Nelson: The Essential Hero (39 page)

While events on the mainland seemed to indicate that the moment would soon come for the return of the Bourbons to Naples, the news came through that a French squadron had entered the Mediterranean. Its destination was unknown - Malta, Alexandria and Sicily were all potentials - and Nelson decided that his best course was to cruise to the west of Sicily whence he could keep an eye on all the main sea-routes. The French, in fact, had made for Toulon and had managed to give the slip to Lord Keith who had himself come in hot pursuit on their heels. The news from Naples was confusing, but one thing was quite clear - Commodore Caracciolo, still smarting from the King’s treatment of him in preferring British ships to his own, had turned coat and had sided with the republicans. Meanwhile Cardinal Ruffo and his irregulars were rapidly closing in on the city, the French had all but evacuated everywhere except the old castle of St Elmo, and the moment seemed ripe for the final overthrow of the Parthenopean Republic.

On the afternoon of 24 June Nelson and his squadron of seventeen ships entered once more the Bay of Naples intent on eradicating the last of the the French influence in the city and, in effect, making it safe for King Ferdinand and Queen Maria Carolina to return. (Neither would leave Palermo until they were convinced that Naples had been thoroughly ‘cleansed’ of the republicans.) Sir William Hamilton and Emma accompanied Nelson to act as representatives of the King and to assist as interpreters. Nelson now found himself in the uneasy situation of promoting the Bourbon cause, forcing unconditional surrender upon the King’s subjects, and ensuring that the last of the French left the city within two hours of his terms being delivered to them. Moving in the murky waters of diplomacy and international politics he adopted the forthright air of the captain of a ship who is confronted by mutineers. ‘That as to the Rebels and Traitors, no power on earth has a right to stand between their gracious King and them: they must instantly throw themselves on the clemency of their Sovereign, for no other terms will be allowed them; nor will the French be allowed even to name them in any capitulation.’

Nelson’s first act was to annul a truce which had been agreed by Captain Edward Foote of the frigate
Seahorse
and Cardinal Ruffo on the one hand, and the French and rebel Neapolitans on the other. Ruffo very naturally complained that he had done his best by arranging the terms of truce in order to spare the city from destruction by the departing French, and that he could not possibly break his word and erase his signature. Many, or indeed most of his countrymen, he believed, who had espoused the Parthenopean Republic, had done so because they had no other option, and they should now be forgiven by their monarch. Ruffe was a politician, Nelson was not, and it was hardly surprising that the two men fell out from the very start. As Sir William was later to write to his nephew Greville, ‘Nothing but my phlegm could have prevented an open rupture on the first meeting between Cardinal Ruffo and Lord Nelson. Lord Nelson is so accustomed to dealing fair & open, that he has no patience when he meets with the contrary, which one must always expect when one has to deal with Italians &, perhaps, His Eminency is the very quintessence of Italian finesse.’ It was largely through Sir William’s tact and his explanation of the real position ashore that an agreement was reached whereby the Jacobins were permitted to withdraw from the two castles, Ovo and Nuovo, where they were established, and to embark in a number of merchantmen which were lying in the harbour* These, however, were not permitted to sail, nor were they accorded the honours of war as had been agreed in the terms of the capitulation.

On 29 June, four days after Nelson had arrived at Naples, letters arrived from Palermo which made it quite clear that nothing other than unconditional surrender was acceptable to the King. Ferdinand had no use for clemency and he was prepared to be uncompromising enough so long as his wishes were being carried out for him by Nelson and his British men-of-war. Queen Maria Carolina’s advice, given to Nelson via Emma, was to treat Naples ‘as if it were a rebellious Irish town’, and to act with ‘the greatest firmness, vigour and severity’. Ruffo immediately felt himself compromised by these new orders, which nullified his efforts to settle things peacefully, and he refused to assist in the projected siege of Fort St Elmo. At the same time he issued an order that nobody in Naples was to be arrested without his authority. Nelson, who had been given carte blanche by the King, even contemplated having the Cardinal arrested. Fortunately he decided that the situation had reached a point where only the return of the King and the Queen and their Prime Minister, Acton, could unravel a knotted situation which by now had assumed Gordian proportions.

(He himself was naturally tempted to use Alexander’s technique and cut it with the sword.)

On 10 July, the King hove up from the south in a frigate and the burden of coping with the whole Neapolitan situation was lifted from Nelson’s shoulders. Before that was to happen, however, there occurred the incident which has long stained Nelson’s reputation for his handling of events in Naples. On 29 June, Captain Hardy, who was on the deck of the
Foudroyant
, heard a great disturbance as a small boat drew alongside the ship. The word then reached him that ‘the traitor Caracciolo was taken’. The Commodore, who had certainly taken an active part in the affairs of the Parthenopean Republic, was condemned almost from the very start by the violent passions that had been aroused in Naples among the anti-Jacobins and by the very nature of his fellow citizens. The fact remains that he should not have been condemned in the heat of the moment -something which must be put down to Nelson’s desire to set an instant example to all French sympathisers.

There can be no doubt as to Caracciolo’s guilt, nor of his own awareness of the fate that must be in store for him if he were caught (he had been discovered hiding down a well in peasant’s clothing). Nelson immediately had a court-martial convened, consisting of five senior officers from the Neapolitan squadron under the presidency of Count Thum, an Austrian commodore in the Neapolitan service. The result was a foregone conclusion. Caracciolo had commanded the republican fleet, he had attacked British and Neapolitan ships (firing on his own colours), and had clearly been a traitor to his king. He was condemned to death by four votes to two and, when the verdict was reported to Nelson, the latter ordered that he should be hanged from the yardarm of a Sicilian frigate that very evening. Thurn’s suggestion that Caracciolo should be allowed twenty-four hours in which to make his peace with his Maker, and Caracciolo’s own request that he should be executed as befitting a nobleman, were both disregarded. Nelson, as he had long ago made plain to St Vincent (when he had agreed with the latter’s summary treatment of mutineers), believed that such matters were best dealt with swiftly.

Midshipman Parsons in his
Reminiscences
shows an evident sympathy towards the Italian admiral and records that his defence largely consisted in pointing out that it was King Ferdinand who had betrayed his people by running away to Palermo, taking all the royal treasure with him, and leaving General Mack’s army unpaid. Parsons goes on to recall a macabre incident that occurred a few days after Caracciolo’s execution:

... I was roused from my slumbers with an account of the king being on deck. ... I hurried up, and found his majesty gazing with intense anxiety on some distant object. At once he turned pale, and letting his spyglass fall on deck, uttered an exclamation of horror. My eyes instinctively turned in the same direction, and under our larboard quarter, with his face full upon us, much swollen and discoloured by the water, and his orbs of sight started from their sockets by strangulation, floated the ill-fated prince ... on Lord Nelson (who was suffering from ill health) being awakened from his uneasy slumbers, he ordered a boat to be sent from the ship to tow the corpse on shore.

As was only to be expected, the city of Naples was now subjected to a White Terror, in which the persecution of revolutionaries and Jacobins was conveniently used for their own private purposes by those who had their own grudges and family vendettas to be avenged. The King, who should by all right have stayed in his city, was only too eager to return once more to Palermo to enjoy his hunting and shooting and to abdicate - as usual - from all responsibility. Nelson’s part in this whole affair was unfortunate, for there can be little doubt that he was used by Ferdinand to lend the weight of his authority and the power of the British fleet to condone a state of affairs that was to provoke Mr Fox in the House of Commons to refer to the ‘horrors’ that had taken place in Naples.

Nelson’s position was an invidious one and, although he can in no sense be ‘whitewashed’, it is difficult to see what else he could have done under the circumstances. He could not control King Ferdinand’s actions. He could not be responsible for, nor indeed could he understand, the passions of southern politics. His job as a British admiral was to see the Bourbons restored - that and nothing else. The internal politics of the kingdom were not his concern. There can be little doubt that he felt an infinite weariness towards Neapolitan affairs and the tortuous processes of Italian thought. Midshipman Parsons, recording the execution of Caracciolo, probably best sums up Nelson’s whole attitude towards all the affairs of this hysterical kingdom: ‘The seamen of our fleet, who clustered on the rigging like bees, consoled themselves that it was only an Italian prince, and an admiral of Naples, that was hanging - a person of very light estimation compared with the lowest man in a British ship.’

On 13 July, shortly after the King had reluctantly returned to Naples from Palermo once again, and when the last pro-French stronghold in the city, Fort St Elmo, had capitulated to the investing forces, Nelson received orders from Lord Keith to ‘send such ships as you can possibly spare . . . [to] Minorca to await my orders.’ Nelson, whose flagship was at the time acting as the seat of government of Ferdinand, and many of whose sailors had been landed to assist in the capture of the two cities north of Naples, Capua and Gaeta, refused. His action was a blatant disobedience of orders and Keith as his Commander-in-Chief had every right to tell his junior to send him every ship that he could spare. The fact that Nelson did not believe that Minorca was in danger had nothing to do with the matter. That he was proved right, and that Minorca was not attacked, did not exculpate him, any more than the fact that Capua and Gaeta soon fell to Neapolitan arms reinforced by British sailors. One sees Nelson at this moment putting the interests of the Kingdom of Naples and the Bourbon king before his own country’s, and disobeying the explicit command of his senior officer.

A further order from Lord Keith, received only six days later, was to the effect that all or at least the greater part of Nelson’s force should withdraw from Sicily and repair to Minorca to protect the island during Keith’s absence on a search for the combined Franco-Spanish fleet. Nelson refused, giving as his excuse that until the French were driven out of Capua he thought it right ‘not to obey your order’. He added : ‘I am perfectly well aware of the consequences of disobeying the orders of my Commander-in-Chief.’ Such behaviour, justified though it was by events, was hardly rational - nor, one may doubt, would Nelson have tolerated it from any subordinate of his. On the receipt of a further order from Keith, Nelson reluctantly sent Duckworth with three sail-of-the-line and a corvette, himself and the bulk of his forces still remaining in the vicinity of Naples. Even allowing for the fact that, in those days of poor communications, a great deal more latitude was allowed to the man on the spot than is conceivable today, Nelson’s whole attitude throughout this exchange is one that merits the deepest censure. He may have had a poor opinion of Keith, but his behaviour by any standard was intolerable.

Keith was now engaged in the pursuit of a French fleet into the Atlantic, which left Nelson as acting Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean for the rest of the year, part of which time was spent aboard the
Foudroyant
at Naples and part back at the Palazzo Palagonia in Palermo. There was no reason or excuse for him to be based ashore when he was at Palermo, for the business of the fleet could just as easily have been conducted from his flagship as it could from a palace ashore. The fact is that in the corrupt and indolent atmosphere of the court, surrounded by adulation and besotted with Emma Hamilton, the victor of the Nile was rapidly succumbing — if he had not succumbed entirely - to a decline of morale that is only too often fatal to northerners who take up their residence in the indolent, lax and febrile south. His health was far from good, his eyesight was declining, and his involvement with Emma can hardly have failed to cause some tremor of conscience in the parson’s son. His letters to Fanny this year are comparatively few and it would not be long before rumour of his activities (only too well known among his friends and equals in the Service) would invade the drawing-rooms and clubs of England. One letter alone from Naples, dated 4 August 1799, gives an idea of the adulation to which he was subject and the extent to which he revelled in it:

The first of August [the anniversary of the Battle of the Nile] was celebrated here with as much respect as our situation would admit. The King dined with me and when his Majesty drank my health a royal salute of 21 guns was fired from all H.S.M.’s ships of war and from all the castles. In the evening there was a general illumination. Amongst others a large vessel was fitted out like a Roman galley. On the oars were fixed lamps and in the centre was erected a rostral column with my name, at the stern elevated were two angels supporting my picture. In short the beauty of the thing was beyond my powers of description. More than 2000 variegated lamps were fixed round the vessel, an orchestra was fitted up and filled with the very best musicians and singers. The piece of music was in a great measure my praises, describing their distress, but Nelson comes, the invincible Nelson and we are safe and happy again. Thus you must not make you think me vain so far very far from it and I relate it more from gratitude than vanity.