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Updated: June 13, 2025
While Charles, at Gaeta, was learning the art of war, and causing his cousin, the Duke of Liria, to pass some of the uneasiest moments of his life, at home in Rome his younger brother Henry, Duke of York, aged nine, was so indignant with his parents for not allowing him to go to the war with his brother, that he flung away his little sword in a temper.
What is the mission of the Pontifical Government? To what end did Europe bring Pius IX. from Gaeta to re-establish him at the Vatican? Was it for the sake of giving three millions of men an active and vigorous overseer? The merest brigadier of gendarmerie would have done the work better.
When success attended Garibaldi's expedition to Sicily, his long-shooting Englishman joined him, and when the English volunteers were ready to leave Naples and take the field at the siege of Gaeta, Colonel "Long Shot" was placed in command a man of execrable temper, and totally unfitted in every way to command anything, let alone a body of half-drilled, high-spirited young Englishmen.
Because she knew that so to speak the curtain would ring up for her entrance, and not an instant before, in the fondness of her heart for young officers she had not even delayed long enough to change the dress she wore as the Contessa Gaëta in the third act of "Girls' Love." The musical comedy had been written for her.
After the fall of Rome, Pius IX. issued a sort of canticle from Gaeta, in which he thanked the Lord at whose bidding the stormy ocean had been arrested, but he did not even so much as say thank you to the French, without whom, nevertheless, the stormy ocean would have proceeded on its way.
But it soon became apparent that, instead of the last act of a comedy, the next might be the first of a tragedy. The troops concentrated on the right bank of the Volturno amounted to 35,000, with 6000 garrisoning Capua. About 15,000 more formed the reserves and the garrison of Gaeta.
"Eleven men were kept behind, either because it was afterwards thought advisable not to release them, as in the case of Longo and Delli Franci, two artillery officers, who were still in the dungeons of Gaeta. Whenever the prisoners were too sick to be moved, as was the case with Pironti, who was paralytic; or because they were in some provincial dungeons too remote from Naples."
"It is the interest of France to make sure of the kingdom of Naples by a useful and easy conquest," the Moniteur had formerly declared, in publishing the treaty of neutrality agreed to by the House of Bourbon. The work was accomplished; on the 30th of March, Joseph Bonaparte was proclaimed King of the Two Sicilies. The city of Gaeta alone was to prolong its resistance.
This vessel then left the harbour, almost unnoticed, and it was not for hours afterwards that we heard that His Holiness Pius IX. was the humble-looking person who had embarked before our eyes, and thus got away safely to Gaëta. I shall never forget the excitement among us all when, after so many years of inactivity, we were called upon to defend the honour of our country.
His first attempt on the 29th of October had met with a decided repulse, another proof that this last remnant of the Neapolitan army was not an enemy to be despised. The second attempt, however, was successful; part of the Neapolitans fell back upon Gaeta, and the other part fled over the Papal frontier.
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