of Charles Albert was brought from the place of exile. Before the coffin, his sword was carried; after it, they led the war-horse he had ridden in all the battles. After the war-horse followed a great multitude. He had said truly that it was an opportune time for him to die. The pathos of his end rekindled the affections of the people for the dynasty.

As in the Mosque of dead Sultans in Stamboul, so in the Mausoleum of the Superga, each sovereign occupied the post of honour only till the next one came to join him. But the post of honour remains, and will remain, to Charles Albert. His son lies elsewhere.



CHAPTER X

THE REVIVAL OF PIEDMONT

1850-1856

Restoration of the Pope and Grand Duke of Tuscany—Misrule at Naples—The Struggle with the Church in Piedmont—The Crimean War.

The decade from 1849 to 1859 may seem, at first sight, to resemble an interregnum, but it was an evolution. There is no pause in the life of nations any more than in the life of individuals: they go forward or they go backward. In these ten years Piedmont went forward; the other Italian governments did not stand still, they went backward. The diseases from which they suffered gained daily upon the whole body-politic, and even those clever foreign doctors who had been the most convinced that this or that remedy would set them on their feet, were in the end persuaded that there was only one place for them—the Hospital for Incurables. After the fall of Rome, Pius IX. issued a sort of canticle from Gaeta, in which he thanked the Lord at whose bidding the stormy ocean had been arrested, but he did not even so much as say thank you to the French, without whom, nevertheless, the stormy ocean would have proceeded on its way. To all suggestions from Paris that now that victory had been won by force the time was come for the Sovereign to give some guarantee that it would not be abused, the Pope turned a completely deaf ear. 'The Pope,' said M. Drouyn de Lhuys, 'prefers to return to Rome upon the dead bodies of his subjects rather than amidst the applause which would have greeted him had he taken our advice.' That advice referred in particular to the secularisation of the public administration, and this was exactly what the Pope and the ex-Liberal Cardinal Antonelli, now and henceforth his most influential counsellor, were determined not to concede. They had grown wise in their generation, for a priest whose ministers are laymen is as much an anomaly as a layman whose ministers are priests. The French government desired that the Statute should be maintained, and demanded judicial reforms and an amnesty for political offenders. None of these points was accepted except the last, and that only nominally, as the amnesty of the 18th of September did not put a stop to proscriptions and vindictive measures. Count Mamiani, whose stainless character was venerated in all Italy, and who had devoted all his energies to the attempt to save the Papal government after the Pope's flight, was ruthlessly excluded, and so were many other persons who, though liberal-minded, had shown signal devotion to the Holy See. All sorts of means were used to serve the ends of vengeance; for instance, Alessandro Calandrelli, a Roman of high reputation, who held office under the republic, was condemned to death for high treason, and to twenty years at the galleys, on a trumped-up charge of theft, which was palpably absurd; but the Pope, while quashing the first sentence, confirmed the second, and Calandrelli would have remained in prison till the year of grace 1870, as many others did, but for the chance circumstance that his father had been a friend of the King of Prussia, who took up his cause so warmly that after two years he was let out and sent to Berlin, where the King and A. von Humboldt received him with open arms.

These were the auspices under which Pius IX. returned to Rome after seventeen months' absence. A four-fold invasion restored the Temporal Power, which Fenelon said was the root of all evil to the Church, but which, according to Pius IX., was necessary to the preservation of the Catholic religion. The re-established regime was characterised by Lord Clarendon at the Congress of Paris as 'the opprobrium of Europe.' The Pope tried to compensate for his real want of independence (for a prince who could not stand a day without foreign bayonets, whatever else he was, was not independent) by laughing at the entreaties of France to relieve that advanced nation from the annoyance of having set up a government fit for the Middle Ages. He rated at its correct value the support of Napoleon, and believing it to be purely interested, he believed in its permanence. The President had thought of nothing in the world but votes, and he thought of them still. The Roman Expedition secured him the services of M. de Falloux as minister, and won over to him the entire Clerical Party, including Montalembert and the so-called Liberal Catholics. Thus, and thus only, was the leap from the Presidential chair to the Imperial throne made possible. The result was flattering, but still there are reasons to think (apart from Prince Jerome Napoleon's express statement to that effect) that Napoleon III. hated the whole business from the bottom of his soul, and that of his not few questionable acts, this was the only one of which he felt lastingly ashamed. Seeing that the communications of his ministers failed in their object, he tried the expedient of writing a private letter to his friend Edgar Ney, couched in the strongest terms of disapproval of the recalcitrant attitude of the Papal Government. This letter was published as it was intended to be, but in the Roman States, except that its circulation was forbidden, no notice was taken of it. Though the incident may be regarded as a stroke of facing-both-ways policy, the anger expressed was probably as sincere as any of Napoleon's sentiments could be, and the letter had the effect of awakening the idea in many minds that something of the former Italian conspirator still existed in the ruler of France. The question arose, What sort of pressure would be needed to turn that germ to account for Italy?

In the kingdom of Naples, where the laws, to look at them on paper, were incomparably better than those in force in the Roman States, the administration was such as would have disgraced a remote province of the Turkish Empire. The King's naturally suspicious temperament was worked upon by his courtiers and priests till he came to detect in every Liberal a personal antagonist, whose immunity from harm was incompatible with his own, and in Liberalism a plague dangerous to society, which must be stamped out at all costs. Over 800 Liberals were sent to the galleys. The convictions were obtained, in a great proportion of cases, by false testimony. Bribes and secret protection in high quarters were the only means by which an innocent man could hope to escape; 50,000 persons were under police supervision, to be imprisoned at will. The police often refused to set at liberty those whom the judges had acquitted. The government had a Turkish or Russian fear of printed matter. A wretched barber was fined 1000 ducats for having in his possession a volume of Leopardi's poems, which was described as 'contrary to religion and morals.'

What was meant by being an inmate of a Neapolitan prison was told by Mr Gladstone in his two 'Letters to the Earl of Aberdeen,' which the latter sent to Prince Schwarzenberg, the Austrian Prime Minister, with a strong appeal to him to make known their contents to the King of the Two Sicilies, and to use his influence in procuring a mitigation of the abuses complained of. Prince Schwarzenberg did nothing, and it was then that the 'Letters' were published. The impression created on public opinion was almost without a parallel. The celebrated phrase, 'The negation of God erected into a system of government,' passing into currency as a short history of Bourbon rule at Naples, kept alive the wrathful feelings which the 'Letters' aroused, even when these ceased to be read. Some small errors of fact (such as that of stating that all the prisoners were chained, whereas an exception was made of those undergoing life sentences) were magnified by the partisans of Ferdinand II.; but the truth of the picture as a whole was amply confirmed from independent sources. Baron Carlo Poerio (condemned to nineteen years' imprisonment) was chained to a common malefactor, the chain never being undone, and producing in the end a disease of the bone from which he never recovered. His case was that of all the political prisoners in the same category with himself. Luigi Settembrini and the others on whom sentence of death had been passed, but commuted into one of life imprisonment, were not chained, but they were put to associate with the worst thieves and assassins, while their material surroundings accorded with the moral atmosphere they were forced to breathe.

The Neapolitan prisoners did more than suffer for freedom; they delivered the name of their country from being a reproach among the nations. They showed what men the South of Italy can produce. Those who wish to know what types of probity, honour and ideal patriotism may grow out of that soil, which is sometimes charged with yielding only the rank weeds planted by despotism, may read the letters and memoirs of the noble Poerios, of Settembrini, gentlest but most fearless of human souls, of the Calabrian Morellis, all patriots and martyrs; of the Duke of Castromediano, who lately, in his old age, has set down a few recollections of the years he spent at the Neapolitan galleys. He records in these notes what he calls the most perilous moment in his life. It was when he was summoned, with six fellow-prisoners who had asked for and obtained freedom, to hear, as he feared, his own pardon pronounced. For pardon was equivalent to dishonour; it was granted either in consequence of real submission and retraction, or in order to be able to blacken the character of the pardoned man by falsely asserting that such submission had been made. His fear was groundless. He had been led out, perhaps, in the hope that the example of the others would prove contagious. He was not pardoned. As he returned to his prison, he thanked Divine Providence for the chains which left him pure.

Strange to tell, Ferdinand II. rendered one considerable service to the national cause; not that he saw it in that light, but the service was none the less real because its motive was a narrow one. Austria proposed a defensive league between the Italian Sovereigns: defensive not only with the view to outward attack, but also and chiefly against 'internal disorder.' Piedmont was to be invited to join as soon as she had renounced her constitutional sins, which it was sanguinely expected she would do before very long. Meanwhile Parma, Modena, Tuscany and Rome embraced the idea with enthusiasm, but the King of the Two Sicilies, who dimly saw in it an opening for interference in his own peculiar governmental ways, boldly declined to have anything to do with it. And so, to Prince Schwarzenberg's serious disappointment, the scheme by which he had hoped to create an absolutist Italian federation, came to an untimely end.

The Grand Duke of Tuscany timidly inquired of the Austrian premier if he might renew the constitutional regime in his state. Schwarzenberg replied with the artful suggestion that he should hear what the Dukes of Modena and Parma, the Pope, and King Ferdinand had to say on the subject. Their advice was unanimously negative: Cardinal Antonelli going so far as to declare that Constitutionalism in Tuscany would be regarded as a constant menace and danger to the States of the Church. The different counsels of Piedmont, conveyed by Count Balbo, weighed little against so imposing an array of opinion, backed as it was by the Power which still stabled its horses in the Convent of San Marco. The Tuscan Statute was formally suspended in September 1850.

From that day forth, Tuscany sank lower and lower in the slough. To please the Pope, havoc was made of the Leopoldine laws—named after the son of Maria Theresa, the wise Grand Duke Leopold I.—laws by which a bridle was put on the power and extension of the Church. The prosecution and imprisonment of a Protestant couple who were accused of wishing to make proselytes, proclaimed the depth of intolerance into which what was once the freest and best-ordered government in Italy had descended.

The ecclesiastical question became the true test question in Piedmont as well as in Tuscany, but there it had another issue.

It had also a different basis. In Piedmont there were no Leopoldine laws to destroy; what was necessary was to create them. To privileges dating from the Middle Ages which in the kingdom of Sardinia almost alone had been restored without curtailment after the storm of the French Revolution, were added the favours, the vast wealth, the preponderating influence acquired during Charles Felix' reign, and the first seventeen years of that of Charles Albert. Theoretically, the Statute swept away all privileges of classes and sects, and made citizens equal before the law, but to put this theory into practice further legislation was needed, because, as a matter of fact, the clergy preserved their immunities untouched and showed not the slightest disposition to yield one jot of them. The Piedmontese clergy, more numerous in proportion to the population than in any state except Rome, were more intransigent than any ecclesiastical body in the world. The Italian priest of old days, whatever else might be said about him, was rarely a fanatic. The very nickname 'Ultramontane' given by Italians to the religious extremists north of the Alps, shows how foreign such excesses were to their own temperaments. But the Ultramontane spirit had already invaded Piedmont, and was embraced by its clergy with all the zeal of converts. There was still a Foro Ecclesiastico for the arraignment of religious offenders, and this was one of the first privileges against which Massimo d'Azeglio lifted his 'sacrilegious' hand. To go through all the list would be tedious, and would demand more explanation regarding the local modes of acquisition and tenure of religious property than would be interesting now. The object of the Siccardi laws, as they were named after the Minister of Grace and Justice who introduced them, and of the stronger measures to which they led up, was to make the priest amenable to the common law of the land in all except that which referred to his spiritual functions; to put a limit on the amassment of wealth by religious corporations; to check the multiplication of convents and the multiplication of feast days, both of which encouraged the people in sloth and idleness; to withdraw education from the sole control of ecclesiastics; and finally, to authorise civil marriage, but without making it compulsory. The programme was large, and it took years to carry it out. The Vatican contended that it was contrary to the Concordat which existed between the Holy See and the Court of Sardinia. Massimo d'Azeglio replied that the maintenance of the Concordat, in all its parts, meant the ruin of the state; that he had tried every means of conciliation, made every effort towards arriving at a compromise, and that since his endeavours had failed in consequence of the refusal of the Vatican to abate pretensions which it neither could nor did enforce in Austria, Naples or Spain, heaven and the world must judge between Rome and Piedmont, between Cardinal Antonelli and himself.

The struggle throughout was bitter in the extreme, but its most striking incident was the denial of the last Sacraments to a member of the Government, the Minister of Agriculture, Santa Rosa, who happened to die soon after the passing of the Act abolishing the Foro Ecclesiastico. Santa Rosa was a sincerely religious man, but he resisted all the attempts of the priest to extort a retractation, and died unabsolved rather than leave a dishonoured name to his children.

The popular indignation excited by this incident was in proportion with the importance attached to outward observances of religion in Catholic countries; the government had to protect the Archbishop of Turin from violence, while, at the same time, they sent him for a month to the Citadel for having forbidden his clergy to obey the law on the Foro Ecclesiastico. He and one or two of the other bishops were afterwards expelled from the kingdom. An unwelcome necessity, but whose was the fault? In other countries, where the privileges claimed by the Piedmontese clergy had been abolished for centuries, did the bishops dictate revolt against the law? If not, why should they do so in Piedmont?

The successor of Santa Rosa in the ministry was Count Cavour, who thus in 1850 for the first time became an official servant of the state. When D'Azeglio submitted the appointment to the King, Victor Emmanuel remarked that, though he did not object to it in the least, they had better take care, as this man would turn them all out before long. This man was, in fact, to stand at the helm of Piedmont, with short intervals, till he died, and was to carve out from the block of formless marble, not the Italy of sublime dreams, which, owing her deliverance to her sons alone, should arise immaculate from the grave a Messiah among the nations, but the actual Italy which has been accomplished; imperfect and peccable as human things mostly are, belonging rather to prose than to poetry, to matter than to spirit, but, for all that, an Italy which is one and is free.

Fifty years ago a great English writer pointed out what the real Italy would be, if it were to be; 'The prosperity of nations as of individuals,' wrote Mr Ruskin in one of his earliest papers, 'is cold and hard-hearted and forgetful. The dead lie, indeed, trampled down by the living; the place thereof shall know them no more, for that place is not in the hearts of the survivors, for whose interest they have made way. But adversity and ruin point to the sepulchre, and it is not trodden on; to the chronicle, and it does not decay. Who would substitute the rush of a new nation, the struggle of an awakening power, for the dreamy sleep of Italy's desolation, for the sweet silence of melancholy thought, her twilight time of everlasting memories?'



There is the case, stated with beautiful lucidity, of the somewhat ghoulish dilettantism which, enjoying tombs, would condemn all mankind to breathe their atmosphere. It is not, however, in order to discuss that view that the passage is quoted, but because of its relevancy to what Cavour attempted and what he did. Never was there a mind which cherished fewer illusions. He believed that the pursuit of the unattainable was still more a political crime than a political blunder. He was, in this, what is now called an opportunist, and he was also an opportunist in believing that though in politics you can choose your aim, you can very rarely choose your means. He held (and this was the reason that he was so profoundly hated by men of very different parties) that to accomplish great changes you have to make sacrifices, not only of the higher sort, but, in a certain sense, also of the lower. As he thought that the Austrians could not be expelled from Italy for good and all without foreign help, he contemplated from the first securing that foreign help, though no one would have been more glad than he to do without it. He thought that Italian freedom could not be won without a closer alliance with the democratic party than politicians like D'Azeglio, who had the fear of the ermine, of tarnishing its whiteness, would have ever brought themselves to acquiesce in, and he therefore immediately took steps to establish that alliance. Cavour had no faith in the creation of ideally perfect states, such as the Monarchy of Dante or the Republic of Mazzini, but he did think that a living land was better than a dead one, that the struggle of an awakening power, the rush of a new nation, was infinitely to be preferred to the desolation of dreamy sleeps, sweet silences, and everlasting memories that spelt regrets.

It may be possible now to see clearly that if no one had tried for the unattainable, Cavour would not have found the ground prepared for his work. The appreciation of his rank among Italian liberators rests on a different point, and it is this: without a man of his positive mould, of his practical genius, of his force of will and force of patience, would the era of splendid endeavours have passed into the era of accomplished facts? If the answer to this is 'No,' then nothing can take from Cavour the glory of having conferred an incalculable boon on the country which he loved with a love that was not the less strong because it lacked the divinising qualities of imagination.

An aristocrat by birth and the inheritor of considerable wealth, Cavour was singularly free from prejudices; his favourite study was political economy, and in quiet times he would probably have given all his energies to the interests of commerce and agriculture. He was an advocate of free trade, and was, perhaps, the only one of the many Italians who feted Mr Cobden on his visit to Italy who cared in the least for the motive of his campaign. Cavour understood English politics better than they have ever been understood by a foreign statesman; his article on Ireland, written in 1843, may still be read with profit. Before parliamentary life existed in Piedmont, he took the only way open of influencing public opinion by founding a newspaper, the Risorgimento, in which he continued to write for several years. In the Chamber of Deputies he soon made his power felt—power is the word, for he was no orator in the ordinary sense; his speeches read well, as hard hitting and logical expositions, but they were not well delivered. Cavour never spoke Italian with true grace and ease though he selected it for his speeches, and not French, which was also allowed and which he spoke admirably. His presence, too, did not lend itself to oratory; short and thickset, and careless in his dress, he formed a contrast to the romantic figure of D'Azeglio. Yet his prosaic face, when animated, gave an impressive sense of that attribute which seemed to emanate from the whole man: power.

It needed a more wary hand than D'Azeglio's to steer out of the troubled waters caused by the ecclesiastical bills, and to put the final touches to the legislation which he, to his lasting honour be it said, had courageously and successfully initiated. In the autumn of 1852 D'Azeglio resigned, and Cavour was requested by the King to form a ministry. He was to remain, with short breaks, at the head of public affairs for the nine following years.

At this time the government of Lombardy and Venetia was vested in Field-Marshal Radetsky, with two lieutenant-governors under him, who only executed his orders. Radetsky resided at Verona. Politically and economically the two provinces were then undergoing an extremity of misery; the diseases of the vines and the silkworms had reached the point of causing absolute ruin to the great mass of proprietors who, reckoning on having always enough to live on, had not laid by. Many noble families sank to the condition of peasants. The taxation was heavier than in any other part of the Austrian Empire; in proof of which it may be mentioned that Lombardy paid 80,000,000 francs into the Austrian treasury, which, had the Empire been taxed equally, would have given an annual total of 1,100,000,000, whereas the revenue amounted to only 736,000,000. The landtax was almost double what it was in the German provinces. Italians, however, have a great capacity for supporting such burdens with patience, and it is doubtful whether the material aspect of the case did much to increase their hatred of foreign dominion. Its moral aspect grew daily worse; the terror became chronic. The possession of a sheet of printed paper issued by the revolutionary press at Capolago, on the lake of Lugano, was enough to send a man to the gallows. These old, badly printed leaflets, with no name of author or publisher attached, but chiefly written in the unmistakable style of Mazzini, can still be picked up in the little booksellers' shops in Canton Ticino, and it is difficult to look at them without emotion. What hopes were carried by them. What risks were run in passing them from hand to hand. Of what tragedies were they not the cause! In August 1851, Antonio Sciesa, of Milan, was shot for having one such leaflet on his person. The gendarmes led him past his own house, hoping that the sight of it would weaken his nerve, and make him accept the clemency which was eagerly proffered if he would reveal the names of others engaged in the patriotic propaganda. 'Tiremm innanz!' ('come along') he said, in his rough Milanese dialect, and marched incorruptible to death. On a similar charge, Dottesio and Grioli, the latter a priest, suffered in the same year, and early in 1852 the long trial was begun at Mantua of about fifty patriots whose names had been obtained by the aid of the bastinado from one or two unhappy wretches who had not the fortitude to endure. Of these fifty, nine were executed, among whom were the priests Grazioli and Tazzoli, Count Montanari of Verona, and Tito Speri, the young hero of the defence of Brescia. Speri had a trifling part in the propaganda, but the remembrance of his conduct in 1849 ensured his condemnation. He was deeply attached to the religion in which he was born, and his last letters show the fervour of a Christian joined to the calmness of a stoic. If he had a regret, it was that he had been unable to do more for his country; but here too his simple faith sustained him. Surely the Giver of all good would not refuse to listen to the prayers of the soul which passed to Him through martyrdom. 'To-morrow they lead me forth,' he wrote. 'I have done with this world, but, in the bosom of God, I promise you I will do what I can.' So did this clear and childlike spirit carry its cause from the Austrian Assizes to a higher tribunal.

In the spring of 1853 there was an attempt at a rising in Milan from which the mass of the citizens stood aloof, if they even knew of it till it was over; an attempt ill-considered and not easily justified from any point of view, the blame for which has been generally cast on Mazzini; but though he knew of it, he was unwilling that its authors should choose the time and mode of action which they chose. He was, moreover, misinformed as to the extent of the preparations, since no Milanese of any standing gave his support to the plan.

On the plea that the Lombard emigration was concerned in the abortive movement, which was by no means consistent with facts, the Austrian Government sequestered the landed property of the exiles and voluntary emigrants, reducing them and their families (which in most instances remained behind) to complete beggary. Nine hundred and seventy-eight estates were placed under sequestration. The Court of Sardinia held the measure to be a violation of the amnesty, which was one of the conditions of the peace of 1850. The Sardinian Minister was recalled from Vienna, and the relations between the two governments were once more on a footing of open rupture.

Not less important was the moral effect of the sequestrations in France and England, but particularly in England. They acted as the last straw, coming as they did on the top of the flogging system which had already enraged the English public mind to the highest degree. The Prince Consort wrote in March to his brother: 'To give you a conception of the maxims of justice and policy which Austria has been lately developing, I enclose an extract of a report from Turin which treats of the decrees of confiscation in Italy. People here will be very indignant.' He goes on to say (somewhat too broadly) that the English upper classes were till then thoroughly Austrian, but that she had succeeded in turning the whole of England against her, and there was now no one left to defend her.

Austria, through Count Buol, complained that she was 'dying of legality,' but England took the Sardinian view that the sequestrations directly violated the treaty between the two Powers. In the Austrian Note of the 9th of March, it was distinctly declared that Piedmont would be crushed if she did not perform the part of police-agent to Austria. Cavour's uncowed attitude at this crisis was what first fixed upon him the eyes of European diplomacy.

In the course of the summer, the Duke of Genoa, Victor Emmanuel's brother, paid a visit to the English Court, where the Duke of Saxe-Coburg was also staying, by whom he was described as 'one of the cleverest and most amiable men of our time.' Sunny Italy, adds Duke Ernest, seemed to have sent him to England so that by his mere presence alone, in the prime of his age, he might make propaganda for the cause of his country. The Queen presented her guest with a handsome riding-horse, and when he thanked her in warm and feeling terms, she spoke the memorable words, the effect of which spoken at that date by the Queen of England can hardly be imagined: 'I hope you will ride this horse when the battles are fought for the liberation of Italy.'

The battle-day was indeed to come, but when it came the sword which the young Duke wielded with such gallantry in the siege of Peschiera would be sheathed for ever. The Prince Charming of Casa Savoia died in February 1855, leaving a daughter to Italy, the beloved Queen Margaret.

In the space of a few weeks, Victor Emmanuel lost his brother, his mother, and his wife. The King, who felt keenly when he did feel, was driven distraught with grief; no circumstance was wanting which could sharpen the edge of his sorrow. The two Queens, both Austrian princesses, had never interfered in foreign politics; what they suffered they suffered in silence. But they were greatly influenced by the ministers of the religion which had been a comfort of their not too happy lives, and they had frequently told Victor Emmanuel that they would die of grief if the anti-papal policy of his government were persisted in. Now that they were dead, every partisan of the Church declared, without a shadow of reticence, that the mourning in which the House of Savoy was plunged was a clear manifestation of Divine wrath. Victor Emmanuel had been brought up in superstitious surroundings; it was hardly possible that he should listen to these things altogether unmoved. But on this as on the other occasions in his life when he was to be threatened with ghostly terrors, he did not belie the name of 'Re Galantuomo,' which he had written down as his profession when filling up the papers of the first census taken after his accession—a jest that gave him the title he will ever be known by. Harassed and tormented as the King was, when the law on religious corporations had been voted by the Senate and the Chamber, and was presented to him by Cavour for signature, he did his duty and signed it. The commentary which came from the Vatican was the decree of major excommunication promulgated in the Consistory of the 27th of July against all who had approved or sanctioned the measure, or who were concerned in putting it into execution.

The law was known as the 'Rattazziana,' from Urbano Rattazzi, whom Cavour appointed Minister of Grace and Justice, thereby effecting a coalition between the Right Centre, which he led himself, and the Left Centre, which was led by Rattazzi; an alliance not pleasing to the Pure Right or to the Advanced Left, but necessary to give the Prime Minister sufficient strength to command the respect, both at home and abroad, which can only be won by a statesman who is not afraid of being overturned by every whiff of the parliamentary wind. The 'Legge Rattazziana' certainly aimed at asserting the supremacy of the state, but in substance it was an arrangement for raising the stipend of the poorer clergy at the expense of the richer benefices and corporations, and save for the bitter animosity of Rome, it would not have excited the degree of anger that descended upon its promoters. In a country where the Church had a rental of 15,000,000 francs, there were many parish priests who had not an income of L20; a state of things seen to be anomalous by the best ecclesiastics themselves, but their efforts at conciliation failed because the Holy See would not recognise the right of the civil authority to interfere in any question affecting the status or property of the clergy, and this right was the real point at issue.

In these days, Cavour came to an understanding with a friendly monk in order that when his last hour arrived, he should not, like Santa Rosa, go unshriven to his account. In 1861, Fra Giacomo performed his part in the agreement, and was duly punished for having saved his Church from a scandal which, from the position of the great minister, would have reached European dimensions.

Cavour's work of bringing into order the Sardinian finances, which, from the flourishing state they had attained prior to 1848, had fallen into what appeared the hopeless confusion of a large and steadily increasing deficit, is not to the ordinary observer his most brilliant achievement, but it is possibly the one for which he deserves most praise. It could not have been carried through except by a statesman who was completely indifferent to the applause of the hour. During all the earlier years that he held office, Cavour was extraordinarily unpopular. The nickname of 'la bestia neira' conferred on him by Victor Emmanuel referred to the opinion entertained of him by the Clerical party, but he was almost as much a 'bestia neira' to a large portion of the Liberals as to the Clericals or to the old Piedmontese party. His house was attacked by the mob in 1853, and had not his servants barred the entrance, something serious might have occurred. Happily the King and the majority in the Chamber and in the country had, if not much love for Cavour, a profound conviction that he could not be done without, and that, consequently, he must be allowed to do what he liked. Thus the large sacrifices he demanded of the taxpayers were regularly voted, and Cavour could afford to despise the abuse heaped upon himself since he saw his policy advancing to maturity along a steady line of success.

When, in 1854, Cavour resolved that Piedmont should join France and England in the coming war with Russia, it seemed to a large number of his countrymen that he had taken leave of his senses, but the firm support which in this instance he found in the King enabled him next year to equip and despatch the contingent, 15,000 strong, commanded by General La Marmora, which not only won the respect of friends and foes in the field, but offered an example of efficiency in all departments that compared favourably with the faulty organisation of the great armies beside which it fought. Its gallant conduct at the battle of the Tchernaja flattered the native pride, and when, in due time, 12,000 returned of the 15,000 that had gone forth, the increased credit of Piedmont in Europe was already felt to compensate for the heavy cost of the expedition.

Among the Italians living abroad, Cavour's motives in taking part in the Crimean War were, from the first, better understood than they were at home. Piedmont, by qualifying for the part of Italian advocate in the Councils of Europe, gave a guarantee of good faith which patriots like Daniel Manin and Giorgio Pallavicini accepted as a happy promise for the future. It was then that a large section of the republican party frankly embraced the programme of Italian unity under Victor Emmanuel. They foresaw that a repetition of the discordant action of 1848 would end in the same way. Manin wrote to Lorenzo Valerio in September 1855: 'I, who am a republican, plant the banner of unification; let all who desire that Italy should exist, rally round it, and Italy will exist.' The ex-dictator of Venice was eking out a scanty livelihood by giving lessons in Paris; he had only three years left to live, and was not destined to see his words verified. But, poor and sick and obscure though he was, his support was worth legions.

It was not the first time that Italian republicans had said to the House of Savoy: If you will free Italy we are with you; but the circumstances of the case were completely changed since Mazzini wrote in somewhat the same language to Charles Albert a quarter of a century before. Both times the proposal contained an ultimatum as well as an offer, but Manin made it without second thoughts in the strongest hope that the pact would be accepted and full of anticipatory joy at the prospect of its success; while by the Genoese republican it was made in mistrust and in the knowledge that were it accepted (which he did not believe), its acceptance, though bringing with it for Italy a state of things which he recognised as preferable to that which prevailed, would bring to him personally nothing but disappointment and the forfeiture of his dearest wishes.

It is difficult to say what were at this date Cavour's own private sentiments about Italian unity. Though he once confessed that as a young man he had fancied himself Prime Minister of Italy, whenever the subject was now discussed he disclaimed any belief in the feasibility of uniting all parts of the peninsula in one whole. He even called Manin 'a very good man, but mad about Italian unification.' It wanted, in truth, the prescience of the seer rather than the acumen of the politician to discern the unity of Italy in 1855. All outward facts seemed more adverse to its accomplishment than at any period since 1815. Yet it was for Italy that Cavour always pleaded; Italy, and not Piedmont or even Lombardy and Venetia. He invariably asserted the right of his King to uphold the cause of all the populations from the Alps to the Straits of Messina. If he adopted the proverb 'Chi va piano va sano,' he kept in view the end of it, 'Chi va sano va lontano.' In short, if he did not believe in Italian unity, he acted in the same way as he would have acted had he believed in it.

It is evident that one thing he could not do. Whatever was in his thoughts, unless he was prepared to retire into private life then and there, he could not proclaim from the house-tops that he espoused the artichoke theory attributed to Victor Amadeus. There were only too many old diplomatists as it was, who sought to cripple Cavour's resources by reviving that story. The time was not come when, without manifest damage to the cause, he could plead guilty to the charge of preparing an Italian crown for his Sovereign. 'The rule in politics,' Cavour once observed, 'is to be as moderate in language as you are resolute in act.'

At the end of 1855, Victor Emmanuel, with Cavour and Massimo d'Azeglio, paid a visit to the French and English Courts. He was received with more marked cordiality at the English Court than at the French. No Prince Charming, indeed, but the ideal of a bluff and burly Longobard chief, he managed to win the good graces of his entertainers, even if they thought him a trifle barbaric. The Duchess of Sutherland declared that of all the knights of St George whom she had ever seen, he was the only one who would have had the best of it in the fight with the dragon. The Queen rose at four o'clock in the morning to take leave of him. Cavour was so much struck by the interest which Her Majesty evinced in the efforts of Piedmont for constitutional freedom, that he did not hesitate to call her the best friend his country possessed in England.

It is not generally known, but it is quite true, that Victor Emmanuel wished to contract a matrimonial alliance with the English royal family. He did not take Cavour into his confidence, but a high English personage was sounded on the matter, a hint being given to him to say nothing about it to the Count. The lady who might have become Queen of Italy was the Princess Mary of Cambridge. The negotiations were broken off because the young Princess would not hear of any marriage which would have required her living out of England.

The Congress which met in Paris in February 1856 for the conclusion of the peace between the Allies and Russia was to have far more momentous results for Italy than for the countries more immediately concerned in its discussions, but, contrary to the general impression, it does not appear that these results were anticipated by Cavour. He even said that it was idle for Sardinia to send delegates to a congress in which they would be treated like children. Cavour feared, perhaps, to lose the ground he had gained in the previous year with Napoleon III., when the Emperor's rather surprising question: 'Que peut-on faire pour l'Italie?' had suggested to the Piedmontese statesman that definite scheme of a French alliance, which henceforth he never let go. In any case, when D'Azeglio, who was appointed Sardinian representative, refused at the last moment to undertake a charge for which he knew he was not fitted, it was only at the urgent request of the King that Cavour consented to take his place. When once in Paris, however, he warmed to the work, finding an unexpectedly strong ally in Lord Clarendon. He won what was considered in all Europe a great diplomatic triumph, by getting a special sitting assigned to the examination of Italian affairs, which had as little to do with the natural work of the Congress as the affairs of China. The chief points discussed at the secret sitting of the 8th of April were the foreign occupations in Central Italy, and the state of the Roman and Neapolitian governments, which was stigmatised by Lord Clarendon in terms much more severe than Cavour himself thought it prudent to use. Count Buol, the chief Austrian representative, grew very angry, and his opposition was successful in reducing the sitting to a mere conversation; but what had been said had been said, and Cavour prepared the way for his future policy by remarking to everyone: 'You see that diplomacy can do nothing for us; the question needs another solution.' Lord Clarendon's vigorous support made him think for a moment that England might take an active part in that other solution, and with this idea in his mind he hurried over the Channel to see Lord Palmerston, but he left England convinced that nothing more than moral assistance was ever to be expected from that quarter. The Marquis Emmanuel d'Azeglio, who for many years represented Sardinia, and afterwards Italy, at the Court of St James, has placed it on record that the English Premier repeatedly assured him that an armed intervention on behalf of Italian freedom would have been much to his taste, but that the country would not have been with him. It is certain that Cavour would have preferred an English to a French alliance; as it was not to be had, he reposed his sole hopes in the Emperor Napoleon, who had not the French people really more with him in this matter than Lord Palmerston had the English—nay, he had them less with him, for in England there would have been a party of Italian sympathisers favourable to the war, and in France, there was no one except Prince Napoleon and the workmen of Paris. But the French Emperor was a despotic sovereign, and not the Prime Minister of a self-governing country. After all, some good may come out of despotism.

Upon Cavour's return to Turin, he received not only the approval of the King and Parliament, but also congratulations from all parts of Italy. His position had gained immensely in strength, both at home and abroad. Yet the power of the Clerical party in Piedmont was still such that, in the elections of 1857—the first that had taken place since the legislation affecting the Church—they obtained seventy seats out of a total of two hundred. Cavour did not conceal his alarm. What if eight years' labour were thrown away, and the movement of the State turned backward? 'Never,' he said, 'would he advise a coup d'etat, nor would his master resort to one; but if the King abdicated, what then?' Victor Emmanuel said to his Prime Minister: 'Let us do our duty; stand firm, and we shall see!' He often declared that, sooner than beat a retreat from the path he had entered on, he would go to America and become plain Monsu Savoia; but he never lost faith in the predominating patriotism and good sense of his subjects; and at this time, as at others, he proved to be right. The crisis was surmounted. On the one hand, some elections were invalidated where the priests had exercised undue influence; and, on the other, Rattazzi, who was especially obnoxious to the Clerical party, retired from office. Cavour thus found himself still able to command the Chamber.



CHAPTER XI

PREMONITIONS OF THE STORM

1857-1858

Pisacane's Landing—Orsini's Attempt—The Compact of Plombieres—Cavour's Triumph.

In spite of the accusation of favouring political assassination which was frequently launched against the Italian secret societies, only one of the faithless Italian princes came to a violent death, and his murder had no connection with politics. Charles III., Duke of Parma, was mortally stabbed in March 1854; some said that the assassin was a groom whom he had struck with a riding-whip; others, that he was the father or brother of one of the victims of the Duke's dissolute habits. The Duchess, a daughter of the Duke de Berry, assumed the Regency on behalf of her son, who was a child. She began by initiating many reforms; but a street disturbance in July gave Austria the desired excuse for meddling in the government, when all progress was, of course, arrested.

In December 1856, a soldier named Ageslao Milano attempted to assassinate the King of the Two Sicilies at a review. He belonged to no sect, but he had long premeditated the act. A few days later an earthquake occurred in the kingdom of Naples, by which over ten thousand persons lost their lives. Ferdinand II. grew morose, and shut himself up in the royal palace of Caserta. The constant lectures of France and England annoyed him without persuading him to take the means to put a stop to them. Not till 1859 did he open the doors of the prisons in which Poerio, Settembrini and their companions were confined. Many plans were made, meanwhile, for their liberation, and English friends even provided a ship by which they were to escape; but the ship foundered: perhaps fortunately, as Garibaldi, with characteristic disinterestedness, had agreed to direct the enterprise, which could not have been otherwise than perilous, and was not unlikely to end in the loss of all concerned.

Disaster attended Baron Bentivegna's attempt at a rising at Taormina in 1856, and Carlo Pisacane's landing at Sapri in the summer of the following year had no better result. Pisacane, a son of the Duke Gennaro di San Giovanni of Naples, had fought in the defence of Rome and was a firm adherent of Mazzini, in conjunction with whom he planned his unlucky venture. Pisacane watched the growing ascendency of Piedmont with sorrow; he was one of the few, if not the only one of his party to say that he would as soon have the dominion of Austria as that of the House of Savoy. But if he was an extremist in politics, none the less he was a patriot, who took his life in his hands and offered it up to his country in the spirit of the noblest devotion. He had the slenderest hope of success, but he believed that only by such failures could the people be roused from their apathy. 'For me,' he wrote, 'it will be victory even if I die on the scaffold. This is all I can do, and this I do; the rest depends on the country, not on me. I have only my affections and my life to give, and I give them without hesitation.'

With the young Baron Nicotera and twenty-three others, Pisacane embarked on the Cagliari, a steamer belonging to a Sardinian mercantile line, which was bound for Tunis. When at sea, the captain was frightened into obedience, and the ship's course was directed to the isle of Ponza, where several hundred prisoners, mostly political, were undergoing their sentences. The guards made little resistance, and Pisacane opened the prisons, inviting who would to follow him. The first plan had been to make a descent on San Stefano, the island where Settembrini was imprisoned, but that good citizen had refused to admit the liberation of the non-political prisoners, which was an unavoidable feature in the scheme. With the addition of about three hundred men, Pisacane left Ponza for the mainland and disembarked near the village of Sapri, in the province of Salerno. From information received, he imagined that a revolutionary movement was on the point of breaking out in that district. Nothing could be further from the fact. The country people did all the harm they could to the band, which, after making a brave stand against the local militia, was cut to pieces by the royal troops. Pisacane fell fighting; those who were not killed were taken, and amongst these was Nicotera, who was kept in prison till set free by Garibaldi.

The Cagliari was captured and detained with its crew. As two of the seamen were British subjects, the English Government joined Sardinia in demanding its restitution, which, after long delays, was conceded.

In 1857, the Emperor of Austria relieved Field-Marshal Radetsky, then in his ninety-third year, of the burden of office. He was given the right of living in any of the royal palaces, even in the Emperor's own residence at Vienna, but he preferred to spend the one remaining year of his life in Italy. At the same time, the Archduke Maximilian was appointed Viceroy of Lombardy and Venetia. A more naturally amiable and cultivated Prince never had the evil fate forced upon him of attempting impossible tasks. Just married to the lovely Princess Charlotte of Belgium, he came to Italy radiant with happiness, and wishing to make everyone as happy as he was himself. Not even the chilling welcome he received damped his enthusiasm, for he thought the aversion of the population depended on undoubted wrongs, which it was his full intention to redress. He was to learn two things; firstly, that the day of reconciliation was past: there were too many ghosts between the Lombards and Venetians, and the House of Hapsburg. Secondly, that an unseen hand beyond the Brenner would diligently thwart each one of his benevolent designs. The system was, and was to remain, unchanged. It was not carried out quite as it was carried out in the first years after 1849. The exiles were allowed to return and the sequestrations were revoked. It should be said, because it shows the one white spot in Austrian despotism, its civil administration, that on resuming their rights of ownership the proprietors found that their estates had not been badly managed. But the depressing and deadening influence of an anti-national rule continued unabated. Lombardy and Venetia were governed not from Milan, but from Vienna. Very small were the crumbs which the Viceroy obtained, though he went on a journey to Austria expressly to plead for concessions. It is sad to think what an enlightened heir to the great Austrian empire was lost, when Napoleon III. and his own family sent Maximilian of Hapsburg to Queretaro.

While Cavour had come to the conclusion that the aid which he believed essential for the expulsion of the Austrians could only come from the French Emperor, this sovereign was regarded by a not inconsiderable party of Italians as the greatest, if not the sole, obstacle to their liberation. All those, in particular, who came in contact with the French exiles, were impressed by them with the notion that France, the real France, was only waiting for the disappearance of the Man of December to throw herself into their arms. Among the Italians who held these opinions, there were a few with whom it became a fixed idea that the greatest service they could render their country was the removal of Napoleon from the political scene. They conceived and nourished the thought independently of one another; they belonged to no league, but for that reason they were the more dangerous; somewhere or other there was always someone planning to put an end to the Emperor's life. It is not worth while to pause to discuss the ethics of political assassination; civilisation has decided against it, and history proves its usual failure to promote the desired object. What benefit did the Confederate cause derive from the assassination of the good President Lincoln, or the cause of Russian liberty from that of Alexander II.? What will Anarchy gain by the murder of Carnot? It is certain, however, that never were men more convinced that they were executing a wild kind of justice than were the men who plotted against Napoleon III. They looked upon him as one of themselves who had turned traitor. There is a great probability that, in his early days when he was playing at conspiracy in Italy, he was actually enrolled as a Carbonaro. At all events, he had conspired for Italian freedom, and afterwards, to serve his own selfish interests, he extinguished it in Rome. The temporal power of the Pope was kept alive through him.

A true account of the attempts on Napoleon's life will never be written, because the only persons who were able and willing to throw light on the subject, ex-police agents and their kind, are authorities whose word is worth a very limited acceptance. It is pretty sure that there were more plots than the public ever knew of, and that in some cases the plotters were disposed of summarily. Most of them were poor, ignorant creatures, but in January 1858 an attempt was made by a man of an entirely different stamp, Felice Orsini.

Born at Meldola in Romagna in 1819, he was of the true Romagnol type in mind and body; daring, resourceful, intolerant of control. From his earliest youth all his actions had but one object, the liberation of his country. His youthful brain was enflamed by Alfieri and Foscolo, who remained his favourite authors. He hated Austria well, and he hated the Papal government as no one but one of its own subjects could hate it. 'When the French landed in Italy' (he told his judges) 'it was hoped that they were come as friends, but they proved the worst of enemies. For a time they were repulsed, then they resumed the cloak of friendship, but only to wait for reinforcements. When these arrived they returned to the assault, a thousand against ten, and we were judicially assassinated.' A succinct and true narrative.