The Sultan's Daughter (43 page)

But no advantage was taken of this unlooked-for respite. On the contrary, matters in Naples went from bad to worse. Pignatelli, presumably on the King's instructions, endeavoured to set fire to the Arsenal. He was prevented by the
Eletti
, but they failed to stop him on December 28th from burning the hundred gunboats that were anchored off Posilipo and having the great store of powder and shot kept at Mergellina thrown into the sea. Ten days later Commodore Campbell, by then convinced that the Regent meant to hand over Naples to the enemy without striking a blow, turned the guns of his Portuguese frigates on the helpless Neapolitan vessels and sank all the bigger ships of the Fleet.

In defiance of Pignatelli, the
Eletti
decreed the calling up of fourteen thousand citizens; but the move proved abortive, as the Regent refused to release more than two hundred muskets from the castles. He declared his policy to be to do nothing to increase the enmity of the French but to levy a huge tax and use the money to bribe them to concede an armistice.

He appeared to be successful in this. On January 11th General Championnet agreed to spare Naples for two months on condition that various strong places and a great area of territory were ceded, that the ports of the Two Sicilies were declared neutral and that, within the current month, Naples paid an indemnity of ten million francs, half of which was to be forthcoming within the next three days.

During this fortnight of confusion and anxiety Roger played no part in events. Having sent off his despatches, he was free of all responsibility and he had no urgent reason for endeavouring to get home. With such patience as he could muster he continued to hope that in another month or so the peninsula would have been sufficiently pacified for him to risk setting out for France. In the meantime he kept himself occupied by riding every morning, practising in a fencing school near his hotel for an hour or so every afternoon and picking up the rumours of the day in cafés in the evening.

But the news of the armistice seemed to give him the sort of chance for which he had been waiting. Before that it would
have been suicidal for him to attempt to join the French. To increase the strength of his Army, King Ferdinand had released all the criminals from the Sicilian jails and had formed no fewer than sixteen battalions with them. With thousands of such desperadoes roving the countryside, no solitary traveller could possibly have hoped to get through to Rome. But now the French would be sending emissaries to Naples, and Roger planned to get in touch with them. If, on some excuse or other, he could have himself sent to General Championnet, the rest should prove easy. After Bonaparte's letters had been copied he had retrieved them from Sir William. He would only have to show them and declare himself as Colonel Breuc to be provided with an escort that would see him safely back to France.

On the 12th, in accordance with the armistice terms, the Neapolitans handed over Capua. General Mack, now scared that his own soldiers would kill him, sought the protection of the French. When he was about to surrender his sword Championnet said contemptuously, ‘Pray keep it. My Government does not allow me to accept presents of English manufacture.' Then he told the old man to go home.

On the evening of the 14th the French Commissioners arrived to collect the first half of the indemnity. It had been got together only with great difficulty as Ferdinand had emptied the national treasury before his departure, carrying off twenty million ducats. But the French never got their money. A seething mob of
lazzaroni
refused to allow it to be handed over and attacked the five carriages in which the Commissioners had arrived. They were rescued only with difficulty by the National Guard, kept in protective custody for the night and departed the following morning vowing vengeance for the insults to which they had been subjected.

Roger found it impossible to get anywhere near them and, as the action of the
lazzaroni
had put an end to the armistice, he was left in the same frustrating situation as before.

Within the next twenty-four hours it became clear that the
lazzaroni
were now the real masters of the city. For the past three weeks they had, in one way or another, been acquiring arms and, just at this time, a great quantity of weapons became theirs for the taking. The five thousand troops whom
Nelson had conveyed to Leghorn returned with their tails between their legs. The Grand Duke had, after all, proved too frightened to launch, an attack from Tuscany on the French and had packed the Neapolitans back into their transports. On their arrival at Naples, hordes of
lazzaroni
swarmed aboard the vessels and seized every weapon in them.

Elated by their success, they proceeded to attack the Castel Nuovo. Pignatelli sent orders to the Commander to defend the castle but not to fire upon the mob. As it was an impossibility to do one without the other, the unhappy officer allowed the
lazzaroni
to take possession. By similar means they secured the great fortress of Castel Sant'Elmo, up on the heights, and the other great Castel dell'Uovo, down on the harbour.

They then began a witch-hunt for ‘Jacobins', as Neapolitans with revolutionary leanings were termed. Anyone believed to have French sympathies was dragged into the street and murdered, then his house was pillaged. This led many hundreds of the lesser nobility and bourgeoisie with Liberal leanings to decide that the only hope of saving their lives lay in siding with the French and, if possible, helping them to capture the city. A number of them banded themselves together and, by a trick, succeeded in gaining possession of the Castel Sant'Elmo, where they shut themselves up.

Meanwhile the
lazzaroni
had broken open all the prisons. The intellectuals who had been locked up in them, on Queen Caroline's orders, as Jacobins were butchered, but the criminals were let loose to join in the orgy of murder and destruction that was now taking place.

On the night of the 17th Pignatelli fled to Palermo. By that time the mobs were no longer bothering themselves about the politics of the wealthier citizens, but were breaking into and looting every house in which they thought they would acquire plunder easily. A hundred thousand male and female cut-throats were storming through the great, wealthy city and its state of anarchy had become worse than that in Paris during the most terrible days of the Revolution.

Roger, now considerably alarmed for his own safety, remained in his hotel; but even that did not save him from a most unpleasant experience. On the night following Pigna-telli's
flight the hotel was attacked by a mob howling for blood. He had only just time to jump out of bed, snatch up his weapons and money-belt, pull on his travelling coat and get out of his bedroom window on to the roof of a verandah at the back of the building.

Climbing down to the ground, he made off through a side door in the courtyard and along several alleys until he could no longer hear the shouts and screams coming from the hotel. It was bitterly cold and he spent the rest of the night huddled, shivering, in a doorway, praying that Hell might open and swallow Ferdinand and Caroline for the horror they had brought upon their capital.

By dawn he had decided that Naples had become too hot to hold him. Tempests or no tempests, he must get out of this inferno before he was murdered; so he must go home by sea. As soon as there was light enough, he set out along the waterfront and trudged the five miles or more south along the bay to the little fishing port of Portici. There he talked cautiously with some fishermen and, selecting one of whom he liked the look, drew him aside. After ten minutes' haggling he persuaded the man, for a considerable sum in gold, to find him some warm clothes, then run him down the coast and across the straits to Messina.

Soon after midday, warmed by a good meal of fish soup and rough wine, and wearing coarse woollens under his travelling coat, he went aboard the fishing smack. The crew consisted of the owner and his two stalwart sons. Roger had little fear that, having such odds in their favour, they might set upon and rob him, since they seemed very decent folk and, moreover, he was armed with two pistols as well as his sword.

The weather continued to be cold with occasional squalls of rain but, for the most part, it was sunny and, after the nightmare happenings in Naples, he found it a great relief to sit day after day in the stern of the boat, free from all anxiety. After rounding Capri they kept within a mile or so of the coast, now and then putting in to fishing villages to replenish their stores. Tacking slowly south, the three-hundred-mile voyage took sixteen days and Roger had become so used to doing nothing, except steer the boat occasionally or help with
the sails, that he was almost sorry when on February 4th they landed in Sicily.

In Messina he spent three nights in a bug-ridden hotel, but there was no better accommodation to be had. After purchasing the best suit of clothes he could find, he set about making preparations for his journey to Palermo. The Sicilian capital was a hundred and fifty miles distant, and the only way to reach it was by a road following the northern coast of the great island. Long stretches of this road were little better than cart-tracks, the so-called inns along it were no more than hovels, and it was said to be infested with brigands. On hearing this, Roger decided that the only way to make the journey with a minimum of discomfort and a reasonable degree of safety would be to hire a travelling coach, in which he could sleep at night, and engage armed outriders for his protection.

The standard of living in the island was so low that men could be hired for any purpose for quite a small sum, but the total cost of such an expedition was considerable and his store of gold was now running low; so he sold a few of his small diamonds to a Spanish Jew who happened to be staying at the inn.

On the morning of the 7th, escorted by four villainous-looking mounted men armed to the teeth, he set out. Stoically he endured the jolting, while deriving such consolation as he could from the beauty of the scenery. To his right there was an endless succession of bays enclosed by wooded promontories and to his left, for the first three days, the magnificent cone of Etna continued to dominate the north-east of the island. On the afternoon of the 13th he reached Palermo,

The walls of the ancient city were most impressive but he found the city within them composed almost entirely of slums, many of which dated back to the occupation of the city by Saracens and Normans. The British Embassy, he learned, had been established in the Villa Bastioni, and he went there as soon as he had paid off his escort. He found it to be a handsome mansion overlooking the Marine Promenade and adjacent to the beautiful Flora Reale gardens, but it soon transpired that the occupants were far from happy in their new home.

Sir William and Emma received him most kindly, but had a sad story to tell. In addition to bemoaning the loss of their fine Neapolitan properties and a great part of their possessions, they had found Palermo most disappointing. The Royal Family had never previously stayed there, except in summer, and then only at long intervals. In consequence, none of the palaces had fireplaces and most of them had fallen into disrepair. As the weather had been very inclement the refugees had suffered severely from the cold and Sir William had spent several weeks in bed with a fever. The King and Queen had installed themselves in the only habitable rooms in the Colli Palace and the Queen, still terrified of assassination, constantly moaned about its being two miles from the harbour, which would make it difficult to escape if the mob took it into its head to follow the example of that of Naples.

As it had taken Roger nearly four weeks to reach Palermo, the Hamiltons had much more recent news of Naples than he had, gleaned from refugees who had continued to arrive by sea. The disciplined French columns had forced their way through the rabble remnants of the Neapolitan Army and launched their attack on the capital on January 23rd, upon which the Liberal nobility in the Castel Sant'Elmo ran up the hated tricolour flag. The
lazzaroni
resisted the French with extraordinary ferocity. Thousands of them were killed as they defended every street and every house, but again French discipline triumphed. After several days of desperate fighting they crushed all opposition, and on February 4th General Championnet proclaimed the Kingdom of Naples as the Parthenopean Republic.

The news from northern Italy was no better. The French, infuriated by the Grand Duke of Tuscany's half-hearted attempt to move against them, had taken over in Florence; so the Duke, too, had to seek safety in exile. The Genoese of the Ligurian Republic had penetrated to Turin and had roused the Republicans there against their King, Charles Emmanuel IV. On December 9th he was forced to abdicate the throne of Piedmont and took refuge in his other kingdom, the island of Sardina. This last event, although apparently a minor one among the upheavals that the French had
caused over such a great area of Europe, was, a year later, to have consequences that altered the fate of a dozen nations.

On the credit side the beginnings of a Second Coalition against the French had at last matured. In the New Year of '99 Britain had signed an alliance with Russia and Turkey and it really looked now as if Austria meant to join them. Nelson's victory of the Nile had already established British supremacy in the Mediterranean and the capture of Minorca towards the end of the preceding year had provided the Admiral with another base. The addition of Russian and Turkish, as well as Portuguese, Squadrons now enabled the Allies to enforce a strict blockade on all enemy ports.

When Roger enquired after the gallant Admiral, Sir William pulled a long face and said, ‘Since making Palermo his headquarters, our beloved hero has been much under the weather. Soon after our arrival here it was my most unhappy duty to hand him a despatch from an officer named Sir Sidney Smith. The despatch stated that Their Lordships of the Admiralty had charged Sir Sidney both to take over all negotiations with the Turks and to conduct all future operations in the eastern Mediterranean.'