He would feel safe, he told himself, in Cosenza, for he intended to arrive when the banquet should be already begun, and leave before it was over, and, in the house of the General, he would be in the company of all of the authorities of the Province, whose presence he seems to have conceived to be a safeguard, for some reason or another. So he went and was royally entertained. Healths were drunk, compliments were exchanged, and Capobianco proposed to depart, followed by the salutations of the General. He got no farther than the ante-room, though, where the gendarmes were waiting for him. They seized him and dragged him off to prison, where, the next morning, he was tried by a Military Commission, condemned, and publicly beheaded before midday in the Square. When this was bruited abroad, some of the “patriots” fled to Sicily and the Bourbons, to breathe, as we are told, “the free atmosphere of Sicily under the Bourbons,” and Joachim’s unpopularity began to assume the proportions of a menace. Still, however, the better elements were upon his side, perhaps from expediency—for Murat’s servants would receive short shrift at Ferdinand’s hands should that monarch return—but they gave Joachim some very good advice among them, even if some of it is rather too subtle. Napoleon’s hands were too full to allow of his interference, and he, in his dealings with the allies, invariably quoted 50,000 Neapolitan troops as part of his own force. The allies knew better, though. Two fatal defects in a ruler are overcraftiness and inconsistency. Murat had both. At one time, as it has been seen, he hastened to pardon those who had conspired against his life; a year later he allowed his own resentment against the Carbonari to lead him into an attempt to crush them by a severity which merely drove them in on each other and made a solid body out of a struggling mob. Before this, with an ideal the meaning of which very few of them understood, the Carbonari—the leaders of the movement, that is to say—were fighting the clouds; but the harrying they received gave them a definite grievance and one that was shared, for purely personal reasons, by thousands, who would otherwise never have joined the movement at all. The craftiness which Murat conceived to be policy delivered him into the hands of men far cleverer than himself, whose life’s business it was to overreach one another. He was a brave man and a most excellent soldier, but those were not qualities that could help him in the thimble-rigging, knife-in-the-boot game of Napoleonic statecraft, played by men who had not an illusion remaining about each other, and who, with the possible exception of the Russians, had each and all betrayed their neighbours over and over again.