Austrian allies having given him plenty of reason
for suspecting their sincerity, he issued from Rimini, on the 30th of
March, the proclamation of an independent Italy from the Alps to
Sicily. There was no popular reply to his call. Italy, prostrate and
impoverished, was unequal to a great resolve. The Napoleonic legend
was not only dead, but buried; Napoleon had literally no friends left
in Italy except those of his old soldiers who had managed to get back
to their homes, many of them deprived of an arm or a leg, but so
toughened that they lived to great ages. These cherished to their last
hour the worship of their Captain, which it was his highest gift to be
able to inspire. 'I have that feeling for him still, that if he were
to rise from the dead I should go to him, if I could, wherever he
was,' said the old conscript Emmanuele Gaminara of Genoa, who died at
nearly a hundred in a Norfolk village in 1892: the last, perhaps, of
the Italian veterans, and the type of them all.

But a few scattered invalids do not make a nation, and the Italian
nation in 1815 had not the least wish to support any one who came in
the name of Napoleon. So Murat failed without even raising a strong
current of sympathy. Beaten by the Austrians at Tolentino on the 3rd
of May, he retreated with his shattered army. In the last desperate
moment, he issued the constitution which he ought to have granted
years before. Nothing could be of any avail now; his admirable Queen,
the best of all the House of Buonaparte, surrendered Naples to the
English admiral; and Murat, harried by a crushing Austrian force,
renounced his kingdom on the 30th of May. After Waterloo, when a price
was set on his head in France, he meditated one more forlorn hope;
but, deserted by the treachery of his few followers, and driven out of
his course by the violence of the waves, he was thrown on the coast of
Calabria with only twenty-six men, and was shot by order of Ferdinand
of Naples, who especially directed that he should be only allowed
half-an-hour for his religious duties after sentence had been
delivered by the mock court-martial. His dauntless courage did not
desert him: he died like a soldier. It was a better end for an Italian
prince than escaping with money-bags to Germany. Great as were Murat's
faults, an Italian should remember that it was he who first took up
arms to the cry which was later to redeem Italy: independence from
Alps to sea; and if he stand on the il