Caroline, the wife of Murat, was the only one of the family untrue to Napoleon. Very ambitious, and forgetting how completely she owed her Kingdom of Naples to her brother, she had urged Murat in 1814 to separate from Napoleon, and, still worse, to attack Eugene, who held the north of Italy against the Austrians. She relied on the formal treaty with Austria that Murat should retain his Kingdom of Naples, and she may also have trusted to the good offices of her former admirer Metternich. When the Congress of Vienna met, the French Minister, Talleyrand, at once began to press for the removal of Murat. A trifling treaty was not considered an obstacle to the Heaven-sent deliverers of Europe, and Murat, believing his fate sealed, hearing of Napoleon's landing, and urged on by a misleading letter from Joseph Bonaparte, at once marched to attack the Austrians. He was easily routed by the Austrians under Neipperg, the future husband of Maria Louisa. Murat fled to France, and Caroline first took refuge in an English man-of-war, the 'Tremendous', being, promised a free passage to England. She was, however, handed over to the Austrians; who kept her in confinement at Hainburg near Vienna.
In October 1815 Murat landed in Calabria in a last wild attempt to recover his throne. He was arrested and immediately shot. After his murder Caroline, taking the title of Countess of Lipona (an anagram of Napoli), was permitted to retire to Trieste with Elisa, Jerome, and his wife. Caroline was almost without means of existence, the Neapolitan Bourbons refusing even to give up the property she had brought there.
She married a General Macdonald. When Hortense was buried at Rueil Caroline obtained permission to attend the sad ceremony. In 1838 she went to France to try to obtain a pension, and succeeded in getting one of 100,000 francs. She died from cancer in the stomach in 1839, and was buried in the Campo Santo, Bologna.
Cardinal Fesch, the half-uncle of Napoleon, the Archbishop of Lyons, who had fallen into disgrace with Napoleon for taking the side of the Pope and refusing to accept the see of Paris, to which he was nominated by Napoleon, had retired to Rome in 1814, where he remained till the return of Napoleon, when he went to Paris, and accepted a peerage. After Waterloo he again sought the protection of the Pope, and he remained at Rome till his death in 1839, a few days before Caroline Bonaparte's. He was buried in S. Lorenzo in Lucina, Rome. He had for years been a great collector of pictures, of which he left a large number (1200) to the town of Ajaccio. The Cardinal, buying at the right time when few men had either enough leisure or money to think of pictures, got together a most valuable collection. This was sold in 1843-44 at Rome. Its contents now form some of the greatest treasures in the galleries of Dudley House and of the Marquis of Hertford, now Sir Richard Wallace's. In a large collection there are generally some daubs, but it is an amusing instance of party spirit to find the value of his pictures run down by men who are unwilling to allow any one connected with Napoleon to have even taste in art. He always refused the demands of the Restoration that he should resign his see of Lyons, though under Louis Philippe he offered to do so, and leave his pictures to France, if the Bonaparte family were allowed to enter France: this was refused.
It can hardly be denied that the fate of the Bonapartes was a hard one.
Napoleon had been undisputed sovereign of France for fourteen years, Louis had been King of Holland for four years, Jerome was King of Westphalia for six years, Caroline was Queen of Naples for seven years.
If Napoleon had forfeited all his rights by leaving Elba after the conditions of his abdication had been broken by the Allies, still there was no reason why the terms stipulated for the other members of the family should not have been carried out, or at least an ordinary income insured to them. With all Napoleon's faults he was always ready to shower wealth on the victims of his policy:--The sovereigns of the Continent had courted and intermarried with the Bonapartes in the tame of that family's grandeur: there was neither generosity nor wisdom in treating them as so many criminals the moment fortune had declared against them. The conduct of the Allies was not influenced simply by the principle of legitimacy, for the King of Saxony only kept his throne by the monarchs falling out over the spoil. If sovereigns were to be respected as of divine appointment, it was not well to make their existence only depend on the fate of war.
Nothing in the history of the Cent Jours is more strange than the small part played in it by the Marshals, the very men who are so identified in our minds with the Emperor, that we might have expected to find that brilliant band playing a most prominent part in his last great struggle, no longer for mere victory, but for very existence. In recording how the Guard came up the fatal hill at Waterloo for their last combat, it would seem but natural to have to give a long roll of the old historic names as leading or at least accompanying them; and the reader is apt to ask, where were the men whose very titles recalled such glorious battle- fields, such achievements, and such rewards showered down by the man who, almost alone at the end of the day, rode forward to invite that death from which it was such cruel kindness to save him?
