Note 406 — SECTION XXXIII: CHAPTER III

That veritable ‘stormy petrel of politics,’ Sir Robert Wilson, was passing through Sicily in May, and seems to have acted a mischievous part in visiting the Queen, and allowing her to set before him all her grievances against Bentinck, and the ‘Jacobin Parliament’ that he was setting up. She told Wilson that Bentinck ‘went to jails and took evidence of miserable wretches, actual malefactors or suspects, inducing them to say what he wished for his plans, and acting without any substantiating facts.’ As to the army Wilson gathered that ‘the Neapolitan soldiery hate us to a man, the Germans would adhere to us, the native Sicilians at least not act against us.’ But there were only 2,000 Sicilians and 1,900 Germans, and 8,000 Neapolitans and other Italians, eminently untrustworthy. [So untrustworthy were they, indeed, that the Italian corps sent to Spain in the autumn deserted by hundreds to the French.] See Wilson’s Private Diary, 1812-15, pp. 35-62.