Pre-eminent in the Liberal Calendar of Saints, alongside Oliver Cromwell, George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln, stands Giuseppe Garibaldi. In Italy he was all but deified in his lifetime: some saw him as ‘Christ the Second’, artists depicted him crucified and ascending, and, according to one of his modern biographers, this expressed ‘no more than the feelings of the great mass of the Italian people, especially in the southern provinces’. ‘The People of Italy’, it was said, ’idolize Garibaldi, they have tabooed him, and no one ventures to touch him.’ The nuns of a Palermitan convent, promising to love him and pray to St Rosalia for him, compared him to St George, ‘sweet and beautiful as a seraph’; and a Milanese crowd gasped at his resemblance to St Ambrose. Many relics are preserved and venerated: for example, some of his red shirts, locks of his hair, the bullet that pierced his ankle at the skirmish of Aspromonte in 1862, and the stretcher, stained with blood, on which he was carried wounded from the field.

Italians, with their tradition of hagiolatry, might perhaps be expected to go to extremes in their devotion to their national hero. More surprising was – and is – the adoration of the English, especially as shown during Garibaldi's visit to England in 1864.