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By Root 2603 0

area in which it could establish permanent hospitals and magazines and rely on supplies of all sorts, not to mention baggage animals and transport (unlike the French army, the British did not maintain a permanent baggage or artillery train, and instead relied on hiring the necessary animals and wagons locally). If such a base could be established on enemy territory, all well and good, but in 1807,except perhaps in the extreme south of Italy, this was simply unthinkable. All that was left, then, was the territory of friendly states - Sicily or, just possibly, Portugal - but this required a considerable sacrifice of sovereignty on the part of the state involved, and an equally considerable degree of harmony between the two powers. In Sicily this was not forthcoming. The king and queen and their leading courtiers uniformly blamed the British for the loss of the mainland in ,1806and had only to look to Gibraltar, Menorca, Corsica and, most recently, Malta to see examples of the way in which British presences in the Mediterranean had a way of becoming permanent. Particular fury, meanwhile, had been caused by Sir John Stuart’s refusal to march on Naples after the battle of Maida. To quote the commander of the Neapolitan army, Roger de Damas:

The political and military character of the English . . . makes them unique as a nation . . . It was in their power to conquer Naples - it is so still. They overcame all the obstacles that might have made it impossible, and deliberately retraced their steps as soon as those obstacles were safely passed. Their inexplicable conduct cannot fail to give them a reputation for being very dangerous allies. Not one of their calculations is ever influenced by higher considerations. Their whole policy is a rule of mercantile algebra, and we have not yet seen an English general whom self-respect or honour or enthusiasm can move to go beyond his orders . . . General Stuart, it seems, came to Calabria with the sole object of erecting scaffolds and preparing tortures, to which from that fatal moment the unfortunate and too credulous Calabrians were abandoned . . . Sicily occupied by the English is merely a kind of maintenance-allowance granted to a Nabob . . . The English are . . . shameless in their exactions . . . and every moment some fresh bitterness is added to the discomfort of the unfortunate sovereigns.50

British complaints of Neapolitan hostility were legion, and relations were not helped by the perception that the Sicilian administration was not just obstructive, but also incompetent and corrupt. Here Lord Holland is typical: ‘In Sicily the misgovernment of the court was daily endangering our interests. The queen, as she advanced in years, grew more ungovernable in her revenge and not more moderate in the indulgence of other passions.’51 Then there are the views of Sir John Moore, for whom the queen was ‘violent, led by her passions, and seldom influenced by reason’; King Ferdinand, ‘an indolent man, hating business’; and the chief minister, Circello, ‘quite an old goose’.52 This is not to say that the British did not have a point. The attitude of the court towards its Sicilian domains was disdainful in the extreme; Maria Carolina was wildly extravagant and inclined to favour a variety of dubious favourites; the court and administration were dominated by emigrés from the mainland; recruitment to the army was at a complete standstill; and, to cap it all, the queen was suspected of maintaining secret contacts with the French. All this was an unacceptable threat to the garrison’s security and the response of the Talents was to tighten the screw: the British ambassador was authorized to stop the subsidy received by the regime of Ferdinand and Maria Carolina as well as to demand the removal of certain figures from the court or even the exile of the queen herself. Thus the scene was set for a long conflict that was to last for most of the war.

How this dilemma was resolved is something that must be left for another chapter. For the time being, what matters is simply that no British army landed