(2 of 2)
Italy was finally united in 1870 under the House of Savoy. The unity was perhaps inevitable, but without Garibaldi the Risorgimento would have lacked a popular hero. He was a good commander of men; Abraham Lincoln even offered him an army corps with the Union forces. (Garibaldi turned him down; he wanted supreme command and immediate abolition of slavery.) He was, however, too much of an innocent to be a good administrator. He was installed only briefly as "Dictator" of Sicily. Yet if the prophet-in-arms was a nuisance in his own country, he received great honor elsewhere. In 1864, London put on an unprecedented jamboree for the visiting lion of liberty. He was given splendid receptions, pronounced "noble" by the poet laureate, and half a million Londoners yelled their heads off. He had the good sense and bad taste to wear his red shirt nearly everywhere. There were only two sour notes. Queen Victoria was "deeply shocked" by the high-level attention paid to this subverter of established order. Karl Marx, then organizing the First International in England, huffed: "A miserable spectacle of imbecility."
When he retired to the granitic little island domain of Caprera, between Corsica and Sardinia (much of it paid for by English friends), Garibaldi dreamed of a Shelleyan end—to be burned, like the poet, on the beach. When he died in 1882, he was instead given the usual Christian burial on Caprera. Nature supplied the Garibaldian touch. A melodramatic storm came up, and the vast granite block that now covers his body cracked and broke.