Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies

Biography

Ferdinand was born in 1751, the third son of Charles of Bourbon, King of Naples and Sicily. When his father became King of Spain in 1759, treaties barred uniting the crowns, so the eight-year-old Ferdinand inherited Naples and Sicily under a regency led by Bernardo Tanucci, who left his education neglected. His majority in 1767 opened with the expulsion of the Jesuits, and in 1768 he married Archduchess Maria Carolina of Austria, who soon dominated policy; Tanucci was dismissed in 1777 and the Englishman Sir John Acton became the leading minister.

In 1798 Ferdinand marched on French-held Rome, but his army was routed and he fled to Palermo aboard Nelson's flagship. The French set up the Parthenopean Republic in Naples in January 1799, but Cardinal Ruffo's royalist army retook the mainland within months, and the returning king had several hundred collaborators executed. After Austerlitz the French invaded again in 1806; Ferdinand withdrew to Sicily, which he ruled under British protection while Joseph Bonaparte and then Joachim Murat held Naples. Under British pressure he accepted a reformed Sicilian constitution and handed power to his son as regent.

After Murat's fall in 1815 Ferdinand returned to Naples, abolished the Sicilian constitution and in December 1816 merged his realms into the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, ruling as an absolute monarch in close dependence on Austria. A Carbonari-led army revolt in July 1820 forced him to grant a constitution, which he repudiated after travelling to the Congress of Laibach; an Austrian army then restored his absolute rule in 1821. He died in Naples in January 1825.