and this I shall never submit to.”  The Admiralty censured Nelson for disobeying Lord Keith’s orders and, as they claimed, endangering Minorca, and also for landing seamen for the siege of Capua, and told him “not to employ the seamen in any such way in future.”  The Admiralty were too hasty in chastising him.  He claimed that his success in freeing the whole kingdom of Naples from the French was almost wholly due to the employment of British sailors, whose valour carried the day.

Nelson sent the First Lord a slap between the eyes in his best sarcastic form.  He said briefly, “I cannot enter into all the detail in explanation of my motives which led me to take the action I did, as I have only a left hand, but I may inform you that my object is to drive the French to the devil, and restore peace and happiness to mankind”; and he continues, “I feel I am fitter to do the action than to describe it.”  And then he curtly and in so many words says to his Chief, “Don’t you be troubled about Minorca.  I have secured the main thing against your wish and that of Lord Keith, and you may be assured that I shall see that no harm comes to the Islands, which seems to be a cause of unnecessary anxiety to you.”  Incidentally, the expulsion of the French from Naples and seating Ferdinand on the throne was, as I have previously stated, not an unqualified success, nor was he accurate in his statement that he had restored happiness to millions.  The success was a mere shadow.  He had emancipated a set of villains.  Troubridge says they were all thieves and vagabonds, robbing their unfortunate countrymen, selling confiscated property for nothing, cheating the King and Treasury by pocketing everything that their sticky fingers touched, and that their villainies were so deeply rooted that if some steps were not taken to dig them out, the Government could not hold together.  Out of twenty millions of ducats collected as revenue, only thirteen millions reached the Treasury, and the King had to pay four ducats instead of one.  Troubridge again intimates to his superior that Ferdinand is surrounded with a nest of the most unscrupulous thieves that could be found in all Europe.  “Such damned cowards and villains,” he declared, “he had never seen or heard of before.”

IX

The French did not mince matters when their opportunity came.  They, too, regarded them as vermin, and treated them according to the unrestrained edicts of the Reign of Terror, organized and administered by their late compatriots Sardanapalus, Danton, Maximilian Robespierre, and their literary colleague, the execrable Marat, who, by the way, was expeditiously dispatched by the gallant Charlotte Corday.[12]