The Pope Who Would Be King, page 15
Gaeta
That night around midnight, a cannon blast from the port awakened the fortress commander. The Ténare had arrived from Civitavecchia and dropped anchor. The next morning two French officers rowed to shore, bringing with them a short, distinguished-looking visitor. The diplomat introduced himself as Duke François Harcourt, French ambassador to the Holy See.10
On exiting the Quirinal Palace, Harcourt had hurried to his residence, where his carriage and bags were waiting for him. In the carriage were two boxes of the pope’s personal effects that Antonelli had entrusted to him to encourage his belief that he would soon be setting sail to France with the pope. Harcourt arrived at Civitavecchia at two a.m., expecting Pius to be waiting for him aboard the French ship. On learning that the pope had not only not arrived but was headed toward Gaeta with Spaur, Harcourt ordered the French captain to sail south, still hoping to persuade the pope to come with him to France.
A high-stakes tug-of-war was under way. For the leaders of any of Europe’s Catholic nations, having the pope choose them to shelter him would be a great coup, bolstering the government’s prestige both among its own Catholic population and among the governments of the world. To have the pope choose instead to turn to a rival was to compound the loss. Cardinal Antonelli had not only led Harcourt to believe that the pope was headed for France; he had at the same time assured the Spanish ambassador, Francisco Martínez de la Rosa, that the pope planned to accept his offer to take refuge on the Spanish island of Majorca. Pius was going to Gaeta, explained the cardinal, in order to board a Spanish ship there. As proof of his good faith, Antonelli had taken the ambassador’s second-in-command with him to Gaeta.
Because Martínez was expecting the Spanish warship to arrive shortly at Civitavecchia, he had gone there, intending to board it and meet the pope in Gaeta. But on arriving at Civitavecchia on the morning following the pope’s escape from Rome, two unpleasant surprises greeted him. Not only had the Spanish ship still not arrived, but the Ténare had sailed south for Gaeta with the French ambassador aboard. Martínez sent a frantic message to Madrid. The Spanish risked “seeing all their efforts of so many months lost in a moment.” The great glory that would come to Spain as savior of the pope, of the papacy itself, now threatened to slip through their fingers.11
The pope was far from certain where he was going. He had acceded to Antonelli’s advice to take refuge first at Gaeta but worried that casting his fate with the widely reviled king of Naples might be a mistake. Yet Gaeta did have some advantages for the pope. He would remain close to his own states, while the port allowed him easy access to the rest of Europe. There, too, he would avoid coming under the thumb of one of Europe’s major powers and so would have more room for diplomatic maneuver. Gaeta would give him some breathing room and time to pray for divine inspiration.12
* * *
—
AT ABOUT THE SAME TIME as the French warship was laying anchor at Gaeta, the Bavarian ambassador, bearing the pope’s letter, reached Naples. Spaur knocked on the door of the papal nuncio’s palace and told the nuncio that he carried an urgent message from the pope to the king. The nuncio was initially unenthusiastic about waking the monarch at that late hour but, at Spaur’s insistence, got into his carriage to go to the royal palace. Once there, he roused Ferdinand and relayed Spaur’s request. The Bavarian had meanwhile gone to a nearby hotel to change from his dusty clothes into something more befitting a royal audience.
Sometime after midnight, to the astonishment of the rest of the royal household, the Bavarian ambassador appeared. Spaur handed King Ferdinand Pius’s letter. The news that the pope was not in Rome but in the king’s own fortress city, and was turning to the king to protect him, was both surprising and thrilling for the beleaguered monarch. He told Spaur to prepare to depart with him on the royal ship at six a.m., only a few hours away.13
* * *
—
IN ROME, CONFUSION REIGNED as news spread of the pope’s disappearance. No one knew where he had gone. At noon, the government posted a dramatic announcement on the doors along the Corso. “Romans,” it began. “We announce an unexpected event of the greatest importance, and one that can have the most serious consequences. Last night the Pontiff Pius IX silently abandoned Rome, and the exact direction he headed in is not known.” The notice went on to assure the public that the government would maintain order.14
The pope’s abrupt departure was met by “a general stupor,” as one diplomat put it, but also by endless speculation. Mixed with people’s uncertainty was a large dose of fear. Might foreign armies now try to retake the city for the pope?15
While some of the government ministers and many of the deputies feared they had gone too far, causing the pope to flee, others were excited. Among the latter was the irrepressible Charles Bonaparte, who that afternoon rose to speak in a hastily convened session of the Chamber of Deputies. “From this point on,” he declaimed, “all thoughts of returning to the past are useless.” In the new phase they had entered, declared the prince, the government bureaucracy had to be purged of the large number of “vicious parasites” whose loyalty was suspect and whose continued presence constituted a grave danger to the country. What was needed, concluded Bonaparte, was the immediate convocation of a constituent assembly, aimed at forming a new government of the people.16
* * *
—
ON THEIR ARRIVAL IN GAETA, King Ferdinand and Queen Maria Teresa of Naples got down on their knees as they neared the pope, who, to the stupefaction of the commander of the fortress, had emerged from the modest inn where he spent the night. After the tension, fears, and humiliation of the previous two days, Pius could not keep the tears from running down his cheeks. He placed King Ferdinand’s hands in his, the first time the pope had ever felt the touch of a royal hand.
For Ferdinand, the pope’s arrival was providential. Earlier in his reign, he had seemed open to the need to modernize his famously retrograde kingdom and had introduced railways and even elevators, but recent events had convinced him that his backward subjects could be ruled only by an iron hand. Having recently acquired the nickname “Bomb King” for his merciless bombardment of the rebellious Sicilian city of Messina, the king seized the chance to cast himself as the pope’s savior.
Ferdinand’s strongest source of support came from the upper clergy, although this had done little to boost his popularity. The king, reported the British envoy in Naples, “is above all a superstitious man and a faithful Catholic.” From the perspective of Britain’s Protestant envoy, the monarch was “enslaved to priestcraft in a degree beyond all belief.” The king’s confessor was one of the most detested men in the kingdom and, reported the envoy, “in league with the Minister of Police.”17
Ferdinand II, King of the Two Sicilies
Although Ferdinand was related through marriage to most of Europe’s royal families, his cultural horizons did not reach much beyond Naples. The great intellectual movements of the times had totally passed him by. While his more enlightened royal counterpart in Turin saw the movement for Italian unification as a chance to enlarge his authority, Ferdinand viewed it simply as a threat. The past year had been a nightmare, beginning with the revolution in Sicily and the revolt in Naples itself. Forced to grant a constitution, then soon reneging on it, he had in recent months been fighting a bloody battle to regain Sicily for his Bourbon kingdom and to bring his rebellious subjects on the mainland to heel.18
Before his early departure that Sunday morning, the king had arranged to have the Giornale ufficiale, Naples’s official newspaper, announce the pope’s arrival. “We have the joy of announcing,” it read, “that the Holy Father is among us and has chosen Gaeta as his residence.” After noting that Ferdinand was already on his way to greet him, the paper added, “We now raise our prayers to the One on high, that He may bless His vicar and deliver not only His states, but the other countries of Europe as well from anarchy.”
In reporting all this to Paris on the twenty-sixth, the French ambassador to Naples, Alphonse de Rayneval, remarked that the news was making a huge impression, promising to strengthen the position of the king and his government. The next day the official Neapolitan newspaper described the pope’s munificence in allowing all the members of the royal family and the senior Neapolitan military officers to kiss his foot. The pope had come out onto his balcony at the end of the day to bless the assembled troops and Gaeta’s inhabitants. “All had tears of emotion in their eyes,” reported the Naples paper, “and burst into shouts of love and devotion for the pope, mixed with cries of ‘Long live the king! Long live Ferdinand II!’ ”19
* * *
—
THE KING HAD PIUS moved into his own royal quarters in the fortress town. The inn that had first hosted him would quickly become a sacred site, the bed in which the pope slept that one night left untouched. “A pilgrimage to Gaeta, in the eyes of the Neapolitan,” the London Times correspondent in Naples later reported, “has nearly the same merit as a pilgrimage to Mecca to all true Mussulmans.* The people see before them a martyr, a suffering saint.” Whole families would come to marvel at the modest room where Pius IX spent his first night in exile and the simple iron bed on which he had slept.20
After the drama of his escape from Rome, the pope began to settle into a new life, a life of waiting, of prayer, of hoping. A time of great uncertainty for the pope, it was no less so for Europe’s other leaders. The Papal States remained one of the bulwarks of the existing order. The pope’s absence from Rome was destabilizing, the establishment of the papal court under the protection of the king of Naples adding to the disquiet. The possibility that radicals might soon take over the Papal States in the pope’s absence and turn them into a republic was deeply threatening. Yet the prospect that the pope might now call for an invasion by foreign powers to reinstall him in the Eternal City raised its own alarms.
Amid all the uncertainty, no one knew how long the pope would remain in Gaeta, or where he might go next, Pope Pius IX least of all.
* Muslims.
Gaeta could not absorb all the soldiers, diplomats, cardinals, and royal familiars who now converged on it. Built into a natural amphitheater at the base of a high cliff, the fortress town was perched on a point of land stretching into the Tyrrhenian Sea. Other than an occasional potted orange tree, it had no vegetation. A single passable road led at either end to one of the fortress’s two gates, one on the port side. Both were locked at night. Military barracks and storerooms lined one side of the road, the modest royal residence and other homes the other.
The ambassadors found local accommodations a painful contrast with their Roman palaces. Some stayed in the nearby fishing village of Mola di Gaeta, which soon filled with an assortment of clerics, diplomats, and other august visitors. The Belgian ambassador reported his horror at finding the woolen sheets of his bed there crawling with white lice. Twenty-seven cardinals would make their way to Gaeta over the next month, but few stayed long, most finding accommodations more to their liking in Naples.1
While Pius was no longer in the bare room in which he spent his first night, the quarters the king gave him were far from luxurious. The fortress’s royal residence was in fact a modest building with five windows facing the street, distinguished from its neighbors only by its green shutters and its lesser degree of grime. It had a ground floor, a mezzanine, and a second floor. The mezzanine housed the captain of the papal guard, placed there by the king. The pope’s sparsely furnished room on the second floor was the best available, but most who saw it thought it barely habitable. There Pius, not one to complain about his personal comfort, received visitors next to his simple bed. Cardinal Antonelli occupied a room down the hall—his, too, serving as both bedroom and study. Smaller rooms served as waiting and meeting rooms for diplomats and other visitors.2
Again the pope found himself in need of a new secretary of state. Cardinal Soglia had taken refuge in his diocese, near Ancona, and sent the pope his resignation from the safety of his new home. It was said that he had left Rome in such a hurry that he had a red knee sock on one foot, a white one on the other. In any case, it was by then clear to the pope who was best suited to deal with the extraordinary challenges he faced. Cardinal Antonelli had stayed by his side when others fled. He had masterminded the pope’s escape, and his loyalty was beyond any doubt. In early December, Pius appointed him secretary of state.3
If Pius had no taste for the game of politics, with its strategizing, posturing, and undercutting of rivals, Antonelli was its master. Pius could not help but speak from his heart when visitors came to see him, but the steely Antonelli was adept at speaking at great length without saying anything. While the pope had a deep belief in his spiritual mission as pontiff and an unshakable faith in the Almighty, Antonelli gave no indication of having any spiritual life at all. A tireless worker, ever eager to gain more power, he was isolated, trusting no one outside his own family. He had no friends, not even among the other cardinals, perhaps especially not among the cardinals, for they resented his influence over the pope.4
The final weeks of 1848 would prove decisive for the future of Italy and for the future of the church. When the pope first arrived at Gaeta, neither he nor anyone else knew how long he was likely to remain or what would happen in Rome in his absence. Would chaos envelop the city? Would civil war erupt, pitting the pope’s supporters against the radicals? Would the pope be able to overcome his anger at the Romans’ betrayal of him and seek a compromise that would allow him to return peacefully to the Eternal City? Would, as some in the church feared, the people of Rome, disgusted with the Catholic clergy, turn to Protestantism?
Both the pope and Antonelli insisted that their arrival in Gaeta had been fortuitous. “We had planned to go in a very different direction on leaving from Rome,” the cardinal told his nuncio in Paris. If the Spanish ship that was supposed to take him to Majorca had in fact been waiting for him, Pius told the Piedmontese envoy later in the month, that is certainly where he would have gone.
The choice of the Kingdom of Naples bore the unmistakable mark of Antonelli’s calculating mind. In Gaeta, the pope came under the protection of one of the most retrograde monarchies in Europe. The papal party could be assured they would come under no pressure to meet the rebellious Romans halfway. Nor would the weak king of Naples hinder their efforts to play the powers of Europe off one another as they determined how best to restore papal rule to Rome.5
* * *
—
WHILE ANTONELLI HAD NO intention of allowing the pontiff to leave the Kingdom of Naples until such time as he could return to Rome, many were urging him to do just that.6 The Sardinian ambassador pleaded with the pope to come to the Savoyard kingdom; the Spanish ambassador urged the pope to go to Majorca; and Britain’s ambassador in Naples offered a ship to take him to Malta. The Portuguese queen sent her own emissary to Gaeta to invite the pope to Portugal, where, reported the papal nuncio in Lisbon, the sumptuous royal palace of Mafra could host him “with the dignity due his high rank.” But no country was more eager to see the pope land on its soil than France.7
When the pope made his escape from Rome, France was in the midst of an election campaign. Nine months earlier the French king had fled and a republic had been proclaimed. Now a presidential contest pitted the current head of the government, General Cavaignac—a military man committed to republican principles but with little political experience—against Louis Napoleon, whose principles, other than his devotion to the glory of the Napoleonic name, were unknown. Cavaignac had the moderate republicans behind him but was eager to capture the Catholic vote, and nothing would help his cause so much as luring the pope to France.8
On November 27, unaware that the pope had left Rome three days earlier, the French government ordered Admiral Charles Baudin—veteran of the Napoleonic wars and commander of French naval forces in the Mediterranean—to take four steam frigates, with thirty-five hundred men, from Marseilles to Civitavecchia to bring the pope to safety in France. On the same day that he ordered the admiral into action, the French foreign minister wrote Harcourt, informing him that, along with the troops, the government was sending Francisque Corcelle, a member of the National Assembly and a longtime friend of Cavaignac, to be special political envoy.9
Corcelle’s instructions were to extract the pope without getting involved in the political dispute under way in the Papal States. A devout Catholic, the forty-six-year-old Corcelle was thought to be someone who could win the pope’s trust, but when Corcelle arrived in Marseilles, intending to board a ship to Italy, he was told that Harcourt had already engineered the pope’s flight from Rome. Witnesses in Civitavecchia had spotted Harcourt—along, they said, with members of the pope’s retinue—leaving on a French steamship, the Ténare. The pope, it was presumed, was on board with them, on his way to France.10
The French government hurriedly began making arrangements for the pope’s arrival. On the first of December, the minister of education and religion left Paris for Marseilles to head the welcoming committee. That same day General Cavaignac read to the members of the French National Assembly a telegram that had been sent from Civitavecchia six days earlier. “The Pope has furtively departed from Rome on the 24th,” it read. “Rome remains calm and indifferent….The Pope is coming to France. The Ténare has gone to take him from Gaeta.”11
