No sooner had the Austrians retired from the Legations in July 1831, than the revolution broke out again.  Many things had been promised, nothing performed; disaffection was universal, anarchy became chronic, and was increased by the indiscipline of the Papal troops that were sent to put it down.  The Austrians returned and the French occupied Ancona, much to the Pope’s displeasure, and not one whit to the advantage of the Liberals.  This dual foreign occupation of the Papal states lasted till the winter of 1838.

CHAPTER IV

‘YOUNG ITALY’ 1831-1844

Accession of Charles Albert—­Mazzini’s Unitarian Propaganda—­The Brothers Bandiera.

On 27 April 1831, Charles Albert came to the throne he had so nearly lost.  His reconciliation with his uncle, Charles Felix, had been effected after long and melancholy preliminaries.  To wash off the Liberal sins of his youth, or possibly with a vague hope of finding an escape from his false position in a soldier’s death, he joined the Duc d’Angouleme’s expedition against the Spanish Constitutionalists.  His extraordinary daring in the assault of the Trocadero caused him to be the hero of the hour when he returned with the army to Paris; but the King of Sardinia still refused to receive him with favour—­a sufficiently icy favour when it was granted—­until he signed an engagement, which remained secret, to preserve intact during his reign the laws and principles of government which he found in force at his accession.  If there had been an Order of the Millstone, Charles Felix would doubtless have conferred it upon his dutiful nephew; failing that, he presented to him for signature this wonderful document, the invention of which he owed to Prince Metternich.  At the Congress of Verona in 1822, Charles Albert’s claims to the succession were recognised, thanks chiefly to the Duke of Wellington, who represented England in place of Lord Londonderry (Castlereagh), that statesman having committed suicide just as he was starting for Verona.  Prince Metternich then proposed that the Prince of Carignano should be called upon to enter into an agreement identical with the compact he was brought to sign a couple of years later.  In communicating the proposal to Canning, the Duke of Wellington wrote that he had demonstrated to Prince Metternich ‘the fatality of such an arrangement,’ but that he did not think that he had made the slightest impression on him.  So the event proved; baffled for the moment, the Prince managed to put his plan in execution through a surer channel.