It is not possible to follow the Sicilians in their long struggle for their autonomy.  They stood out for some fourteen months.  An English Blue-book is full of the interminable negotiations conducted by Lord Napier and the Earl of Minto in the hope of bringing the strife to an end.  When the parliament summoned by the revolutionary government declared the downfall of the House of Bourbon, all the stray princes in Europe, including Louis Napoleon, were reviewed as candidates for the throne.  The choice fell on the Duke of Genoa; it was well received in England, and the British men-of-war were immediately ordered to salute the Sicilian flag.  But the Duke’s reign never became a reality.  After an heroic struggle, the islanders were subjugated in the spring of 1849.

So stout a fight for independence must win admiration, if not approval.  The political reasons against the course taken by the Sicilians have been suggested in a former chapter.  In separating their lot from that of Naples, in rejecting even freedom unless it was accompanied by disruption, they hastened the ruin of the Neapolitans and of themselves, and surely played into the hands of the crafty tyrant who desired nothing better than to fish in the troubled waters of his subjects’ dissensions.

In the gathering storm of January 1848, the first idea that occurred to Ferdinand II. was the good old plan of calling in Austrian assistance.  But the Austrians were told by Pius IX. that he would not allow their troops to pass through his territory.  Had they attempted to pass in spite of his warning, events would have taken a different turn, as the Pope would have been driven into a war with Austria then and there; perhaps he would have been glad, as weak people commonly are, of the compulsion to do what he dared not do without compulsion.  The Austrian Government was too wise to force a quarrel; it was easy to lock up Austrian subjects for crying ‘Viva Pio Nono,’ but the enormous importance of keeping the Head of the Church, if possible, in a neutral attitude could not be overlooked.  All thoughts of going to Ferdinand’s help were politely abandoned, and he, seeing himself in a defenceless position, and pondering deeply on the upsetting of Louis Philippe’s throne, which was just then the latest news, decided on that device, dear to all political conjurors, which is known as taking the wind out of your enemy’s sails.  The Pope, the Grand Duke of Tuscany and the King of Sardinia, had worried him for six months with admonitions.  ‘Very well,’ he now said; ’they urge me forward, I will precipitate them.’  Constitution, representative government, unbridled liberty of the press, a civic guard, the expulsion of the Jesuits; what mattered a trifle more or less when everything could be revoked at the small expense of perjury?  Ferdinand posed to perfection in the character of Citizen King.  He reassured those who ventured to show the least signs of apprehension by saying:  ’If I had not intended to carry out the Statute, I should not have granted it.’