The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean (62 page)

Nelson, meanwhile, had been pursuing the French ships across the Mediterranean. Misled by information from a Genoese vessel that Bonaparte had left Malta on 16 June–three days earlier than he actually did–he had hastened to Alexandria; then, finding to his astonishment no trace of the French fleet, he had sailed again on 29 June to search for it along the coast of Syria. As a result of this confusion, it was only around 2.30 p.m. on 1 August that he returned to Egypt, to find thirteen French men-of-war–he himself had fourteen–and four frigates anchored in a two-mile line in Aboukir Bay, one of the mouths of the Nile. But they were still nine miles away; it would take another two hours to reach them, and a lot longer still to draw up his own ships in a regular line of battle. Night encounters in those days were hazardous things; there was a danger of running aground in unknown waters, and a worse one of firing into one’s fellows by mistake. Most admirals, in such circumstances, would have elected to wait until morning; Nelson, however, seeing that the French were unprepared and that there was a favourable northwest wind running, decided on an immediate attack. He began by sending four ships inshore along one side of the French line, while he himself in his flagship, the
Vanguard
, led a parallel attack down the offshore side. Each enemy vessel was thus subjected to a simultaneous cannonade from both sides. That was at about six o’clock; the ensuing battle lasted through the night. By dawn all the French ships but four had been destroyed or captured, including their flagship,
L’Orient
, on which Admiral Brueys had been killed by a cannon shot. The vessel still lies beneath the waters of Aboukir Bay, together with all the treasure looted from the palaces and churches of Malta.

The Battle of the Nile, as it was called, was one of the greatest victories of Nelson’s career.
¹⁹⁸
At a stroke he had not only destroyed the French fleet; he had severed Napoleon’s line of communication with France, leaving him marooned and frustrating all his plans of conquest in the Middle East. His victory also had a serious effect on French morale–though not, apparently, on Bonaparte’s. Almost before the ships’ guns had cooled, Napoleon was at work transforming Egypt into a strategic base. What the British were attempting to achieve little by little in India, he set himself to complete in a few months. He devised new and more efficient systems of administration and taxation; he established land registries; he gave orders for hospitals, improved sanitation and even street lighting. The scientists and engineers whom he had brought with him were put to work on such problems as the purification of the Nile water and the local manufacture of gunpowder.

Where he failed, unsurprisingly, was in his attempts to win the trust and support of the Egyptians. He did his best, taking every opportunity to stress his admiration for Islam; he even issued a ‘Proclamation to the People of Egypt’, in which he seemed to go still further:

I, more than any Mameluke, worship God, glory be to Him, and respect His Prophet and the Great Koran…

O you sheikhs, judges, imams, tell your nation that the French are also sincere Muslims…

The fact remained, however, that his men were living off the country and behaving as if they owned it. Small-scale revolts were constantly breaking out, with attacks on isolated French garrisons or individual Frenchmen in the street. A more serious uprising in October was put down with brutal efficiency; over 3,000 Egyptians were killed and the entire al-Azhar quarter sacked, including its mosque. From that day forward Napoleon decreed that any Egyptian found carrying a firearm was to be beheaded and his body thrown into the Nile. It was no wonder that the longer the occupation continued, the more detested it became.

Beyond the Egyptian frontiers, too, enemies were gathering. On 2 September 1798 the Ottoman Sultan Selim III declared war on France, and the Turkish governor of Syria, Djezzar (‘the Butcher’) Pasha, began to raise an army. This could easily march south, then turn across the Sinai peninsula and invade Egypt from the east; worse still, it could be carried by English ships straight to the Nile delta. Rather than risk such an eventuality, Napoleon decided to act first: to destroy Djezzar’s army even before it was fully formed. In early February 1799 he marched his men across the deserts of Sinai and up into Palestine. On 7 March Jedda fell; 2,000 Turks and Palestinians were put to the sword, another 2,000 taken down to the sea and shot. In an effort to improve his image after these atrocities, the Commander-in-Chief visited a plague hospital and, we are told, was ill-advised enough personally to carry a plague victim out to his grave. He was not infected; otherwise, this exercise in public relations does not seem to have been outstandingly successful.

Acre was his next objective; but Acre was well defended and well garrisoned, the Turkish commander having enlisted additional support from the British navy under the swashbuckling Commodore Sir Sidney Smith, famous for having escaped from the Temple prison in Paris during the revolution. Smith had brought with him his friend Colonel Phélippeaux, a military engineer who had been at the
Ecole Militaire
with Bonaparte and who was able to contribute invaluable expertise to the defence of the town. For two months the French army besieged the city; fortunately, however, Smith had succeeded in capturing the eight gunboats carrying their siege artillery, stores and ammunition. Napoleon had only his field guns, and it was not until 25 April that he was able to bring up six heavy cannon from Jaffa. On 10 May he launched his final assault. Like its predecessors, it was thrown back with heavy losses, and he had no course but retreat. By this time plague had taken hold in the army; he himself advocated killing all the patients with overdoses of opium, but his chief medical officer refused outright. The hundreds of stretchers carrying the sick and wounded considerably slowed the return journey; it was a miserable body of men that finally limped back into Cairo.

As always, Bonaparte did his best to dress up defeat as victory. Turkish prisoners were paraded, captured Turkish flags proudly displayed. What was left of the army, cleaned up as far as possible, staged a triumphal march through the city and, on 25 July, made short work of a Turkish force which, with British assistance, had been landed at Aboukir. But no one, least of all the Egyptians, was fooled. The Middle Eastern expedition had been a failure, and had done little for Napoleon’s reputation. He was alarmed, too, by reports reaching Cairo that Europe was once again at war, that the Italian Cisalpine Republic which he had established two years before was now under Austrian occupation, that the Russian army was on the march and that the domestic situation in France itself was once again critical. For the first time in his career–but not the last–he left his army to get home as best it could and, at five o’clock in the morning of 22 August 1799, slipped stealthily from his camp and sailed for France. Not even his successor in command, General Jean-Baptiste Kléber, knew of his departure until he was safely away.

In Paris, the
coup d’état
of 30
prairial
(18 June) 1799 had expelled the moderates from the Directory and brought in men who were generally considered to be Jacobin extremists, but confusion continued to reign and one of the new Directors, Emmanuel Sieyès, declared that only a military dictatorship could now prevent a return of the monarchy. ‘
Je cherche un sabre
,’ he said–‘I am looking for a sabre.’ That sabre was soon to hand, and from the moment Napoleon arrived in Paris on 14 October–having almost miraculously escaped the British fleet–he and Sieyès started planning a
coup
of their own. It took place on 18–19
brumaire
(November 9–10), abolished the Directory and established a new government, the Consulate. There were technically three consuls, but effectively only one: the First Consul, Napoleon Bonaparte, was henceforth master of France.

He spent the winter reorganising his army, and–Russia having by now withdrawn from the anti-French coalition–preparing for a campaign against his principal remaining enemy, Austria. At that moment the Austrians were besieging Genoa, capital of one of his more ephemeral creations, the Ligurian Republic. A lesser general would have marched south from Paris and down the valley of the Rhône; Napoleon turned east at the Alps and took his men over the Great St Bernard Pass before the snow had melted, appearing in Italy behind the Austrian army and taking it entirely by surprise. The Austrian general Michael von Melas had no course but to leave Genoa and regroup, concentrating all his forces on Alessandria. Napoleon followed them, and on the evening of 13 June 1800 reached the village–it was in fact little more than a farm–of Marengo, some two and a half miles southeast of the town.

The encounter that followed might have spelled the end of Napoleon’s career. Melas did not wait to be attacked; the following morning, with a force of some 31,000, he lashed out at the 23,000 French, pounding them remorselessly with his eighty guns for over five hours. In the early afternoon their line began to give way; they were forced to retreat nearly four miles to the village of San Giuliano. The Austrians’ victory seemed certain; strangely enough, however–perhaps because the seventy-one-year-old Melas now retired to Alessandria, leaving the command to some relatively incapable subordinate–their pursuit was slow and half-hearted, giving Napoleon time to regroup and to welcome substantial reinforcements under General Louis Desaix which just then providentially arrived from the southeast. As evening drew on he launched a counter-attack. Desaix was killed almost immediately, but his 6,000 men, fresh and rested, gave new spirit to their fellows, and by nightfall the Austrians were in full retreat. When the battle ended they had lost 9,500 men, the French less than 6,000.
¹⁹⁹

Melas now had no choice but to come to terms, withdrawing all his troops east of the river Mincio and north of the Po, giving the French complete control of the Po valley as far as the Adige. Napoleon, his reputation unstained despite the narrowness of his victory, returned to Paris, where he took over both the military and the civil authority. In 1801 Austria was forced to sign the Treaty of Lunéville, whereby France regained the old frontiers that Julius Caesar had given to Gaul: the Rhine, the Alps and the Pyrenees.

Napoleon’s star was now high in the sky–and was still rising.

CHAPTER XXII

Neapolitan Interlude

The news of Nelson’s victory on the Nile was received with jubilation in England–but still more so, perhaps, in Naples. Its king, Ferdinand IV,
²⁰⁰
had come to the throne in 1759 at the age of eight. He and his queen, Maria Carolina–daughter of the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria and elder sister of the unfortunate Marie Antoinette–were an ill-assorted couple. Ferdinand–‘the scoundrel king’, as he was universally known, ‘
il rè lazzarone
’–was a childish boor who loved only hunting and horseplay, possessed not a shred of natural dignity and boasted of never having read a book. The Queen was comparatively intellectual, acutely conscious of her rank yet surprisingly tolerant of her insufferable husband,
²⁰¹
to whom she was to bear eighteen children; though herself only sixteen years old at the time of her marriage, it was not long before she was effectively running the kingdom, her foreign policy being dictated by her understandable detestation of the French Revolution and all it stood for.

Ever since 1797, to Maria Carolina, to her subjects and even to King Ferdinand, French intentions in south Italy had been only too clear. In Rome on 22 December of that year, the local Jacobins staged an armed demonstration against the Pope, in the course of which a twenty-seven-year-old French officer named Léonard Duphot was shot by a papal corporal. The French ambassador, Napoleon’s elder brother Joseph, refused to listen to the Vatican’s explanations and reported to the Directory that one of his country’s most brilliant young generals had been murdered by the priests. As a result General Louis Berthier was ordered to march on Rome. He met with no opposition and on 10 February 1798 occupied the city. Five days later the new republic was proclaimed in the Forum. Pope Pius VI, aged eighty, was abominably treated–his rings were torn forcibly from his fingers–and was carried off to France, where he was to die miserably at Valence in August 1799.
²⁰²

What was Naples to do? The French were now on its very doorstep; what was to prevent them from crossing the frontier, and who could stop them if they did? With Napoleon’s seizure of Malta in June 1798 the threat loomed still larger. No wonder that the Neapolitans rejoiced at the news of the Battle of the Nile, or that when Nelson himself arrived on his flagship
Vanguard
towards the end of September he was accorded a hero’s welcome–with, on the 29th, a magnificent fortieth-birthday banquet for 1,800 guests, given at Palazzo Sessa by the British Minister, Sir William Hamilton, and his wife, Emma. But the party, as far as Nelson was concerned, was not a success. On the following morning he wrote to Lord St Vincent:

I trust, my Lord, in a week we shall all be at sea. I am very unwell, and the miserable conduct of this Court is not likely to cool my irritable temper. It is a country of fiddlers and poets, whores and scoundrels. I am, etc.

Indeed, the next three months were a nightmare. The Austrian field marshal Baron Karl Mack von Leiberich arrived in early October to assume command of the Neapolitan army of 50,000 men, who duly marched north, a quivering King among them. Needless to say, they proved quite incapable of stopping the French advance, and by early December more and more of them, officers and men alike, had shed their uniforms and returned to their homes. The Queen–her sister’s dreadful fate always in her mind–wrote several times to Lady Hamilton deploring their cowardice, but when her husband deserted in his turn there were no more letters on the subject. On 18 December there arrived a despatch from an utterly demoralised Mack, confessing that his army–which had not yet fought a single battle–was now in full retreat and imploring Their Majesties to leave while there was still time. ‘I do not know,’ wrote Nelson to the Minister at Constantinople, ‘that the whole Royal Family, with 3,000 Neapolitan émigrés, will not be under the protection of the King’s flag this night.’

And indeed it was, though thanks to atrocious weather and the usual Neapolitan confusion, the
Vanguard
did not leave Naples until the evening of the 23rd. On Christmas Eve Nelson recorded that ‘it blew harder than I have ever experienced since I have been at sea’. On board, there was general panic. Of the distinguished passengers, only Emma Hamilton kept her head; Sir William was found in his cabin with a loaded pistol in each hand–since, he explained to his wife, he was determined not to perish with ‘the guggle-guggle-guggle of salt water in his throat’. Little Prince Albert, aged six, died of exhaustion in Emma’s arms; but at two in the morning on the 26th the vessel finally dropped anchor in the harbour of Palermo, and a few hours later His Sicilian Majesty made a formal entry into his kingdom’s second capital.

The King and Queen settled as best they could into what passed for the royal palace. Nelson, meanwhile, moved in with the Hamiltons. He was desperately tired, and not yet completely recovered from a head wound sustained at Aboukir Bay; he was quarrelling with the Admiralty, and his relationship with his wife was also giving him cause for serious concern. He desperately needed emotional support, and Emma Hamilton gave it him. Her long experience as a courtesan did the rest. It was in Sicily that their celebrated affair began.

When the French troops under General Jean-Etienne Championnet arrived in Naples in mid-January, they found the populace a good deal more spirited than the army. The mob–the so-called
lazzaroni
–was prepared to attack the invaders tooth and nail, and for three days there was bitter house-to-house fighting. In the end the
lazzaroni
had of course to give in, but not before they had stormed and gutted the royal palace. They had done so with a clear–or almost clear–conscience. Had not their king abandoned them? And besides, would he not have preferred his treasures to go to his own subjects rather than to his French enemies? When at last peace was restored, a French officer remarked that if Bonaparte had been there in person he would probably have left not one stone of the city standing on another; it was fortunate that Championnet was a moderate and humane man. Quietly and diplomatically he established what was known as the Parthenopean Republic
²⁰³
on the French Revolutionary model. It was officially proclaimed on 23 January 1799 and acquired a number of loyal Italian adherents–though it was perfectly obvious to all that it had been the result of conquest, and that the French army of occupation was its only support.

To Queen Maria Carolina, life in Sicily was ‘worse than death’. She and her husband, she believed, had been dishonoured and disgraced. The winter of 1798–99 was perishingly cold, with snow on the ground–a rare phenomenon in Palermo–and the royal apartments possessed neither fireplaces nor even carpets. The news of the sack of the royal palace in Naples had caused her deep distress. Worst of all, perhaps, her husband had turned against her, blaming her for forcing him into that shameful campaign and for saddling him with the hopeless General Mack. But her spirit was undaunted; she dreamed only of counter-revolution and enthusiastically welcomed a proposal for just such an operation, despite the fact that it came from a most improbable quarter.

Cardinal Fabrizio Ruffo was already over sixty. He had been papal treasurer to Pope Pius VI, but in Rome all his suggested reforms had been rejected as too radical. He had consequently retired to Naples, from where he had duly followed the court to Palermo. He now proposed a landing in his native Calabria, first to defend it from any further French advance–as well as from Italian republicanism–and ultimately to recover Naples for its king. This would, he emphasised, be nothing less than a Crusade, and he had no doubt whatever that all his fellow Calabrians would rally to the Cross.

Ruffo landed as planned on 7 February, with eight companions. Eighty armed
lazzaroni
joined him almost at once, and by the end of the month the strength of the ‘Christian Army of the Holy Faith’ had risen to 17,000. He was a born leader, and quickly won their love and trust; in 1799, wrote his secretary–biographer Sacchinelli, ‘there was not a miserable peasant in all Calabria but had a crucifix on one side of his bed, a gun on the other.’ On 1 March the Cardinal was able to establish his headquarters in the important city of Monteleone. Catanzaro followed, and then Cotrone. Admittedly, he had his problems. His ramshackle army was totally without discipline, his ‘Crusaders’ comporting themselves no better than their medieval predecessors; Cotrone, for example, was delivered over to a sack from which it never recovered. Such atrocities could not but damage his reputation, though he personally was mild and merciful, always preferring peaceful conversion to violence. But his momentum was unstoppable, and his successes encouraged other, similar movements throughout south Italy. He himself, having recovered the whole of Calabria, marched eastwards into Apulia, where he had similar success. By the beginning of June he was at the gates of Naples–which, thanks to a blockade of the bay by a British fleet under Rear Admiral Sir Thomas Troubridge, was by now on the brink of starvation.

On 11 June, hearing of the Cardinal’s approach, the people of Naples broke out in open rebellion. There was fighting throughout the city. Desperate for food, mercilessly bombarded by the French from the Sant’ Elmo, Nuovo and Ovo castles, the
lazzaroni
fell on every Jacobin that they could lay their hands on, French or Italian, with unbridled barbarity. There are accounts of unspeakable atrocities: of dismemberment and cannibalism, of severed heads paraded on pikes or kicked around like footballs, of women suspected of Jacobinism being subjected to ghastly humiliations. The horrified Cardinal did what he could, but many of his own men had plunged joyfully into the bloodbath; in any case, against mob hysteria he was powerless. The orgy of destruction continued for a week. Negotiations were seriously impeded by the inability of the commanders of the three castles to communicate with one another, and it was only on the 19th that the French formally capitulated, St Elmo alone still holding out. Even then there were problems: the King and Queen–and of course the Hamiltons–insisted that no mercy be shown to any of the Jacobin survivors, while Ruffo and his friends saw all too clearly the danger of bringing home a royal couple who thought only of revenge.

Nelson, understandably but most unfortunately, took the monarchist side. Politically he was extraordinarily naive, his knowledge of the situation in Naples being limited to the highly tendentious opinions that he had picked up from the King and Queen and the Hamiltons. He spoke not a word of any language but his own. As a down-to-earth, right-wing English Protestant he mistrusted the Cardinal, and on his arrival in Naples had no hesitation in overruling him, insisting–as his friends also insisted–on unconditional surrender. Some 1,500 rebels, whom Ruffo had saved from the mob and to whom he had given refuge in the municipal granaries, marched out according to the terms of the capitulation, expecting safe conduct to their homes. They were seized by the new royalist government, and many of them were executed. Was Nelson guilty of betraying them? Probably not. All that we know of his character suggests that he would never knowingly have done such a thing, but the Hamiltons’ influence was paramount and he always accepted their point of view.

He has also been condemned, with a good deal more justification, for his treatment of Commodore Francesco Caracciolo, the former senior officer of the Neapolitan navy who had transferred his allegiance to the republicans. After ten days on the run in disguise, Caracciolo had been found hiding in a well and was brought before Nelson on the
Foudroyant
. At ten in the morning of 30 June he was court-martialled, at noon he was found guilty of high treason and condemned to death, and at five in the afternoon he was hanged from the yardarm. There his body remained until sunset–it was virtually midsummer–when the rope was cut and it fell into the sea. He had been allowed no witnesses for his defence, no priest to hear his last confession. His request to be shot rather than hanged was refused outright. Traitor he may have been, but he had deserved better than that. Why had Nelson allowed it? Simply because of his infatuation with Emma. With a ship and the ocean beneath him he was invincible, infallible; on land he was literally out of his element, and when in the arms of his mistress little better than a child.

Leaving Maria Carolina in Palermo, the King returned to Naples in the first week of July, but he did not stay there long. Never, during his forty years on the throne, had he believed that he had enemies in the city; now he knew that he did, and the knowledge had shaken him to the core. Henceforth he preferred the safety of Palermo, where he could still fool himself that he was popular. On 8 August he sailed back into its harbour with Nelson on the
Foudroyant
. The Queen came on board, and the two together then made their formal disembarkation to a salute of twenty-one guns before driving in state to a
Te Deum
in the cathedral.