Freedom's Battle by Gary J. Bass

Author:Gary J. Bass
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307269294
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2008-08-18T16:00:00+00:00

Perhaps most important, Gladstone had a history of activism against foreign oppression. Even as a Tory, he could be roused to fury by suffering overseas. Back in 1851, while Gladstone was a Tory MP for Oxford, he spent about four months living in Naples, bearing witness to horrors. A dictatorial monarchy was in the process of a brutal crackdown on liberals—arbitrarily detaining tens of thousands of political prisoners, torturing some, condemning some to death, and cramming the rest into filthy and disease-ridden jails. When the prisoners in one jail revolted, soldiers threw hand grenades into the mob.5

With growing disgust, Gladstone personally went to see some of the jails. He, as an Italian friend said, “erupted like Vesuvius.” When he returned to Britain, he fired off a long letter to an influential Tory friend, who was also Byron’s cousin and a strong supporter of the Greeks in the 1820s. Gladstone wrote that the “revolting” practices of the Neapolitan government, unmatched in all of Europe, were “an outrage upon religion, upon civilization, upon humanity, and upon decency.” He scrupulously reported the pitiable legal cases of several of the detainees.6

Gladstone, in his conservative phase, at first only wanted British diplomatic pressure over “an internal question” for Naples. But three months passed without British action. An official appeal to Austria yielded only a frosty reminder that Austria had not disapproved of British treatment of dissidents in Ireland and Ceylon. Gladstone, almost with a sense of relief, published his letters, appealing to “the bar of general opinion.” (He chose pamphleteering over raising the issue in Parliament, for fear of miring “the sacred purposes of humanity” in European diplomacy.) He wrote, “On the Government of Naples I had no claim whatever; but as a man I felt and knew it to be my duty to testify to what I had credibly heard, or personally seen, of the needless and acute sufferings of men.”7

Gladstone’s pamphlet produced a public sensation. Palmerston, then foreign secretary, printed up official copies and formally sent them to every European government, including that of Naples. Britain broke off diplomatic relations with Naples—a potential prelude to war. But the Neapolitan king stood firm.

Stymied, Gladstone tried force. In 1855, as chancellor of the exchequer, he secretly backed a reckless plan to send a fast steamship to Santo Stefano jail to break the prisoners out by cover of darkness. The famous Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi was put in charge of the daring rescue. The covert activists quickly raised the massive sum to buy the steamer, bolstered by big donations from Gladstone’s wife and friends—and a hefty £500 secured by Gladstone himself from the British secret service fund, with Palmerston’s approval. One prisoner in Santo Stefano snuck out a letter written in lemon juice to give the plotters a sketch of the jail.

The spectacular plan failed spectacularly: the steamer sank in a violent storm off the British coast at Yarmouth, drowning three members of the crew. Gladstone set about using the remaining money to help the political prisoners and their relatives.

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