When the King started for his capital, Radetsky offered to draw up his troops as a guard of honour over the whole extent of occupied territory between Novara and Turin.  The offer was declined, and Victor Emmanuel took a circuitous route to avoid observation.  His journey was marked throughout by a complete absence of state.  Before he arrived, a trusty hand consigned to him a note written in haste and in much anguish by the Queen, in which she warned him to enter by night, as he was likely to have a very bad reception.  On the 27th of March he reviewed the National Guard in the Piazza Castello on the occasion of its taking the oath of allegiance.  The ceremony was attended by Queen Maria Adelaide in a carriage with her two little boys, the Princes Umberto and Amedeo.  There was no hostile demonstration, but there was a most general and icy coldness.

That evening, the terms of the armistice were communicated to the Chamber.  As was natural, they evoked the wildest indignation, a part of which fell undeservedly on the King.  Twenty thousand Austrians were to occupy the district between the Po, Sesia and Ticino and half the citadel of Alessandria.  The excitement rose to its height when it was announced that the Sardinian Fleet must be recalled from Venetian waters, depriving that struggling city of the last visible sign of support from without.  The Chamber sent a deputation to the King, who succeeded in persuading its members that, hard though the terms were, there was no avoiding their acceptance, and that the original stipulations were harder still.

On the 29th, Victor Emmanuel took the oath to observe the Statute, to exercise the royal authority only in virtue of the laws, to cause justice to be fairly and fearlessly administered, and to conduct himself in all things with the sole view to the interest, honour and prosperity of the nation.

A trifling accident occurred which might have been far from trifling; one of the ornaments of the ceiling of the Palazzo Madama, where the Parliament assembled, fell close to the King.  As it was of great weight, it would have killed anyone on whom it had fallen.  ’Never mind that,’ said the King in Piedmontese dialect to Colonel Menabrea, who was near him, ‘it will not be the last!’

The ministry which held office under the late King resigned; a new one was formed, in which General Delaunay was President of the Council, and Gioberti minister without a portfolio.  The King was advised to dissolve the Chamber, which had been elected as a war parliament, and was ill-constituted to perform the work now required.  General La Marmora had orders to quell the insurrection at Genoa, the motive of which was not nominally a change of government, but the continuance of the war at all costs.  Its deeper cause lay in the old irreconcilability of republican Genoa with her Piedmontese masters, breaking out now afresh under the strain of patriotic disappointment.  Like the 15th of May at Naples, the Genoese revolution