Читать книгу Patriotic Lady - Bowen Marjorie - Страница 26

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The Kingdom of Naples spread over half the map of Italy, reaching to the frontier of the Papal States, the very gates of Rome, it also comprised the rich, fantastic Island of Sicily.

For long a Spanish province under a Viceroy, Naples had been given a King in the person of Ferdinand IV, third son of Carlos III of Spain. Ferdinand, when a child eight years old, had been installed in Naples under the tutelage of a Tuscan Minister, Bernardo Tanucci, who worked wholly under the directions of the Spanish Cabinet.

This state of affairs came to an end with the King's marriage to a daughter of Maria Theresa and Francis of Lorraine, who speedily broke off connections with her father-in-law and gathered all the business of the Kingdom into her own nervous hands; by a clause of her marriage contract she was to have a seat in the Cabinet on the birth of a Prince, and the heir had duly appeared.

To assist her in this responsibility Queen Maria Carolina had introduced a foreign favourite into her Council, an Englishman of good birth, one John Acton, who had been employed at her brother's Tuscan capital, and who fitted very cleverly into the part of adviser of the passionate Queen who ruled the foolish King. Acton had no idea in his handsome head save that of personal aggrandisement and it mattered little to him how the Kingdom was run, as long as he had money and power and Maria Carolina was pleased.

Under these three, the lazy ignorant King, touched with hereditary imbecility, the ambitious, superstitious, violent Queen and the incapable, greedy, unscrupulous favourite, Naples was as badly governed as a country could be. A system already out-of-date was eaten into by every manner of corruption and abuse; the King regarded his position as a vulgar joke, the Queen hers as a chance to enrich and advance her brood of sickly children, Acton his as a piece of luck to be exploited to the utmost.

To anyone of sense, who looked beneath the surface, it would have been obvious that South Italy was in the state of the seething pot that so nearly boils over, that bubbles already gather at the brim.

But this surface was very brilliant, and no one about the Court did look beneath it. What did obsolete laws, a crazy system of finance, an impoverished country, the discontent of the intellectuals matter, as long as the sun shone and there was money for games and festivals, for hunts and concerts?

Sir William had never looked below the glittering crust on which he had sported so long and so gaily. While he had been going into raptures over the discoveries at Pompeii he had never concerned himself with the conditions of the country where he had resided for twenty years; while he had been quizzing at his vases, or prying into the volcanic earths of Vesuvius, he had not noticed other fires as dangerous as those of the great mountain smouldering beneath the sparkling life of Naples.

The upper- and middle-class Neapolitans were proud, patriotic, intelligent and cultured; in their ranks were many brilliant men and women, philosophers, scholars, poets, writers, scientists, medical men, highly educated, lofty-minded gentlewomen, ardent, brave, ambitious youths. These people loathed the reckless, heartless tyranny under which they lived, detested the alien Bourbon rule, the meddling Austrian Queen, the sly, stupid English adventurer, and in their clubs, societies, academies, drawing-rooms and cabinets, they absorbed and discussed the highest culture of the day and ventured to dream of plans for the reform of a country beloved and oppressed.

What did Sir William Hamilton know of this? Even if he knew, why should he care? What did it matter to Emma, who had never minded anything but her own affairs; she had lived in London through the war with the American Colonies, the war with France, the trial of Warren Hastings, the rise of Pitt, but if she had been stirred to a cheer at the victories of Hood and Rodney, that was as far as her concern in the fortunes of her country had gone. All she was ever to know of Italy she knew at once; the superficial glance was always enough for Emma.