654 Chapter XXVII
bided their time until all the revolutionary republics in Italy might be destroyed.
For a while it seemed that Austria would recognize the Roman Republic (taking
Bologna and Ferrara for itself ), if only the French would abandon the Cisalpine.
Even the most moderate and upper- class Italian republicans, even Melzi d’Eril,
the Cisalpine representative at the Congress of Rastadt, were dismayed by signs of
conservatism in the French Directory (as in the Floréal coup d’état), and alarmed
by the thought that the French, to prevent a renewal of war on the Continent,
might abandon them to the Hapsburgs. The minister of the Ligurian Republic in
Paris, on hearing of the riotous demonstration against Bernadotte in Vienna, be-
lieved that Austria planned an early attack in Italy. He drew the only conclusion
possible even for a moderate: “We and all the other democratic republics,” he re-
ported to Genoa, “will be unable to avoid making common cause with France
against the common enemy.”^23
In September it was learned in Italy that the British had destroyed the French
fleet at the mouth of the Nile. Bonaparte with the best of the French army was cut
off. Nelson docked at Naples on September 23. He was a pronounced anti- Jacobin,
and his enthusiastic monarchism made him a warm advocate even of the Bourbon
monarchy at Naples. He was hailed as a saviour, and his officers enjoyed a series of
fetes and triumphs. Nelson’s arrival reinforced other British influences by which the
royal court had long been surrounded, since the king’s chief minister was an English
expatriate, Acton, and the queen’s confidante was the famous English adventuress,
Emma Hamilton, wife of the British ambassador. While both the British and the
Austrian governments warned against premature action, and preferred to wait until
the French attacked Naples, which they stubbornly refused to do, Nelson and the
English colony persuaded King Ferdinand to force the issue. The chaos at Rome,
and peasant insurrection in the Roman departments, seemed to offer an irresistible
opportunity, especially since, as Sir William Hamilton wrote to Grenville, Rome
was defended by “not more than 3,000 Poles and French.”^24 The Neapolitan troops
were commanded by an expert borrowed from Austria, General Mack—a soldier
much dogged by misfortune, who had been worsted in Belgium in 1794, and was to
surrender to Napoleon in 1805 at the famous capitulation of Ulm.
Mack with his Neapolitans invaded the Roman Republic on November 23.
Pushing through without opposition to Rome itself, they tore up the trees of lib-
erty, and King Ferdinand appeared in person to promise the restoration of order
and true religion. While panic and consternation gripped the Roman republicans,
the French general, Championnet, gathering a force much smaller than Mack’s,
soon turned the tables. By a movement equally speedy in the reverse direction, he
put Mack to flight, and in January 1799 the French, along with Polish and Cisal-
pine forces, entered the city of Naples, against the fierce but unorganized opposi-
tion of the lazzaroni, or populace. The king and queen fled abruptly to Sicily, tak-
ing off with 50,000,000 gold francs’ worth of valuables and their English friends in
Nelson’s ships to Palermo. The Neapolitan Bourbons, like the House of Orange,
made themselves unabashedly into wards of the British government.
23 Zaghi, 106, 180, 236.
24 Camb. Hist. Br. For. Policy, I, 583.