While reducing his finances to order and newspaper editors to servility, the conqueror received news of the triumph of his arms in Southern Italy.  There the Bourbons of Naples had mortally offended him.  After concluding a convention for the peaceable withdrawal of St. Cyr’s corps and the strict observance of neutrality by the kingdom of Naples, Ferdinand IV. and his Queen Caroline welcomed the arrival at their capital of an Anglo-Russian force of 20,000 men, and intrusted the command of these and of the Neapolitan troops to General Lacy.[65] This force, it is true, did little except weaken the northward march of Massena; but the violation of neutrality by the Bourbons galled Napoleon.  At Vienna he refused to listen to the timid pleading of the Hapsburgs on their behalf, and as soon as peace was signed at Pressburg he put forth a bulletin stating that St. Cyr was marching on Naples to hurl from the throne that guilty woman who had so flagrantly violated all that is sacred among men.  France would fight for thirty years rather than pardon her atrocious act of perfidy:  the Queen of Naples had ceased to reign:  let her go to London and form a committee of sympathetic ink with Drake, Spencer-Smith, Taylor, and Wickham.

This diatribe was not the first occasion on which the conqueror had proved that he was no gentleman.  In his brutal letter of January 2nd, 1805, to Queen Caroline, he told her that, if she was the cause of another war, she and her children would beg their bread all through Europe.  That and similar outbursts afford some excuse for the conduct of the Bourbons in the autumn of 1805.  They infringed the neutrality which their ambassador had engaged to observe:  but it is to be remembered that Napoleon’s invasion of the Neapolitan States in 1803 was a gross violation of international law, which the French Foreign Office sought to cloak by fabricating two secret articles of the Treaty of Amiens.[66] And though troth should doubtless be kept, even with a law-breaker, yet its violation becomes venial when the latter adopts the tone of a bully.  For the present he triumphed.  Joseph Bonaparte invaded Naples in force, and on January 13th the King, Queen, and Court set sail for Palermo.  The Anglo-Russian divisions re-embarked and sailed away for Malta and Corfu.  One of the Neapolitan strongholds, Gaeta, held out till the middle of July.  Elsewhere the Bourbon troops gave little trouble.

The conquest of Naples enabled Napoleon to extend his experiment of a federation of Bonapartist Kings.  He announced to Miot de Melito, now appointed one of Joseph’s administrators, his intentions in an interview at the Tuileries on January 28th.  Joseph was to be King of Naples, if he accepted the honour quickly.  If not, the Emperor would adopt a son, as in the case of Eugene, and make him King.—­“I don’t need a wife to have an heir.  It is by my pen that I get children.”—­But Joseph must also show himself worthy of the honour.  Let him despise fatigue, get wounded, break a leg.