by Lucy Riall
The red shirt with Freedom is one now and ever,
Hurra, for the red shirt! Garibaldi and glory.161
Janet Hamilton, ‘the radical bard of the Glasgow workers’, may have sung her welcome to Garibaldi in ‘Auld Scottish’ (‘The warm bluid's swalling’ like the tide – Through my auld heart’), but the sentiment – ‘Blest among women was the mither – That bore thee, Garibaldi!’ – was entirely standard.162
A Garibaldi fashion was created in 1864, and the British public's enthusiasm expressed itself in clothes, china and songs. What makes these ephemera interesting is their sheer repetition and banality: quality or novelty was not nearly as important as conformity to the style. Equally, Garibaldi's visit provided the occasion for a new round of biographies which closely followed the established formulas. Titles from 1864 include the illustrated Garibaldi: his life and times. Comprising the revolutionary history of Italy from 1789 to the present time. Illustrated with numerous engravings, and a coloured portrait of Garibaldi; the reformatted Garibaldi: his career and exploits, reprinted … from the ‘Morning Star’ of April 2, 1864; E. H. Nolan's The liberators of Italy (a serial, which came out in twenty-five parts); and The life of Garibaldi … Interspersed with anecdotes illustrative of his personal character. Compiled from authentic and original sources, a fairly straightforward cull of existing accounts from The Times and from Vecchi. None of these writers took any chances with their approach to the subject. ‘There is no man of the present day whose life abounds in more stirring incidents than that of the hero of Italian freedom, Giuseppe Garibaldi’, began The life of Garibaldi; ‘[n]ever has the muse of history or song touched a nobler theme than the soldiership and manhood of the patriot hero who lands to-day on English soil’, proclaimed the Morning Star.163 The 1860 biography, Garibaldi, by O. J. Victor of New York, came out in a London edition in 1864. Perhaps the only 1864 biography with any pretence to originality was Garibaldi and Italian unity, written by Garibaldi's close friend, Colonel Chambers (‘the writer being convinced that there was much unknown in the history of General Garibaldi’), which claimed to tell the story of Aspromonte ‘for the first time … to the world’. In reality, Chambers' study was more overtly political but equally tendentious in its approach to Garibaldi, and just as formulaic in its methodology and sources as the other 1864 biographies.164
So Garibaldi's visit to London was a broad and spectacular confirmation of the success of the Garibaldi cult. At the time, as we have seen, there was a general consensus that the welcome given to him was unique, or at least unprecedented in the history of London. How can this enthusiasm for Garibaldi be explained? The first point to make is that however novel it may have seemed, the welcome given to Garibaldi was part of a longer tradition. Only a year before, the prince of Wales had passed through London with his bride-to-be in front of a huge cheering crowd (indeed, Queen Victoria complained that Garibaldi had received the kind of honours ‘usually reserved for Royalty’).165 In 1851–2, the arrival of the Hungarian revolutionary, Lajos Kossuth, had provoked an ‘ecstatic reaction’: ‘London has never … witnessed such a sight as it has seen today’, commented one paper; in Birmingham, his reception was said to have ‘eclipsed all the great occasions of public note since 1832’, and 500,000 people were reported to have turned out to see him.166 The obvious similarities between Kossuth's and Garibaldi's receptions tell us that a kind of radical choreography had already been created for welcoming democratic heroes to England, and that this choreography was being practised in 1864. Equally, the vast crowds were not amorphous: each had its own banners, speeches and rituals, and their presence reflects a political culture based around an existing associational life.167
The British enthusiasm for Italian revolution (and for Kossuth) reflected British concerns and a British sense of identity. British support for Italy was closely connected to evangelical Protestantism and, as in 1860–2, many Garibaldi admirers in Britain saw him as above all an opponent of ‘Popery’, the ‘Lord's battleaxe’ against the Roman ‘Babylon’.168 One British man even wrote to Garibaldi at this time to suggest a new tricolour flag for his volunteers: red, orange (signifying antipapal Protestantism), and blue (‘the colour of the Scotch covenanters’).169 Admiration for Garibaldi was often expressed in terms of approval of his ‘English’ or ‘gentlemanly’ virtues.170 This identification of Englishness was also literary and romantic. Mrs Tennyson's reaction to Garibaldi as an ‘Elizabethan’ hero has already been mentioned. Shakespeare and Garibaldi were manufactured as a pair of Staffordshire figures. A biographer likened Garibaldi to a litany of native heroes: to Raleigh, Frobisher, Drake, ‘Blake the admiral’ and Rob Roy; he also speculated that Garibaldi had Scottish or Irish ancestry (‘Baldy Garrow’ = ‘Garret Baldwin’ = ‘Garibaldi’), and compared the ‘horrors’ of the retreat from Rome in 1849 to ‘the disasters and miseries which attended the flight of the Young Pretender after Culloden’.171 The Times was keen to show that the welcome given to Garibaldi was better than any foreign ‘pageant’:
in every country of the Continent there may be seen brilliant pageants and well drilled battalions. It is in England only that associations of workmen could conduct a revolutionary hero, through a capital thronged with their own class, and yet not excite a fear in the mind of any politician … With not a soldier visible, and with only a few police to clear the way, that wonderful combination of order and disorder, an English crowd, conducted Garibaldi … to the mansion of his noble host.172
Thus, for The Times, Garibaldi's welcome became a sign of English superiority: of the country's social cohesion, native liberty and freedom from political interference. That this impression was at least partly intentional is suggested by Palmerston's comment to the queen: contained by the aristocracy, he told her, Garibaldi's visit would afford ‘great pleasure to the bulk of the nation, as a proof of the community of feeling among all classes of the nation’.173
Yet perhaps unsurprisingly, behind the official façade of one nation lay a divided response to Garibaldi. Even before he arrived in England, aristocratic enthusiasts, middle-class radicals and working-class activists had disagreed about what Garibaldi represented and who was to welcome him. The great social diversity in the British and Italian committees who greeted and celebrated Garibaldi in London, and the organisation of separate receptions to honour him, is as suggestive of political competition for control of his name as it is of any class unity in enthusiasm for him. Although his entry into London was a celebration of social belonging, the readings of it varied. Middle-class publications tended to downplay the prominent presence of trade unions in the ceremony, whereas the working-class press stressed the presence of labour associations, as well as highlighting a speech by Garibaldi in which he identified himself as working class. Both groups united when Garibaldi was ‘captured’ by the aristocrats and kept under the duke of Sutherland's control. They were particularly angry that Garibaldi was allowed only occasional visits to radicals like Cowen and McAdam, and a dinner in Chiswick with the foreign exiles Mazzini, Herzen and Karl Blind.174
In Italy and elsewhere, Garibaldi caused controversy by his association with the radicals. His dinner with Herzen, more specifically his widely publicised toast to Mazzini as ‘a man who has performed the greatest services both to my native land and to freedom in general … the counsellor of my youth … my friend, my teacher!’, was criticised in the moderate and clerical press.175 King Vittorio Emanuele was said to be equally offended – ‘angry and sore’ – because he resented Garibaldi's English reception ‘as an ovation to a rival’.176 In turn, Mazzini and the radicals were angry with Garibaldi for allowing himself to be hijacked by the British elite. As Minghetti, the Italian prime minister, had foreseen: ‘Garibaldi is rather unyielding to the designs of others; so he prefers to initiate his own plan: and this plan will probably not be that of Mazzini.’177
All these disagreements probably account for the unexpected conclusion to Garibaldi's visit. Pleading ill health, Garibaldi abrup
tly cancelled his plans to visit Manchester, Newcastle and Glasgow, and paid only brief visits to Cliveden (the duke of Sutherland's country house), Eton College and Cornwall (to see his friend, Colonel Peard, and he was given a huge public welcome). He then left for Caprera on 28 April in the duke of Sutherland's yacht. It was widely felt that illness was not the reason for his sudden departure. Instead it was alleged that the British government, and Gladstone in particular, had put pressure on Garibaldi not to undertake a tour of the provinces for fear of stirring up radical agitation and popular disorder. There were also rumours that the government had been subject to pressure from the French and Italian governments to contain him.178
Whatever the real reasons for Garibaldi's departure, the struggle to manage him and his visit suggests that he had a political significance in Britain that went beyond (even as it depended on) a popular taste for his ‘style’. Emanuele d'Azeglio and many others noticed the predominance of the poor and working class in the crowds that welcomed him, and of radical symbols and leaders in the ceremonies of welcome.179 In fact, Garibaldi's presence in 1864 helped to bring about a major shift in British radicalism. As Margot Finn argues, the great resentment felt by radicals at Garibaldi's departure served to mobilise a popular movement for domestic reform and, in particular, an extension of the franchise which was to culminate in the Second Reform Act of 1867. Agitation over his visit brought to prominence new radical leaders ‘capable both of expressing class interests and of bridging them’, who used their sympathy with continental nationalism ‘to gain admittance to the public sphere of politics and economics’.180 As well as the extension of the franchise in 1867, this political coalition brought about a change in the language of radicalism, introducing new definitions of national belonging and a debate about women's suffrage.181
Garibaldi provoked an equally vigorous response among those opposed to him, and they saw him as a real threat to British society. Queen Victoria was in no doubt about what had happened. ‘Garibaldi – thank God! – is gone!’ she wrote to her daughter: ‘It has been a very absurd and humiliating exhibition and was becoming very dangerous by the connection with Mazzini and all the worst refugees.’182 British conservatives denounced ‘the fumes of this intoxication’ and wrote that the working-class celebration of Garibaldi represented a coded threat of ‘revolution’ and ‘socialism’.183 Catholics were infuriated by Garibaldi's visit, as they had been two years previously by the outcry over Aspromonte, which had led to riots in Hyde Park between Irish supporters of the Pope and pro-Garibaldi demonstrators.184 ‘What a degrading and disgraceful exhibition of English feeling in favour of Garibaldi’, Archbishop Cullen wrote from Dublin on 14 April (it had ‘offended everybody in Rome’, Odo Russell confirmed).185 Only two political figures in Britain professed indifference to Garibaldi. Disraeli refused to meet him for fear of alienating Irish Catholic MPs, while Karl Marx mocked the popular enthusiasm for ‘a pitiful … donkey’.186
So we can explain a great deal about the reaction to Garibaldi's visit by contextualising it in British politics and by reference to prevailing British sensibilities. However, the emotional intensity of people's responses to him should perhaps be reflected on further. Everyone who saw him in London seemed touched by the experience. Arthur Munby did not get close to him but, as he wrote in his diary, ‘one would have known that heroic face among a thousand’. A friend of Munby, who was nearer Garibaldi's carriage when it passed, was ‘instantly converted’, and told Munby that Garibaldi's face was ‘by many degrees more beautiful than any face he ever saw’.187 ‘We who then saw Garibaldi for the first time’, Gladstone remarked, ‘can many of us never forget the marvellous effect produced upon all minds’ by his presence.188 Even the prince of Wales professed himself ‘much pleased with him … nobody who sees him can fail to be attracted by him’. Lord Granville noticed that both Lord Shaftesbury and the duchess of Sutherland had been driven ‘temporarily a little out of their minds’ by the company of their hero.189
Lord Granville was not wrong: the duke of Sutherland's wife, Anne, seemed to have fallen fervently for Garibaldi. As Garibaldi prepared to leave England, and after his departure, she wrote him a series of despairing letters (in French). ‘Have you really not understood, my General?’ she wrote on 24 April, ‘that I have given you everything I have – a real cult for your beautiful life, your noble actions – a veritable and profound affection, made holy by my admiration for your great character.’ ‘You have filled my thoughts since I left you this morning’, she wrote on another occasion: ‘I love you with an affection which will last forever. I so wanted to kiss you when saying goodbye … Let me believe that you are coming now, and for the future, into our life.’190 Her mother-in-law, the dowager duchess, wrote (also in French) on 27 April to tell Garibaldi of ‘all my regrets for your departure, and to tell you of the void you have left. Come back, dear General.’191 She evidently had a close and intimate sense of identification with him. She was concerned for his happiness (‘I think so often about your sad words on life! How I would like to bring it some consolation! Can you give me the friendship of your beautiful spirit?’); and worried incessantly about his health. ‘Do you remember the day that you took my finger and placed it on the deep scar of your wound. Dear General, how you have suffered in your noble life, and I worry so, and often, that I did not express all the sympathy [sympathie] that I felt and will always feel.’ She also told him that she kept his portrait with her always: ‘It is next to me and looks at me with great indulgence.’192
There was, moreover, nothing unusual about the passion that the two duchesses felt for Garibaldi. Mary Seely, who with her husband Charles had entertained Garibaldi for a week on the Isle of Wight, wrote him letter after letter filled with adoring prose. ‘Beloved General’, one letter began:
When, alas! you had left me yesterday, and my heart was heavy with grief – I went to your little bed – full of emotion – and sorrow, that your dear and revered head, would not rest there again – for long. I stood – so sad – and from below the quilt there was the corner of a handkerchief that you had used. Oh! dearest Garibaldi, it was there to comfort me! I cannot send it away! I may surely keep it, to love, and to delight in – it is the grey one, that used to hang around your neck … and I have helped to cover your dear head with it … I had longed to possess that handkerchief, but could not frame the expression of my wish – and now it is here – do say it may be mine.193
‘Your visit has been the great glory of my life’, she told him in another: ‘Dearest General, when will you return to England?’ ‘Do you know that since your visit I find everything that is not associated with you, has ceased to interest me. If you have not used a room, I do not care to enter it, if your portrait is not in a collection, I do not care to look at it. If people do not speak of you, I wish them to be silent.’194 As well as the handkerchief, she kept a half-cigar and a lock of his hair as ‘treasured mementoes’. She sent him a Stilton cheese, and she kept on writing to him:
Dearest dearest General, who can tell how deeply you are beloved? or how justly? … The room you occupied is sacred ground, no one shall sleep in it again … except those who love, and honour and revere Garibaldi … I was telling Charles last night, that if our house was ever on fire – I would save your letters first, of all my possessions.195
Everyone shared her passion, she told Garibaldi. ‘My husband and I, sit at nights talking of your probable return, and of our true love for you – and we never tire’; and after Garibaldi had kissed her daughter, Fanny, ‘she told her husband never to touch that little part of her cheek! And then she wept long’. Even her baby grandaughter knew Garibaldi's portrait (‘[s]he kisses her darling little hand to it, and dances with pleasure’). Tennyson's sons had sent Garibaldi seeds, and ‘[m]any people beg of me to send you Odes in your honour and verses without end’. Even the police, apparently, had declared their work for him ‘a labour of love’.196
Fame itself can help to explain this passion for Gar
ibaldi. He came to London as a cult figure and, as Munby noticed, he enjoyed instant public recognition. This was largely due to the wide circulation of papers, books and printed images of him, so that people felt as if they knew him personally, and identified emotionally with his life story (or, as an American woman who had met him once wrote: ‘I forget … that it is not an old and intimate friend I address so long have you had a home in my heart’).197 What captivated mid-Victorian Britain most of all was the contrast between the greatness of Garibaldi's reputation and his ‘simplicity’ as a man; enthusiasts saw this kind of charisma as an innate quality or defined it as a form of moral ‘character’ (something ‘English’, as we saw above),198 and never wondered if it might be staged. In Mary Seely's words, he seemed ‘the grandest, gentlest, most beloved and admirable of men’.199 There was, to quote Munby again, ‘in his bearing and looks … a combination utterly new and most impressive, of dignity and homeliness, of grace and tenderness with the severest majesty’.200 Gladstone selected ‘from every other quality’ his ‘seductive simplicity of manner’: ‘the union of the most profound and tender humanity with his fiery valour … one of the finest combinations of profound and unalterable simplicity with self-consciousness and self-possession’.201 Trying to explain Garibaldi's fascination to a hostile Queen Victoria, Lord Granville told her that he had:
all the qualifications for making him a popular idol in this country. He is of low extraction, he is physically and morally brave, he is a good guerilla soldier, he has achieved great things by ‘dash’, he has a simple manner with a sort of nautical dignity, and a pleasing smile … His mountebank dress, which betrays a desire for effect, has a certain dramatic effect.202
In this way, and as Granville partially perceived, Garibaldi actually added to the personal impact of his fame by appearing to deny or distance himself from it.
