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since then played a leading role in its politics (the French, of course, regarded him as a British agent and were determined to get rid of him). All that could be said of the arrangement was that it might have been worse. Indeed, as Damas admitted, the peace terms ‘were by no means as bad in proportion as the terms to which Austria was obliged to submit’.25

This insouciance, however, was not shared in Naples, where Acton had gone to great lengths to avoid personal responsibility for the negotiations: indeed, the diplomat who had actually been sent to Florence was publicly disgraced and banished from the court for three years. This reflected the deep impact the whole affair had on Queen Maria Carolina, the Austrian princess who was the de facto ruler of the country given the lack of interest in public affairs evinced by her slow-witted husband, Ferdinand IV. A violent opponent of the French Revolution, who had been horrified by the execution of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, she had been a leading advocate of war in 1793, lamented the treaty of peace that had been signed with France in 1796, and welcomed the resumption of hostilities in 1798. Yet she was always ambivalent about Napoleon:

Personally I abhor the part that Bonaparte serves and plays. He is the Attila, the scourge, of Italy, but I have a genuine esteem and deep admiration for him. He is the greatest man several centuries have produced. His force, constancy, activity and talent have won my admiration . . . My sole regret is that he serves so detestable a cause. I should like the fall of the Republic, but the preservation of Bonaparte . . . I hope that his plans will miscarry and his enterprises fail [but] at the same time I wish for his personal happiness and glory so long as it is not at our expense . . . If he dies they should reduce him to powder and give a dose of it to each ruling sovereign, and two to each of their ministers, [and] then things would go better.26

For Maria Carolina, then, Napoleon himself was not so great an issue so long as he left Naples alone. Her hatred of France, meanwhile, was further dissipated by the campaign of 1800. It was not just that Austria had let Naples down in the aftermath of Hohenlinden. Caught by Napoleon’s passage of the Alps at Livorno en route to Vienna, whither she was going in a personal attempt to secure Naples’ interests in central Italy against Thugut’s determination to secure territorial compensation for Austria, she was able to observe defeat at close quarters. To quote a letter that she wrote to the Neapolitan ambassador in Vienna on 28 June, ‘The fugitives of the Austrian army arrive here in a pitiful state. You see them dying in the streets without clothes or shirts, and they no longer look human. The ill will of the generals and admirals is as incredible as their talk. They all want peace and repose. If all the emperor’s troops are like those I see, I advise him to make peace and never again think of war.’27 On 2 July, she put her views even more clearly:

I swear that once the peace is settled it will be an expert in cunning who can catch me again except in the case of aggression against our country . . . The rest of Europe may be on fire, Thugut emperor and Fox King of England, but even so I would not be drawn from a permanent system of neutrality, or, to be more precise, of nullity. I only aspire to repose.28

Despair at Austria’s war-making capacity, meanwhile, was presently joined by irritation at Britain’s actions in the Mediterranean, the bone of contention here being the island of Malta. After a long siege in which the Neapolitan armed forces were heavily involved, the French garrison of Valetta was forced to surrender on 5 September 1800. While this was welcome, there was great irritation in Palermo at the manner in which the Neapolitans had been excluded from the peace negotiations. With relations already strained by the manner in which the notoriously complacent Sir William Hamilton had been replaced as ambassador by the much more forceful Arthur Paget, the queen was much distressed:

The French