Europe

by Jan Morris

  Such was the web of the dynasts, a powerful theoretical factor towards the uniting of Europe, and the Habsburgs were only the most formidable of a plethora of families that plotted, flirted, downed and diplomatized towards useful matrimonial alliances, linking the most improbable States in cousinhood. The eighteenth-century Prince Eugène, the archetypal European commander – so famous that the Germans of the Second World War named both a division and a cruiser after him – Eugène the perfect European general had Spanish, French, Bulgarian, Czech and Italian ancestors. Almost into our own times princesses of one house or another were whisked around the continent, for betrothal to dear cousin Otto, or marriage to some totally unknown margrave, rather as footballers nowadays are transferred from Manchester United to Real Madrid. The complications were endless, and reached far back into European history. King Canute the Dane was the grandson of Mieszko I of Poland! Jan III Sobieski the Pole was great-grandfather to Bonnie Prince Charlie! In 1914 the King of England was cousin both to his ally the Tsar of Russia and his enemy the German Kaiser! In 1941 the Duke of Savoy, as nephew to the King of Italy, became King Tomislav II of Croatia! Lord Palmerston, the British Prime Minister, once said that only three people had ever known the solution to the dynastic complexities of the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein: the first had gone mad, the second was dead, and the third was Palmerston himself, who had forgotten what the solution was. As the Encyclopaedia Britannica observed in its 1976 edition, ‘The House of Bourbon-Brazil, or of Orléans-Braganza … is not to be confused with the House of Borbón-Braganza, a Spanish branch originating in the Portuguese marriage of the infante Don Gabriel (a son of Charles III of Spain: see Table 5).’

  14 The crown itself

  All this seems absurd to me, but as a republican with a taste for swagger, with a weakness for ritual too, I have always thought that the future of monarchies might lie in emblemization. As the soul of the Ashanti people is contained in their Golden Stool, which floated down from heaven rather like the halberd of Trieste, so the virtue of European nations might be projected into that most venerable symbol of kingship, the crown. They could do without mortal monarchs altogether. The golden crown itself would be the emblem of their Statehoods, and stand at the centre of their rituals as royalty alchemized. When on some ceremonial occasion a regal coach passed by in all its gilded splendour, attended by flunkeys and outriders, followed by helmeted cavalry, through its windows the wondering crowds would glimpse only the national crown, flashing with gems, reclining on a crimson cushioned dais.

  The Hungarians have come closest to this consummation. The supreme symbol of Hungarian Statehood is the marvellously Byzantine crown of St Stephen, their canonized original king, which is amazingly old, heart-rendingly beautiful, and attended by a profound and mystical significance. Legend says it was presented to the King, for his coronation at the end of the year AD 1000, by Pope Sylvester II, and augmented by later precious acquisitions: certainly during the next nineteen centuries it was used to crown fifty-two later monarchs, acquired the soubriquet ‘The Apostolic Crown’, and was kept in various fortresses and palaces throughout the Hungarian domains, ending up, when the monarchy collapsed in 1918, in Veszprém near Lake Balaton. Maria Theresa wore it when she rode side-saddle up the coronation mound at Pozsony in 1741, Franz Josef when he waved his sword to the four corners at Budapest in 1867. When in 1945 the Germans were driven out of Hungary by the Russians, they took the crown with them, and with other treasures it was buried beside the Mattsee in Austria, not far from Salzburg. There it was unearthed by the United States Army and taken away to America, to be kept for twenty-seven years among the gold reserves of Fort Knox.

  Throughout its absence, throughout the long years of Communist rule, the Hungarians continued to revere the holy crown of the Saint-King. When I went to Budapest in the 1970s a mere replica of it, displayed in the National Museum, was surrounded by armed soldiers, as though just the memory of the real thing, even in a People’s Republic, deserved an honour guard. By the 1990s, when I went again, there was the real thing, returned at last from Kentucky and exhibited with other royal regalia in a room of its own at the museum. I was more moved by it than by any appearance of living royalty. It was, after all, nearly a thousand years old! It had seen fifty-three monarchs come and go! There were no other visitors about when I went to see it on a wintry morning. The great doors of the crown room opened with a vast and echoing creak, and there in the dim-lit chamber, guarded by a solitary elderly janitor dozing on a chair in the corner – there ablaze with light stood the holy crown. Nothing could seem much holier: its gems and pearls all gleaming there, its enamelled ancient saints from old Byzantium, its ancient Greek and Latin lettering, the precious stones hanging on gold chains from its rim, and, most touching of all, the golden cross mounted cockily or even tipsily skew-whiff on the top of it. I could easily imagine men dying for it.

  15 Two royal ladies

  Kings and queens, though, generally thought the continuance of dynasties more important than the preservation of crowns, and in the heyday of the monarchies royal scions galore were available for the marriage market. In Germany alone, until the unification of the country in the nineteenth century, there were some 350 petty princedoms, each with its own administration, its own toy army, its own royal schloss in a park, its own high-born sons and daughters only awaiting suitable matches. Bismarck called the house of Saxe-Coburg, an especially fertile source, ‘the stud-farm of Europe’. The interchange of princesses, in particular, defies enumeration, and played an incalculable part in the long intricate process of calculation and compensation by which the royal families of Europe enmeshed the continent.

  Some of these ladies were by no means mere ciphers, but played powerful parts in the affairs of State and society. One such was the formidable Princess May of Teck (Victoria Mary Augusta Louise Olga Pauline Claudine Agnes), daughter of the Duke of Teck, a princedom which by then consisted of nothing much but a ruined castle on a hill. She was also a granddaughter of the Duke of Württemberg, and although she was born and brought up in England she never lost her severe Teutonic dignity. She was engaged first to Edward VII of England’s disreputable eldest son, the Duke of Clarence, but when he suddenly died in 1892 she married his brother instead, and finally became an unnerving Queen Mary to the hardly more cuddly King George V. I remember her well, and vicariously disliked her always. Majestic in her long dove-grey coat and toque, clasping her umbrella, she was once deferentially ushered (probably at her own demand) into the incorrigibly misogynist library of one of the oldest and stuffiest of London clubs, where never a woman had dared set foot unless she was going to clean the carpet or empty the ashtrays. Stately the Queen of England entered, attended as I imagine it by an obsequious club secretary, and an elderly member looked up from his newspaper. He saw the First Lady of Europe, descended from kings herself, married to the King of England, pausing at the doorway to raise her lorgnette and inspect the furnishings. ‘Ha,’ was all the old member said, returning to his paper. ‘The thin end of the wedge.’

  At the other end of Europe I once went in search of Marie Alexandra Victoria, who made the most of being Queen of Romania in the first half of this century. She was the daughter of the then Duke of Edinburgh, and thus a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. She was also a great-granddaughter of Tsar Alexander II, while her children married into the royal families of Greece and Yugoslavia, and her husband, King Ferdinand, was a Hohenzollern from Germany. However she strongly resisted the usual royal homogenization, and remained her own Englishwoman from first to last, besides taking the trouble to learn the Romanian language. At Sinaia, in the Transylvanian mountains, the Romanian royal family possessed a fantastic fairy-tale castle, Peleş Castle, a mock-Renaissance flourish of pinnacles, terraces, ornamental staircases, gables, crests, clocks and bits of half-timbering. Queen Marie preferred not to live in it (so, years later, did President Ceauşescu, who thought he would catch dry rot from it). Instead she moved into a gentler
house nearby, the Pelisor Castle, and here against all the cultural and historical odds she imposed her own taste. I much enjoyed it when I followed her there half a century after her death. Retreating defeated from the forbidden extravagances of Peleş (see page 152), I found myself wonderfully soothed in Pelisor by an elegant synthesis of art nouveau, Byzantium and Celtic design, gracefully complemented by Romanian motifs. Marie designed it all herself. She allowed Ferdinand a few Teutonic blasts in his study, but elsewhere all is cool restraint, white walls, lovely wood, golden stuccoes from the Bosporus.

  Away on the Black Sea, in an area that now forms part of Bulgaria, she built herself another characteristic retreat. It stands beside the sea at Balchik, with gardens up the hills behind. Marie called it ‘The Quiet Nest’, and although we are told that in her day guardsmen stood throughout the twenty-four hours motionless at its gates (she was not a queen for nothing), its intentions are unpretentious, all rustic red tiles and slabbed steps and small waterfalls, miscellaneous follies, and a chapel in a yard. Balchik was largely Muslim in those days, and Marie was always keen to reconcile Romania’s Muslims with its Christians, so she went out of her way to absorb Islam into the Quiet Nest aesthetic. The little palace is crowned by a minaret. Among the gardens are many old Muslim gravestones. And it was Marie’s pleasure to entertain Muslim ladies from the town in her private smoking-room, where they shared the consolations of Turkish coffee, gossip and opium – all of which the daughter of the Duke of Edinburgh was apparently rather fond of.

  Queen Marie it was whose persuasive gifts brought Romania into the First World War on the side of France and England, and she went heroically to war herself as a Red Cross nurse. She published several books. She was said to be fabulously beautiful. She was a fine horsewoman. She died in 1938, and, while her body was buried in the garden at The Quiet Nest, where it remains, her heart was placed under the altar of the chapel: when during the Second World War that part of the coast passed from Romania to Bulgaria, the queenly organ was taken away to Bucharest, and Marie Alexandra Victoria is honoured among Romanians to this day.

  16 ‘Comment’, 1926, by Dorothy Parker

  Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,

  A medley of extemporanea;

  And love is a thing that can never go wrong;

  And I am Marie of Roumania.

  17 If …

  A good place to think about royal connections is the pleasant German town of Celle, near Hanover. Its decorous streets and beautifully preserved half-timbered houses all seem to look with affectionate respect towards the schloss that stands in a moated park on its edge. In this house was born King George I of England, whose great-great-great-granddaughter was Queen Victoria, whose great-great-great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter would be Queen Elizabeth II. The Hanoverian link ensured that from then onwards the British royal family would be essentially Germanic, sometimes speaking in a thick German accent, and never looking in the least like a family of English gentry. Queen Victoria used to say that if she were not who she were she would go and live in Coburg, where her paternal forebears came from: until the First World War her dynasty was still called the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, only changing its name to Windsor to distance it from the enemy.

  I am told that now and again Prince Charles, as I write the heir to the British throne, has paid a visit to Celle – I suppose to contemplate the fact that from here his great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather George Ludwig, Elector of Hanover and Duke of Celle, set off for London to become King of England too. If history had gone in other ways Charles might now just be Duke of Celle himself, living in that agreeable white castle at the head of the town, and one day in the 1990s, when he was even more than usually embroiled in marital difficulties and London’s tabloid tittle-tattle, I amused myself by imagining that he was. How content he would be, I thought, as the beloved and respected sovereign of that little State, Karl Philip the Good of Celle! No ravishing English aristocrats to mess him about, no tabloids to mock, no paparazzi to haunt him, only his dear Duchess Kamilla to stroll arm in arm with him through the gabled streets of his capital, like a prince and princess in a fairy tale, to visit the dukely stud-farm or the State Institute of Beekeeping (talking to the bees being, as is well known, one of His Highness’s little foibles). Celle really is a kind of story-book capital for this amiable duke. The schloss itself, four-square and multi-turreted, stands moated in a park through which the ever-loyal citizenry is encouraged to wander, and outside its gates the whole town seems to bear itself with a proper deference, awaiting the palace wishes. It is like a very large estate village somewhere, looking no further than the manorial lodges for its allegiance and its welfare. The Duke’s mild Germanic eye misses little, I am assured, and he can only be pleased by what he sees on his promenades – it is all a dukely dream!

  But quick, look, over there by the garden café – there they are Themselves, and coming this way too! See how the waitresses wave and simper! See how Their Highnesses pause to watch the ducks! The children stare, sucking their thumbs. The elderly ladies curtsey. ‘Guten tag, Your Highness, a lovely day in Celle!’ Karl the Good smiles sadly at us. ‘Ah so. I do not – er – speak very much English, but it is, how do you say, er, terribly nice to see you here – is it not so, meine Liebchen?’ ‘Terribly nice,’ says the Duchess. ‘We’ve been down to see the bees.’

  Fancies, only fancies – the stuff of what might have been!

  18 In Ruritania

  To sense the dynastic system at its most allegorical, though, the only place to go is Cetinje, former capital of the mountain republic of Montenegro, which, with Serbia, is all that is left in the late 1990s of the old Yugoslavia. I drove there in the 1970s up the precipitously corkscrew road that used to be called the Ladder of Cattaro, away from the flowered Adriatic coast to the harsh high plateau of the Lovćen massif – waterless, apparently soil-less, and stubbled only with arid patches of scrub. Crouched in a declivity of this wilderness is Cetinje, which was for a decade or two around the turn of the twentieth century the undisputed capital of Ruritania. When the Turks swept this way in the fifteenth century, spreading the word of Islam all across the Balkans, the Montenegrins maintained their Christian independence, led by a line of fighting prince-bishops, and in 1910 a descendant of those heroic clergymen declared himself a king – King Nicholas I of Montenegro. It was the very heyday of the monarchical networks, when emperors, kings and princes lorded it all over Europe, and Nicholas enthusiastically joined their company. Sixty years later his royal palace in Cetinje still seemed to me a very encapsulation of royalty, a cabinet of kingship. Observe the dinner service presented by Napoleon III. Note the portrait of the future King George V of England. What staggering profusions of medals and orders, stacked with their gaudy ribbons in big glass cases, surmounted by the lions, the elephants, the peacocks, the bears and the chimeras of international chivalry! What elaborations of chinoiserie, rococo or Second Empire, presented to His Majesty by this fellow potentate or that to celebrate one formal occasion or another!

  Nicholas fathered three princes and nine princesses, and their several marriages linked this remote Balkan villa astonishingly with the royal castles and palaces of Europe. One daughter married the King of Italy, one the King of Serbia, two became the pair of grand duchesses who introduced Rasputin to the Russian court, one became a German princess, and one gave birth to the future King Alexander of Yugoslavia. In Cetinje I toured the embassies of the Powers which had been accredited to His Montenegrin Majesty, together with the court chapel, the opera house and the offices of State with which Nicholas equipped his village capital. Imagine the life that hummed around these anomalous structures in the days before the First World War, while the wind off the plateau whistled all around – the presentations at the palace, the soirée invitations delivered by sashed messengers, the confiding and betraying of courtly secrets, the encounters of diplomatic and ministerial wives on Sunday promenades! King Nicholas adored it a
ll, and made sure that no monarchical nicety was neglected: on badges and buttons, cutlery and cannon, the double-headed eagle of Montenegro, elevated to the status of a royal cipher, gave notice of his admission to the company of the Habsburgs.

  19 Long lines of soldiers

  Most of these royal aristocrats traced their ancestry back to the Germanic heartlands of Europe, and the German patriciate is still hard to escape, if only in memory. The Almanach de Gotha is, after all, a German institution, founded in 1863 when the unification of Germany must have made the future of the German nobility uncertain. Off the highway south of Riga I came by chance upon an old German estate which had its origins, I imagine, in the days of the Teutonic Knights. Those alarming warriors, members of a Christian fighting order, had entered the pagan Baltic countries in the thirteenth century, and their descendants had established themselves as a German governing class which survived the rule of the tsars and was extinguished only when the three republics gained their independence after the First World War – remaining after that, too, in the part of East Prussia which is now the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad. The estate I stumbled upon had long been requisitioned and communalized, of course, but it was peopled by ghosts for me. The big plain manor-house stood in the heart of it, surrounded by tall trees, and there were rambling outbuildings all around, with tumbled cottages which were once the serfs’ quarters, I supposed, and a pretty lake with ducks on it. I imagined the Grafs and baronesses of long ago, the von Thises and von Thats who amounted to local society, big, confident, haughty people, sitting over the candle-lit dinner-table of the big house exchanging local scandal, speculating sotto voce about the future of the tsardom and execrating the laziness of the local peasants, whose language they seldom understood and whose race they despised. I felt I knew them well, if only from the pages of Keisri Hull (‘The Czar’s Madman’), a 1987 masterpiece by the Estonian novelist Jaan Kross which is their communal memorial.