Nelson’s biographers from Southey to Mahan have painted one little black spot on the hero of Trafalgar. Only in Mr. Clennel Wilkinson’s volume, that appeared but yesterday, has this “spot” blended into the natural color of things. Even here it is not fully washed away. I do not refer, of course, to the indiscretions of his private life but to his acts as a sea officer—to the haste with which Admiral Francesco Caracciolo, the revolutionary, was executed: condemned at noon on board Foudroyant, Nelson’s flagship, by a court of Neapolitan officers and hanged at five to the yardarm of the Minerva—over which much ink has been spilled.
This speck of tarnish always annoyed me in my Nelson and I determined to search for data that seemed not to have been at the disposal of previous writers. The proceedings of the court are not on record; the presence of Emma Hamilton at its sitting (she came ostensibly as interpreter) and the disregard for delay of twenty-four hours “for care of the soul” as recommended by Cardinal Ruffo, leader of what was called the “Christian Army,” in spite of the strong seconding by Sir William Hamilton, seemed evidence of a “hidden hand.” For Nelson held over all other political prisoners till the arrival of their rulers. I began to search. I went to the archives of Naples, read Nelson’s letters to Acton, the King’s minister at Palermo, and Sir William Hamilton’s to the same, written that day on board Foudroyant, but learned nothing new. When I asked the curator if there were not something further to be found somewhere in Italy, throwing light on Caracciolo’s death, he gave me a line to the keeper of the royal archives in Rome, who had published several tomes on the beginnings of the risorgimento in the kingdom of Naples. This valuable introduction gave me access to the journal of the Queen of Naples, a document never published, and one that never can be published because the lady out-Casanovas Casanova.
In putting together the mise-en-scene of June 29, 1799, on board Foudroyant, it is important to paint carefully the tenor of the eighteenth century mind. A Bourbon king’s head had fallen in Paris only six years before; the cruel trial of Marie Antoinette, sister of Maria Carolina, Queen of the Two Sicilies or, as we generally put it, the Kingdom of Naples, still outraged lovers of justice and fair play. The September Massacres had rocked society across the channel. The same opprobrium attached to the men who committed these acts as today attaches to those in Russia who have tried to exterminate property holders and make a new division of the spoil. The majority of literate people in Europe and America have a strong distaste for acts of violence now as then. In eighteenth century England, there was more than distaste; there was mortal fear and reciprocal hatred, for the French had professed hatred for all the world that did not approve their revolution, and Paris is nearer to Dover than Moscow to most of us. General Bonaparte had already risen to that leadership which the Directory’s armies needed to carry them from victory to victory. This was no time to quibble over an hour or two of reprieve in the execution of a man who threw over his king and country to turn his guns on men remaining loyal to their allegiance; others, made bold by their escape from punishment, might throw their fortunes with the French. Bourbon rule in Naples was misrule certainly; but it was not a question of Bourbon rule opposed as later to the sceptered strut of Murat armed with a Napoleonic code. It was law and some order as opposed to massacre and much chaos.
Regina Maria Carolina, rex in petticoats, was very frightened. She heard that their dear Francesco, who had followed them into exile, had gone over to the French, to the people who had tortured and executed her sister. Maria Carolina had, I believe, with her animal vice of promiscuous mating the animal virtue of being ready fiercely to defend the results of that mating against all dangers. There were some eight or nine of them, princelings and princesses, with rather charming curly heads, as depicted on canvases in the Naples Gallery. She did not mean to let these fall under the guillotine or into the hands of a Simon to die of tortures in a Conciergerie. Not alone her crown was at stake but the lives of her children. And then she knew her Ferdie—she had relieved him of the scepter and pressed into his hands a fowling piece, for he was a passionate shot, and she the true daughter of a dominant mother—Maria Theresa. Now Ferdinand was very fond of Francesco Caracciolo, he might be said to be his greatest crony—for even a king must have a crony. The Neapolitan admiral had asked Nelson’s permission to follow his monarch into exile on that memorable night of December 21, when Nelson and Emma hustled them all on board Foudroyant and themselves brought up the rear guard with the crown jewels. Not long after, when word came that the French were surrounding Naples and the Neapolitan anti-Bourbonists had joined them, Caracciolo asked permission once more to go over to the mainland to protect his property. He sailed in the king’s ship. The next thing heard was that he had used the king’s ship and the king’s guns to murder the king’s loyal subjects—he had turned his guns upon His Sicilian Majesty’s ship Minerva. It was almost unbelievable. But Maria Carolina had to believe it and she knew the suave admiral was capable of establishing an alibi, at least with Ferdinand, in case he were caught. Soft-hearted, chicken-livered Ferdinand was incapable of executing a personal friend. Rex petticoats must act.
Nelson insisted that if he were to make the world safe for Bourbons, King and Queen should at least step into the picture promptly, at the crucial moment. As they were too frightened to come with him in Foudroyant he left the Seahorse with instructions for Acton to shove them on board as soon as the revolution was well in hand. Emma Hamilton, more daring and with other considerations beside, gladly accepted passage in Foudroyant along with the British minister, her husband. Both were supposed to act as interpreters for Nelson. Emma was out to see the fun.
Now the entries in Maria Carolina’s journal show that, in the capacity of monarch rather than friend, she exacted a solemn promise from the powerful Emma to see to it that Caracciolo, if caught and tried, be dispatched quickly, before the vacillating Ferdinand, with his great friendship for the renegade, appear in the Bay of Naples. Nelson was ordered by her as head of the Neapolitan state to execute Caracciolo, if found guilty.
The scene is now high noon of a warm June day on board the ship-of-the-line Foudroyant, riding at anchor in the liquid indigo that separates Capri from the base of Vesuvius and the half-moon city which climbs proudly upward into the blue. Vesuvius is smoking in lazy indifference to its city in turmoil, Sant’ Elmo, crowning the heights, still in the hands of the French, although Uovo and Nuovo that guard the harbor so picturesquely have struck the white flag. The bay is crowded with craft, French, Neapolitan, British ships, and on H.M.S. Foudroyant barefoot sailors are climbing the rigging, scrubbing, polishing, shining, to get the flagship up to Nelson’s standard after the voyage from Palermo. In the after cabin, a very grave company is sitting, augmented as is unusual in such a body, by a cardinal in crimson robes and by one of the most noted beauties of all time. It is a court-martial composed of Neapolitan officers. The president of the court, Count Thurn, of Austrian descent, is captain of the Minerva, whose men were killed by Caracciolo’s guns; but the senior officer present, the greatest sailor in the world, already victor of the Nile, thanked by czar and sultan for saving the world from French domination, the personality that crowns the scene. He is glittering, for he loves to wear his diamond stars, and his forelock hangs over the gash, scarce healed, he had received at Aboukir. A prisoner is brought in between two masters-at-arms, a pitiful figure described in Sir William Hamilton’s letter to Acton as “half dead already with fatigue” and by Nelson writing the same day as “being brought on board with Cassano’s son, Don Giulio, Pacifico the priest, and other villainous traitors, with a long beard and never looking up.”
He had no defense and he said nothing. Indeed, he had done exactly what his accusers said and the only reason conceivable for his doing it must have been that be thought the French generals in the fortresses on shore would hold out against Nelson in his wooden ships. He had gambled and he had lost and he knew he had to pay the penalty. He went out to die without a murmur, and it is a pity he could not at least have known that his fellow-citizens a century later, feeling that fundamentally he was for liberty and that liberty might come from the French, named their finest avenue for him.
Unfortunately, Emma Hamilton’s testimony, if she gave any, is lost to us with the proceedings of the court. I am sure it was colorful, exaggerated, feminine, and dealt with the personal misdemeanors of the accused against King and Queen, and his ingratitude. When the court had found him guilty of firing on his king’s ship and flag, of killing two men and wounding others, he was condemned as a traitor. Lord Nelson was asked to pronounce the sentence. He rose and said solemnly, “I will write it.” Being handed pen and paper he wrote laboriously with his left hand:
I approve the sentence of death pronounced upon Francesco Caracciolo, and it shall be executed by hanging at the yardarm of H.M.S. Foudroyant at five o’clock this day, June 29th, 1799.
(signed) Nelson and Bronte
The ambassadors of God and of the King of England were for delay “for care of the soul,” but Maria Carolina had relied on Emma and Emma evidently “did her stuff”—Nelson but carried out the orders of the king in petticoats who did not trust the soft Bourbon heart that went with a sheepshead and had bleated itself into massacre and annihilation in Paris. The Queen had taken measures for the safety of the cause, for Caracciolo was without a doubt the most popular and the strongest adherent of the anti-Bourbon party.
Nelson upon his entry with the fleet on the twenty-fifth had revoked what he called the “infamous treaty,” an arrangement made by Ruffo and a British captain called Foote, by which the Neapolitan conspirators in the castles of Uovo and Nuovo were to be set free and sent off to France with their French allies in return for the surrender of the strongholds. Foote apparently had had no authority from his commander in chief to make any treaty and the fortresses were about to capitulate. Nelson held the prisoners from the fortresses over for execution until His Sicilian Majesty should arrive. There were among them men quite as prominent as Prince Caracciolo. One of them, Ruvo, the eldest son of the Duca d’Andria, long known for his anti-Bourbon sentiments, later died a patriot’s death. Caracciolo’s seems, therefore, to have been a different case—his execution preordained by his sovereign. Meanwhile the British fleet was in command of the situation although, with Brueys but lately escaped from Brest (he took immediate cover when he heard that Nelson was afloat and looking for him), it had other fish to fry than the restitution of a throne to the king of the Two Sicilies.
The show was over and, on July 11, faint-hearted Ferdinand with his masterful Queen sailed into the bay in the Seahorse and repaired on board the flagship to report to the “throne-propper”. It was a full twelve days since Caracciolo’s body had been cut down from the fore yardarm and thrown into the bay. The ghastly story runs that on his first morning after re-entry into the capital the King, shaving himself close to a porthole in Foudroyant, saw a thing bobbing up in the water beside him and recognized the nigh unrecognizable face of Caracciolo. Screaming, “Ecco! Francesco! my poor friend, why do you visit me?” he rushed on deck in dressing gown and slippers with lather still on his face to have the corpse sunk.
Nelson again propped Ferdinand upon his throne where he remained for several years till the plumed and strutting Murat dislodged him. Nelson was weary; his wound received at the Nile and the excesses of passion, eating, and drinking into which the hitherto ascetic seaman had been plunged by maenad Emma, had worn him out. He craved the more moderate pace in England to rest him, for he had Copenhagen soon to face and Trafalgar loomed—after years of chase—upon his ultimate horizon. The triumphal progress overland through Central Europe began, and in its orgies the troubles of Naples were forgotten—not however by Foote, whom Nelson had censured for making unwarrantably the treaty he termed “infamous.” Foote sought to justify himself in letters to the Admiralty and to his friends and to condemn Nelson’s actions during the last month in Naples, and upon these documents probably is based the opinion of Nelson’s biographers.
In Europe, the eighteenth century has but moved across the Carpathians, and as we study it there in its excesses, its condemnations, its violence, its executions let us remember the victor of the Nile and all he had to face. Looking backward on his actions, even upon this bit of “tarnish” (his harshness toward Jacobins) and with the understanding of another century, looking on those Jacobins may help us to comprehend our own Jacobins. Let us never forget that he who ordered the execution of Caracciolo destroyed the power of the greatest despot Western civilization ever knew and made Europe safe and free, such as it is, for us.
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Of all the grand miscalculations of the German High Command none is more remarkable than their inability to comprehend the meaning of war with the American Union. It is perhaps the crowning example of the unwisdom of basing a war policy upon the computation of material factors alone. The war effort of 120,000,000 educated people, equipped with science, and possessed of the resources of an unattackable continent, nay, of a New World, could not be measured by the number of drilled soldiers, of trained officers, of forged cannon, of ships of war they happened to have at their disposal.—Winston Churchill.