"In spite of these indignities he became an out-and-out Frenchman, which men found so difficult to believe of a Commodore in His Sicilian Majesty's Navy. Troubridge himself wrote to me on April 18th: 'I enclose your Lordship one of Caracciolo's letters as head of the Marine. I hope he has been forced into this measure.... Caracciolo, I am assured by all the sailors, _is not a Jacobin_, but forced to act as he does. They sign his name to printed papers without his authority, as they have, in my opinion, the Archbishop's.' That was on April 18th; but on May 1st Troubridge wrote again: 'I am now satisfied that Caracciolo is a Jacobin. I enclose you one of his letters. He came in the gunboats to Castel-a-mare, himself, and spirited up the Jacobins; though he seems to have had so much conscience left that he saved Sorrento and Castel-a-mare from being burnt, after they had been taken and plundered.' "This is all bad enough, but there was worse to follow. For on the 28th of May Capt. Foote wrote to me: 'Caracciolo threatens the second attack, and on the 13th his gunboats annoyed the Royalist forces attacking the fort of Villema and the bridge of Madelena a good deal.' Caracciolo had thus fired repeatedly upon his Sovereign's flag, and was by everybody recognised as the Commander of the Rebel Navy. His condemnation therefore was inevitable. "I should not be surprised if some one were put up by an enemy to ask why I ordered the sentence to be carried into immediate execution. It may be said that there is no parallel to be drawn between this and Admiral Lord St. Vincent's instant execution of two seamen taken in the act of mutiny. There was more than a parallel--there was necessity. The situation, which has been blinked at by some, is that there are in the Neapolitan State a vast number of persons neither actively loyal nor actually indisposed to the Crown, whose main idea is to save their skins and their own goods, and if they can, get as much as possible of other people's. So far, the lesson before these jackals has been that to be loyal means exposing yourself to every kind of danger and ignominy, and the almost certainty of being abandoned to your enemies without a finger raised to save you or punish evil doers; while if you are disloyal, though you may be plundered and ill-treated by your new allies, you are not in danger of death or torture, nor precluded from robbing, maiming or slaying your private enemies. Every coward, therefore, and that means a large proportion of the population of Naples, feels bound to be a rebel; and the little risk there might have been attached to rebellion is removed by the treachery of the Royal commanders, who, having no foreigners at their elbows, are indulging in the other Neapolitan weakness of selling their country. All the way along it is 'Heads, I win; Tails, you lose,' against the loyal, until the belief begins to grow that nothing serious can happen to a rebel. It is to combat this feeling