[1742-1748 A.D.]

France, overran and occupied all Savoy, which was mercilessly pillaged by his troops. But Don Philip was unable to penetrate into Piedmont; and meanwhile the duke of Montemar, with the Spanish army already in Italy, had been oppressed successfully by the Austrians and Piedmontese on these opposite frontiers of Lombardy.

But Charles Emmanuel, even after he had formally pledged himself to England and Austria, was perpetually carrying on secret and separate negotiations with the Bourbons; and it was only because he could not obtain all the terms which he demanded of them, and because he was also as suspicious of their ill-faith as he was conscious of his own, that he maintained his alliances unchanged to the end of the war (1743). His states were almost constantly the theatre of hostilities, equally destructive to his subjects, whether success or failure alternately attended his career. Yet he displayed activity and skill and courage, scarcely inferior to the brilliant qualities which had distinguished his father, Victor Amadeus. When, however, the infante Don Philip had been joined by the prince of Conti with twenty thousand men, all the efforts of the Sardinian monarch, though he headed his troops in person, could not resist the desperate valour of the French and Spanish confederates; who, forcing the tremendous passes of the Alps, broke triumphantly into Piedmont, and for some time swept over its plains as conquerors (1744). But reinforced by the Austrians, Charles Emmanuel, before the end of the same campaign, turned the tide of fortune, and obliged the allies to retire for the winter into France. They still retained possession of the duchy of Savoy, and crushed the inhabitants under every species of oppression.

In the following year, Genoa declared for the Bourbon confederation; and the Spanish and French forces under Don Philip, being thus at liberty to form a junction in the territories of that republic with the second Spanish army from Naples, the king of Sardinia and the Austrians were utterly unable to resist their immense superiority of numbers (1745). In this campaign, Parma and Piacenza were reduced by the duke of Modena, the ally of France and Spain; Turin was menaced with bombardment; Tortona fell. to the Bourbon arms; Pavia was carried by assault; and Don Philip, penetrating into the heart of Lombardy, closed the operations of the year by his victorious entry into Milan.

But such were the sudden vicissitudes of this sanguinary war, that the brilliant successes of the Spanish prince were shortly rendered nugatory by a growing misunderstanding between the courts of Paris and Madrid, and by the arrival of large reinforcements for the Austrian army in the peninsula (1746). Don Philip lost, in less than another year, all that he had acquired in the preceding campaign. He was driven out of Milan; he was obliged to evacuate all Lombardy; and the French and Spanish forces were finally compelled, by the increasing strength of the Austrians, to recross the Alps, and to make their retreat into France. The king of Sardinia and his allies carried the war into Provence, without meeting with much success; and the French in their turn endeavoured once more to penetrate into Piedmont. But while that quarter of Italy was threatened with new ravages, the peninsula was saved from further miseries by the signature of the Peace of Aixla-Chapelle (1748).

One of the declared purposes of the European powers in their assembled congress was to give independence to Italy; and if that object could have been attained without the restoration of ancient freedom, and the revival of national virtue among the Italians, the provisions of the Treaty of Aix-la

[1748-1789 A.D.] Chapelle would have been wise and equitable. The Austrians were permitted to retain only Milan and Mantua; and all other foreign powers consented to exclude themselves from the peninsula. The grand duke Francis of Lorraine, now become emperor, engaged to resign Tuscany to a younger branch of his imperial house. The throne of the Two Sicilies was confirmed to Don Charles and his heirs, to form a distinct and independent branch of the Spanish house of Bourbon; and the duchies of Parma and Piacenza were elevated anew into a sovereign state in favour of Don Philip, who thus became the founder of a third dynasty of the same family. The king of Sardinia received some further accessions of territory, which were detached from the duchy of Milan; and all the other native powers of Italy remained, or were re-established, in their former condition.

FORTY YEARS OF "LANGUID PEACE" FOR DIVIDED ITALY

Thus was Italy, after two centuries of prostration under the yoke of other nations, relieved from the long oppression of foreigners. A small portion only of her territory remained subject to the empire; and all the rest of the peninsula was divided among a few independent governments.

But after the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, Italy was still as little constituted as before to command the respect or the fear of the world. Her people for the most part cherished no attachment for rulers to whom they were indebted neither for benefits nor happiness, in whose success they could feel no community of interest, and whose aggrandisement could reflect no glory on themselves.

The condition of Italy after the nominal restoration of her independence, offers, as a philosophical writer has well remarked, a striking lesson of political experience. The powers of Europe, after having in some measure annihilated a great nation, were at length awakened to a sense of the injury which they had inflicted upon humanity, and upon the general political system of the world. They laboured sincerely to repair the work of destruction; there was nothing which they did not restore to Italy, except what they could not restore the extinguished energies and dignity of the people. Forty years of profound peace succeeded to their attempt; and these were only forty years of effeminacy, weakness, and corruption-a memorable example to statesmen that the mere act of their will can neither renovate a degraded nation, nor replenish its weight in the political balance; and that national independence is a vain boon, where the people are not interested in its preservation, and where no institutions revive the spirit of honour, and the honest excitement of freedom.

During these forty years of languid peace (from the Treaty of Aix-laChapelle to the epoch of the French Revolution) the general history of Italy presents not a single circumstance for our observation; and it only remains for us to pass in rapid review the few domestic occurrences of any moment in the different Italian states of the eighteenth century. The affairs of the Sicilies, of the popedom, of the states of the house of Savoy, of the duchies of Tuscany and Modena, of the republics of Genoa and Venice, and of the Milanese and Mantuan provinces, may each require a brief notice. But the obscure or tranquil fortunes of Lucca, and of the duchies of Parma and Piacenza, would scarcely merit a separate place in this enumeration.

The duchies of Parma and Piacenza, which had once more been separated from that of Milan to form the independent appanage of a Spanish prince,

[1738-1765 A.D.]

relapsed into the deep oblivion from which the dispute for their possession had alone drawn them. Don Philip reigned until the year 1765, and his son, Don Ferdinand, succeeded him. The administration of both of these princes was, in a political sense, marked by no important event; but the literary and scientific tastes of Don Philip entitle him to be mentioned with respect, and shed some beneficial influence on his ducal states.

THE KINGDOM OF NAPLES AND SICILY

The transition of the crowns of Naples and Sicily, from the extinguished. Spanish branch of the house of Austria to the collateral line of Germany, and from that dynasty again to a junior member of the Spanish Bourbons, has already been noticed; and we take up the annals of the Sicilies from the epoch only at which the infante Don Charles was confirmed in the possession of their throne by the Treaty of Vienna. This sovereign, who reigned at Naples under the title of Charles VII, but who is better known by his later designation of Charles III of Spain, governed southern Italy above twenty-one years.

The general reputation of his character has perhaps been much overrated; but, as the monarch of the Sicilies, he undoubtedly laboured to promote the welfare of his kingdom. The war of the Spanish Succession paralysed all his efforts during the first half of his reign; but after the restoration of tranquillity in 1748, he devoted himself zealously and exclusively to the pacific work of improvement. He was well seconded by the virtuous intentions, if not by the limited talents, of his minister Tanucci. The principal error of both proceeded from their ignorance of the first principles of finance; and the cultivated mind and theoretical knowledge of Tanucci fitted him less for the active conduct of affairs than for the station of professor of law, from which the king had raised him to his friendship and confidence.

It has been objected as a second mistake of Charles, or his minister, that the system of government which they adopted contemplated only the continuance of peace, and contained no provision against the possibility of war. No attempt was made either to kindle a martial spirit in the people, or to rouse them to the power of defending themselves from foreign aggression and insult. The army, the fortifications, and all warlike establishments were suffered to fall into utter decay; and the military force of the kingdom, which was nominally fixed at thirty thousand men, was kept so incomplete that it rarely exceeded half that number. The only security for the preservation of honourable peace at home was forgotten in a system which neglected the means of commanding respect abroad; but Charles occupied himself, as if he indulged the delusive hope of maintaining his subjects in eternal tranquillity. He studiously embellished his capital; and the useful public works, harbours, aqueducts, canals, and national granaries, which preserve the memory of his reign, are magnificent and numerous.

The laudable exertions of Charles were but just beginning to produce beneficial effects, when he was summoned by the death of his elder brother, Ferdinand VI of Spain, who left no children, to assume the crown of that kingdom (1759). According to the spirit of the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, his next brother, Don Philip, duke of Parma, should have succeeded to the vacant throne of the Sicilies; but Charles III was permitted to place one of his own younger sons in the seat which he had just quitted. His eldest son betrayed such marks of hopeless idiocy that it was necessary to set him

[1759-1825 A.D.] altogether aside from the succession to any part of his dominions; the inheritance of the Spanish throne was reserved for the second, who afterwards reigned under the title of Charles IV; and it was to the third that the sceptre of the Sicilies was assigned.

This prince, who under the name of Ferdinand IV of Naples and Sicily reigned till 1825, was then a boy of nine years of age. Charles appointed a Neapolitan council of regency to govern in his son's name; but the marquis Tanucci remained the real dictator of the public administration; and the new monarch of Spain continued to exercise a decisive influence over the councils of the Two Sicilies during the whole of his son's minority, and even for some time after its expiration. It was by the act of Tanucci, and in conjunction with the policy of Charles, that the Jesuits were expelled from the Two Sicilies and from Spain at the same epoch; that the ancient usurpations of the holy see were boldly repressed; and that the progress of other useful reforms was zealously forwarded.

It was the most fatal negligence of Charles III, and the lasting misfortune of his son, that the education of Ferdinand IV was entrusted to the prince of San Nicandro, a man utterly destitute of ability or knowledge. The young monarch, who was not deficient in natural capacity, was thus permitted to remain in the grossest ignorance. The sports of the field were the only occupation and amusement of his youth; and the character of his subsequent reign was deplorably influenced by the idleness and distaste for public affairs in which he had been suffered to grow up. The marriage of Ferdinand with the princess Carolina of Austria put a term to the ascendency of Charles III over the Neapolitan councils. His faithful servant Tanucci lost his authority in the administration; some years afterwards he was finally disgraced; and the ambitious consort of Ferdinand, having gained an absolute sway over the mind of her feeble husband, engrossed the direction of the state. Her assumption of the reins of sovereignty was followed by the rise of a minion, who acquired as decided an influence over her spirit as she already exercised over that of the king. This was the famous Acton, a low Irish adventurer, who, after occupying some station in the French marine, passed into Tuscany, and was received into the service of the grand duke. He had the good fortune to distinguish himself in an expedition against the pirates of Barbary; and thenceforth his elevation was astonishingly rapid. He became known to the queen, and was entrusted with the direction of the Neapolitan navy. Still young, and gifted with consummate address, he won the personal favour of Carolina; he governed while he seemed implicitly to obey her; and without any higher qualifications, or any knowledge beyond the narrow circle of his profession, he was successively raised to the office of minister of war and of foreign affairs. The whole power of government centred in his person; and Acton was the real sovereign in the Sicilies, when the corrupt court and the misgoverned state encountered the universal shock of the French Revolution.

THE STATES OF THE CHURCH

On the outline of government and policy in the ecclesiastical state, as these features presented themselves in the seventeenth century, very little has to be either altered or added, if we would make the picture true for the age that succeeded. It is necessary indeed to pay, at the outset, that tribute of respect which is deserved by the personal character of most of the sover

[1700-1800 A.D.]

eigns who ruled on the Seven Hills during the eighteenth century. Never had the bishops of Rome been so decorous, so generally unexceptionable in morals; seldom had they numbered so many men of sincere and earnest piety; never had the list included names more illustrious for talent and learning. Two popes in particular, Prospero Lambertini and the accomplished Antonio Ganganelli, would have reflected honour upon any throne in Christendom.

But those venerable priests, who, for a few years before they sank into the grave, left the altar and the closet, the breviary and the pen, to wear the triple crown and wield the keys of St. Peter, discovered by sad experience what everyone who has administered that office must have discovered before he had slept a month under the roof of the Vatican. Genius becomes a public calamity, virtue itself is paralysed into despair, when, after a lifetime spent in the library or the cloister, they are summoned, in the decrepitude of old age, to discharge duties more complicated, more difficult, requiring greater versatility and greater energy in action than those which belong to any other sovereignty in the world. Where the whole edifice of government must be overturned before effectual repair can be wrought upon any of its parts, differences in the character of successive rulers are confined in their results to individual and temporary interests. In regard to the permanent improvement or deterioration of the state, Rodrigo Borgia was as innocent as the irreproachable Barnaba Chiaramonti; Clement VII was as wise as Sixtus V; and the hermit-pope Pietro di Murrhone, with his gentle and pious ignorance, was not more helpless than Julian della Rovere, who wore armour beneath his sacerdotal robe.

The most unpleasing task which the popes of the eighteenth century had to perform was that of accommodating their prerogatives over the Catholic states to those opinions of independence which were now rooted in every cabinet of Europe. The priestly chiefs bowed with infinite reluctance to this hard necessity; some of them disgraced themselves by persecuting foreign inquirers, like Giannone and Genovesi; and, but for the activity and talent of Clement XIV, who yielded gracefully what he had no power to withhold, the papal court might have suffered losses infinitely more injurious than the sacrifice which it was obliged to make of its able servants the Jesuits. Pius VI, on whose head were to break the thunders of the French Revolution, was more a man of the world than any of his recent predecessors. Long employed in offices of the government, and familiar in an especial degree with the business of the Roman exchequer, he distinguished himself by endeavours zealous and incessant, but utterly unsuccessful, to introduce internal ameliorations. The sluggish imbecility of the papal rule cannot be better proved than by the fact that, till the middle of the eighteenth century, while internal taxes and restrictions ground the faces of the people, there was no duty (though, at several points of time, there were absolute prohibitions) on the importation of foreign manufactures; and that one of the most vaunted measures of this reign was the organisation of a force to protect the frontiers against smuggling; a measure of which, amidst all their recent tariffs, the popes do not appear to have ever dreamed.

In the details of his new system of foreign duties on merchandise, as well as in many of his regulations for agriculture and internal trade, Pius and his advisers proved singularly how much they were still in the dark as to the principles of political economy. His partial abolition of the innumerable baronial tolls did not confer benefits half sufficient to counterbalance the evils produced by his arbitrary restrictions on the corn-trade; his expensive