Everything dear having been ripped from her, Maria Carolina, frail and ailing, was heard to remark in her waning months, “For a long time I have believed that I knew how to govern, and I have only found out my mistake when it was too late. In order to rule men wisely one should study and understand them; this I did not do. If ever God should restore me to the throne, I will begin a new life.” But can one blame her for not knowing how to rule when the power and authority were first thrust upon her at the age of sixteen, as a stranger in a strange land with a husband who had abrogated all responsibilities to govern?
The queen filed a formal protest against her banishment with England, claiming they had no right to separate her from her family, effectively deposing her as queen. But for their sakes, she ultimately acquiesced to Britain’s request and her husband’s demands.
However, even Ferdinand believed that exile was too harsh a punishment, and regretted the necessity of this enforced estrangement after forty-four years of marriage. It was one thing to separate from his wife of his own volition, but quite another to have it mandated by a foreign entity and their tone-deaf viceregal minister.
In Maria Carolina’s parting letter to her husband, she expressed her pity for him and told Ferdinand that she forgave him, but added that she would never forgive the “wretches” that surrounded him, and warned the king that the fate of his reign rested on a knife’s edge. She closed the note by offering Ferdinand her prayers for himself and for Sicily.
The sixty-year-old queen was most grief-stricken at the prospect of being parted from her children. Her only consolation was that Prince Leopoldo, who refused to be separated from his mama, accompanied her into exile.
Emperor Francis had approved of his former mother-in-law’s ouster from the Sicilian throne, but was too embarrassed by her request for refuge in Vienna not to grant it. Maria Carolina had become an international outcast; her children had to beg Francis to extend her a cordial welcome.
Even Ferdinand wrote to the Austrian emperor urging him to receive Maria Carolina and Leopoldo, because “for reasons very displeasing [to me], my dear wife [was] being obliged to leave this kingdom . . . to avoid greater misfortunes to us both.”
Traveling as always with her precious family portraits, including those of the murdered French monarchs, Maria Carolina took the scenic route, finally arriving in Vienna on February 2, 1814, eight months after her departure from Sicily. This last living daughter of Empress Maria Theresa was granted the courtesy title of Queen of Sicily, and took up residence at the pastoral Hetzendorf Castle on the outskirts of Vienna.
How ironic that she would spend her final months dispensing advice to her favorite grandchild, Marie Louise, the wife of her greatest nemesis. As much as Maria Carolina had despised Napoleon, by now her enmity was a decade in the past and she was able to view him with respect, admiration, and even sympathy. She scolded the young French empress for refusing to follow her husband into exile after his downfall. Upon hearing that Marie Louise’s father had forbidden her to do so, the queen declared that she would have tied her bed curtains together and escaped out the window to join her vanquished spouse. “At least, that is what I should have done in her place, for when one is married it is for life.” Appalled that Marie Louise did not even have her husband’s picture on display, Maria Carolina impressed upon her granddaughter the honor a wife owes to her husband, despite absence and adversity. She convinced her to retrieve the portrait, which Marie Louise placed atop her writing desk.
On September 7, the sixty-two-year-old Maria Carolina spent an exhausting day greeting visitors and courtiers at the glittering Congress of Vienna, the first major display of movers and shakers of Europe’s new world order following the fall of Napoleon. She retired to bed at ten o’clock that evening, so tired that her son Leopoldo asked that she not be disturbed before seven the next morning.
But shortly after midnight, Maria Carolina’s maid thought she had been summoned. She entered the queen’s bedchamber to find her mistress dead on the floor, a number of letters scattered about her, her hand reaching for the bellpull. She had died of a stroke, or as it was termed then, a fit of apoplexy.
Laid out across a mantle of silver tissue, Maria Carolina’s corpse was dressed in silver-colored slippers and a black taffeta gown, with a matching veil worn over a white lace cap. According to custom, a fan and a pair of gloves were placed at her feet, as well as a casket containing her entrails and a cushion that displayed the Order of the Starry Cross, an honor bestowed on noblewomen of uncommon virtues. She was buried in the Kaisergruft, the Hapsburgs’ imperial crypt, where her parents are also interred.
The kingdoms of Naples and Sicily were directed to observe strict mourning for six months. Ferdinand ordered his secretary to read the following statement: “The dreadful blow struck at my soul by the fatal news which came as a thunder-bolt on the morning of the 22nd left me so dispirited that I could do nothing but retire to the country plunged in the most extreme affliction.”
It was too little, and far too late, but in her death, Maria Carolina finally earned the praise of her nemesis, Napoleon, who eulogized his “grandmother” from exile on Elba. “That woman knew how to think and act like a queen, while preserving her rights and her dignity.”
Violating his own mandated half-year period of mourning, on November 27, 1814, less than three months after Maria Carolina’s death, Ferdinand wed his forty-four-year-old, raven-haired mistress Lucia Migliaccio, the widowed Princess of Partanna. Upon her royal nuptials, she was made Duchess di Floridia. It was a morganatic marriage, meaning that she could never formally or legally bear the title of queen. The placid-natured duchess, who knew nothing about politics and could not have been less interested in governance, was the temperamental opposite of Maria Carolina. “How happy I am! with a wife who lets me do what I will, and a minister who leaves me nothing to do,” declared the delighted Ferdinand.
After Ferdinand’s brother, King Carlos IV of Spain, had abdicated in 1808, Napoleon replaced him with his brother Joseph Bonaparte. The emperor then filled the vacancy on the Neapolitan throne with his own brother-in-law Joachim Murat. Seven years later, during the Neapolitan War against Austria in 1815, which coincided with Napoleon’s Hundred Days return from exile, Murat was dethroned. Ferdinand returned to Naples, and in 1816, he reunited his sister realms into the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, ruling both of them until his death.
Although he had been viewed as a fairly benign, if not kindly ruler in the prerevolutionary days, and had always been the king of the lazzarone (the darling of Naples’s lowest classes), his postrevolutionary cruelty was well-known. After the demise of Maria Carolina, Ferdinand became a repressive autocrat, reigning as an absolute monarch and granting no constitutional reforms within his domains. This triggered a revolt in Sicily, but it was quickly quashed by Neapolitan troops. In 1820, Ferdinand was compelled to sign a constitution, which he repeatedly violated. The following year, Prince Metternich, chancellor of the Austrian Empire, authorized the Austrian army to enter Naples for the purpose of restoring order.
On January 2, 1825, Ferdinand went hunting for the last time. The following day, he suffered the symptoms of a cold, and by that evening he struggled to remain alert during his nightly card game with his wife, Lucia. His speech became slurred. He refused a bloodletting by the royal physicians, preferring to retire for the night with the request that he not be roused at his usual time of six a.m. After that hour had come and gone, at eight o’clock, Ferdinand’s valet entered the king’s room and asked whether His Majesty wanted the windows open. When he received no reply, he parted the bed hangings to discover the seventy-four-year-old monarch lying dead, his mouth slack, one arm hanging limply off the bed. Like Maria Carolina, Ferdinand had died of a stroke.
He lay in state for three days, during which time the theaters of Naples were closed in his honor. Mourning Ferdinand’s demise, Lady Blessington, an English expatriate wh
o had lived in Italy for years, wrote, “He is much regretted, for if not a sovereign of superior mental requirements, he was assuredly a good-natured man.”
None of the Neapolitan royal family regretted the passing of the Duchess di Floridia the following year. Maria Carolina’s children had never approved of their father’s remarriage, a royal mismatch of social unequals.
Ferdinand was succeeded by Francesco, who had temporarily ruled Sicily in his stead during the period of British babysitting earlier in the century. Prince Leopoldo, who had accompanied his mother into exile, had remained in Vienna, marrying a daughter of Emperor Francis in 1816.
Each of Ferdinand and Maria Carolina’s surviving daughters became a queen consort. After all the tragedies of the French Revolution, their daughter Maria Amalia, duchesse d’Orléans, became queen of France when her husband was chosen to reign after the abdication of Charles X (Louis XVI’s youngest brother, the former comte d’Artois). Louis Philippe I, King of the French, and the Neapolitan-born Maria Amalia, a niece of Marie Antoinette, reigned from 1830 until 1848, when another French revolution overthrew them.
Empress Maria Theresa had, in her own words, sacrificed her daughter Maria Carolina to politics because the necessity of forging a strategic alliance between Austria and Spain in order to gain a measure of control in southern Italy trumped her child’s marital happiness. And like it or not, the Austrian archduchesses were aware of the roles they were destined to play, not only within the Hapsburg dynasty, but on the international stage. Yet Maria Carolina’s royal marriage to Ferdinand of Naples is an inglorious one, not only because it was so unhappy. When it came to the actual governance of the kingdom, in the misogynistic culture of eighteenth-century Naples, the traditional gender roles were reversed. This led to widespread dislike and distrust of Maria Carolina, despite the many progressive reforms she accomplished toward the beginning of her reign. By the time revolution had reached their borders, she was perceived as a harridan whom her husband could not control.
But Ferdinand and Maria Carolina had never been given the choice of a different partner. Nor would the concept that teenage royals had the right to marry for love have been an acceptable one. These two were forced to play the hand their parents dealt them till death (or in their case, the British government) parted them, making babies and making the best of it, regardless of whether their temperaments were compatible.
Most of the time, young royal spouses never met before their wedding day, and had learned nothing about each other, so they never knew whether their personalities and affinities would mesh. But Maria Carolina and Ferdinand are a rare exception to this rubric: Their parents, especially the Austrian empress, who was fully aware of the character and habits of both children, pushed her daughter into an inglorious mismatch with a boy she already knew to be a coarse and illiterate lout. Nevertheless, the security of her empire came first.
The fact that Maria Carolina and Ferdinand didn’t kill each other over the course of four decades of matrimony, despite all their rows, is a testament to something we rarely see today: a deep religious faith (at least on the queen’s part), and an unswerving devotion to their children, combined with a sense of duty and obligation to something larger than themselves. Not only did the hopes of their respective families rest on the success of their marriage, but the fate of their subjects and—during the era of Napoleon’s campaigns—a significant portion of the world was in their hands. As Maria Carolina herself understood, despite the pitfalls of an inglorious union, “[W]hen one is married, it is for life.”
PRINCESS MARIE OF EDINBURGH
AND
FERDINAND I OF ROUMANIA
MARRIED: 1893–1927
“And Love is a thing that can never go wrong; / And I am Marie of Roumania,” the acerbic Dorothy Parker sardonically versified in her four-line “Comment” on life and love in the mid-1920s. Parker’s poetic witticism illustrates the glamorous Balkan sovereign’s popularity during the first quarter of the twentieth century, employing Marie’s then–immediately recognizable identity as a personage of wealth and exoticism in the same way some people still sarcastically say, “Yeah, and I’m the queen of Sheba.”
Typical of Parker’s razor wit, her couplet was double-edged. At the time the poem was published, the whole world would have known that Marie’s royal marriage, never a love match to begin with, had gone terribly wrong.
Marie Alexandra Victoria was born three years before the country she was destined to rule came into existence. A granddaughter of Queen Victoria, Missy, as she would always be known within the family, was the second of five children born to Victoria’s second son Alfred (“Affie”), the Duke of Edinburgh, and his duchess, Marie Alexandrovna, a daughter of Czar Alexander II.
A devotee of fashion and beauty from the age of five (according to her own recollection), Missy spent her earliest years at the family estate of Eastwell in Kent. Blond and blue eyed, she was close to her siblings, especially her sister Victoria Melita (“Ducky”), who was taller and darker, and only thirteen months her junior. The Edinburghs were a more peripatetic family than many royals of the day because their father actually had a job. In 1886, when Missy was going on twelve, Affie was named commander of the Mediterranean fleet. He moved the family to his posting in Malta, where they remained for three years.
During their sojourn at Malta, the adolescent Missy experienced first love with her short, bearded, first cousin George, a naval lieutenant already in his early twenties. They flirted and kissed and exchanged affectionate correspondence when he was away at sea.
Even after the family moved again in 1889, this time to Coburg, Germany, in preparation for the day when Affie would inherit his uncle Ernest’s duchies of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, the general expectation, or at least the great hope, was that Missy—who was only fifteen at the time—would marry George. At this point, George was merely the Prince of Wales’s “spare”; his older brother Prince Albert Victor (“Eddy”) was second in line to the throne after their father. Even though he was a second son, George would nonetheless have been a prestigious catch, and Protestant princes were at a premium. Marriage to an English prince would have been considered a major alliance for Missy. Unfortunately, her Anglophobic mother was adamantly against it.
Another match that might have been was with the snub-nosed, “red-haired, freckled and impudent” Winston Churchill, who happened to pay a visit to Osborne, Queen Victoria’s retreat on the Isle of Wight, while Missy and her family were also vacationing with her grandmama. “He and I had a sneaking liking for each other. At first we did not dare to show it openly, but by degrees our red-haired guest threw away all pretence and brazenly admitted his preference for me, declaring before witnesses that when he was grown up he would marry me!”
But marriage to a commoner would have been out of the question, regardless of his pedigree. A passionate Germanophile, the duchess, who abhorred London’s society, food, weather, and most of all its dissipation, was determined to wed her eldest daughter to the kaiser’s cousin Ferdinand, Crown Prince of Roumania, in a bid to pave the way for her own family, the Romanovs, to extend Russia’s influence into the Balkans. Her own Anglophobic prejudices (as well as her Russian Orthodox beliefs against the intermarriage of first cousins—a credo that would nevertheless be violated with the marriage of Nicholas and Alexandra)—prevented her from acknowledging that the prospective match with Missy’s cousin George would by far have been the more glorious union. And there would have been an unforeseen bonus to it as well. George’s older brother died young, moving the prince up a notch in the line of succession. Missy would eventually have become queen of England, instead of queen of Roumania.
Ferdinand wasn’t even Roumanian; nor was the country’s king, Carol I. In 1861, the Roumanian Parliament voted to invite a foreign royal to accept their throne as a deterrent to the rampant squabbling among the nobility. Fighting on behalf of the Roumanians, Carol (formerly Karl), from
the Sigmaringen branch of Germany’s Hohenzollern dynasty, had defeated the Turks in 1877, completely freeing the Roumanians from Ottoman tyranny. But by decree, the king of Roumania could not wed a native, for fear that such a union would lead to a return of the former corruption. So Carol married a German princess, Elisabeth of Wied, who in due time became a free-spirited patron of the arts, and a mediocre dilettante in her own right, assuming the pseudonym Carmen Sylva. Their only child, a daughter, had died at the age of four, and Carol adopted his nephew, Ferdinand, as his heir.
Ferdinand Viktor Albert Meinrad was the second son and favorite child of Carol’s older brother, Prince Leopold, and his wife, Princess Antonia of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, a Portuguese infanta. Unfortunately, he was shy to the point of being inarticulate. Although Ferdinand possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of botany and a corresponding passion for flora—one of the only interests Missy would share—biology had betrayed him. His legs were too short for his long torso, and when he was a child, his parents had instructed his nurse to bandage his head in an (unsuccessful) effort to pin back his protruding ears. When Ferdinand became an adult, his head would indeed resemble a two-handled pitcher.
Carol had first offered to make Ferdinand’s older brother, Wilhelm, his heir, but after a year in the Balkans, Wilhelm found the lifestyle there unrewarding and was ready to come home. Ferdinand lacked the guts to take a stand regarding his own destiny. He was the perfect good soldier, diligent and obedient, and too weak-willed to question authority. Off he went to Roumania to become schooled in their history and politics. A rigid autocrat, Carol drilled Ferdinand night and day, refusing to let him socialize with anyone beyond the immediate family.
Consequently, the crown prince spent a considerable amount of time in the company of the queen, which left him ample opportunity to fall in love with Hélène Vacaresco, her favorite lady-in- waiting. Hélène was clever and witty, a talented writer, but plump and homely, a commoner, and moreover Roumanian, which made her absolutely off-limits. The kingdom’s constitution contained an ironclad clause compelling its kings to marry foreign-born princesses of equal rank.
Inglorious Royal Marriages Page 36
