he 7th of March, in the
mountains near Rieti, General Guglielmo Pepe, with 8000 regular troops
and a handful of militia, encountered an overwhelmingly superior force
of Austrians. The Neapolitans stood out well for six hours, but on the
Austrian reserves coming up, they were completely routed, and obliged
to fly in all directions.

'Order reigned' in the kingdom of Naples. In Sicily, a gallant attempt
at insurrection was begun, but there was not the spirit to go on with
it, and General Rossaroll, its initiator, had to fly to Spain. The
afterpiece is what might have been expected; an insensate desire for
vengeance got hold of Ferdinand, and the last years of his life were
spent in hunting down his enemies, real or imaginary. Morelli and
Silvati were hung, the fugitives, Pepe and Rossaroll, were condemned
to death, but this was only the beginning. The Austrian commander
counselled mercy, but in this respect the King showed an independent
mind. A court-martial was instituted to examine the conduct of
ecclesiastics, public functionaries and soldiers, from the year 1793
downwards. No one was safe who had expressed a dislike of absolutism
within the last thirty years. A blameless gentleman who was a
Carbonaro, was conducted through Naples on the back of an ass, and
beaten with a whip, to which nails were attached. Eight hundred
persons are said to have perished at the hands of the state in one
year. Ferdinand himself expired on the 3rd of January 1825, after
misgoverning for sixty-five years.

The Neapolitan revolution had just collapsed, when another broke out
in Piedmont, which, though short in duration, was to have far-reaching
consequences.

At that time, the King of Sardinia was Victor Emmanuel I., who
succeeded his brother Charles Emmanuel in 1802, when the latter
abdicated and retired to Rome, where he joined the Society of Jesus.
Victor Emmanuel's only son was dead, and the throne would devolve on
his youngest brother, Charles Felix, Duke of Genoa, whom reasons of
state led to abandon the wish to become a monk, which he had formed as
a boy of eleven, on being taken to visit a convent near Turin. But
Charles Felix, though married, was without children, and the
legitimate heir-presumptive was Charles Albert, Prince of Carignano,
who represented the younger branch of the family, which divided from
the main line in the early part of the seventeenth century. Charles
Albert's father was the luckless Prince Charles of Ca