A little earlier Spain, rid of Isabella, and in the hands of a provisional government, sought a king from Italy, and found one in Victor Emmanuel’s son, Amadeus, who went to Madrid, and reigned there for a few troubled years, until another revolution released him from a position which he had never sought or desired.
For seven years Victor Emmanuel reigned in Rome, and they were years of great strides in progress and in national unity. He visited foreign sovereigns, and they in turn visited him; in 1873 he went to Vienna as the guest of the Austrian Emperor Francis Joseph, and in 1876 the latter visited him at Venice. The King of Italy, always open-hearted and simple by nature, was glad to forget the days when Austria had ruled in Italy, and to form ties of friendship between the Houses of Savoy and of Hapsburg, ties which Francis Joseph was equally glad to make.
The Pope continued publicly to resent the presence of the King in Rome, but privately he stated his admiration for him. Pius IX. was two men in one, delightful as a private character, but narrow and bigoted in his public views. He still held to his claim to temporal power over the States of the Church, but gradually the claim ceased to be other than an echo of history.
In those seven years between 1871 and 1878 the King knit his people together, met Garibaldi, now the arch republican, and brought him to terms of reason, concerned himself with scores of plans for bettering the material welfare of his people, draining the Campagna, tunneling Mont Cenis and the St. Gothard, and building up commerce with the East. He was always the idol of his people, the Rè Galantuomo, in whatever part of the country he visited. On January 9, 1878, he died, being fifty-eight years of age, and having reigned twenty-nine years.
Thousands of stories are told of Victor Emmanuel’s frankness and independence, of his love of mixing with his people, and doing little acts of kindness and charity. He was a great hunter, never happier than when in the Alps, free as the meanest goatherd, and forgetful of all his cares. He had a most magnetic personality, a certain ruggedness of character that led men to trust him implicitly and follow him without debate. He was the very man for his time, a leader who could accomplish what Charles Albert could never have done, because he was first and foremost a fighter and never the scholastic theorist. Grouped about him were men of the greatest ability and devotion, such patriots as D’Azeglio, Cavour, La Marmora, who could do for him what they could never have done for his father, because Victor Emmanuel knew when to give others a free rein, and having once given them that rein, did not immediately jerk them back. He understood the delicate position of a constitutional sovereign almost by instinct, time and again he might have forced his wish upon his country, but he understood that it was Parliament and not he that should be supreme. Yet, on the other hand, he did not shirk responsibility, he was ready to assume any burden which would aid in delivering Italy from foreign domination.
Events in the lives of nations, such as the union of the disordered states of Italy, are greater than any man, but often such events seem to await the coming of a certain man who shall collect within himself the spirit of his time, and personify its impulse in his nature. Reading this history, one feels as though the men of the Peninsula had waited the coming of a King of Piedmont who should throw everything he had into the common cause, and, without counting any cost or pain, fight to the goal. When such a man came, then and then only, could the forces that were preparing reach their full growth and opportunity, then and then only could Mazzini, Garibaldi, and Cavour put into operation the energies for which they severally stood.
In Italy to-day the memory of Victor Emmanuel meets one on every hand, it was his fortunate fate to rise to every opportunity, and to grow in his people’s affection with each step he took.