Inglorious Royal Marriages

by Leslie Carroll

  Maria Carolina was raised within a close-knit family at the Hapsburg palaces in and around Vienna. Although the empress’s court etiquette was not rigid, she insisted on a high moral tone within and beyond the palace walls. Perhaps because Maria Theresa despaired over her husband’s extramarital liaisons, she discouraged all flirtations and intrigues, imposing strict laws regarding the conduct of her subjects. She formed a commission to enforce purity, whose officers patrolled the Viennese streets twenty-four/seven, with the authority to arrest anyone behaving immorally.

  Until it came time to “finish” Maria Carolina’s education to prepare her for marriage, she was schooled primarily in the company of her youngest sister, the future queen of France, Marie Antoinette; as girls, they were inseparable and would always remain kindred spirits.

  Yet Maria Carolina lacked her younger sister’s porcelain prettiness. And while both girls were high-spirited, it was the headstrong and impetuous Maria Carolina who most reminded the empress of herself. The child always behaved as if she were born to rule.

  It would happen far sooner than even Maria Theresa could have predicted. In October 1767, Maria Carolina’s beautiful and dutiful sister Maria Josepha died of smallpox on the eve of her departure from Vienna to wed Ferdinand IV, the teenage monarch of the southern Italian kingdoms of Naples and Sicily. Consequently, Maria Theresa had a slot to fill. She had four remaining unwed daughters, but had already promised Maria Antonia, who was only twelve at the time, to the dauphin of France. Maria Elisabeth had survived the smallpox epidemic, but was too disfigured by the scars to make an attractive bride. Maria Amalia remained a possibility, but she was older than Ferdinand, who, it was alleged, was already immature for his years.

  As the Neapolitan marriage was never intended to be a love match anyway, Maria Theresa left the choice to Ferdinand’s father, King Carlos III of Spain, dispassionately writing to her fellow sovereign as though they were discussing chattel that had been destroyed due to some mishap. “I grant you with real pleasure one of my remaining daughters to make good the loss. . . . I do currently have two who could fit, one is the Archduchess Amalia . . . and the other is the Archduchess Charlotte who is also very healthy and a year and seven months younger than the King of Naples.”

  Carlos selected Maria Carolina. Rather than undertake the complicated process of renegotiating the marriage contract between his son and the Archduchess Josepha, the empress simply substituted Charlotte’s name.

  Although she wore the king of Naples’s portrait affixed to her corsage as a symbol of their betrothal, the pinch-hitting bride-to-be fought her destiny with every ounce of strength. She’d heard enough about Ferdinand’s unattractive appearance and crude manners from Josepha to dread marrying him. Worse still, he’d shown no respect for her sister’s demise. Word had gotten back to Vienna that upon hearing of his fiancée’s death, Ferdinand had staged a mock funeral, dressing one of his pages in a gown, stippling his face with melted chocolate to simulate smallpox, and solemnly parading him through the palace atop a bier. Hilarity ensued. But not in Austria.

  Maria Carolina cried and screamed and pleaded with her mother to spare her the fate of such a husband. But the empress, who viewed her daughters as sacrifices to politics, had no intention of changing her mind.

  So at the Church of the Augustinian Friars in Vienna, on April 7, 1768, wearing a cloth of gold gown, with a tissue overlay of white organza, her bodice studded with gemstones and her hair teased high off her forehead and dressed with seed pearls, Maria Carolina Louise Josepha Johanna Antonia, archduchess of Austria, was married by proxy to the seventeen-year-old Ferdinando Antonio Pasquale Giovanni Nepomuceno Serafino Genarro Benedetto. Her eldest brother, the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, gave her away to another of their brothers, also named Ferdinand, who represented the Neapolitan groom during the nuptials. Empress Maria Theresa, wearing the black widow’s weeds that had become her habit since the death of her husband in 1765, witnessed the ceremony from her private pew.

  The bride was so miserable that she might have considered wearing mourning herself. Incapable of concealing her dismay, she lamented that “they might as well have thrown her into the sea.”

  Afterward, the empress proudly and tenderly embraced Maria Carolina; in her view she wasn’t losing a daughter: She was gaining a queen. Although Charlotte had yet to meet her husband, she was now queen of Naples and Sicily and, at the age of sixteen, the youngest reigning queen in Europe.

  A wedding breakfast at Schönbrunn Palace on the outskirts of Vienna followed Maria Carolina’s proxy nuptials. Immediately afterward, she embarked on her journey for Naples, aware that she would not be expected to return to her homeland. Maria Carolina was so unhappy at the prospect of heading off to a repulsive husband from whom there would be no escape that she was homesick before her carriage clattered out of the courtyard. She sprang from the coach and dashed across the cobbles in her gold-and-blue traveling ensemble to tearfully embrace Maria Antonia one last time.

  The nearer she drew to Naples and Ferdinand, the more Maria Carolina’s heart filled with dread. The Emperor Joseph despaired, too, fearing that his sister wasn’t ready for her new role. He observed Maria Carolina during the early part of her journey to the south, and informed their mother that “she has a good heart, she willingly accepts advice, being anxious to do right, but she is impetuous . . . and has as yet too little experience of the world. . . . Of course, she is so young . . . she has never been trained to be Queen of Naples.”

  Joseph was right. In the months prior to her proxy wedding, Maria Carolina’s education had been “finished” by her governess, the Countess von Lerchenfeld, but nothing had prepared the archduchess to rule over a boisterous, largely illiterate, and indolent populace whose behavior was vulgar in comparison with the Viennese, and a husband who had been deliberately brought up to lack all interest in the governance of his own kingdom.

  Born in Naples, Ferdinand was the third son of King Carlos III of Spain and Maria Amalia of Saxony. At the time, Naples was governed as a satellite of the Spanish branch of the Bourbon dynasty, but a king of Spain was not permitted to rule both realms. Consequently, Ferdinand ascended the Neapolitan throne at the tender age of eight, after Carlos, who had been king of Naples, inherited the Spanish crown from his father. An excess of royal inbreeding had left its mark on Ferdinand’s oldest brother, the epileptic Prince Royal. He was too mentally incapacitated to reign, characterized at the time as a congenital imbecile. Madness ran in the family; King Carlos’s father was convinced that his mania for hunting every day would stave off the hereditary insanity, evincing, it seems, little awareness that the responsibility for it could be placed on his dynasty’s numerous uncle-niece and first-cousin intermarriages.

  With his parents in Spain, the boy-king Ferdinand was raised more or less by his prime minister, Bernardo Tanucci, who became regent in 1759 when Ferdinand ascended the Neapolitan throne. Tanucci wanted to rule Naples unimpeded, so he ensured that Ferdinand learned as little as possible about his own kingdom by instructing the monarch’s tutor, the Prince of San Nicandro, to maintain Ferdinand’s ignorance and encourage the boy to amuse himself. This seemed perfectly all right with King Carlos, as well as with his incurious son, who was raised without any responsibilities and little contact with his own regent. In consequence, Ferdinand grew up as an anti-intellectual. Unlike most royals of his day, he knew no foreign languages and could not even speak formal Italian, communicating only in the local Neapolitan dialect. At the age of fifteen, the king was still entertaining himself with his marionette theater.

  Ferdinand’s lifelong passions were those of his peasantry: He loved to spend his entire day hunting, or fishing at the edge of the bay alongside the lazzarone, Naples’s half-clad, unshod underclass who were deeply loyal to him and considered him one of their own. He’d haul in a day’s catch and hawk it on the pier, giving away his earnings. Some of his customers recognized their so
vereign in the “tall and muscular” youth described by the Margravine of Anspach, due to the bulbous Bourbon proboscis that had earned him the affectionate nickname il re nasone—King Nose—from his subjects.

  Ferdinand’s loutish behavior and practical jokes had become the talk of other European courts and coffeehouses, including those in Vienna. To protect his dignity, Tanucci obtained an order forbidding all courtiers, except those on duty, from attending the young king’s meals, because he was prone to rowdy behavior.

  Ferdinand’s minority had ended in 1767, the year before his marriage, but he evinced no interest in assuming any power or responsibility. Instead, he provided Tanucci with a stamp bearing his signature, content for the prime minister to govern in his name, although Bernardo was no longer Ferdinand’s regent.

  Naples was officially ruled by the Spanish Bourbons, and was therefore expected to parrot Spain’s political ambitions. But there were vast cultural differences between them. The spontaneous, carefree, and superstitious Neapolitans could not have been less similar to the rigid, urbane, and learned Spaniards. When Maria Carolina arrived as their new queen, it was not her husband but Tanucci who was the de facto ruler of Naples, doing the bidding of his boss’s father, Carlos of Spain, rather than the unsophisticated and barely literate King Ferdinand, whom the Neapolitans looked upon as one of their own. Consequently, the country she entered in May 1768 was still struggling to find its national identity.

  After traveling for several days, Maria Carolina finally met her husband for the first time in the town of Portella, at an opulent pavilion that had been constructed for Ferdinand’s parents thirty years earlier. Accompanied by her brother Leopold, the Duke of Tuscany, and his wife, Maria Luisa, the new bride was introduced to a scruffily attired teen who looked more like a peasant than a king. Later that day, the couple left Portella for Caserta, the location of Ferdinand’s summer palace, to celebrate their Italian wedding ceremony.

  Maria Carolina wrote to her former governess, the Countess von Lerchenfeld, about the lengthy carriage ride to Caserta, which afforded her the opportunity to become acquainted with her husband, admitting, “He is very ugly, but one gets used to that; and as to his character, it is all much better than I was told”; however, “I must tell you and confess that I don’t love him except from duty, but I do all I can to make him think I have a passion for him. I conduct myself with great patience and gentleness. He says that he loves me very much, but he will not do anything I want.”

  The new queen’s first glimpse of the twelve-hundred-room Palace of Caserta, where her nuptials were to be held, took place at night, when the vast baroque monstrosity looked its best, illuminated by the glow of countless candles and lanterns. On hand to greet Maria Carolina was a welcoming committee of ministers, courtiers, and the ambassadors from Spain, Austria, and France.

  Shortly before midnight on May 13, the teenage royals were wed during a brief ceremony inside the palace chapel. According to Sir William Hamilton, Britain’s ambassador to Naples since 1764, “Ferdinand manifested on his part, neither ardour nor indifference for the Queen.” Given the groom’s evident ambivalence, the wedding night was hardly romantic, although it appears the marriage was consummated. Up per usual at the crack of dawn to go hunting, Ferdinand had left his bride in bed the following morning. When asked by his courtiers how things had transpired between the sheets, he had ungallantly replied, “Dorme come un’ ammazzata, e suda come un porco”—“She sleeps as if she had been killed and sweats like a pig.”

  The honeymoon was worse. “One suffers real martyrdom, which is all the greater because one must pretend outwardly to be happy,” Maria Carolina wrote to her former governess. She was even more irritated that he considered himself extremely handsome and clever, and was utterly convinced that she had fallen in love with him. It was an effort to feign pleasure in his company, when she was disgusted, bored, and homesick. “I would rather die than endure again what I had to suffer. If religion had not said to me: ‘Think about God,’ I would have killed myself rather than live as I did for eight days. It was like hell and I often wished to die.”

  In addition to their language barrier, spending time with her spouse must have been a nightmare because part of this “hell” was a roundelay of celebrations—fetes and fireworks, operas and concerts, all in honor of the royal newlyweds. But the bride couldn’t force herself to have fun.

  On May 19, the teenage monarchs entered Naples “with royal pomp in the full light of a lovely day.” Maria Carolina put on her game face and waved with poise and grace to the vast crowds eager to greet their new queen, but inwardly she was miserable. Her husband was more toad than prince. And despite the incomparable physical beauty of Naples, a gem overlooking the glistening blue confluence of the Mediterranean and Tyrrhenian seas, it was a far cry from the elegance and sophistication of Vienna. Moreover, the wealthy lived extravagantly, while the poor were desperately so. The kingdom’s literacy rate was estimated at a mere ten percent. No wonder Naples was considered a backwater by the rest of Europe.

  Maria Carolina’s first few months of marriage were dreadfully unhappy. Friendless, in a strange country, she didn’t understand her husband, literally or emotionally, nor could Ferdinand fathom her. Despite the enormity of her palaces and the beckoning Bay of Naples beyond her windows, the new queen felt stifled and suffocated. Ferdinand described a tantrum his wife pitched one day when “she became a fury . . . calling to all the servants who are maids, who could see nothing but that she was screeching like an eagle.”

  Maria Theresa’s spies, including the Austrian ambassador, informed her about the queen of Naples’s volatile temper, particularly when Maria Carolina unleashed it on her hapless attendants. This prompted a scolding from the empress, who told Maria Carolina to curb her rudeness, especially to her ladies. There was no excuse for such behavior in a queen. Maria Theresa also cautioned her daughter against falling prey to the Neapolitans’ natural indolence and to find something with which to occupy her mind, as such a task would prevent her from acting rashly or immaturely.

  A woman’s reputation was everything. And a queen’s character should always be above reproach, regardless of the king’s behavior. Maria Theresa reminded Maria Carolina to [a]void coquetry,” bearing in mind that “many things harmless in a girl are not so in a married woman, although contemptible in either. Love your husband,” the empress advised her daughter, “and be firmly attached to him; that is the only true happiness on earth,” conveniently forgetting that her own union had been that rare royal love match. Maria Theresa also urged Maria Carolina to endeavor to understand the “ill-educated but well meaning . . . King Ferdinand.”

  It is unclear whether Maria Carolina knew by this point that her husband commanded foreign ambassadors to attend him while he was sitting on the commode enjoying a postprandial poop. Or if she’d been acquainted with his habit of pouring steaming handfuls of macaroni upon the heads of the well-coiffed opera patrons beneath the royal box. Or that when he went hunting, he personally slaughtered beasts by the hundred, then insisted on field-dressing them himself, up to his elbows in gore. Ferdinand was exceptionally skilled at gutting his kill, a far better butcher than a king.

  Maria Theresa also cautioned her daughter not to compare the customs and drawbacks of her new kingdom to the morals and merits of her homeland. The empress was quick to point out, “There is good and bad in every country.” And then she dispensed the advice that would always confound her girls regarding the twin allegiances that she expected from them as royal wives. “In your heart and in the uprightness of your mind be a German,” adding specifically for Charlotte’s benefit, “in all that is unimportant, though in nothing that is wrong, you must appear to be Neapolitan.”

  In this, Maria Carolina would willingly obey her mother. “My first aim . . . is to render service to my adored brother the Emperor, for whom I would willingly shed my blood,” the queen would declare even two deca
des later.

  As a newlywed, Maria Carolina initially resented her mother’s meddling. But the empress’s letter ultimately sparked her ambition to steer herself out of the doldrums. From then on, she vowed to make the best of her destiny by taking control of it. Not only would she manage her husband, as her mother had instructed—she would become the real king of Naples.

  In the words of historian Derek Beales, “Ferdinand was born to be ruled by others.” Maria Carolina’s sister-in-law, Grand Duchess Maria Luisa of Tuscany, coached her on how to be a caring, supportive wife to Ferdinand, while also gaining the upper hand with him. In his case, feminine wiles would go a long way. The queen cleverly gained ascension over Ferdinand by flattering his athletic prowess, feigning interest in his pursuits, and making him believe that her suggestions were his own ideas, then heartily congratulating him on executing them. In so doing, she also managed to convince the king that she was in love with him.

  But the ultimate magic touch turned out to be the king’s attraction, bordering on fetishism, to Maria Carolina’s bare arms and opera-length gloves. The queen discovered that she could get just about anything she wanted, even politically, by tantalizingly removing her long kidskin gloves. Twentieth-century burlesque queens could have learned a trick or two from her technique.

  As soon as Maria Carolina chose to take charge of her own happiness, even if she still didn’t enjoy her husband, something positive occurred. “The affability and goodness of the Queen of Naples gives unusual satisfaction here,” wrote the British ambassador Sir William Hamilton in June 1768. By the end of the summer, having decided to follow her mother’s instructions to the letter, Maria Carolina had won the affection of her subjects and her spouse. Ferdinand was said to be “dazzled” by her self-possession. In turn, she considered him “ein recht guter Narr,” as she told her brother—a right good fool.