in 1820 he grovelled to the insurgents as he had done to his parents, descending to the meanest submissions while fear was on him, then intriguing and, when detected, grovelling again. When at the beginning of 1823, as a result of the congress of Verona, the French invaded Spain,[1] “invoking the God of St Louis, for the sake of preserving the throne of Spain to a descendant of Henry IV., and of reconciling that fine kingdom with Europe,” and in May the revolutionary party carried Ferdinand to Cadiz, he continued to make promises of amendment till he was free. Then, in violation of his oath to grant an amnesty, he revenged himself for three years of coercion by killing on a scale which revolted his “rescuers,” and against which the duke of Angoulême, powerless to interfere, protested by refusing the Spanish decorations offered him for his services. During his last years Ferdinand’s energy was abated. He no longer changed ministers every few months as a sport, and he allowed some of them to conduct the current business of government. His habits of life were telling on him. He became torpid, bloated and horrible to look at. After his fourth marriage in 1829 with Maria Christina of Naples, he was persuaded by his wife to set aside the law of succession of Philip V., which gave a preference to all the males of the family in Spain over the females. His marriage had brought him only two daughters. When well, he consented to the change under the influence of his wife. When ill, he was terrified by priestly advisers, who were partisans of his brother Don Carlos. What his final decision was is perhaps doubtful. His wife was mistress by his death-bed, and she could put the words she chose into the mouth of a dead man—and could move the dead hand at her will. Ferdinand died on the 29th of September 1833. It had been a frequent saying with the more zealous royalists of Spain that a king must be wiser than his ministers, for he was placed on the throne and directed by God. Since the reign of Ferdinand VII. no one has maintained this unqualified version of the great doctrine of divine right.
King Ferdinand VII. kept a diary during the troubled years 1820–1823, which has been published by the count de Casa Valencia.
FERDINAND II. (1810–1859), king of the Two Sicilies, son of
Francis I, was born at Palermo on the 12th of January 1810.
In his early years he was credited with Liberal ideas and he was
fairly popular, his free and easy manners having endeared him
to the lazzaroni. On succeeding his father in 1830, he published
an edict in which he promised to “give his most anxious attention
to the impartial administration of justice,” to reform the
finances, and to “use every effort to heal the wounds which had
afflicted the kingdom for so many years”; but these promises
seem to have been meant only to lull discontent to sleep, for
although he did something for the economic development of
the kingdom, the existing burden of taxation was only slightly
lightened, corruption continued to flourish in all departments
of the administration, and an absolutism was finally established
harsher than that of all his predecessors, and supported by even
more extensive and arbitrary arrests. Ferdinand was naturally
shrewd, but badly educated, grossly superstitious and possessed
of inordinate self-esteem. Though he kept the machinery of
his kingdom fairly efficient, and was a patriot to the extent of
brooking no foreign interference, he made little account of the
wishes or welfare of his subjects. In 1832 he married Cristina,
daughter of Victor Emmanuel I., king of Sardinia, and shortly
after her death in 1836 he took for a second wife Maria Theresa,
daughter of archduke Charles of Austria. After his Austrian
alliance the bonds of despotism were more closely tightened, and
the increasing discontent of his subjects was manifested by
various abortive attempts at insurrection; in 1837 there was a
rising in Sicily in consequence of the outbreak of cholera, and in
1843 the Young Italy Society tried to organize a general rising,
which, however, only manifested itself in a series of isolated outbreaks.
The expedition of the Bandiera brothers (q.v.) in 1844,
although it had no practical result, aroused great ill-feeling owing
to the cruel sentences passed on the rebels. In January 1848
a rising in Sicily was the signal for revolutions all over Italy and
Europe; it was followed by a movement in Naples, and the king
granted a constitution which he swore to observe. A dispute,
however, arose as to the nature of the oath which should be taken
by the members of the chamber of deputies, and as neither the
king nor the deputies would yield, serious disturbances broke
out in the streets of Naples on the 15th of May; so the king,
making these an excuse for withdrawing his promise, dissolved
the national parliament on the 13th of March 1849. He retired
to Gaeta to confer with various deposed despots, and when the
news of the Austrian victory at Novara (March 1849) reached
him, he determined to return to a reactionary policy. Sicily,
whence the Royalists had been expelled, was subjugated by
General Filangieri (q.v.), and the chief cities were bombarded,
an expedient which won for Ferdinand the epithet of “King
Bomba.” During the last years of his reign espionage and
arbitrary arrests prevented all serious manifestations of discontent
among his subjects. In 1851 the political prisoners of
Naples were calculated by Mr Gladstone in his letters to Lord
Aberdeen (1851) to number 15,000 (probably the real figure was
nearer 40,000), and so great was the scandal created by the prevailing
reign of terror, and the abominable treatment to which
the prisoners were subjected, that in 1856 France and England
made diplomatic representations to induce the king to mitigate
his rigour and proclaim a general amnesty, but without success.
An attempt was made by a soldier to assassinate Ferdinand in
1856. He died on the 22nd of May 1856, just after the declaration
of war by France and Piedmont against Austria, which was
to result in the collapse of his kingdom and his dynasty. He
was bigoted, cruel, mean, treacherous, though not without a
certain bonhomie; the only excuse that can be made for him
is that with his heredity and education a different result could
scarcely be expected.
See Correspondence respecting the Affairs of Naples and Sicily, 1848–1849, presented to both Houses of Parliament by Command of Her Majesty, 4th May 1849; Two Letters to the Earl of Aberdeen, by the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, 1st ed., 1851 (an edition published in 1852 and the subsequent editions contain an Examination of the Official Reply of the Neapolitan Government); N. Nisco, Ferdinando II. il suo regno (Naples, 1884); H. Remsen Whitehouse, The Collapse of the Kingdom of Naples (New York, 1899); R. de Cesare, La Caduta d’ un Regno, vol. i. (Città di Castello, 1900), which contains a great deal of fresh information, but is badly arranged and not always reliable. (L. V.*)
FERDINAND III. (1769–1824), grand duke of Tuscany, and archduke of Austria, second son of the emperor Leopold II., was born on the 6th of May 1769. On his father becoming emperor in 1790, he succeeded him as grand duke of Tuscany. Ferdinand was one of the first sovereigns to enter into diplomatic relations with the French republic (1793); and although, a few months later, he was compelled by England and Russia to join the coalition against France, he concluded peace with that power in 1795, and by observing a strict neutrality saved his dominions from invasion by the French, except for a temporary occupation of Livorno, till 1799, when he was compelled to vacate his throne, and a provisional Republican government was established at Florence. Shortly afterwards the French arms suffered severe reverses in Italy, and Ferdinand was restored to his territories; but in 1801, by the peace of Lunéville, Tuscany was converted into the kingdom of Etruria, and he was again compelled to return to Vienna. In lieu of the sovereignty of Tuscany, he obtained in 1802 the electorship of Salzburg, which he exchanged by the peace of Pressburg in 1805 for that of Würzburg. In 1806 he was admitted as grand duke of Würzburg to the confederation of the Rhine. He was restored to the throne of Tuscany after the abdication of Napoleon in 1814 and was received with enthusiasm by the people, but had again to vacate his capital for a short time in 1815, when Murat proclaimed war against Austria. The final overthrow of the French supremacy at the battle of Waterloo secured him, however, in the undisturbed possession of his grand duchy during the remainder of his life. The restoration in Tuscany was not accompanied by the reactionary excesses which characterized it elsewhere, and a large part of the French legislation was retained. His prime minister was Count V. Fossombroni (q.v.). The mild rule of Ferdinand, his solicitude for the welfare of his subjects,
- ↑ Louis XVIII.’s speech from the throne, Jan. 28, 1823.
