Leo XII had died on February 10 of the preceding year, and had been succeeded by Pius VIII, whose beneficent reign was ended all too soon by death on the eve of All Saints, 1830. The gentle old man had, during his short Pontificate, attacked and handled with vigour and wisdom some of the most important questions of the day, notably in his regulations for mixed marriages and in his stern condemnation of the secret societies. These had, during the last momentous year of his life, produced the harvest of revolution which convulsed Europe more or less from Warsaw to Rome; yet worse was to come, but Pius VIII was spared the trial of witnessing it. That was reserved for his successor, Gregory XVI, sturdy, imperturbable, broad-shouldered, bringing with him the breezes of the Julian Alps and the hard good sense of the Venetian from the mountains and the sea. He needed it all, for, as I have said elsewhere, the storm that had muttered so long broke loose even before his election; the henchmen of anarchy, who had long been secretly busy in the Papal States, started a revolution in Rome itself in February 1830; this was promptly quelled, but the trouble in the more northerly provinces was very serious, and the Pope had to appeal to Austria to subdue it. Spoleto had by no means escaped the general infection, but the Archbishop had, by constant watchfulness and his great personal influence, succeeded in preventing any open outbreak of the revolutionary spirit which lurked there; what was his horror, and that of the citizens, when it became known that a body of four thousand insurgents, retreating before the Austrians, were approaching the town with the intention of holding it against their pursuers! The place was in a panic—the inhabitants already saw themselves trampled down and massacred in the bloody conflict that would take place—saw the stern punishment that the Austrians would inflict upon them for harbouring the desperate revolutionaries. It was in this emergency that Giovanni Maria Mastai showed the coolness of a statesman and the courage of a soldier. At the risk of his life he drove at full speed to the Austrian head-quarters and insisted on interviewing the commander. To the surprised general he explained that the armed insurgents who were demanding Spoleto’s hospitality at the point of the bayonet were strangers to her, that she was in no way responsible for them, and that she disclaimed all part in their designs. This point being made clear, he undertook to bring the rebels to submission, single-handed, if the general would promise not to let his own men enter Spoleto. The promise was, naturally, most readily given, the irritated commander being only too glad to relinquish an unpleasant job. And then the Archbishop, getting into his carriage again, rushed off to intercept the revolutionaries in their march on the town.