Oh, thank you so much CountessKate, for the portrait and the info (age) of Maria Carolina's portrait! You're right, Ferdinand seemed so "enamoured" of Lucia!
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Excerpts from a book (Naples in 1799) by Constance Giglioli:
"Ferdinand was born to be ruled by others not so much that he had a yielding character as that he hated to be disturbed, hated scenes, difficulties, opposition, mental effort ; and to avoid these things let others govern in his name. If he could have fallen into good hands, there would perhaps have been no great harm ; but in an evil day for him and for Naples he was given to wife, when he was seventeen, Maria Carolina of Austria, daughter of the great Maria Theresa, sister of Marie Antoinette, of Pietro Leopoldo, Grand-Duke of Tuscany, and of the Emperor Joseph II. of Austria, and she lived to be his ruin and that of the Bourbon dynasty at Naples, and the scourge of the kingdom she insisted on governing.
The new queen, still in her teens, was devoured by the ambition to shine among the crowned heads of Europe, as her mother had shone and Catherine II., the famous Empress of Russia. The king, embarrassed by his conscious ignorance, and dazzled and subdued by the brilliant qualities and high spirit of his wife no less than by her violent temper, soon became to her like clay in the hands of the potter, and the queen, " consummate mistress," as Hugh Elliot called her, " in the experienced management of every female wile and snare," now by flatteries and concessions, now by furious scenes and tears, led or drove him whatever way she chose.
He complained of these things occasionally in his letters to his father, where he gives a ludicrous picture of the part he was forced to play in these domestic scenes. The queen, after some six years, and the birth of two daughters, became at last the mother of a son, and acquired thereby the right, most ardently desired, to a seat in the Council of State ; after which event she considered it superfluous to have any more children. She was destined, however, in the lapse of some five-and-twenty years, to have no less than seventeen a course of things which interfered intolerably with her extreme love of activity and amusement, for which she took her revenge in outbursts of ungovernable rage against the author of her misfortunes.
The queen tacitly encouraged as much as possible all these tastes that kept the king out of public affairs and allowed her to rule in his name. She gradually substituted for the policy of Carlo III. that of the royal family from which she came. The tendency of Carlos III had been towards friendship with the kindred houses of France and Spain and enmity with England. The young queen aimed at withdrawing altogether from the Spanish tutelage, drawing closer to Austria, and looking, as time went on, to the English navy for protection by sea. This personal policy of Maria Carolina led her to disaster, and caused the ultimate ruin of the Bourbons of Naples. The queen never sought to identify herself with the country of her adoption ; and as her sister, Marie Antoinette remained always F Autrichienne at her French Court, so Maria Carolina at Naples was Austrian, nor dreamed of being anything else. All one can see in her is personal interest, and personal passion still stronger than interest. The country merely supplies the instruments or the objects of her private desires and revenges. The kingdom, in the gross, she regards as the " patrimony " of her children, and she intrigues and fights over it with the instincts of a mother-tiger rather than of a queen. She gave much to the poor, and at the same time heaped wealth and presents on swarms of utterly unworthy people spies, informers, favourites, and persons of whom she made use in ignoble and underhand ways, besides ministers and others whom she honoured lavishly in public.
Ferdinand found himself placed in the dilemma of having to choose between offending his father at Madrid or his wife at home, and naturally chose to break with Madrid if only he might hope for peace within his domestic walls. The lelters in which, with many transparent falsehoods and equivocations, he lays these matters before his father are characteristic and very amusing.
It is remarkable how the many descriptions and portraits given of the queen by various contemporary diplomatists and others, English, French, and Italian, correspond, almost down to the use of the same images and phrases, through a long series of years.
It is said, by people who should know, that diaries and letters of the queen, now in the keeping of the royal house of Italy, were withdrawn from the archives, by special request, lest the publication of their scandalous contents should give pain to the reigning house of Austria. Meanwhile, we are not seriously at a loss, for want of these documents, to know what to make of Maria Carolina. The exact extent of her private immorality matters little to us in comparison with her failure and her crimes as a queen.
Gorani, for instance, the Lombard adventurer, seems to know her very well when he writes thus in his open letter to Ferdinand 1 : " Since, Sire, you have never studied, you have a great idea of the learning of the queen . . . she is an absurd pedant who has read a few books without in the least understanding them, and who has no real knowledge, no talent, no virtue. ... If this woman were nothing else but licentious and pedantic she would be merely contemptible . . . but upon her lover, upon her favourites, she lavishes the blood of your people." The queen, he says, is execrated by all her subjects, "who accuse her, and justly, of all the evils which they suffer." Gorani seems rather to have admired Ferdinand than not in those days, as a man who, however deficient in education, might at least have been open to reason and good influence. It is no wonder, he says indulgently, that Ferdinand should be covered with relics and charms, and that during thunderstorms he should walk about his apartments ringing a little bell taken from the Holy House at Loreto. But that the queen, with all her pretensions to philosophy, should be taken, on and off, with fits of superstitious devotion, he considers as a strong proof of the real inferiority of her understanding."
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The whole book can be read at:
http://www.ebooksread.com/authors-eng/constance-h-d-giglioli/naples-in-1799-an-account-of-the-revolution-of-1799-and-of-the-rise-and-fall-of-ala/page-2-naples-in-1799-an-account-of-the-revolution-of-1799-and-of-the-rise-and-fall-of-ala.shtmlI have yet to read the whole book to see if the author is fair enough (in the other sections) to Maria Carolina....
What does anyone think?
