The influence of the king was sought by Napoleon to induce Garibaldi to stop short at Messina, but he can hardly have been surprised when the General showed no disposition to serve his sovereign so ill as to obey him.  He then proposed that the French and British admirals should be instructed to inform Garibaldi that they had orders to prevent him from crossing the straits.  Lord John Russell replied that, in the opinion of Government, the Neapolitans should be left to receive or repel Garibaldi as they pleased; nevertheless, if France interfered alone, they would limit themselves to disapproving and protesting.  But Napoleon did not wish to interfere alone; the effect would be to make British influence paramount in Italy, and possibly even to cause Sicily to crave a British protectorate.  In great haste he assured the Foreign Secretary that his chief desire was to act about Southern Italy in whatever way was approved by England.  Italy was saved from a great peril in 1860, firstly, by English goodwill, and, secondly, by the absence of any real agreement between the Continental Powers.  Had there been a concert of Europe, the passage of Garibaldi to Calabria would have been barred.

By this time no one was more determined than Cavour himself that not a palm of ground should be left to the Bourbon dynasty, but he still thought it necessary to save appearances.  Thus he met the too late advances of the Neapolitan Government, not by a refusal to treat, but by proposing a condition with which Francis, as an obedient son of the Church, could not comply:  the formal recognition of the union of Romagna with Piedmont.  Strict moralists, like Lanza, would have wished him to send the ambassadors of the King of Naples about their business, and to declare war on any pretext, and so escape from “a hybrid and perilous game.”  Cavour looked upon the Neapolitan Government as doomed, and that by its own fault, its own obstinacy, its own rejection of the plank of safety, which, almost at the risk of doing a wrong to Italy, he had advised his king to offer it three months before.  He felt no scruples in accelerating its fall.  The means he took may not have been the best means, but he thought them good enough in dealing with a system which was a by-word for bad faith and corruption.  He wished that the end might come before Garibaldi crossed the straits, or, at least, when he was still far from Naples.  Thus a repetition of the Sicilian dictatorship would be impossible.  To what measures he resorted is not known with any accuracy; he was carrying on a policy without the knowledge of the king or the cabinet, and no trustworthy account exists of it.  What is known is that Cavour, as a conspirator, failed.