Prisoner of the Vatican Read Online Free PDF Page B

delight was short-lived, for farther north the Prussians soon overwhelmed Austria's army. And, embarrassingly for the Italian king, while Italy's regular army and navy were both being routed by the Austrians, Garibaldi, again leading his own army of irregulars, was scoring a series of impressive victories against them.
    On July 10 Russell chronicled the change of mood: Austria's losses, he wrote, have "destroyed the hopes entertained, but a few days ago, by the Papal Government and the Legitimists in Rome. They had prayed for and hailed the war as their only salvation and had never doubted that Austrian troops would again occupy the lost provinces of the Pope and would re-establish Francis II on the throne of Naples."
    "I called again on Cardinal Antonelli this morning," Russell reported, "and found His Eminence looking painfully ill and unusually excited. 'Good God,' he exclaimed and struck his forehead with the palms of his hands, 'what is to become of us?'" 12
    With the Convention's deadline for the departure of the French troops from Rome rapidly approaching, some of Pius's advisers were urging that he escape from Rome while he could and take refuge in Austria or Spain.
    This was the situation in December 1866 as the French flag was taken down from Rome's Sant'Angelo Castle and the last French soldiers boarded their ships in the papal port of Civitavecchia, bound for home. 13
    With Rome no longer protected by foreign troops, Victor Emmanuel and his ministers found themselves in an awkward position. The nationalist movement had long insisted that Italian unification would be complete only when Rome was made capital of Italy, and the lack of popular support for papal rule inside the city was well known. Yet, in signing the Convention of September, the Italian government had made itself the guarantor of papal rule in Rome, the king's honor at stake.
    The trick, from the king's as well as his ministers' point of view, was to find a way to provoke a "spontaneous" revolt in Rome, which they could use as a pretext for sending in troops to restore order. To this end, they were secretly financing a number of subversive groups in the Holy City. Yet this tactic was proving to be not only frustrating but also dangerous. It was frustrating because the Romans, disgruntled though they may have been, seemed none too eager to put their lives at risk by revolting against papal rule. The pope, after all, still had thousands of his own military recruits—almost all foreigners—as well as a disreputable, and greatly feared, force of irregulars that patrolled the streets. But the government's plotting was also dangerous, for plans could easily go wrong. After all, the most likely candidates for the secret subsidies were revolutionaries who would be pleased to see the Italian monarchy fall along with the papacy.
    In the government's campaign of deceit and plotting, Garibaldi came to play a central role. In some ways this was odd, for Garibaldi despised dissimulation. Undeterred by the disastrous fate of his march on Rome in 1862, he again deemed the time right for forcing the government's hand by leading his army on Rome. While careful to keep a safe public distance, the king secretly encouraged him, for such an expedition was exactly the excuse that he needed to justify sending in his own troops.
    Leaving his island retreat of Caprera, off the Sardinian coast, early in 1867, wearing his trademark red shirt and embroidered cap, the sixty-year-old Garibaldi set off on a European tour to drum up support for his crusade. He put one of his sons in charge of collecting funds from wealthy donors while urging patriotic women to sew red shirts for his men.
    In early September, speaking at an international conference in Geneva, Garibaldi called on the Italian state, on taking Rome, to declare the papacy "the most noxious of all sects," to end it, and to replace the Catholic priesthood—an engine of ignorance in his view—"with the