‘Order reigned’ in the kingdom of Naples.  In Sicily, a gallant attempt at insurrection was begun, but there was not the spirit to go on with it, and General Rossaroll, its initiator, had to fly to Spain.  The afterpiece is what might have been expected; an insensate desire for vengeance got hold of Ferdinand, and the last years of his life were spent in hunting down his enemies, real or imaginary.  Morelli and Silvati were hung, the fugitives, Pepe and Rossaroll, were condemned to death, but this was only the beginning.  The Austrian commander counselled mercy, but in this respect the King showed an independent mind.  A court-martial was instituted to examine the conduct of ecclesiastics, public functionaries and soldiers, from the year 1793 downwards.  No one was safe who had expressed a dislike of absolutism within the last thirty years.  A blameless gentleman who was a Carbonaro, was conducted through Naples on the back of an ass, and beaten with a whip, to which nails were attached.  Eight hundred persons are said to have perished at the hands of the state in one year.  Ferdinand himself expired on the 3rd of January 1825, after misgoverning for sixty-five years.

The Neapolitan revolution had just collapsed, when another broke out in Piedmont, which, though short in duration, was to have far-reaching consequences.

At that time, the King of Sardinia was Victor Emmanuel I., who succeeded his brother Charles Emmanuel in 1802, when the latter abdicated and retired to Rome, where he joined the Society of Jesus.  Victor Emmanuel’s only son was dead, and the throne would devolve on his youngest brother, Charles Felix, Duke of Genoa, whom reasons of state led to abandon the wish to become a monk, which he had formed as a boy of eleven, on being taken to visit a convent near Turin.  But Charles Felix, though married, was without children, and the legitimate heir-presumptive was Charles Albert, Prince of Carignano, who represented the younger branch of the family, which divided from the main line in the early part of the seventeenth century.  Charles Albert’s father was the luckless Prince Charles of Carignano, who, alone of his house, came to terms with Napoleon, who promised him a pension, which was not paid.  His mother, a Saxon Princess, paraded the streets of Turin, dressed in the last republican fashion, with her infant son in her arms.  Afterwards, she gave him a miscellaneous education, that included a large dose of Rousseau from a Swiss professor.  The boy was shifted from place to place, happier when his mother forgot him, than when, in temporary recollection of his existence, she called him to her.  Once when he was travelling with the Princess and her second husband, M. de Montleart, Charles Albert was made to sit on the box of the carriage, in a temperature many degrees below zero.

His uncles (as the King and Charles Felix called themselves, though they were his cousins) heard with natural horror of the vagaries of the Princess of Carignano, and they extended their antipathy from the mother to the son, even when he was a child.  In Victor Emmanuel, this antipathy was moderated by the easy good-nature of his character; in Charles Felix, it degenerated into an intense hatred.