A.D. 1812.] WRETCHED STATE OF AFFAIRS IN SICILY. a considerable army, we preserved the island of Sicily for him and his Austrian queen, Carolina, the daughter of Maria Theresa, and sister of the unfortunate Marie Antoinette. And why preserve it? The man was a mere jolly sportsman, taking no care whatever of his people, thinking nothing whatever of his duties as a ruler, leaving all to his active, ambitious, unprincipled wife. The country was in the worst possible condition, the people ignorant, priest-ridden, and ground to the extremest misery by extortionate taxation. Why preserve the island for such people? The population could not have been worse under the French; they might have been better. It could matter little that Buonaparte, having Italy, should have Sicily too. When his time came-when the nation was sufficiently oppressed and insulted-they would rise and put him down. Till they did arrive at that spirit, foreign oppression and insult were better for them, morally and politically, than domestic oppression. At all events, it was no business of ours. Europe was surely large and populous enough to take care of itself, or it was not worth taking care of. Yet we maintained our own army of between twenty and thirty thousand men-English, Maltese, Neapolitans, Sicilians, &c. Besides this, the king was to have a Sicilian army, and we allowed him four hundred thousand pounds a-year to pay and equip it. But, instead of doing this, he and his court received the money and spent it on themselves, and left his own troops to come to our officers for provisions, for they could get none from Ferdinand. As soon as it was known that our commander took pity on them, and allowed them rations, the court stopped the pay altogether as unnecessary. Thus we paid four hundred thousand pounds a-year, besides maintaining an army, to keep this worthless couple on a throne, and they took it and spent it in court folly and luxury, whilst their subjects were starving, and were ground to the dust by taxes, and duties, and monopolies-and it had been well had this been the worst. But whilst the king ran after his fishing and shooting, the queen, whom the cruelties of the French to her sister had converted into a fury and a fiend, dipped her hands in the blood of those all around her who had taken part with the French in driving them from Naples, or who had sympathised with the revolution in Sicily. When the French Republica Partenopea was overturned in Naples, in 1799, and the royal family returned, and remained for about a year, she was remorseless in her vengeance, cramming the prisons with the patriots, and putting them to death without remorse. It was then that Nelson disgraced himself by becoming her tool. Befooled by his passion for lady Hamilton, the wife of the British ambassador at Naples, who was all in all with the queen, he was weak enough and wicked enough to allow the Neapolitan admiral, Caraccioli, to be tried by a court-martial on board his own flag-ship, and hanged at the yard-arm of a Neapolitan vessel alongside. This dark deed was regarded with horror throughout our fleet, and the sailors of Nelson's hip were continually saying that they saw the head of Caraccioli emerge from the waves, following their voyages! On the return to Sicily, this royal fury continued her persecutions of every one who was an advocate of reform; and, as the English officers discouraged their execution, 429 they remained in the terrible dungeons of the island till they were glutted with victims, And all this we were actually supporting and perpetuating by our arms and our money. We had much better have let Buonaparte rule there, and have let the miserable Bourbons retire to Austria, where the king could have hunted and the queen indulged in her tirades against all ameliorations of the condition of subjects. As it was, she declared that the English were encouraging the disaffected, and were ruining the people by false ideas of freedom-the English, to whom she, her effeminate sons, and her sportsman husband, were indebted for a house over their heads! After the marriage of Napoleon with her niece, Maria Louisa, queen Carolina's views of the French changed. She regarded Buonaparte as an enemy of the revolution which had destroyed her sister and her family, and driven herself and husband from the throne of Naples. She fondly hoped that her imperial relative would allow her family to return to Naples, and she entered into a conspiracy with him to betray the English to him. Buonaparte encouraged her hopes, for his own objects; but, unfortunately for her plans, lord William Bentinck became the ambassador to Sicily, and commander-in chief of the forces there, in the summer of 1811. He was astonished beyond measure at the condition of things which he found in the island. He declared that there must be a thorough reform. But the virago queen pointed to the Sicilian troops, and her Calabrian guards, and told him she would fight for it, rather than allow any one to usurp the rights which belonged only to the king and herself. Lord William returned to England to lay the state of things before the government, and demand ample powers. During the absence of the commander-in-chief, general Maitland had remained in power; and an accident suddenly revealed the fact that the British were surrounded by the meshes of a deep-laid and active conspiracy, at the head of which was the queen herself. A Sicilian friendly to the English caught certain words which a boatman of Messina let fall, which flashed the fact upon him that this man had been employed to convey packets across the strait by night. Following up this clue, he soon became possessed of the information that Manhes, the commander of Murat's army, was in constant communication with the queen, and that there were spies and emissaries going to and fro, by night, between them. The boatmen were engaged, by ample pay, to bring the messengers from the Neapolitan side to disguised Sicilian officers of our own, who opened the letters before delivering them to their respective addresses, took. fac-similes of them, kept the originals, and delivered the copies. By these letters they became fully possessed of the plot, and of the names and residences of the conspirators, amongst whom were some very near the throne, and the queen at the head of all. The Sicilian flotilla of gunboats at Messina was to be put at the service of Manhes to cross over with his troops, at some crisis when the English fleet was absent, and the English were to be betrayed to the French. Fourteen of the conspirators were seized, tried, and condemned to death by a court-martial, partly of English and partly of Sicilian officers. As soon as this was concluded, the resident of the court burnt the list containing the names of the conspirators, to screen the queen and the rest of the court party concerned. Only one of these traitors was executed; the rest were sent to different prisons in the islands near Sicily. By this time lord William Bentinck had returned with enlarged powers, and he set about to frame a new constitution for the country, on the model of the English one. There was a limited monarch, a house of peers, and a house of commons. Any one knowing the character of the Sicilians, the despotism of the aristocracy, the habitual compliance with it by the people, must have known that the very moment the royal family regained their kingdom by the expulsion of the French, this con the influence of the queen should cease, or the money should not again be paid. On this, the king made over the government to his son, Don Francesco, in January, 1812, and retired to a country seat a few miles from Palermo, where he could shoot and fish at his pleasure. But the queen remained in the city, and continued to fish in the more troubled waters of politics and conspiracy. The power of the army was invested in the English, and the imprisoned patriots were set at liberty; but Carolina, with her emissaries about her, at the head of whom was a French emigrant named St. Clair, continued to plot. Lord Bentinck insisted that she should retire from the city, and her residence was selected at Castel Vetrano-an old town in the hills of the stitution would go to pieces. For the present it raised the hopes of the ignorant people, who imagined that a new constitution meant the abolition of all taxation, and it enraged the queen beyond all bounds. She protested that the English were going to set up a new sans-culotte republic, and that her head, like that of her sister, would fall by the guillotine. Lord William Bentinck went on with his Utopian constitution as firmly as the queen opposed it. He stopped at once the subsidy of four hundred thousand pounds. This brought matters to a solution. Lord Bentinck resolved that interior. There, however, she assembled around her a perate band of Calabrian bandits, spies, and priests; renewed her conspiracies more actively than ever, and endeavoural to raise the fanatic people on the English by denouncing them as heretics. It became necessary to send her out of the country alto gether, and general Macfarlane was selected to execute difficult and dangerous service. He had been on friendly terms with the king and queen, and therefore it was hopel that he would be able to obtain access to her, and to per suade her to retire quietly. But he found his way to the castle stopped by numbers of ferocious-looking, bearded fellows, who issued from the surrounding chestnut woods and dense thickets of myrtle, and crossed their muskets before him in the way. Persuading them, however, that he was a friend of the queen conveying her orders for her allowance, he was permitted to pass. A terrible scene took place when he opened his mission, and the queen, in a tempest of rage, shrieked out that she would "Never, never, never quit the island!" But the attendants being privately assured that her retiring was the only way for them to obtain their salaries, and a good bribe besides, they eagerly set about to persuade her, and she consented to go, under protest. She made her way to Vienna, where she died in 1814, just before the restoration of her husband to his Neapolitan throne, and whilst Napoleon was a prisoner at Elba. Her closing days were rendered dreadful by the apparitions of her many murdered victims, which, she said, haunted her bed all night long, telling her, in exulting tones, that she was coming now amongst them, and, even in the day-time, visibly beckoning her to follow. Her son, Fer. dinand of Naples, trod faithfully in her steps; her far more amiable second daughter married Louis Philippe, became queen of France, and lived for some time in widowed exile at Claremont, near London, with her family. On the coasts of Italy, as in various other quarters of the world, our naval flag asserted its supremacy. Buonaparte was endeavouring to make Venice a great naval port for the Mediterranean. He had built a number of small armed vessels there, and at length he produced a fine 74-gun ship at the docks of Malamocca, within a few miles of Venice. With a crew of eight hundred and fifty men, chiefly Italians and Dalmatians, this new ship, the Rivoli, ventured out to ses, and was standing over for Pola, a port of Istria, when captain Talbot, of the 74-gun ship the Victorious, descried her on the 21st of February, 1812, only three days after quitting port. The Rivoli was accompanied by three brigs and two gun-boats; the Victorious by an 18-gun brig, the Weazle, commanded by captain Andrew. There was a desperate fight, in which the crews of the Italian vessels fought undauntedly; but the Rivoli was compelled to surrender, having lost nearly half her crew in killed and wounded. Both ships were dreadfully shattered; most of their masts shot away, or irreparably damaged. The Victorious had twenty-seven killed, and about one hundred Wounded. The Weazle did not lose a man. The lesser craft managed to escape. 431 cause of it was gone by; but this was not the case. In all our contests with revolutionary France, they rejoiced over any disasters which befel us, and were silent in the hour of our victories. Though they were bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh, and our population was pouring over to swell their numbers, they displayed towards us a hostility that no other nation, France excepted, had ever shown. There were not wanting thousands in England only too ready to praise them for their heroic spirit, but this elicited no generous response on their parts. The praises of Europe, not excepting England herself, seemed to have carried them off their feet, and produced in them a spirit of boasting, in which not even Gascony could equal them; and this characteristic remains pre-eminently theirs, above all other nations, to this day. But it was not to England only that this want of generosity was shown. No people rejoiced more vehemently, none, indeed, so much, but quite the contrary, over the fall and execution of Louis XVI. of France, the one monarch of Europe who had been their great benefactor, without whose powerful aid they would have fought and struggled in vain, and who had, in fact, lost his crown and his head, and his empire to his family, by sending his soldiers to learn republicanism amongst them. There were feasts and public rejoicings in the United States to commemorate the death of Louis, who was, in fact, the martyr of America, What was equally extraordinary, whilst they exulted in the French republic, they followed with an equal admiration the career of Buonaparte, who crushed that republic, and raised up a despotism opposed in its principles to all the political professions of Americans. But it was the idea that he was born to humble and, perhaps, blot England from the list of nations, which served to render Napoleon so especially the object of their unbounded eulogies. His victories were celebrated nowhere so vociferously as in the United States, through the press, the pulpit, and in general oratory. With them he was the man of destiny, who was to overthrow all kings but himself, and especially drive Great Britain from her dominion of the seas. During the republic of France, and in the worst times of Robespierre, the French had their minister, M. Genet, in the United States, who excited the democrats to acts of hostility against England, and gave them French an aorities to seize and make prizes of English vessels at sea, though they were nominally at peace with England. And though Washington, then president, protested against these proceedings, the From skirmishing at sea we had now come to direct war great body of the people were against him, and were supwith the people of North America. From the period of the ported in that spirit by Jefferson, who was secretary of state. American colonists obtaining their independence of this When Jefferson became president, in 1801, and Maddison ountry, they retained a peculiar animus against the mother his secretary of state, the hatred to England was carried to country. We have seen that, in the war by which that its extreme, and the friendship of Buonaparte was cultivated ndependence was achieved by the aid of France, Holland, with the utmost zeal. When Jefferson was a second time ad Spain, which all combined to attack us on sea and land, president, in 1807, he violently resisted our right of search he Americans displayed no traces of a magnanimity which of neutral vessels, thus playing into the hands of Buonasually accompanies bravery. They resorted to many dis- parte and his Berlin decree, in the hope of carrying on a onourable practices, amongst which was the breach of great trade with the European continent at our expense. Out ntract in retaining prisoners from the army of Sir John of this arose the affair of the Leopard and the Chesapeake argoyne. The same spirit continued to animate them after-off the capes of Virginia, in which the Chesapeake, refusing arda. It was natural to suppose that their success would to allow a search for English deserters, was attacked and we the usual effect of making them forget enmity when the taken. This put the whole of the democracy of America into a raging fury, though the boarding of the United States utmost indignities were offered to all the offic war-sloop, the Hornet, in the French port of L'Orient, for of our men-of-war who happened to be lying the same purpose, was passed over without a murmur. To harbours. Moreover, Jefferson issued, in Dece prevent such collisions, Canning, on the part of the British an embargo against all American vessels quittin A.D. 1812.] THE ORDERS IN COUNCIL REVOKED. 433 of American vessels continued to be seized in French ports, though the United States government dared not to complain, nor did they ever recover any compensation from Napoleon; it was from Louis Philippe that they first obtained such compensation, and, curiously enough, through the friendly intervention of England. parte's Berlin decree, and made necessary by it. On the other hand, Buonaparte seized any American or other vessel entering into any port of Europe under the power of France, which had submitted to search. To prevent this certain seizure of trading vessels, the embargo was issued, and all merchant vessels of all nations were prohibited entering American ports. A more suicidal act than this To produce a better tone of feeling in America, the English could not be conceived, and the people of the United States government had done all in its power, except to annul soon felt and complained loudly of the consequences. In the orders in council. It put up with many insults and 809, Madison succeeding Jefferson in the presidency, and luonaparte having now rendered matters worse by his filan decree, in addition to his Berlin one, abolished the eneral embargo with all nations except France and England, ad declared that, too, was at an end, whenever either or both these nations withdrew -one its decrees, and the other I orders in council. But in 1810 Madison declared that ance had withdrawn its decrees so far as America was ncerned; though this was notoriously untrue. Numbers violations of neutrality. It sent Mr. Foster as envoy to the United States, to endeavour to adjust all differences; but in vain. This continued thus till 1812, when, on the 20th of May, Mr. Russell, the American chargé-d'affaires, presented lord Castlereagh a copy of an instrument by which France had, on the 28th of April, abrogated its Berlin and Milan decrees so far as they related to American vessels. To show an equal liberality, England, on the 23rd of June, revoked its orders in council so far as concerned America, |