Only a few days into the new year, alarming news arrived from Spain. Outside Cádiz on 1 January 1820, Major Rafael del Riego and Colonel Antonio Quiroga had led out the troops under their command and staged a pronunciamiento. This was a comparatively new form of action. It was not primarily a rebellion, more of a political demonstration, a declaration of political protest or intent. In a country in which all normal channels of political expression had been abolished, it could only be carried out by the army, which was the sole institution in existence (aside from the Church). If it did not gain the support of most of the army and other sections of the population, the regiments involved would go back to barracks and the leaders would face retribution or emigrate. There had been at least three such actions since 1814, when the returning Ferdinand VII had abolished the constitution brought in by the national assembly, the Cortes, in 1812, and they had all failed to gain wider support. Riego’s pronunciamiento would prove more successful.
Ferdinand had been massing a large force at Cádiz to send across the Atlantic and restore his authority in the former Spanish colonies, not a cause most of the officers and men were keen to fight for. Nor were they happy at the prospect of an open-ended sojourn on the other side of the world. They were also underpaid, bored and disaffected. In their grito, the manifesto announcing the aim of the pronunciamiento, they demanded the reinstatement of the constitution of 1812 and the summoning of the Cortes. Riego and Quiroga nevertheless failed initially to enlist the support of the other units in Cádiz.
Wellington dismissed the affair as being of little consequence, and expected the troops to return to barracks soon. Metternich too made light of the matter, as it did not appear to threaten the stability of the rest of Europe. The French foreign minister, Étienne-Denis Pasquier, a former prefect of police under Napoleon, knew better than most how tempting it was for army officers to try anything that might create the opportunity of promotion. He also felt the event should give pause for thought to monarchs who kept large armies on which they relied heavily, and which in some cases were the only pillar of the throne. But events in Spain were soon overshadowed by a more dreadful occurrence, in Paris.1
At 11 p.m. on 13 February 1820, as he was re-entering the opera, having escorted his wife to her carriage after the first act, the duc de Berry was approached by a man and stabbed. He fell to the ground and was carried back into the antechamber of his box, still clutching the dagger he had himself pulled from his side. He was laid on a sofa and medical help was summoned. When it became evident that he was mortally wounded, a priest was called. As nobody wished to start a panic the show was allowed to go on, and the prelate administered the last rites to the strains of an opera set in the Venice carnival. The duke’s wife returned, and Louis XVIII soon arrived on the scene, staying with his nephew until he died several hours later.
Berry was not the heir to the throne, as he was the younger son of Monsieur, but in him had resided all the hopes of the monarchists. His elder brother, the duc d’Angoulême, was married to the daughter of Louis XVI, who was heavily marked by the five years she had spent in a revolutionary prison, and was barren. Berry was not particularly clever, but he was brave and generous, and his liberal instincts had made him popular. Although he had no male heir, his twenty-one-year-old wife had in the previous year been delivered of a daughter, and was expecting another child. His death caused dismay and sadness among all classes. It also had serious political consequences.2
Polarisation in the Chamber over the past months had led to increasingly acrid debates, accompanied by more and more aggressive outbursts at both ends of the political spectrum outside it: dark threats were bandied about, and suppressed fears aired. When news of the assassination broke, people jumped to conclusions suggested by their worst fears and prejudices. As it spread it assumed a life of its own and became unrecognisable, with some affirming that a vast conspiracy had hatched, others that the Tuileries had been stormed, that there was fighting in the streets, that a St Bartholomew’s Day massacre of the royal family and its supporters was in progress, and so on. Where local prefects delayed making official announcements before receiving the full story, tales spread by travellers, embellished by speculation, led to wild inventions. Stories circulated that the assassin, a saddler named Louis Pierre Louvel, was a heroic former Napoleonic officer, that Berry had insulted him, that he had spat in his face, that he had torn the Légion d’honneur off his chest, that he had seduced his wife, or daughter, or sister. In a curious leap of the imagination, Louvel was linked to Napoleon, and rumours began to circulate that the emperor had landed in France, in Spain, in America.3
Louvel did have Napoleonic sympathies, but his only ascertainable motive was the desire to extinguish the Bourbon dynasty, and he had acted on his own. This did not stop people from seeing accomplices everywhere, and Ultras were quick to spot their chance. The police were deluged by anonymous letters pointing the finger at Decazes. A spate of books and pamphlets related Louvel’s act to a long succession of assassinations and attempts stretching back to the eighteenth century, taking in the kings of Portugal and Poland, committed by members of ‘an impious sect’ that merely changed its name, from Masons to Illuminati to Jacobins, and currently called themselves Liberals. Decazes himself was accused of complicity at best, and of having personally ordered the assassination at worst; one publication suggested an accomplice in the shape of a sinister Jew.4
‘I have this moment heard of the assassination of the duc de Berry,’ Metternich wrote to his family on 20 February. Like Pozzo di Borgo, who had written to Wellington that ‘Jacobinism and Bonapartism are marching together, head held high, not only with audacity, but with rage,’ Metternich immediately jumped to the conclusion that ‘Liberalism is on the march,’ and anticipated ‘a deluge of assassins’. To Lebzeltern he pointed out triumphantly that the assassination provided proof that there was, as he had always believed, a Europe-wide conspiracy. Alexander thought likewise. ‘The daggers of Sand and Louvel are forged in the same fire,’ he said to the French ambassador, Pierre Louis de La Ferronnays, during a ball in St Petersburg. ‘Are you quite sure that this latest assassin does not have accomplices deranged like himself, determined like him to brave the scaffold in order to strike at other august victims?’ In London, the prince regent assumed that he himself was personally threatened. Wellington, in a letter to his Spanish former comrade-in-arms General Álava, dismissed the idea that Louvel could have been a lone wolf. ‘It seems fairly certain that it was a conspiracy; and we shall see whether the French have the courage to unmask this conspiracy,’ he wrote, likening the state of France to that in 1793. ‘God knows where all this will end, but for my part, I believe we need a rain of fire to put things in order.’ Two days after he wrote that letter, an event took place in London which appeared to vindicate his worst fears.5
According to the Annual Register, only four months after Peterloo ‘The situation of the country at the commencement of the year 1820 was more tranquil, than the violent popular agitation of the preceding months would have given reason to expect.’ This tranquillity was disturbed by Arthur Thistlewood, aka ‘Marcus Brutus’. He was the natural son of a Lincolnshire farmer, who had served as an officer in the army in the West Indies, then travelled in America and France, where he joined the French army for a time. On his return to England he indulged his taste for gambling and his revolutionary instincts by becoming a Spencean and conspiring to assassinate the king in 1802. He had been one of those who attempted to hijack Hunt’s 1816 Spa Fields meeting, and had been arrested along with Watson and Preston, charged with high treason and acquitted. He now proposed to murder the entire cabinet over dinner at Lord Harrowby’s house in Grosvenor Square on 23 February. He intended to burst in through the servants’ entrance with a gang of men recruited for the purpose, cut off the heads of Sidmouth and Castlereagh and bear them on pikes to the Mansion House, where he would proclaim himself president of the Britannic Republic. In pursuance of this plan he rented a stable in Cato Street off the Edgware Road, and began to fill the hayloft above it with guns, swords, daggers and bombs.6
Thistlewood had never been strong on discretion. He had made the acquaintance of one George Edwards, a maker of casts for plaster figurines (his best-selling piece was a bust of the headmaster of Eton, which the school’s pupils would purchase in order to throw things at). During the Napoleonic wars Edwards devised a lucrative scam of extracting money from French prisoners on the promise of getting them out of the country, and then denouncing them and pocketing a reward. After the end of the war he became a Home Office spy. He was, in the words of his contemporary biographer, ‘a diabolical wretch, who created the treason he disclosed; who went about – a fiend in human form – inflaming distressed and desperate wretches into crimes, in order that he might betray them to justice, and make a profit of their blood’. Thistlewood welcomed Edwards into his gang, another member of which may also have been a spy, and the plot was leaked to the government. As a result, the ministers did not go to the dinner, and most of the conspirators were arrested by a group of constables as they were buckling on their arms in the hayloft. Those who got away in the scuffle were apprehended the following day. Thistlewood and four others were hanged, the rest had their sentences commuted to transportation. Edwards lived on, well-rewarded, to judge by his lavish lifestyle.7
The discovery of the conspiracy was highly convenient for the government, as it silenced the continuing criticism of its handling of the Peterloo affair. ‘I do not know whether we shall ever be able to publish everything we know about this business,’ Wellington crowed in a letter to Richelieu, but he could confide that it had been planned with chilling deliberation, and greater lust for blood than the September massacres of 1792. There is some reason to believe that the whole enterprise had been set up by Edwards, possibly with the assistance of other Home Office agents, with or without the knowledge of members of the cabinet. They certainly played up the danger. At a dinner given by Castlereagh in his house in St James’s Square in London on 28 February, Countess Lieven asked him whether he was taking any precautions, ‘whereupon he produced two small pistols which he carries everywhere, even at his own dinner table’, according to one of the guests. Whether this was a sign of genuine apprehension or a theatrical display is impossible to tell. Either way, following hard on the assassination of the duc de Berry, the affair reinforced the government’s case that the country was threatened with revolution. While awaiting their sentence, the conspirators had been visited by a clergyman, who concluded that they ‘had cast off the fear of God’, which explained how they could conceive such evil plans. This chimed with a notion being propagated of a connection between irreligion and the various ‘blasphemous’ Churches springing up and revolutionary proclivities. Public opinion remained unconvinced and, significantly, condemned Thistlewood and his accomplices for their ‘folly’ and ‘wickedness’, rather than as dangerous assassins who had nearly brought down the government. In other respects too, public opinion was at odds with government policy.8
On his release from Lancaster gaol, where he had been sent after Peterloo, Hunt set off for London. His horse died along the way, near Preston, and its burial, under a headstone inscribed ‘Alas! Poor Bob!!!’, was attended by thousands. As he entered London he was greeted by a crowd estimated at 300,000 people. On 2 March, at a dinner held at the Crown and Anchor in honour of the Radical politician and friend of Byron John Cam Hobhouse, just released from Newgate, the first toast drunk by the 450 guests was to the Sovereign People. Revolutionary graffiti was not uncommon, with texts such as ‘Civil war – Liberty-Death or no George the Fourth – Hunt for ever – No tyrant, no damned royal crown – No damned king – No George the 4th – No churches’. There were reports of drilling and even of people arming, which may have been true: following Peterloo, those who attended meetings expected to be set upon by troops. Passive as much of this activity was, the authorities kept up the alarm, and Sidmouth made a connection between the ‘diabolical’ Cato Street conspiracy and Manchester, and with ‘men of similar Principles in other parts of the World’.9
The situation on the Continent appeared to have stabilised. Louis XVIII had done everything to keep Decazes in office, but the Ultras played on the feelings of horror inspired by the assassination of the duc de Berry, orchestrating more anti-royal plots. Not long after the event, two former Napoleonic officers and a police agent hatched a plan to induce the duchess to miscarry by setting off explosives in her apartment in the Tuileries. They managed to plant one charge and set it off on 29 April, to no apparent effect on the duchess. Disheartened, the two officers gave up, but they were worked on by the police agent, who accused them of cowardice, so they planted a second charge to be set off on the night of 6 May. They were caught, tried and sentenced to death, but reprieved at the request of the duchess herself. Some time later, she handed Monsieur a note she purportedly found on her dressing table warning of a plot to assassinate the entire royal family. Monsieur passed it to Richelieu, and strict security measures were implemented. Various suspects were brought in and questioned before, a few days later, the duchess’s confessor called on the magistrate in charge of the case and informed him that she had confessed to writing the note herself. The king was finally obliged to give way and let Decazes go. A new ministry was formed under Richelieu with the support of the Ultras, which brought in a raft of repressive measures and moved legislation restricting the suffrage. This would bear fruit the following year in a new electoral law which shifted power from the urban middle class back to the landed nobility. France, it seemed, was under control.10
But now Wellington was having second thoughts about the situation in Spain. In late February, units in Galicia and Aragon had come out in support of Riego and Quiroga, and by the beginning of March the mutiny had spread to Madrid. ‘What makes the revolt of these troops alarming is that in Spain the government has nothing in common with the people of the country, nor any other authority over them except by means of these troops,’ Wellington wrote to Richelieu. On 6 March the king agreed to summon the Cortes. The following day, with the royal palace in Madrid surrounded by troops, he agreed to reintroduce the constitution of 1812. ‘It is a terrible example for those states in Germany which have armies based on the same model,’ Wellington wrote to Richelieu on 24 March, adding that what was happening in Spain was ‘pure evil’. The events there had prompted him to ‘serious reflections on the dangers menacing the social order’. Metternich too was anxious about the effect the example being set by the Spanish rebels might have elsewhere, with good reason. From St Petersburg, La Ferronnays reported to Pasquier that there was more revolutionary talk among the officers of the imperial guard than among their Parisian counterparts. Pozzo di Borgo on the other hand believed the bad example was coming from England, which was ‘vomiting missionaries of revolt on all the corners of the globe’.11
Metternich was beginning to despair of Europe. To his ambassador in London, Prince Esterházy, he wrote on 7 April 1820 that he felt like a physician standing by the bedside of a sick man of whose survival he had given up hope. In a letter to Lebzeltern, he likened Europe to ‘a sea whipped up by the storm’. He did not know what to make of events in Spain. ‘I have for so long made it a habit not to allow myself to try to comprehend what goes on in Spain, since I understand nothing of it, nor of what those people want or say,’ he wrote. Of one thing he was certain, namely that there could be no such thing as ‘a revolution steeped in rose-water’, and as far as he was concerned, a constitutional Spain was a nonsense. The Spanish constitution of 1812, which had been closely modelled on the French one of 1791, was based on the principle of the sovereignty of the people, and reserved for the monarch an essentially executive role. Such ‘false doctrines’, if allowed to take root, would undermine the foundations of other states. Gentz echoed this view of the danger posed by ‘poisonous’ and ‘corrosive’ principles emanating from Spain, although he believed that it was not Spain, but France, that would precipitate ‘the fall of the existing social order in all civilised countries’.12
Alexander was for military intervention. According to him, the Spanish nation owed the world an act of ‘expiation’ for the evil it had perpetrated. This did not suit Metternich at all. In a deft attempt to satisfy his lust as well as reasons of state, he instructed Lebzeltern to persuade Alexander that a conference of ambassadors should be called to discuss the matter, and to suggest to the tsar that he replace the existing ambassador in Vienna with Count Lieven, who had a better grasp of the situation. Castlereagh was also worried by talk of intervention. At the beginning of May he drew up a State Paper in which he stressed that the purpose of the Quadruple Alliance was the maintenance of the territorial settlement created in 1815; only a clear threat to this or to world peace could sanction military intervention in another country’s internal affairs. Wellington contributed a memorandum, citing first-hand experience. ‘There is no country in Europe in the affairs of which foreigners can interfere with so little advantage as Spain,’ he wrote.13
Such arguments were lost on the Continent, where porous borders provided no protection from the ever more fearsome threat: the vocabulary of occult conspiracy was now enriched with a more scientific and medical lexicon, as people spoke of ‘corrosion’, ‘inflammation’, ‘consumption’, ‘gangrene’ and similar processes. ‘The world is in the grip of fever,’ Metternich wrote to Vincent in June 1820; ‘it will not kill everyone, as even the plague spares some individuals. The most important thing now is to live in the midst of the epidemic without being infected and to bring assistance to those who are sick.’14
Vigilance was of the essence, and the faintest rash had to be treated as a possible symptom of the creeping malady. Metternich duly noted every detail, and his police anticipated. Reports that Napoleon’s former police chief Savary was plotting something with Napoleon’s stepson Prince Eugène de Beauharnais, and was allegedly travelling around Switzerland meeting ‘persons unknown’, were meticulously noted by Metternich and by Pozzo di Borgo in Paris, where an outbreak of violence had set alarm bells ringing.15
Ultra guards officers in plain clothes had taken to roughing up liberal deputies as they left the Chamber, and forcing people in the street, particularly students, to shout ‘Vive le Roi!’ At the beginning of June they beat Nicolas Lallemand, a law student, so badly that he died. His funeral became the focus for a demonstration which turned into a riot. There followed several days of violence which some saw as the prelude to revolution, and it was not brought under control by troops until the end of the second week of June. Many believed, with some reason, that the episode had been a provocation by the Ultras and the police.16
The director general of police, baron Claude Mounier, the son of a prominent revolutionary of 1789 and a former Napoleonic civil servant, insisted that the whole thing had been carefully planned by a ‘comité general d’insurréction’. The idea was taken up by those who did not wish to contemplate the possibility that the unrest might have had natural causes, and rumours began to spread of money having been paid out to bring people onto the street. Gradually, a conviction grew in conservative quarters that there was some kind of sinister body controlling events, and people began to talk of a ‘comité directeur’. On 24 June Pozzo di Borgo reported to Nesselrode on a ‘vast conspiracy’ which had failed to materialise: the plotters had apparently hoped to gain the army, but having failed, decided to blacken its reputation and goad the people into attacking it by paying teachers to release schoolchildren and instruct them to jeer and throw stones at soldiers and provoke a ‘massacre of the innocents’. There is no evidence to suggest that any of these events, aside from the provocations of the Ultras and their agents, had been planned. But conspiracy and revolution were in the air.17
In response to anxious enquiries from Nesselrode, Countess Lieven reported from London that the only revolution occupying people’s minds there was a ‘boudoir revolution’ precipitated by the king taking a new mistress. But the streets of London were by no means quiet, as public opinion was highly frothed up over the treatment of Queen Caroline, and many prominent Whigs and Radicals such as William Cobbett had taken up her cause in order to enlist the support of the masses for reform.18
From the moment she arrived in England in 1795 to marry the prince regent, Princess Caroline of Brunswick had declared her intention of making herself loved by ‘the people’. She largely succeeded, because she was seen as the victim of her much-disliked husband. Rejected by him, she had spent the past six years abroad, at the centre of an indecorous circus of shady characters, giving rise to tales of unbridled debauchery. On the news of the death of George III at the end of January 1820, she hastened to England in order to take her place at the coronation of her husband as George IV. He attempted to bribe her to stay away, and, failing that, to divorce her. When she arrived in London she became the natural focus for all the ill-feeling against him and the government.
As this prepared his case against her, she consorted with leading figures in the opposition and made public appearances, admirably playing the role of the wronged wife. She engaged feminist opinion, and her peccadilloes were forgotten in a surge of sympathy as a sense of chivalry was awakened in the masses. Public demonstrations of support for her easily turned into anti-government riots, and in June Sidmouth’s house was attacked on three consecutive nights. The carriage in which he and the Duke of Wellington were travelling was mobbed and had its windows shattered. Sidmouth and Castlereagh received death threats, as did the king himself. There were cries of ‘No Queen, no King!’, and on 15 June the 3rd Guards Regiment mutinied, refusing to give up their cartridges when coming off duty. They were brought back into line by force and marched out of the capital the following day, but that night a mob assembled outside their vacated barracks and the Life Guards had to be called out to disperse it. ‘I feel the greatest anxiety respecting the state of the military in London,’ wrote Wellington in something of a panic; ‘in one of the most critical moments that ever occurred in this country, we and the public have reason to doubt in the fidelity of the troops, the only security we have, not only against revolution but for the property and life of every individual in the country who has anything to lose’. Recent events in Spain could not be ignored, and he advised against using troops to restore order. Soldiers could be seen drinking the queen’s health and making ugly jibes about the king. It was reported that even the whores were refusing to service soldiers who would not side with the queen. According to the Austrian chargé in London, Caroline’s presence was like ‘a contagious illness’ undermining all existing institutions, and he prophesied that if she were to be found guilty of the charges being levelled against her there would be a revolution.19
With alarmist reports of brewing discontent coming in from all parts of the country, it was with a sense of foreboding that the government prepared for the start of the divorce proceedings in August. Barriers were erected around the Houses of Parliament, and troops and even field guns were deployed at strategic points, although nobody could be sure how they would behave in an emergency. As its anniversary drew near, meetings and processions were held to commemorate the victims of the ‘Peterloo massacre’. The queen made inflammatory statements suggesting her husband should be dethroned, and the Sunday papers poured oil on the flames by spreading scandal about the royal family in general. The Home Office informer John Shegog alerted his masters that the Radicals were preparing to act in alliance and cooperation ‘with all the Republicans all over the world’ – there were, by that time, a growing number of these.20
At the beginning of July Metternich had gone to Baden, to the bedside of his favourite daughter Marie, who was dying, and it was there that, on 15 July, news reached him that revolution had broken out in Naples. He was so shocked that even his daughter’s death three days later could not distract him from it. Gentz had never seen him in such a state of disarray. Metternich had visited Naples no more than a year ago, and had written that he could see ‘no possibility of any kind of movement’ anywhere in Italy. ‘In the region of Naples in particular the population is positively contented,’ he had written. ‘If it were not for all those Russian agents who are travelling around Italy in every direction and who seek to inflame the hopes of various groups by telling them of the liberal tendencies of the Emperor Alexander, there would be no permanent agitation in people’s minds. There have always been malcontents in Italy. The Italian shouts a great deal, but he does not act.’21
He was not the only one to have been taken by surprise. ‘The quiet and prosperous state of these Kingdoms afford but few subjects worthy of being brought to your Lordship’s notice,’ the British minister at Naples, Sir William A’Court, had reported to Castlereagh only three months earlier. Austria’s ambassador in Naples, Prince Jabłonowski, admitted that ‘news of a revolution on the moon would have seemed more likely’. The events were not only unexpected, but confusing as well.22
On 1 July, the feast of St Theobald, patron of the Carbonari, a priest by the name of Luigi Minichini, who was the grand master of the vèndita in the small town of Nola, had slung an old musket over his shoulder, mounted a horse and led his fellow Carbonari off towards the nearby town of Avellino. He had persuaded Lieutenant Michele Morelli and his troop of cavalry, who were unpaid and disaffected, to join him. The peasants they expected to rouse along the way were either indifferent or hostile. On arrival at Avellino, Morelli proclaimed his loyalty to ‘Ferdinand the constitutional king’, which was something of a joke.
King Ferdinand IV had been chased from the mainland part of his realm by the French in the 1790s, and had taken refuge in Sicily. Under pressure from the British, who were guarding him there, in 1812 he granted the island a constitution, modelled on the Spanish one of the same year. It was said that the very word ‘constitution’ gave him ‘nervous spasms’, and as soon as his supplanter, King Joachim Murat, had been expelled from Naples and he was back on his throne there (as Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies), he had revoked it. A story had nevertheless been put about by some Neapolitan Carbonari that on regaining his mainland kingdom, Ferdinand had declared: ‘The People will be sovereign, and the monarch will only be the depository of the laws which shall be decreed by a constitution …’23
Not knowing what to do about the loyal subjects of the king who had appeared on his patch, the commander at Avellino sent for instructions. Troops were sent from Naples to restore order, but they fell in with the loyal subjects. The Neapolitan army was officered mostly by men who had served in the Napoleonic wars and fondly remembered their flamboyant general and king Joachim Murat. Typical was General Guglielmo Pepe, who had served with distinction and attained the rank of marshal. He had been well treated by Ferdinand, but he was out of sympathy with the Bourbon regime, and bored.
Faced with rebellion and the apathy of his army, King Ferdinand decreed on 6 July that he would bring in the constitution of 1812, at the same time announcing his retirement from political life and proclaiming his son Francesco, Duke of Calabria, vicar general of the kingdom. Two days later, in a grandiose ceremony, the king and his sons solemnly swore to uphold the constitution. On 9 July Lieutenant Morelli made his entrance into Naples at the head of his troopers and other units which had joined him along the way, followed by Father Minichini and some 6,000 barely armed men marching under the Carbonarist tricolour of red for the fire of charity, blue for the smoke of hope, and black for the charcoal that represented their name. The vicar general of the kingdom saluted them, and there followed wild feasting and celebrations throughout the city, accompanied by some random violence.
What worried Metternich was that as the whole thing had passed off bloodlessly and the king had accepted the constitution, Britain might take the view that it should be allowed to stand. He need not have worried. A’Court was an arch-conservative, and painted a very dark picture in his reports to his chief. Castlereagh was so alarmed as he contemplated the state of affairs that his usually measured prose was now overcome with torrential and volcanic imagery. From Milan, Lieutenant Colonel Browne reported on 29 July that the ‘infection from Naples’ had reached that city, the coffee rooms were crowded with people discussing politics in terms ‘more assuming and desperate’, and that ‘Constitution and insurrection are in every one’s mouth’. ‘The Liberales here are loud in their celebration of the Spaniards and Neapolitans,’ he continued. ‘They are ripe for anything.’ Byron, who was in Ravenna in the Papal States, could feel the excitement too. ‘Here there are as yet but the sparks of the volcano,’ he wrote, ‘but the ground is hot, and the air sultry.’ Castlereagh told Decazes, now France’s ambassador in London, that if they did not act promptly, ‘the fire will take hold, spread and soon engulf everything’. Both Castlereagh and Wellington, who thought it was ‘time to set an example’, believed Austria should act immediately, possibly with the support of France.24
Austria could not tolerate what had taken place, if only because its treaty with Naples stipulated that no change could be introduced into its form of government without its sanction. More important, Metternich was convinced that what had happened in Naples was an offshoot of the revolution in Spain. ‘The calmness and the kind of order which has characterised the doings of the Neapolitan revolutionaries can leave no doubt that the events of 1 to 8 July had been planned beforehand and are only the development of a conspiracy hatched in the dark, conceived and decided by men highly placed in society,’ he wrote to Esterházy in London on 17 July. He went on to make out that the fate of the Austrian monarchy was at stake.25
The threat posed by the events in Naples was in fact negligible. There was no revolutionary urge among the population, merely a tradition of lawlessness which, not being in a position to curb, the kingdom’s rulers had accepted. At the end of the eighteenth century and during the Napoleonic wars they had either formed or encouraged corps such as the Santa Fede to combat the French and their influence under the guise of defending the Catholic faith. In 1816 they created the Calderari as a foil to the Carbonari. This unholy alliance of throne and popular posse worked against the middle class and the nobility. The French-style administration of the kingdom under Murat had favoured the aspirations of these by introducing a more workable system along with opportunities for economic development and social advancement. Most of this was reversed on the return of Ferdinand, who propped up his throne with the lower orders in order to check the ambitions of the propertied classes and the army, which had also infiltrated the Carbonari. The elections held after the revolution returned a majority of moderate nobles. The new government’s actions were placatory. The status of the papal enclaves of Pontecorvo and Benevento was scrupulously respected. A paper which criticised Austria in unseemly terms was suppressed. A popular revolt in Palermo was successfully put down. The foreign minister, the Duke of Campochiaro, did everything he could to reassure all the courts of Europe that his government had the situation under control.
The Austrian chargé d’affaires, Count de Menz, took a positive view of what had taken place. ‘One has to admit,’ he reported to Metternich, ‘that constitutional ideas do dominate and have taken root in the nation. The clergy, the nobility, the military, the bourgeoisie, and, above all, the judicial order are imbued with them.’ He went on to say that the revolt had not been aimed at the monarchy but at the incompetent, corrupt and despotic ministry, which had been incapable of providing order and had stifled economic activity. Menz took the view that the new regime could bring stability to the region, and reported that it was willing to introduce changes into the 1812 constitution, which was such a red rag to conservative bulls, by including an upper chamber of peers and a royal power of veto. Even the reactionary A’Court admitted that the previous state of affairs had been indefensible.26
The Russian and Prussian representatives broadly reinforced this analysis, while the Bavarian minister strongly contradicted the alarmist assertions that had been printed in Metternich’s press mouthpiece. ‘Up to the present, nothing which has taken place in the kingdom since 1 July justifies the declamations of the Österreichische Beobachter,’ he wrote to his superior, Count Rechberg, on 26 September. ‘Everything leads one to assume here that if foreign armies do not intervene the new institutions will establish themselves without resistance.’27
Such views undermined the very bases of Metternich’s policy. His war on demagogues in Germany had recently come under criticism, and the press had begun to question whether there had ever been any threat of a kind to justify the Karlsbad Decrees. The justification for the Mainz commission was beginning to look threadbare as it thrashed about in an increasingly futile but desperate quest for evidence of subversion. In January it had tracked down Justus Grüner, who was undergoing a forlorn hope of a cure at Wiesbaden, and subjected him to interrogation on his deathbed. At the end of February the Bavarian minister Baron von Zentner complained that this kind of thing reflected badly on the rulers of the German states, who were finding it hard ‘to maintain the trust of their people’. Metternich’s response was to place even more pressure on the commission to produce some credible evidence that there really had been a conspiracy. In the words of Matthias Edler von Rath, one of its members, they were instructed no longer to look for the perpetrators but to find the crime.28
In the case of Naples, there was a crime – there had been a revolution. Since it was demonstrably the work of the Carbonari, there was also a conspiracy. Metternich was not going to let anyone rob him of it by suggesting it was some kind of justifiable plebiscite which had righted wrongs and should therefore be acknowledged. The challenge now facing Europe, he declared, came from ‘the secret societies’, which constituted ‘a real power, and all the more dangerous for working in the shadows, undermining every part of the social structure, and leaving everywhere the germs of a moral gangrene which will rapidly develop and bear fruit’. Behind the Carbonari and other secret societies stood the middle classes with their ‘immeasurable ambition’, which could most easily be satisfied through social upheaval. What strengthened his case was the fact that the conspiracy was potentially immense, on the Barruel scale. Suddenly, everyone was talking and writing about the Carbonari, their power and their reach. The Neapolitan ambassador in St Petersburg told Alexander that there were 700,000 of them in Naples alone. Cardinal Consalvi’s informer in Naples assured him that there were over 1,200,000. The political police of various countries gathered documentation and compiled memoranda in a race to prove that they had known about them all along.29
Metternich had other, more weighty reasons for refusing to accept what had happened in Naples. If the kingdom of the Two Sicilies were to stabilise as a constitutional monarchy with the attendant freedoms of speech and press, Austria would have lost control of the southern part of the Italian peninsula. Moreover, such a kingdom was bound to develop cordial relations with its sister constitutional Bourbon kingdom of France, thus providing that power with a conduit for exerting influence on the peninsula. It would also provide a base for all malcontents and nationalist enemies of Austrian rule in Italy.
Others were more worried by the military aspect: following so soon after the Spanish pronunciamiento, the role of the army in the events in Naples suggested a pattern. ‘These two latest mutinies, in Spain and Naples, should make rulers think of the future, because the fall of thrones is now … carried out by the first support of royal authority – the armed forces,’ Count Rostopchin, the former governor and incinerator of Moscow, who was in Paris having his haemorrhoids treated, wrote to a friend on 1 August. ‘I am of the opinion that if strong measures are not adopted now to bring back the former order of things, over the next twenty years the greater part of European thrones will undergo the most terrible convulsions and fall under the dictatorship of the military, and that will be the real fruit of the Enlightenment.’30
Alexander was keen on military intervention against the Neapolitan revolutionaries. His generals less so. General Vassilchikov, commander of the Guard Corps, believed the Russian army was not up to the job. ‘The state of mind is not good,’ he wrote to Prince Volkonsky. ‘Universal discontent and no desire to endure the sacrifices demanded by the conduct of a war the necessity of which is not clear to ordinary mortals …’ The officers had no wish to fight the Neapolitans, and even sympathised with them. Metternich would have been delighted to hear this, as the last thing he wanted was Alexander interfering in what he considered to be his own back yard.31
On 1 August Metternich sent a memorandum to all the courts of Italy, giving his view of the situation. He traced the origins of the problems facing Europe to the French Revolution, which, he asserted, derived from the influence of England, which had been ‘imbued … for nearly a century with the errors of a false philosophy’. Recent events in Germany and Italy had been the natural and foreseeable consequence of the French Revolution. What had taken place in Spain was of a different order, the result of ‘ineptitude on the part of the government on a scale that few examples in the past can be found to compare with’. The Neapolitan revolution was more sinister in character, since it was not the army itself which had carried it out: ‘it was a sect, to which the army belonged more than it belonged to the king’. ‘It was the orders of its real superiors, of an invisible though universally felt power, that the army followed,’ he concluded. He warned that the Carbonari, ‘a secret sect, founded on criminal statutes’, had attained a ‘degree of perfection’ in the ‘art’ of carrying out revolutions that made it impossible to predict when any government might be toppled. ‘The revolution which has just broken out in Naples is therefore of a very particular character, one that is without doubt the most menacing for any government; since a sect conceived and prepared this catastrophe in the shadows; since it made use of a gangrened portion of the armed forces to consummate it.’
In the second part of the memorandum he prepared the ground for Austria’s intervention, and tried to allay any fears that it might have ulterior motives. He argued that the status quo fixed in 1815 was perfect and immutable, but that the middle classes in every society, ‘those classes always ready, at any time and in every place, to embrace a career of ambition which offers them a chance to reach for the rudder of government’, had goaded the people to try to subvert it. This meant that all legitimate governments were under threat. ‘If the revolution in Naples establishes itself, if the reign of the Carbonari is recognised as a legitimate institution, no government in Italy can rest easy.’ He went on to explain the particular position in which Austria found itself as guarantor of the King of Naples’s monarchical rights, which left it with no option but to declare its opposition to the new state of affairs.32
But he was determined that Austria, and Austria alone, should act. It needed the sanction of its allies, not their assistance. The active support of France, for instance, might lead to an increase in French influence in the peninsula. But while Metternich was wary of the intentions of France, even suspecting it of trying to use the crisis in order to take control of the duchy of Lucca, the French were alarmed that Austria might use it to enlarge its own holdings in Italy, and some of their informers were hinting that the Austrian chancellor was actually using the Carbonari to that purpose. They were also not beyond suspecting Britain of using it to turn Sicily into a British protectorate. And nobody could be sure of Russia’s intentions: Alexander’s long-standing interest in Italy was a source of universal apprehension.33