Book: History of Modern Europe 1792 1878

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[The Carbonari.]

The origin of this society, which derived its name and its symbolism from
the trade of the charcoal-burner, as Freemasonry from that of the builder,
is uncertain. Whether its first aim was resistance to Bourbon tyranny after
1799, or the expulsion of the French and Austrians from Italy, in the year
1814 it was actively working for constitutional government in opposition to
Murat, and receiving encouragement from Sicily, where Ferdinand was then
playing the part of constitutional King. The maintenance of absolute
government by the restored Bourbon Court severed the bond which for a time
existed between legitimate monarchy and conspiracy; and the lodges of the
Carbonari, now extending themselves over the country with great rapidity,
became so many centres of agitation against despotic rule. By the year 1819
it was reckoned that one person out of every twenty-five in the kingdom of
Naples had joined the society. Its members were drawn from all classes,
most numerously perhaps from the middle class in the towns; but even
priests had been initiated, and there was no branch of the public service
that had not Carbonari in its ranks. The Government, apprehending danger
from the extension of the sect, tried to counteract it by founding a rival
society of Calderari, or Braziers, in which every miscreant who before 1815
had murdered and robbed in the name of King Ferdinand and the Catholic
faith received a welcome. But though the number of such persons was not
small, the growth of this fraternity remained far behind that of its model;
and the chief result of the competition was that intrigue and mystery
gained a greater charm than ever for the Italians, and that all confidence
in Government perished, under the sense that there was a hidden power in
the land which was only awaiting the due moment to put forth its strength
in revolutionary action.

[Morelli's movement, July 2, 1820.]

After the proclamation of the Spanish Constitution, an outbreak in the
kingdom of Naples had become inevitable. The Carbonari of Salerno, where
the sect had its headquarters, had intended to rise at the beginning of
June; their action, however, was postponed for some months, and it was
anticipated by the daring movement of a few sergeants belonging to a
cavalry regiment stationed at Nola, and of a lieutenant, named Morelli,
whom they had persuaded to place himself at their head. Leading out a
squadron of a hundred and fifty men in the direction of Avellino on the
morning of July 2nd, Morelli proclaimed the Constitution. One of the
soldiers alone left the band; force or persuasion kept others to the
Standard, though they disapproved of the enterprise. The inhabitants of the
populous places that lie between Nola and Avellino welcomed the squadron,
or at least offered it no opposition: the officer commanding at Avellino
came himself to meet Morelli, and promised him assistance. The band
encamped that night in a village; on the next day they entered Avellino,
where the troops and townspeople, headed by the bishop and officers,
declared in their favour. From Avellino the news of the movement spread
quickly over the surrounding country. The Carbonari were everywhere
prepared for revolt; and before the Government had taken a single step in
its own defence, the Constitution had been joyfully and peacefully
accepted, not only by the people but by the militia and the regular troops,
throughout the greater part of the district that lies to the east of
Naples.

[Affairs at Naples, July 2-7.]

The King was on board ship in the bay, when, in the afternoon of July 2nd,
intelligence came of Morelli's revolt at Nola. Nothing was done by the
Ministry on that day, although Morelli and his band might have been
captured in a few hours if any resolute officer, with a few trustworthy
troops, had been sent against them. On the next morning, when the garrison
of Avellino had already joined the mutineers, and taken up a strong
position commanding the road from Naples, General Carrascosa was sent, not
to reduce the insurgents--for no troops were given to him--but to pardon,
to bribe, and to coax them into submission. [313] Carrascosa failed to
effect any good; other generals, who, during the following days, attempted
to attack the mutineers, found that their troops would not follow them, and
that the feeling of opposition to the Government, though it nowhere broke
into lawlessness, was universal in the army as well as the nation. If the
people generally understood little of politics, they had learnt enough to
dislike arbitrary taxation and the power of arbitrary arrest. Not a single
hand or voice was anywhere raised in defence of absolutism. Escaping from
Naples, where he was watched by the Government, General Pepe, who was at
once the chief man among the Carbonari and military commandant of the
province in which Avellino lies, went to place himself at the head of the
revolution. Naples itself had hitherto remained quiet, but on the night of
July 6th a deputation from the Carbonari informed the King that they could
no longer preserve tranquillity in the city unless a Constitution was
granted. The King, without waiting for morning, published an edict
declaring that a Constitution should be drawn up within eight days;
immediately afterwards he appointed a new Ministry, and, feigning illness,
committed the exercise of royal authority to his son, the Duke of Calabria.

[Ferdinand takes the Oath to the Spanish Constitution, July 13.]

Ferdinand's action was taken by the people as a stratagem. He had employed
the device of a temporary abdication some years before in cajoling the
Sicilians; and the delay of eight days seemed unnecessary to ardent souls
who knew that a Spanish Constitution was in existence and did not know of
its defects in practice. There was also on the side of the Carbonari the
telling argument that Ferdinand, as a possible successor to his nephew, the
childless King of Spain, actually had signed the Spanish Constitution in
order to preserve his own contingent rights to that crown. What Ferdinand
had accepted as Infante of Spain he might well accept as King of Naples.
The cry was therefore for the immediate proclamation of the Spanish
Constitution of 1812. The court yielded, and the Duke of Calabria, as
viceroy, published an edict making this Constitution the law of the kingdom
of the Two Sicilies. But the tumult continued, for deceit was still feared,
until the edict appeared again, signed by the King himself. Then all was
rejoicing. Pepe, at the head of a large body of troops, militia and
Carbonari, made a triumphal entry into the city, and, in company with
Morelli and other leaders of the military rebellion, was hypocritically
thanked by the Viceroy for his services to the nation. On the 13th of July
the King, a hale but venerable-looking man of seventy, took the oath to the
Constitution before the altar in the royal chapel. The form of words had
been written out for him; but Ferdinand was fond of theatrical acts of
religion, and did not content himself with reading certain solemn phrases.
Raising his eyes to the crucifix above the altar, he uttered aloud a prayer
that if the oath was not sincerely taken the vengeance of God might fall
upon his head. Then, after blessing and embracing his sons, the venerable
monarch wrote to the Emperor of Austria, protesting that all that he did
was done under constraint, and that his obligations were null and void.
[314]

[Affairs in Portugal, 1807-1820.]

A month more passed, and in a third kingdom absolute government fell before
the combined action of soldiers and people. The Court of Lisbon had
migrated to Brazil in 1807, when the troops of Napoleon first appeared upon
the Tagus, and Portugal had since then been governed by a Regency, acting
in the name of the absent Sovereign. The events of the Peninsular War had
reduced Portugal almost to the condition of a dependency of Great Britain.
Marshal Beresford, the English commander-in-chief of its army, kept his
post when the war was over, and with him there remained a great number of
English officers who had led the Portuguese regiments in Wellington's
campaigns. The presence of these English soldiers was unwelcome, and
commercial rivalry embittered the natural feeling of impatience towards an
ally who remained as master rather than guest. Up to the year 1807 the
entire trade with Brazil had been confined by law to Portuguese merchants;
when, however, the Court had established itself beyond the Atlantic, it had
opened the ports of Brazil to British ships, in return for the assistance
given by our own country against Napoleon. Both England and Brazil profited
by the new commerce, but the Portuguese traders, who had of old had the
monopoly, were ruined. The change in the seat of government was in fact
seen to be nothing less than a reversal of the old relations between the
European country and its colony. Hitherto Brazil had been governed in the
interests of Portugal; but with a Sovereign fixed at Rio Janeiro, it was
almost inevitable that Portugal should be governed in the interests of
Brazil. Declining trade, the misery and impoverishment resulting from a
long war, resentment against a Court which could not be induced to return
to the kingdom and against a foreigner who could not be induced to quit it,
filled the army and all classes in the nation with discontent. Conspiracies
were discovered as early as 1817, and the conspirators punished with all
the barbarous ferocity of the Middle Ages. Beresford, who had not
sufficient tact to prevent the execution of a sentence ordering twelve
persons to be strangled, beheaded, and then burnt in the streets of Lisbon,
found, during the two succeeding years, that the state of the country was
becoming worse and worse. In the spring of 1820, when the Spanish
revolution had made some change in the neighbouring kingdom, either for
good or evil, inevitable, Beresford set out for Rio Janeiro, intending to
acquaint the King with the real condition of affairs, and to use his
personal efforts in hastening the return of the Court to Lisbon. Before he
could recross the Atlantic, the Government which he left behind him at
Lisbon had fallen.

[Revolution at Oporto, August 1820.]

The grievances of the Portuguese army made it the natural centre of
disaffection, but the military conspirators had their friends among all
classes. On the 24th of August, 1820, the signal of revolt was given at
Oporto. Priests and magistrates, as well as the town-population, united
with officers of the army in declaring against the Regency, and in
establishing a provisional Junta, charged with the duty of carrying on the
government in the name of the King until the Cortes should assemble and
frame a Constitution. No resistance was offered by any of the civil or
military authorities at Oporto. The Junta entered upon its functions, and
began by dismissing all English officers, and making up the arrears of pay
due to the soldiers. As soon as the news of the revolt reached Lisbon, the
Regency itself volunteered to summon the Cortes, and attempted to
conciliate the remainder of the army by imitating the measures of the Junta
of Oporto. [315] The troops, however, declined to act against their
comrades, and on the 15th of September the Regency was deposed, and a
provisional Junta installed in the capital. Beresford, who now returned
from Brazil, was forbidden to set foot on Portuguese soil. The two rival
governing-committees of Lisbon and Oporto coalesced; and after an interval
of confusion the elections to the Cortes were held, resulting in the return
of a body of men whose loyalty to the Crown was not impaired by their
hostility to the Regency. The King, when the first tidings of the
constitutional movement reached Brazil, gave a qualified consent to the
summoning of the Cortes which was announced by the Regency, and promised to
return to Europe. Beresford, continuing his voyage to England without
landing at Lisbon, found that the Government of this country had no
disposition to interfere with the domestic affairs of its ally.

[Alexander proposes joint action with regard to Spain, April, 1820.]

It was the boast of the Spanish and Italian Liberals that the revolutions
effected in 1820 were undisgraced by the scenes of outrage which had
followed the capture of the Bastille and the overthrow of French absolutism
thirty years before. [316] The gentler character of these southern
movements proved, however, no extenuation in the eyes of the leading
statesmen of Europe: on the contrary, the declaration of soldiers in favour
of a Constitution seemed in some quarters more ominous of evil than any
excess of popular violence. The alarm was first sounded at St. Petersburg.
As soon as the Czar heard of Riego's proceedings at Cadiz, he began to
meditate intervention; and when it was known that Ferdinand had been forced
to accept the Constitution of 1812, he ordered his ambassadors to propose
that all the Great Powers, acting through their Ministers at Paris, should
address a remonstrance to the representative of Spain, requiring the Cortes
to disavow the crime of the 8th of March, by which they had been called
into being, and to offer a pledge of obedience to their King by enacting
the most rigorous laws against sedition and revolt. [317] In that case, and
in that alone, the Czar desired to add, would the Powers maintain their
relations of confidence and amity with Spain.

[England prevents joint diplomatic intervention.]

This Russian proposal was viewed with some suspicion at Vienna; it was
answered with a direct and energetic negative from London. Canning was
still in the Ministry. The words with which in 1818 he had protested
against a league between England and autocracy were still ringing in the
ears of his colleagues. Lord Liverpool's Government knew itself to be
unpopular in the country; every consideration of policy as well as of
self-interest bade it resist the beginnings of an intervention which, if
confined to words, was certain to be useless, and, if supported by action,
was likely to end in that alliance between France and Russia which had been
the nightmare of English statesmen ever since 1814, and in a second
occupation of Spain by the very generals whom Wellington had spent so many
years in dislodging. Castlereagh replied to the Czar's note in terms which
made it clear that England would never give its sanction to a collective
interference with Spain. [318] Richelieu, the nominal head of the French
Government, felt too little confidence in his position to act without the
concurrence of Great Britain; and the crusade of absolutism against Spanish
liberty was in consequence postponed until the victory of the
Ultra-Royalists at Paris was complete, and the overthrow of Richelieu had
brought to the head of the French State a group of men who felt no scruple
in entering upon an aggressive war.

[Naples and the Great Powers.]

[Austria.]

[England admits Austrian but not joint intervention.]

But the shelter of circumstances which for a while protected Spain from the
foreigner did not extend to Italy, when in its turn the Neapolitan
revolution called a northern enemy into the field. Though the kingdom of
the Two Sicilies was in itself much less important than Spain, the
established order of the Continent was more directly threatened by a change
in its government. No European State was exposed to the same danger from a
revolution in Madrid as Austria from a revolution in Naples. The Czar had
invoked the action of the Courts against Spain, not because his own
dominions were in peril, but because the principle of monarchical right was
violated: with Austria the danger pressed nearer home. The establishment of
constitutional liberty in Naples was almost certain to be followed by an
insurrection in the Papal States and a national uprising in the Venetian
provinces; and among all the bad results of Austria's false position in
Italy, one of the worst was that in self-defence it was bound to resist
every step made towards political liberty beyond its own frontier. The
dismay with which Metternich heard of the collapse of absolute government
at Naples [319] was understood and even shared by the English Ministry, who
at this moment were deprived of their best guide by Canning's withdrawal.
Austria, in peace just as much as in war, had uniformly been held to be the
natural ally of England against the two aggressive Courts of Paris and St.
Petersburg. It seemed perfectly right and natural to Lord Castlereagh that
Austria, when its own interests were endangered by the establishment of
popular sovereignty at Naples, should intervene to restore King Ferdinand's
power; the more so as the secret treaty of 1815, by which Metternich had
bound this sovereign to maintain absolute monarchy, had been communicated
to the ambassador of Great Britain, and had received his approval. But the
right to intervene in Italy belonged, according to Lord Castlereagh, to
Austria alone. The Sovereigns of Europe had no more claim, as a body, to
interfere with Naples than they had to interfere with Spain. Therefore,
while the English Government sanctioned and even desired the intervention
of Austria, as a State acting in protection of its own interests against
revolution in a neighbouring country, it refused to sanction any joint
intervention of the European Powers, and declared itself opposed to the
meeting of a Congress where any such intervention might be discussed. [320]

[Conference at Troppau, Oct. 1820.]

Had Metternich been free to follow his own impulses, he would have thrown
an army into Southern Italy as soon as soldiers and stores could be
collected, and have made an end of King Ferdinand's troubles forthwith. It
was, however, impossible for him to disregard the wishes of the Czar, and
to abandon all at once the system of corporate action, which was supposed
to have done such great things for Europe. [321] A meeting of sovereigns
and Ministers was accordingly arranged, and at the end of October the
Emperor of Austria received the Czar and King Frederick William in the
little town of Troppau, in Moravia. France had itself first recommended the
summoning of a Congress to deal with Neapolitan affairs, and it was
believed for a while that England would be isolated in its resistance to a
joint intervention. But before the Congress assembled, the firm language of
the English Ministry had drawn Richelieu over to its side; [322] and
although one of the two French envoys made himself the agent of the
Ultra-Royalist faction, it was not possible for him to unite his country
with the three Eastern Courts. France, through the weakness of its
Government and the dissension between its representatives, counted for
nothing at the Congress. England sent its ambassador from Vienna, but with
instructions to act as an observer and little more; and in consequence the
meeting at Troppau resolved itself into a gathering of the three Eastern
autocrats and their Ministers. As Prussia had ceased to have any
independent foreign policy whatever, Metternich needed only to make certain
of the support of the Czar in order to range on his side the entire force
of eastern and central Europe in the restoration of Neapolitan despotism.

[Contest between Metternich and Capodistrias.]

[Circular of Troppau, Dec. 8, 1820.]

[The principle of intervention laid down by three Courts.]

The plan of the Austrian statesman was not, however, to be realised without
some effort. Alexander had watched with jealousy Metternich's recent
assumption of a dictatorship over the minor German Courts; he had never
admitted Austria's right to dominate in Italy; and even now some vestiges
of his old attachment to liberal theories made him look for a better
solution of the Neapolitan problem than in that restoration of despotism
pure and simple which Austria desired. While condemning every attempt of a
people to establish its own liberties, Alexander still believed that in
some countries sovereigns would do well to make their subjects a grant of
what he called sage and liberal institutions. It would have pleased him
best if the Neapolitans could have been induced by peaceful means to
abandon their Constitution, and to accept in return certain chartered
rights as a gift from their King; and the concurrence of the two Western
Powers might in this case possibly have been regained. This project of a
compromise, by which Ferdinand would have been freed from his secret
engagement with Austria, was exactly what Metternich desired to frustrate.
He found himself matched, and not for the first time, against a statesman
who was even more subtle than himself. This was Count Capodistrias, a Greek
who from a private position had risen to be Foreign Minister of Russia, and
was destined to become the first sovereign, in reality if not in title, of
his native land. Capodistrias, the sympathetic partner of the Czar's
earlier hopes, had not travelled so fast as his master along the
reactionary road. He still represented what had been the Italian policy of
Alexander some years before, and sought to prevent the re-establishment of
absolute rule at Naples, at least by the armed intervention of Austria.
Metternich's first object was to discredit the Minister in the eyes of his
sovereign. It is said that he touched the Czar's keenest fears in a
conversation relating to a mutiny that had just taken place among the
troops at St. Petersburg, and so in one private interview cut the ground
from under Capodistrias' feet; he also humoured the Czar by reviving that
monarch's own favourite scheme for a mutual guarantee of all the Powers
against revolution in any part of Europe. Alexander had proposed in 1818
that the Courts should declare resistance to authority in any country to be
a violation of European peace, entitling the Allied Powers, if they should
think fit, to suppress it by force of arms. This doctrine, which would have
empowered the Czar to throw the armies of a coalition upon London if the
Reform Bill had been carried by force, had hitherto failed to gain
international acceptance owing to the opposition of Great Britain. It was
now formally accepted by Austria and Prussia. Alexander saw the federative
system of European monarchy, with its principle of collective intervention,
recognised as an established fact by at least three of the great Powers;
[323] and in return he permitted Metternich to lay down the lines which, in
the case of Naples, this intervention should follow. It was determined to
invite King Ferdinand to meet his brother-sovereigns at Laibach, in the
Austrian province of Carniola, and through him to address a summons to the
Neapolitan people, requiring them, in the name of the three Powers, and
under threat of invasion, to abandon their Constitution. This determination
was announced, as a settled matter, to the envoys of England and France;
and a circular was issued from Troppau by the three Powers to all the
Courts of Europe (Dec. 8), embodying the doctrine of federative
intervention, and expressing a hope that England and France would approve
its immediate application in the case of Naples. [324]

[Protest of England.]

There was no ground whatever for this hope with regard to England. On the
contrary, in proportion as the three Courts strengthened their union and
insisted on their claim to joint jurisdiction over Europe, they drove
England away from them. Lord Castlereagh had at first promised the moral
support of this country to Austria in its enterprise against Naples; but
when this enterprise ceased to be the affair of Austria alone, and became
part of the police-system of the three despotisms, it was no longer
possible for the English Government to view it with approval or even with
silence. The promise of a moral support was withdrawn: England declared
that it stood strictly neutral with regard to Naples, and protested against
the doctrine contained in the Troppau circular, that a change of government
in any State gave the Allied Powers the right to intervene. [325]

France made no such protest; but it was still hoped at Paris that an
Austrian invasion of Southern Italy, so irritating to French pride, might
be averted. King Louis XVIII. endeavoured, but in vain, to act the part of
mediator, and to reconcile the Neapolitan House of Bourbon at once with its
own subjects and with the Northern Powers.

[Conference at Laibach, Jan., 1821.]

The summons went out from the Congress to King Ferdinand to appear at
Laibach. It found him enjoying all the popularity of a constitutional King,
surrounded by Ministers who had governed under Murat, exchanging
compliments with a democratic Parliament, lavishing distinctions upon the
men who had overthrown his authority, and swearing to everything that was
set before him. As the Constitution prohibited the King from leaving the
country without the consent of the Legislature, it was necessary for
Ferdinand to communicate to Parliament the invitation which he had received
from the Powers, and to take a vote of the Assembly on the subject of his
journey. Ferdinand's Ministers possessed some political experience; they
recognised that it would be impossible to maintain the existing
Constitution against the hostility of three great States, and hoped that
the Parliament would consent to Ferdinand's departure on condition that he
pledged himself to uphold certain specified principles of free government.
A message to the Assembly was accordingly made public, in which the King
expressed his desire to mediate with the Powers on this basis. But the
Ministers had not reckoned with the passions of the people. As soon as it
became known that Ferdinand was about to set out, the leaders of the
Carbonari mustered their bands. A host of violent men streamed into Naples
from the surrounding country. The Parliament was intimidated, and Ferdinand
was prohibited from leaving Naples until he had sworn to maintain the
Constitution actually in force, that, namely, which Naples had borrowed
from Spain. Ferdinand, whose only object was to escape from the country as
quickly as possible, took the oath with his usual effusions of patriotism.
He then set out for Leghorn, intending to cross from thence into Northern
Italy. No sooner had he reached the Tuscan port than he addressed a letter
to each of the five principal sovereigns of Europe, declaring that his last
acts were just as much null and void as all his earlier ones. He made no
attempt to justify, or to excuse, or even to explain his conduct; nor is
there the least reason to suppose that he considered the perjuries of a
prince to require a justification. "These sorry protests," wrote the
secretary of the Congress of Troppau, "will happily remain secret. No
Cabinet will be anxious to draw them from the sepulchre of its archives.
Till then there is not much harm done."

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