Inglorious Royal Marriages

by Leslie Carroll

  Unfortunately, Maria Carolina and Ferdinand were not able to broker as many matches as they might have liked, because smallpox—the scourge of the eighteenth century—claimed the lives of so many of their children, despite the queen’s progressive insistence on inoculation. Each death devastated her, yet she could scarcely spare the time to mourn. By 1789, pockets of rebellion were at the Neapolitan doorstep. Soon Naples would be flooded with royalist refugees.

  While many of the issues of the French Revolution were indeed endemic to France, the events did not occur in a vacuum; nor was it solely a copycat uprising of the American Revolution fomented in the 1770s. The world was on fire in the months before the storming of the Bastille. By early 1789, the Hapsburg dominions were in revolt, because Emperor Joseph II’s subjects were convinced that he had destroyed the economy of central Europe. Austria had already depleted its military resources in Eastern conflicts, and had been decimated by the Turks.

  Then, as part of a westward-moving domino effect, the Austrian Netherlands exploded. Maria Carolina’s sister Maria Christine and her husband, the Duke of Saxe-Teschen, watched in horror as Antwerp was flooded with revolutionaries venting their frustration on all Hapsburgs; the emperor was no longer the single target of their animosity. The insurgents in the Austrian Netherlands then encouraged their Dutch counterparts to rebel.

  North of Italy, the Magyars were on the brink of revolt in Hungary, and peasants were leading uprisings in Bohemia (which comprised a portion of the present-day Czech Republic), as well as in other Eastern European regions. As Emperor Joseph lay dying, his own chancellor abandoned him. After issuing orders reversing all of his progressive reforms, Maria Carolina’s brother died of tuberculosis on February 20, 1790. Joseph was succeeded by their brother Leopold, who was able to abate the crisis in Hungary later that year.

  During the madness, a pregnant Maria Carolina was busy arranging marriages for three of her oldest children with a trio of Leopold’s offspring. By this time, after fifteen births, the queen’s health was understandably strained, and world events did nothing to soothe her frazzled nerves. She began to suffer bouts of dizziness. This had not deterred Ferdinand from his conjugal visits, so she was soon enceinte for a sixteenth time. Doctors did not want to treat her symptoms, for fear she would miscarry. Pregnant for half her life, Maria Carolina remarked, “I sincerely hope this will be my last child.” She was wrong; there would be two more.

  About to become a grandmother for the first time, the queen was more concerned about her first child Teresa’s health than her own. Teresa, the wife of Leopold’s widowed son Francis (who would eventually succeed him as emperor), bore a daughter, Marie Louise.

  On December 17, 1792, a French squadron appeared in the Bay of Naples. The flagship dropped anchor within firing distance of the Neapolitan fortress of the Castel dell’Ovo. An immediate apology from Maria Carolina was demanded for her having insulted the ambassador from the fledgling French Republic—which had deposed her beloved sister and brother-in-law, imprisoning the royal family—or else the French navy would bombard the city. A craven Ferdinand hastily promised neutrality and the fleet weighed anchor.

  The execution of Louis XVI in January 1793, followed that October by the judicial murder of Marie Antoinette, marked a sea change in Maria Carolina’s personality, as well as in her governance of Naples. Determined to prevent the violence from spreading to her door, and aware that the progressive ideas that had fomented the Revolution in France had been spawned in the salons and coffeehouses frequented by the intelligentsia, the Neapolitan queen cracked down on the very groups she had once championed for their enlightened minds. She herself had been a member of the arcane Illuminati; the society was now banned.

  Vengeance was Maria Carolina’s byword; she became hell-bent on rooting out all revolutionary ideals within her realm, resorting to a network of spies and a secret police force comprised of informants from every stratum of society. Those in the highest echelon filed their reports via clandestine nocturnal visits to a chamber within the Palazzo Reale called the sala oscura—the dark room. Naples was in the grip of paranoia; her citizens were terrified of the twin threats of foreign invasion and the domestic secret police. Even siblings and cousins of members of the royal household were tried for treason.

  “This infamous revolution has made me cruel,” Maria Carolina wrote in 1795. She recounted an incident at one of the intellectual clubs “where many of the nobility spat upon, reviled and finally pierced my portrait with knives, inciting each other to repeat these gestures to the original.” She defended her husband against their common enemy. “Personally I scorn the madness of these people, but when it rages against their King—and what a King!—an affectionate father, devoted to them, just and good, such as they do not deserve, I cannot forgive them for it.”

  Just as Marie Antoinette had become the locus of her subjects’ hatred, Maria Carolina became the target of vicious innuendo and slander, the wildly mistrusted outsider who was the architect of all their misfortunes. This was the fate of many royal brides, who, in the opinion of their adopted countrymen, had overstepped their bounds and become more than the mother of an heir.

  Rumors abounded that Maria Carolina had emptied the Neapolitan treasury for her own gains and self-indulgent political schemes. British ambassador William Hamilton observed that although Ferdinand remained as popular as ever, “the Queen of Naples is by no means popular, but as her power is evident, she is greatly feared.”

  In the space of a few years, Maria Carolina had gone from being an enlightened sovereign to a neurotic one, but not without reason. By the mid-1790s, French Republican troops had begun to press past France’s borders, west into Hapsburg terrain, and south into Italy and Spain. Naples was within their sights, and despite the queen’s efforts to quash them, many Jacobin sympathizers, homegrown Neapolitans as well as French expatriates, already dwelled within the realm. Maria Carolina had to continue to feign interest in her husband’s amusements in order to maintain her influence over him. Even at this dire juncture, Ferdinand might have declared Naples a neutral territory, were it not for the queen’s insistence on revenge for the murder of the French monarchs.

  In 1796, Ferdinand finally decided to take control of his own kingdom, in the face of a Napoleonic invasion. That October, he signed the Treaty of Brescia, but the terms for Naples were so unfavorable, they placed his realm in an untenable position. To avoid being run over roughshod by the French army, he had agreed to “indemnify” Napoleon with the astronomical sum of eight million francs. Maria Carolina was outraged by her husband’s capitulation to the treaty.

  By 1797, Italy was embroiled in open warfare with the new French Republic. After Rome fell to their army, Ferdinand personally assumed command of the Neapolitan troops. It was his first taste of combat ever—and was an unmitigated disaster for his men and his monarchy, opening the door to the revolutionaries.

  With the encouragement of Britain’s preeminent naval strategist, Lord Nelson, who had been charged with protecting England’s Neapolitan allies from Napoleon, Maria Carolina convinced her husband to launch a preemptive military strike. On November 29, 1798, Ferdinand led thirty thousand troops into Rome, with the aim of liberating the Eternal City from the French menace and forestalling Napoleon’s troops from heading south into Naples.

  Having lulled the inexperienced king into a false sense of security, Bonaparte’s army quietly surrounded the equally amateurish Neapolitan soldiers on all sides. Within two days, they had retaken Rome. Ferdinand donned a disguise and fled home in disgrace. In retaliation for Ferdinand’s violation of the Treaty of Brescia, Napoleon ordered an invasion of Naples.

  The royal spouses disagreed on what course to take. Ferdinand insisted upon remaining on his Neapolitan throne. Backed by Lord Nelson and the Hamiltons, Maria Carolina endorsed a flight to safety in their sister kingdom of Sicily. With Emma Hamilton acting as a courier, in December 1798, plans
were secretly hatched to spirit the royal family, their household effects, and approximately two thousand members of their retinue from the palace. The queen packed up, at one modern estimate, some £2.5 million worth of money, crown jewels, and treasure, and safely stowed it at the British embassy.

  Other personal effects were being jettisoned, sold, or worse—as the royal family prepared for all eventualities. Maria Carolina wrote to her foreign minister, the Marchese Gallo, “. . . We have got rid of our silver . . . Not even coffee-pots, all is gone. The King has given up 392 horses and 300 dogs, and reduced his hunting grounds. . . . Yesterday he had the wild beasts of the menagerie killed. . . . From one minute to the next we expect the French squadron of fifty-four sails. . . . If the French exceed this number, we have informed them that the surplus will be regarded as hostile. . . .”

  Despite Maria Carolina’s despair over the fate of her nation and her family, Napoleon’s undeniable genius would always impress her, regardless of their mutual enmity. “I wish this rare and extraordinary man to succeed . . . outside Italy,” she wrote to Gallo, as the royal family prepared to flee Bonaparte’s approaching troops. “I foresee that this world will resound with his name, and history will immortalize him. He will be great in all things, in war, diplomacy, conduct, resolution, talent, genius: he will be the greatest man of our century. . . . Cultivate in him friendly sentiments for Naples and the desire not to injure us.”

  Five days before Christmas, violence reached the gates of the Palazzo Reale, as loyalist mobs clashed with the Jacobin revolutionaries. The queen was convinced that their own subjects wished to take them hostage. Ultimately, she and Ferdinand were able to placate their supporters, but the mollification was short-lived, and Naples erupted into chaos.

  Maria Carolina was not about to endure the fate of her sister and brother-in-law. When the going got tough, the Neapolitan monarchs fled. Unlike the French sovereigns, at least they were successful. But first they were compelled to hole themselves up in the palace for three days—essentially under house arrest—because their subjects, fearing they might escape, kept a vigilant eye on them. Under cloak of darkness, the royal family was finally able to sneak away during a masquerade ball, boarding Nelson’s flagship, the H.M.S. Vanguard. Looking forward to his daily hunting in the sister kingdom he had ruled for four decades but had never before seen, Ferdinand had already sent the royal dogs ahead.

  It should have been a short sea voyage across the Bay of Naples to Palermo, but the flotilla bearing the royal family, their personal property, and hundreds of retainers was caught in a horrific storm on December 23, 1798, causing tremendous damage to the Vanguard. The queen’s favorite child, six-year-old Prince Alberto, became ill on the journey and died in Lady Hamilton’s arms. By the time the ship limped into the snowy port on Christmas morning, the grief-stricken Maria Carolina no longer wished to live, let alone reign.

  After the Neapolitans registered their shock and disbelief at the disappearance of their sovereigns, some judicious royal spin-doctoring recast their departure as an extended holiday: The king had never visited his other realm and had chosen to do so now. One purported reason for his Sicilian journey was to gather military reinforcements. Yet few believed the story. Although Palermo was the other capital of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, Ferdinand and Maria Carolina were perceived by royalist and revolutionary alike not as exchanging one capital city for the other, but as abandoning their Neapolitan thrones.

  Following their cloak-and-dagger departure, the monarchs ordered the willful destruction of their naval fleet. All Neapolitan ships were to be torched, to prevent the French from capturing the vessels and enlarging their own navy, then turning the guns against the Neapolitan citizens. It was a maritime tragedy. Years of the queen’s focus, money, and ambition went up in smoke in a matter of hours.

  In Sicily, the royal family was in crisis; the monarchs’ marriage was in a shambles; their children, as well as their offspring’s spouses, were seriously ill. The king blamed his wife for encouraging him to attack Rome, thereby poking the Napoleonic hornet’s nest—an action that he believed had led to their present situation in Palermo’s damp and chilly Colli Palace, refugees from their own mainland home. Maria Carolina was exasperated by her husband’s inaction and placidity. “Nothing is done,” she lamented. “And soon, in spite of our privations, we shall be in financial straits, for we must create everything anew, marine, artillery, everything. . . . Alas, the thought of being dishonoured and disparaged throughout Europe kills me even more than my losses and misfortunes.”

  Their reign and their marriage were both failures. Deep in mourning for little Prince Alberto, Maria Carolina detested Sicily, whose “customs and ideas” she described as being “sixty years behind the times.” She became permanently morose, although she should have had something to cheer. By the end of the eighteenth century, the queen had married off her oldest surviving children so astutely that she was being called the “mother-in-law of Europe.” Members of Maria Carolina’s immediate family sat on thrones reaching across one-third of the continent.

  This might have brought a measure of solace, but not contentment. In the early weeks of 1799, the queen’s winter cold and perpetual throat infections gave Ferdinand, fearing contagion, an additional excuse to avoid her company. Far less indisposed than she by their change in fortunes, he was glad to go out hunting “to spare himself the tedium of his wife’s tears.”

  A simple man of simple tastes, after thirty-one years, he still couldn’t handle being married to a drama queen, even when her losses—the deaths of their children and the downfall of Naples—were his as well. “Whether owing to religion, resignation, virtue or temperament, he is far more resigned to his fate than I,” griped Maria Carolina. So fed up was Ferdinand with his wife’s constant weeping and morbidity that he left the Colli Palace and took up residence in a coastal villa, cheerfully dividing his time between this sanctuary and the theater, and rarely visiting his wife or children. Maria Carolina lamented to Lady Hamilton, “I am neither consulted nor even listened to, and am excessively unhappy.”

  In the monarchs’ absence, the French, abetted by the Neapolitan Jacobins, transformed Naples from a kingdom into the Parthenopean Republic, named for an ancient Greek colony that had existed in the same locale. Trees of liberty were planted, sympathizers wore the red Phrygian caps of the French Revolutionaries, and a new tricolor flag of red, blue, and yellow was raised. Any man unfortunate enough to be named Ferdinand hastened to be rechristened, or risked assault merely for sharing the king’s name. The Neapolitan streets were renamed, too, in a similar vein to the Revolutionary-era Parisian rues, with absurd symbolic monikers such as Fortune, Triumph, Fecundity, Hilarity, Innocence, and Frugality.

  From Sicily, Ferdinand and Maria Carolina supported a counterinsurgency, but things got horrifically out of hand. The former treasurer to Pope Pius VI and superintendent of Ferdinand’s silk factory, Cardinal Fabrizio Ruffo, led a ragtag army known as the Sanfedisti (the Army of the Faith) against the French, but his rebels were just as bloodthirsty as Napoleon’s troops or the Neapolitan Jacobins. Meanwhile, the lazzarone, the previously indolent underclass so devoted to Ferdinand, independently dispensed their own brand of justice to the political enemies of their beloved monarch, viciously slaughtering hundreds of innocent and defenseless men, women, and children. Cardinal Ruffo either encouraged or turned a blind eye to the carnage.

  Finally, in an effort to halt the unremitting violence on both sides, Ruffo signed an unauthorized two-month armistice, infuriating the monarchs. Neither the king nor Maria Carolina could countenance the cardinal’s capitulation of amnesty to those who had collaborated with the enemy—the occupying French Republican army. The queen wanted vengeance, not compromise. Yet Ruffo believed he had no alternative. Moreover, he had reconquered the monarchs’ lost kingdom for them. Explaining his rationale for the truce to Acton, he wrote, “. . . Having to govern, or more precise
ly to curb, a vast population accustomed to the most resolute anarchy; having to control a score of uneducated and insubordinate leaders of light troops, all intent on pillage, slaughter and violence, is so terrible and complicated a business that it is utterly beyond my strength.” Although he had nowhere to restrain them, “1,300 Jacobins” had nonetheless been handed over to him, men “. . . [who] must have massacred or shot at least fifty in my presence without my being able to prevent it, and wounded at least two hundred, whom they even dragged here naked.” Accused of coddling the enemy, the cardinal came under suspicion of being a secret Jacobin.

  Thanks in part to Ruffo’s invasion with his Sanfedisti, in June of 1799 the Parthenopean Republic collapsed, within six months of its formation. But the real hero of the hour—at least to the Neapolitan monarchs—was Lord Nelson, acting beyond the scope of his commission by actively strategizing on behalf of a foreign government to keep them in power. Yet, with an inept and militarily inexperienced Neapolitan sovereign, and an unpopular queen who had lost all perspective and become a vengeful termagant bent on executing every revolutionary, Nelson’s unthinkable alternative would have been to allow Naples to permanently fall to Napoleon.

  The royalist crackdown was intense. While the queen stayed safely in Palermo, and Ferdinand remained aboard Nelson’s flagship in the Bay of Naples, rough justice was dispensed in their names, as trials proceeded with the ruthlessness of a personal vendetta. Yet things were not quite as bad as Maria Carolina and Ferdinand’s enemies have painted it. Out of eight thousand political prisoners, one thousand four were punished. Only a hundred and five of those were sentenced to death, although six of them were reprieved; two hundred twenty-two received life imprisonment; three hundred twenty-two were given shorter terms of incarceration; two hundred eighty-eight were deported; and sixty-seven were exiled.