The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean (78 page)

Meanwhile, quiet diplomacy was proving rather more successful. Pope Pius himself was refusing to yield an inch; so far as he was concerned, he held the Papal States for the Catholic world and was obliged by his coronation oath to pass them on to his successor. Napoleon III, by contrast, was becoming steadily more amenable to negotiation, and by what was known as the September Convention, signed on 15 September 1864, he agreed to withdraw his troops from Rome within two years. Italy in return pledged herself to guarantee papal territory against any attack, and agreed to transfer her capital within six months from Turin to Florence.

The Convention, which was to remain in force for six years, did not directly improve the prospects of incorporating Rome into the new Italian state; indeed, it seemed at least temporarily to guarantee the
status quo
. On the other hand, by putting an end to the fifteen years of French occupation it cleared the ground for the next steps, whatever these might be, and by freezing the situation in Rome it enabled the government to turn its mind to the other overriding necessity in those early years of Italian nationhood: the recovery of the Veneto. For some time past King Victor Emmanuel had been toying with the idea of an invasion of the Balkans–led, it need hardly be said, by Garibaldi–to stir up revolt among the Austrian subject peoples; with Austria fully engaged in restoring order, it would be a simple matter to occupy the Italian lands. Unfortunately Napoleon III–whose support would have been vital–had pooh-poohed the idea and the King had reluctantly put it to one side.

But now, by a stroke of quite unexpected good fortune, there appeared a
deus ex machina
who was effectively to drop both the coveted territories into Italy’s lap. This was the Prussian Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, who was now well on the way to realising his dream of uniting all the German states into a single empire. The one stumbling-block was Austria, whose influence in Germany he was determined to eliminate. He therefore approached General La Marmora–now once again Victor Emmanuel’s Chief Minister–with a proposal for a military alliance: Austria would be attacked simultaneously on two fronts, by Prussia from the north and by Italy from the west. Italy’s reward, in the event of victory, would be Venetia. La Marmora readily agreed, and Napoleon III signalled that he had no objection. The treaty was signed on 8 April 1866, and on 15 June the war began.

Six weeks later it was over. For the Prussians, a single battle was enough. It was fought at Sadowa, some sixty-five miles northeast of Prague, and it engaged the largest number of troops–some 330,000–ever assembled on a European battlefield. (It was also the first in which railways and the telegraph were used on a considerable scale.) The Prussian victory was total. It bankrupted the military resources of the Austrian Emperor Franz Josef I and opened the way to Vienna. Bismarck had achieved exactly what he wanted, and was glad to accede to Austria’s request for an armistice.

Italy, unfortunately, did less well. Her main army, under the King, La Marmora and General Enrico Cialdini, Duke of Gaeta, was defeated several times in and around Custoza–always unlucky for the house of Savoy–and at sea her navy was largely destroyed off Lissa (now the Croatian island of Vis). The only good news was provided by Garibaldi, who had delightedly obeyed a summons to lead a force of 35,000 into the Tyrol. While scoring no major victory, he certainly caused the Austrians a good deal of discomfiture. The Italian government, now settled in Florence, though mildly aggrieved that it had not been consulted over its terms, nevertheless welcomed the armistice–not least because it provided for the cession of the Veneto. Since Austria had not yet granted recognition to the new kingdom of Italy, the same procedure was followed as for Lombardy five years before: the province was ceded to Napoleon III, who instantly passed it on to Victor Emmanuel.

The cession was confirmed by a plebiscite, the result of which was a foregone conclusion. There was a measure of disappointment in that the area ceded did not include the South Tyrol–what the Italians called the Trentino–or Venezia Giulia, which included Trieste, Pola and Fiume (the modern Rijeka); for those Italy would have to wait until after the First World War. But Venice was an Italian city at last, and Italy could boast a new and invaluable port on the northern Adriatic.

Only Rome remained.

By the end of 1866 the last of the French army had left Rome. The motley array of mercenaries that Pope Pius had managed to recruit seemed to constitute little enough threat to anyone; by the beginning of 1867 the old conspirators were once again out in force. Mazzini, playing on Bismarck’s fears of a Franco-Italian alliance, was demanding money and munitions with which to overthrow the government in Florence; Garibaldi, not for the first time, was preparing for a march on Rome and actually went so far as to issue a proclamation calling on all freedom-loving Romans to rise in rebellion. Since the September Convention still had four years to run, the government had little choice but to arrest him and send him back to Caprera, but he soon escaped–he was now in his sixtieth year–reassembled his volunteers and began his promised march.

He had reckoned without the French. Napoleon III, having realised that he had withdrawn his troops too soon, sent a fresh army equipped with the deadly new
chassepot
rifles, which landed at Civitavecchia in the last week of October. The volunteers, outnumbered and outclassed, stood no chance. A day or two later, at Mentana, they met their fate. Garibaldi himself managed to slip back across the frontier into Italy–and into the arms of the authorities. Back he was sent to Caprera, where he remained–this time heavily guarded–under house arrest. His men were less lucky. No less than 1,600 of them were taken prisoner.

Yet again, by his swift reaction, the Emperor Napoleon had saved the temporal power of the Papacy; none could have expected that less than three years later he would be instrumental in bringing about its downfall. The prime mover, once again, was Bismarck, who had cunningly drawn France into a war by his threat to place a prince of the ruling Prussian house of Hohenzollern on the throne of Spain. That war was declared–by France, not Prussia–on 15 July 1870. It was to prove a bitter struggle; Napoleon was going to need every soldier he had for the fighting that lay ahead. By the end of August there was not one French soldier left in Rome.

Pope Pius was fully aware of the danger. Only his little mercenary army remained to protect him. Just three days after the declaration of war, during the First Vatican Council
²⁵⁵
and at the height of the most violent thunderstorm that any Roman could remember, he sought to bolster his position by proclaiming the doctrine of Papal Infallibility. It was a step that arguably did his cause more harm than good,
²⁵⁶
but there was little point in arguing it: Napoleon’s defeat at Sedan on 1 September spelled the end of the Second Empire and the destruction of Pius’s last hopes. In the minds of the Italian government, the only question still to be decided was one of timing: should their army occupy Rome immediately–the September Convention was on the point of expiry, and with the elimination of one of the signatories was anyway a dead letter–or should they wait for a popular rising or mutiny?

Meanwhile, Victor Emmanuel addressed a last appeal to the Pope, writing (as he put it) ‘with the affection of a son, the faith of a Catholic, the loyalty of a king and the soul of an Italian’. The security of Italy and of the Holy See itself, he continued, depended on the presence of Italian troops in Rome. Would His Holiness not accept this unalterable fact and show his benevolent cooperation? Alas, His Holiness would do no such thing. He would yield, he declared, only to violence, and even then he would put up at least a formal resistance. He was as good as his word. When Italian troops entered Rome on the morning of 20 September 1870 by the Porta Pia, they found a papal detachment waiting for them. The fighting was soon over, but not before it had left nineteen papalists and forty-nine Italians dead in the street.

Over the next few hours Italian troops swarmed through Rome, leaving only the Vatican and the Castel Sant’ Angelo, from which there now flew the white flag of surrender. There was no more resistance. Pope Pius withdrew inside the walls of the Vatican, where he remained for the last eight years of his life. The plebiscite that was held shortly afterwards registered 133,681 votes in favour of the incorporation of Rome into the Kingdom of Italy, and 1,507 against. Rome was now part of Italy not by right of conquest but by the will of its people. Only the Vatican city now remained an independent sovereign state.

It was not until 2 July 1871 that Victor Emmanuel made his official entry into his new capital. The streets were already being decorated for the occasion when he sent a telegram to the mayor, Prince Francesco Pallavicini, forbidding all signs of festivity. As a pious Catholic, he had been not only saddened but terrified when sentence of excommunication had been passed upon him. Ferdinand Gregorovius, the Prussian historian of medieval Rome, wrote in his diary that the procession was ‘without pomp, vivacity, grandeur or majesty; and that was as it should have been, for this day signals the end of the millenary rule of the Popes over Rome’. In the afternoon the King was urged to cross the river to Trastevere, where some ceremony had been prepared by the largely working-class population. He flatly refused, adding in the Piedmontese dialect of which few of those about him would have understood a word, ‘The Pope is only two steps away, and would feel hurt. I have done enough already to that poor old man.’

CHAPTER XXIX

The Queens and the Carlists

On 30 September 1868, Queen Isabel II of Spain boarded a train with her children at San Sebastian and trundled off into exile. Her departure marked the end, not only of a reign, but of perhaps the most turbulent period in the entire history of her country.

The story began with her father, Ferdinand VII, who, with her grandfather Charles IV, had in 1808 abdicated his right to the throne.
²⁵⁷
The fall of Napoleon clearly rendered these abdications null and void, and Ferdinand, having succeeded in 1814, had ruled Spain with singular ineptitude for fifteen years when, in 1829, he was widowed for the third time. None of his three wives had produced a child that survived infancy, and Ferdinand was desperate for a son. What with his crippling gout and his regular fits of apoplexy, his chances looked slim enough; but he refused to give up hope. His problem was to find a suitable wife. As it happened, his youngest brother, Francisco de Paula, was married to a daughter of King Francis I of Naples; she had been christened Maria Luisa Carlotta, but in Spain was known simply as Carlota. It was she who showed the King a miniature of her twenty-three-year-old sister, Maria Cristina, and Ferdinand looked no further. On 12 December 1829 he married the young princess at the church of Our Lady of Atocha in Madrid.

Maria Cristina was devastatingly attractive, shamelessly flirtatious, with a huge capacity for enjoyment; to the suffocating stuffiness of the Spanish court she came as an invigorating breath of fresh air. Immediately, she won all hearts. Or nearly all; for the marriage came as a severe blow to the heir apparent, the King’s younger brother Don Carlos, and even more to his wife, Maria Francisca of Braganza. They were an ill-assorted couple. Don Carlos was almost a dwarf, though fully endowed with the hideous Bourbon chin and nose; he was morbidly pious, fanatically absolutist and weak as water. To the English diarist Henry Greville he was ‘an imbecile…bigoted and perverse…a coward too, without a spark of energy or talent’. Maria Francisca by contrast was statuesque, intelligent, with a commanding presence and formidably ambitious. Heretofore she had been virtually certain of her husband’s succession; now there was a chance that it might be taken from him. And worse was to come. When, three months after the wedding, it was announced that the new Queen was pregnant, Ferdinand promulgated the old Pragmatic Sanction, whereby the even older Salic Law–barring females from the succession–was set aside. In other words, the long-awaited child, whether boy or girl, would inherit the throne of Spain.

It was a girl, born on 10 October 1830 and christened Maria Isabel Luisa. The Carlists–as the adherents of Don Carlos now came to be called–could derive little immediate comfort from the fact, but as time went on, with the King’s health steadily worsening, the prospect of a reigning queen began to cause serious concern. Then, in July 1832 on the way to his summer palace at La Granja, Ferdinand was seriously injured in a carriage accident, and two months later he still lay at the point of death. The Queen, who in those two months had seldom left his bedside, took advice from one of his chief ministers and was horrified when she was told that the whole country would immediately rally around Don Carlos. Maria Francisca, we may be sure, uttered her own dire warnings, and the King, by now barely conscious, was persuaded that the Pragmatic Sanction must be revoked if a bloodbath was to be avoided. A decree was hastily drafted, which he signed with a quavering hand. Shortly afterwards he was pronounced dead. Don Carlos, it seemed, was king.

But he was not. Suddenly, the undertakers who came to prepare the body for its lying in state detected signs of life, and slowly Ferdinand began to recover. Even so, the document which he had so recently signed, and on which the ink was scarcely dry, would probably have remained in force had it not been for his sister-in-law Carlota. The moment the astonishing news reached her in Cadiz, she ordered her carriage and set off at top speed, over 400 miles of execrable roads, for La Granja. The state of the King’s health was of relatively little interest to her, but she detested Don Carlos and his wife and had no intention of letting them deprive her niece of her rightful crown. On her arrival she went straight to the Queen, berated her for her fecklessness and demanded to see the revocation decree. When it was shown to her she snatched it out of the official’s hand and tore it to pieces.

Ferdinand lived for another year, during which he presided over an elaborate ceremony in the ancient church of Los Jeronimos in Madrid, designed to strengthen yet further the claim of his little daughter to the succession. One by one all the grandees of Spain–with one significant exception–filed past, kissing the hands of the King, the Queen and the two-year-old Infanta. Then, on 29 September 1833, Ferdinand suffered an apoplectic stroke. This time there was no resuscitation. The Infanta was proclaimed Isabel II, with her mother as regent. She was recognised by Britain, France and Portugal; Don Carlos, on the other hand, who had proclaimed himself King Charles V, was favoured by Russia, Austria, the Pope and–most surprisingly of all–Maria Cristina’s brother, Ferdinand II of Naples. As for Spain itself, it was split across the middle. Madrid and the south were overwhelmingly in favour of Isabel; many of the cities and towns of the north, however, immediately rose in support of Don Carlos. The Carlist Wars–the last in European history in which two rival claimants fought for a crown–had begun. They were to continue, on and off, for the best part of half a century.

Or perhaps even longer: it could be argued that the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War were Carlists at heart. For Carlism came to mean something a great deal more than loyalty to Don Carlos and the unwavering conviction that he was the legitimate ruler of Spain. It also represented all the old reactionary Spanish traditions: devout Catholicism, with unquestioning obedience to the Church and even nostalgia for the Inquisition (‘that most august tribune, brought down by angels from heaven to earth’); political absolutism under an authoritarian and all-powerful king (never, in any circumstances, a queen); and that unbending austerity which was for so long a feature of the Spanish character. Set against all this was the great wave of liberalism which swept across Europe throughout the nineteenth century and was now improbably represented by little Isabel and her loyal subjects. The Spanish royal family had never, heaven knows, been known for their left-wing views; compared with the Carlists, however, they were rabid revolutionaries. Anyway, they desperately needed liberal support, so liberals they reluctantly became–proving it by reinstating the remarkably liberal constitution of 1812.
²⁵⁸

Spain was now rent by civil war–and of all forms of warfare civil war is the most cruel. Fighting was fierce throughout the north, with hideous atrocities committed on men, women and children by both sides. Finally, in August 1839, the Carlists secretly negotiated a surrender agreement. Don Carlos sadly crossed the border into France, where he, his second wife
²⁵⁹
and his three sons were to maintain a mildly ridiculous little court at Bourges. He lived another fifteen years, but never returned to Spain.

Towards the end of August 1840, the Regent Maria Cristina set off for Barcelona, ostensibly to take the waters at Caldas but in fact to meet the country’s leading general, Baldomero Espartero, and to ask his advice. The constitution of 1812 had conferred a considerable degree of independence on the country’s municipalities, many of which had taken what she considered unwarranted advantage of their new privileges during the recent war. The more conservative members of the government were now keen to cut them once again down to size by what was known as the Municipal Bill, and Maria Cristina wholeheartedly agreed with them; the liberals, on the other hand, were determined that they should do no such thing. It was obvious that serious trouble was brewing. Considering that Catalonia had never had much love for the royal family, Maria Cristina was surprised and gratified by the warmth of her reception; it proved, however, to be nothing like the rapturous welcome accorded to Espartero a day or two later, and when the general informed her of his strong opposition to the bill, such was her irritation that–just to spite him–she signed it on the spot.

That night Barcelona erupted in protest. The palace was surrounded by a furious mob, cheering the General and the constitution and threatening death to the Regent and her ministers. At 1 a.m. a terrified Maria Cristina begged Espartero to bid the crowds disperse, but he refused to do so until she had revoked her signature to the bill. She did so, then a few days later attempted to change her mind; once again, chaos resulted. She fled to Valencia, but the fuse had been lit: on 1 September Madrid rose in revolt and denounced the government, and other cities quickly followed its example. Only when she swallowed what was left of her pride and invited Espartero to form a government did a semblance of order return. It was then that Maria Cristina dropped her bombshell. She announced her abdication as Regent. Espartero begged her to reconsider, but she was adamant. Her last words to him are said to have been, ‘I made you a Duke [of Morella], but I could not make you a gentleman.’ She then said goodbye to the two little Infantas, now aged ten and eight respectively–the younger, Maria Luisa Fernanda, had been born in 1832–and on 17 October, with her second, semi-secret family,
²⁶⁰
a vast amount of money and virtually all the jewels, silver and linen in the palace,
²⁶¹
boarded a ship for France.

The loot that Maria Cristina had taken with her was probably enough to have kept her and her family in comfort for the rest of their lives; in fact, her abdication proved to be short-lived. She and her family received the warmest of welcomes in Paris, King Louis-Philippe travelling out as far as Fontainebleau to meet them, and were given a splendid apartment at the Palais-Royal. In December they paid a visit to Rome, where she signed a written act of repentance for the anticlerical laws to which she had given her approval, receiving a full absolution from Pope Gregory XVI before returning to Paris. But then, on 8 November 1843, at the age of thirteen, Queen Isabel II was declared to be legally of age. There was now no political obstacle to her mother’s return to Spain; such problems as existed were chiefly financial. The liberals demanded that Maria Cristina should first pay compensation for all that she had taken away at the time of her departure. This resulted in endless legal wrangling, particularly after she had lodged an enormous counterclaim in respect of an unpaid pension, but by the time matters were finally settled she was substantially richer than ever. At last she was ready for her homecoming.

At every stage of her journey through Spain she received a tumultuous welcome. She showed, too, that after fifteen years–and despite a formidable increase in weight–she had lost none of her youthful exuberance and charm. On her return to Madrid the court recovered, almost overnight, all its old brilliance. Balls, banquets and dazzling receptions followed thick and fast, at all of which Maria Cristina completely overshadowed her somewhat surly daughter who, realising that she was outclassed, grew surlier still. Such moods, however, are not uncommon in teenage girls, and Isabel too was soon to change.

On 3 April 1846 the Comte de Bresson, French ambassador to the Court of Spain, sent his Foreign Minister, François Guizot, a terse message. ‘
La Reine,’
he reported blandly, ‘
est nubile depuis deux heures
.’
²⁶²
Few ambassadors have ever been quicker off the mark, but Maria Cristina, it need hardly be said, had not waited for this happy moment. For months already, she had devoted most of her waking hours to the question of her daughter’s marriage. No one, of course, thought of consulting Isabel herself. Away in Bourges, Don Carlos was intriguing hard on behalf of his son, the Count of Montemolin, even going so far as to abdicate in his favour. Such a marriage would obviously have eliminated the Carlist question once and for all; it would, however, have relegated Isabel to the status of Queen Consort–a position which her mother refused absolutely to contemplate. In Paris, Louis-Philippe favoured his own son, the Duc de Montpensier, while in London–where the thought of a royal union between France and Spain was anathema–Queen Victoria and Lord Palmerston were pressing for the Prince Consort’s cousin, Prince Leopold of Coburg. This in turn was unacceptable to Louis-Philippe, who politely pointed out that there were already Coburg princes in Brussels, London and Lisbon and that four would be really too many. The King of Naples proposed his brother the Count of Trapani, but as he was studying in Rome with the Jesuits, who were at that time banned in Spain, his claim was not even seriously considered.