No. 288.
Mr. Marsh
to Mr. Evarts.
Rome, January 9, 1878. (Received January 28.)
Sir: His Majesty Vittorio Emanuele Secondo, King of Italy, died today at the royal palace of the Quirinal at half past two o’clock, in the fifty-eighth year of his age, having been born March 14, 1820. He succeeded to the throne of the Sardinian States on the abdication of his father, Carlo Alberto, on the 23d of March, 1849, and by the law of the Sardinian Parliament of 17th of March, 1861, assumed the title of King of Italy, several of the smaller Italian states having in the mean time been annexed to the Kingdom of Sardinia. The war of 1866 between Austria, on the one part, and Italy and Prussia on the other, resulted in the cession of the Venetian provinces to the new kingdom, and Italy was finally united under one crown by the occupation of Rome and the States of the Church by the army of Italy on the 20th of September, 1870, followed by a popular vote of annexation. The Italian Parliament in the course of that year passed an act declaring Rome the national capital, and the King made his solemn entry into that city on the 1st of July, 1871.
The King, who was of a robust constitution and of active habits, spent, according to his usual custom, a considerable part of the last summer in the chase in the Alps, and, as he told me at my last audience on the 31st of December, 1877, ascended to a greater height and encountered severer weather than on former occasions. He then seemed in about his ordinary health, but I found him less cheerful than usual. On Friday, the 4th instant, he drove out on the Pincio, but became unwell on Saturday morning with pleuritic and malarial symptoms, and sunk rapidly until this morning. The last offices of his church were then administered to him, after which he revived for a short time, but finally ceased to breathe at the hour above named.
[Page 468]For the last forty-eight hours a fatal termination of His Majesty’s illness has been anticipated, and this was of course known throughout the kingdom. The sudden removal of a sovereign whose reign embraced the entire political history of his kingdom, and who had personally done so much to promote the realization of the national hope of centuries in the constitution of a united Italy, cannot fail to produce a profound impression on the mind of the people, which, I trust, will be found to strengthen rather than weaken the ties which now bind so closely together political communities long, unhappily, put asunder.
I have, &c.,