Apart, however, from this urgent private trouble, it is doubtful whether Lord Hardwicke would have continued his service in the Mediterranean. He felt, indeed, that the approval of his conduct at Genoa by the Whig Government was less hearty than Mr. Croker believed was the case, confined as it was to the barest official acknowledgment of services which to everyone else appeared not only creditable to Lord Hardwicke as a captain of a British ship of war, but of the highest value to Italy, to the cause of good order, and, by the havoc and bloodshed his tact and firmness had certainly prevented, to humanity itself. As the documents set out in the appendix to the last chapter fully show, all this was highly appreciated abroad. King Victor hastened to confer on Lord Hardwicke the order of St. Maurice and St. Lazarus for what were described by General de Launay, his foreign secretary, as 'les importans services que vous avez rendus à Son Gouvernement pendant les graves évènemens qui ont affligé la ville de Gênes et l'empressement efficace avec lequel vous avez puissamment secondé M. le Général de La Marmora pour y ramener l'ordre'; Lord Normanby, the British Ambassador at Paris, reported to his government that the French Minister at Turin had more than once expressed his conviction 'that during the late troubles at Genoa that city was in great part saved from pillage and destruction by the energetic attitude assumed by the British naval force in that port, and that the French consuls had stated to him that there were moments when the lives and properties of the peaceable inhabitants would have been in great danger, but for the dread inspired by the position taken up by H.M.S. _Vengeance_, and the effective support given by Lord Hardwicke to the consular authorities.' There was less value perhaps in the thanks given by 'the Count and Colonel, Director of the Bagni Maritim,' whose gratitude was mingled with a sense of favours to come, in the possible exertion of Lord Hardwicke's good offices with King Victor Emmanuel for clemency for the convicts under the Count's charge, whose conduct had added so much to the dangers of the situation. But of the foreign testimony to Lord Hardwicke's service at Genoa perhaps the most eloquent was that of Mazzini, who admitted to Lord Malmesbury that his career in Italy had been spoiled 'by one English sailor at Genoa called Hardvick.'