Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires

by Justin C. Vovk

  11

  “We Must Help Each Other Get to Heaven”

  (1910–11)

  As Zita of Bourbon-Parma reached her late teen years, she had grown into a pretty young woman. Though not a classical beauty like Tsarina Alexandra, Zita inherited many fine features from both her parents. Like the Duchess of Parma, she possessed dark hair and deep-set chestnut eyes. From her father, she received the defined chin and jawline of her French Bourbon ancestors. With this type of exotic beauty and distinguished pedigree, it came as no surprise that as Zita stood upon the brink of womanhood, her admirers multiplied. The leading candidate for her hand was the pretender to both the French and Spanish thrones, her highly eligible yet overage cousin Jaime, Duke of Madrid, who was twenty-two years older than Zita. This Spanish prince’s infatuation with the teenage Zita grew from time he spent with his Parma cousins at Frohsdorf while he was on leave from his position in the Russian army.

  Always a welcome guest at the Austrian home of his aunt the Duchess of Parma, Jaime spent many hours in Zita’s company. A mutual attraction took hold, though it was always stronger on Jaime’s part. Jaime, then in his early forties, was smitten with the young princess, who was still only nineteen. Though a frequent companion to Zita and all her sisters, Jaime did not hide his preference for the elegant, vivacious younger sister. It was not long before Zita sensed her much older cousin’s feelings.

  Far from growing weaker, as time and distance might normally have been expected to do, Jaime’s infatuation grew as Zita reached an age when she could start to think about marriage. His commission with the Russian army took him to the front lines on more than one occasion during the Russo-Japanese War. Jaime saw combat in one of the war’s most decisive campaigns—the Battle of Liaoyang—which foreshadowed the fall of Port Arthur to the Japanese. When the duke returned from the front, it was always to Frohsdorf and to Zita, but because of his position as a pretender to the French throne, he was away in Paris for months, forcing him to settle for writing letters to his dear Zita.

  This union was very much to the liking of Jaime’s stepmother, the Duchess of Madrid, as well as the Carlist community in Spain who hoped to one day see him sit on the throne as King Jaime III. His hopes of marrying his Italian cousin, however, were dashed. His outspoken criticism of King Alfonso XIII and Queen Victoria Eugenie did not earn him any points with the Bourbon-Parmas, who were sympathetic to the couple. He was further hampered in his pursuit by other major obstacles, including his advanced age and the implacable opposition of Zita’s mother, who protested on the grounds that Jaime and Zita were too closely related. He eventually discovered he could not make Zita his wife. As Jaime’s visits increased, the Duchess of Parma watched her daughter carefully. Her tempered opposition to the match doomed any plans for marriage between her daughter and the duke.

  Like the late Duke of Parma, who could not bear the thought of any of his daughters being forced into a loveless marriage, Maria Antonia prevented her daughter from being roped into an arranged union. This decision may have had something to do with the disastrous outcome of the marriage of Robert I’s eldest daughter from his first marriage, Maria Louisa. Robert personally arranged her marriage to Prince Ferdinand of Bulgaria (later king of the Bulgarians); the couple did not meet until their wedding at Pianore in 1893. Unfortunately, Maria Louisa and Ferdinand were deeply unhappy together, largely because Ferdinand found his wife unattractive, paid her little attention, and was bisexual. It cannot be said for certain whether or not Maria Louisa’s failed marriage was the Duchess of Parma’s only impetus for not forcing Zita into an arranged union, but it did play a part. Thankfully, the duchess’s decision destroyed any plans Don Jaime may have had for marriage, thus ending any chance of her daughter being locked in a marriage with a man who was old enough to be her father.

  This episode spurred the Duchess of Parma into action. Maria Antonia knew that she had to act quickly to obviate an unsuitable romance. Although she hoped Zita would marry for love, Maria Antonia wanted a glittering future for her beautiful daughter. Though the political furor surrounding the Spanish and defunct French thrones was not to her liking, the Austrian throne was another matter entirely. Fortunately for this caring mother, Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria was also on the prowl for an ideal wife for his great-nephew and heir presumptive Archduke Charles. A pious, gentle young man with aspirations of being a career soldier, Charles was the son of the playboy Archduke Otto and the stocky, conservative Princess Maria Josepha of Saxony. Charles’s remarkable character was almost shocking in light of his father’s disreputable lifestyle. He came into his position as second in line for the throne after his father’s death in 1906. Before Zita realized it, and while Charles was on leave from his dragoon regiment, the machinations of Emperor Franz Joseph and the Duchess of Parma would work to unite the destinies of these two young people.

  The head of the Imperial and Royal House of Habsburg, Franz Joseph was an extremely conservative man who detested change. After the invention of telephones and elevators, he refused to use either. When he was sick, he would not let his doctor see him unless the physician was dressed in formal court attire. The emperor was a paradigm from a different era of royalty that was becoming extinct. He came to the throne in 1848 when he was only eighteen after his uncle Emperor Ferdinand—a hydrocephalic epileptic whose neurological problems were legion—was forced to abdicate.

  From that day forward, Franz Joseph’s reign was crippled by one calamity after another. In 1854, he married the stunningly beautiful Elizabeth, Duchess in Bavaria. Six years later, the nonconformist Elizabeth separated from her husband. She spent the next four decades wandering Europe, living on yachts and at resorts, trying to escape the pain of her life in Vienna. Franz Joseph’s brother, the emperor of Mexico, was executed. His only son, Rudolf, killed himself. When it appeared that the emperor and his wife were on the verge of reconciliation in 1898, Elizabeth was killed in Switzerland when a lunatic stabbed her with a nail file. Two years later came Franz Ferdinand’s historic decision to marry Sophie. In the hopes of conceding some ground to his heir, the emperor elevated Sophie to the rank of princess and, later, to Duchess of Hohenberg. These courtesy titles were the minimum requirements for Sophie to appear at court. Despite this token, the “marriage was awkward for Sophie. Even as the consort of the heir to the throne, her rank was lower than that of all the archdukes and archduchesses, including the children. She entered the halls of the Hofburg after little boys and little girls. The Hofburg was drafty in the best of times, but Sophie felt a special chill.”618 For the rest of his life, Franz Joseph reminded his nephew and his wife of the eternal shame that their marriage brought upon the dynasty. But undaunted by his tragedies and misfortunes, Franz Joseph threw himself wholeheartedly into his role as Austria’s leader for more than sixty years.

  This determination was all the more poignant because of Austria’s waning influence as a Great Power. The decline and fall of the Holy Roman Empire, the rise of Prussian hegemony, and the embryonic ethnic groups gestating within Austria significantly weakened its imperial integrity.

  Austria-Hungary … was territorially the dominant force in central Europe … But in power terms it was regarded as an empire on the way down. Within its borders a dozen nascent nationalist movements were threatening to pull it apart. Respect for the inscrutable, irreproachably correct, dutiful and patient emperor Franz Joseph … was increasingly cited as the only thing holding the different groups—among them Croats, Czechs, Poles, Hungarians and Ukrainians—together. Though he presented himself as an autocratic monarch with one of the most stiffly hierarchical courts in Europe, Franz Joseph had kept the empire together through a series of peaceful compromises which had turned him into a constitutional one. The empire had been further weakened by the loss of Italy after 1848, and Bismarck himself had sent it into eclipse by kicking it out of Germany in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866.619

  The Habsburgs had ruled Austria for some sixteen generations. Their
monarchy truly embodied the word empire. Centuries of conquest, royal marriages, and hereditary possessions meant that the Habsburgs, in addition to already being emperors and archdukes of Austria, were also the kings, grand dukes, margraves, princes, and counts of more than fifty territories that had been added to their monarchy since the 1400s. In the sixteenth century, Hungary, Poland, and Bohemia were added to their possessions through a marriage pact between the Habsburgs and the Jagiellonians, eastern Europe’s most powerful ruling family at the time. Around the same time, the Habsburgs were called upon to rule Spain until their line died out almost two centuries later. By the beginning of the twentieth century, their empire was made up of present-day Austria, Hungary, Bosnia, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Slovenia, Liechtenstein, and parts of Italy, Switzerland, Romania, Poland, and Ukraine. Aside from Russia, Austria-Hungary was the largest power on continental Europe. “Within our Empire, the small nations of central Europe find a refuge,” Franz Joseph said in 1868. “Without this common house their fate would be a miserable one. They would become the plaything of every powerful neighbour.”620 The emperor’s statement, though somewhat disconnected from the true reality of central Europe, does reveal the mantle of responsibility that many of the Habsburgs felt was their duty to carry.

  Throughout its long and volatile history, Austria (or more specifically, the Habsburgs) had learned to compromise to survive. In 1713, Emperor Charles VI essentially bribed Europe’s other rulers to allow his daughter Maria Theresa to inherit his thrones. At the time, it seemed promising, but as soon as the emperor died, the heavily pregnant Maria Theresa was forced to rally her subjects to her side to defend against the Prussian-led invasion of the Habsburg crown lands. In 1810, Maria Theresa’s grandson Emperor Francis I married his daughter off to Napoleon to cement the Franco-Austrian Alliance that was put in place after France’s victory in the War of the Fifth Coalition. After the Austro-Prussian War, the Habsburgs were forced to create the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, granting the empire’s Hungarian Magyars equality with its German citizens. The dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary was born.621 Fifty-years later, it would be this compromise that would help unravel the Habsburgs’ monarchy.

  The Compromise of 1867 was not the only significant matter of policy that affected the course of Austria’s future. By the late 1870s, the transgressions of the Austro-Prussian War were slowly being forgotten. The elimination of France as an imperial power in 1871 seemed to have eased tensions between Germany and Austria, paving the way for a level of rapprochement. By the end of that decade, Bismarck—the man who had been the single-greatest proponent of the 1866 war—had negotiated a mutual defense treaty between the two Germanic empires, known as the Dual Alliance. Upon his accession to the throne in 1888, Wilhelm II made it a priority mission to mend fences with Austria even further. He held deep respect and admiration for the aging Franz Joseph, whom he viewed as an archetype of his own venerated grandfather Wilhelm I.

  The closer Germany and Austria became in the Wilhelmine era, the more apparent were the differences between the two empires. Where Germany was a homogenous state driven by a single nationalist agenda, Austria was quite the opposite. It was a true example of a vast empire made up of more than a dozen divergent, often volatile, ethnic groups; Zita once said that the Austrian Empire “incarnated the spirit of European civilisation as did no other state.”622 And unlike the homogenous, nationalistic Germany, where hundreds of dispossessed, mediatised royals searched to find their place in the monarchical hierarchy centered on the Hohenzollerns, Austria was the personification and embodiment of the Habsburg dynasty itself. It comes as no surprise, then, that their family motto was “Let others fight wars! Thou Happy Austria marry. What Mars gives to others, Venus bestows on thee.”623 Centuries-old tradition reigned supreme in Austria, where the dynasty “was always superior to the state. Family laws in old Austria-Hungary had precedence over state laws, and the provisions of the Family Charter, drawn up in 1839, are still unpublished and secret.”624

  Archduke Charles (who was known in German as “Karl”) became heir presumptive at the age of nineteen when his father died. Charles’s life from that point forward took on a decidedly different tone. His education now included political matters, whereas before it had revolved mostly around the military. For most of his teen years, he had his own household that moved from one palace to another. When he finished school, he took up the traditional Habsburg occupation of being a career soldier. Unlike many of his relatives, Charles remained free from scandals, but in 1910, he embroiled himself with the wrong crowd of friends from his dragoon regiment. A minor incident they caused with a young woman was the catalyst that launched the emperor on the search for a wife for Charles. For a brief period, his name was romantically linked with a number of princesses, including the emperor’s granddaughter Ella and Princess Hohenlohe, an Austrian courtesan. Charles and Ella were already twice related, so a marriage between the two was stretching it. It also became noticeable that he had no interest in Princess Hohenlohe. Eventually, the emperor caught wind of the duchess’s efforts to find a husband for Zita, so the two matchmakers arranged for the couple to meet in Lucca.

  Dressed in a white muslin gown trimmed with lace, Zita was seated next to Charles at a dinner they both attended. They soon found themselves attending the same parties, which gave them the chance to become better acquainted. They spoke in German—a language Zita spoke since childhood—and the archduke soon charmed the princess. When they met in 1910 at Villa Wartholz, the home of their mutual relative Archduchess Maria Theresa, their interactions turned from charm to romance.625 They were afforded the chance to spend more time together when Zita and her sister were invited to a ball given by Charles’s mother, the Archduchess Maria Josepha. Later, they were guests of Maria Theresa at her hunting lodge, Saint Jacob, where Charles and Zita got to know one another on more intimate terms. They spent the next two years meeting together, primarily at Wartholz, where they developed a deep connection. Charles’s kindness and gentility aroused admiration in Zita, while her “personality was a happy combination of Italian vivacity and German training.”626

  Just shy of his twenty-fourth birthday, Charles was five years older than Zita. Intelligent, generous, and loyal, Charles, who had brown hair and blue eyes, had inherited some of the good looks of his playboy father. In the very large Austrian imperial family, the moral character of Archduke Charles was highly respected. “If one does not know how to pray,” recalled one the archduke’s relatives, “he can learn from this young gentleman.”627 In character, he and Zita harmonized perfectly. Zita recalled of the time they spent together that they “were of course glad to meet … and become close friends,” but on her part, “feelings developed gradually.” Although these do not sound like words of passion, Zita came to genuinely love Charles, and it was enough for the nineteen-year-old to accept his proposal on June 13, 1911. The engagement was an early modern example of public interest in the personal lives of royalty. The Austrians were conscientiously interested in this upcoming wedding, since it was a fact that Charles and Zita’s children would one day inherit the throne, not Franz Ferdinand’s. Zita herself became an object of interest partly because of her “most unusual name” and partly because of her “semi-Italian background.”628 Some observers noted that it was “the feast-day of an important Italian saint, St Anthony of Padua: a good day for a former ruling family of an Italian duchy to mark this new and significant chapter in its history.”629 The couple looked happy and in love as they posed on the balcony at Pianore for a formal engagement photograph. Zita’s arm was gingerly wrapped around her fiancé’s with an unpretentious smile on her face. The proposal was largely prompted by Archduchess Maria Theresa. Zita later recalled the following of the engagement:

  He [Charles] seemed to have made up his mind much more quickly, however, and became even keener when, in the autumn of 1910, rumours spread about that I had got engaged to a distant Spanish relative, Don Jaime, the Duke
of Madrid. On hearing this, the Archduke came down post haste from his regiment at Brandeis and sought out his grandmother, Archduchess Maria Theresa, who was also my aunt and the natural confidant in such a matter. He asked if the rumor was true and when told it was not, he replied, ‘Well, I had better hurry in any case or she will get engaged to someone else.’”630

  Before he actually proposed, Charles went to ask for Zita’s hand from her mother, the Duchess of Parma, who expressed concern since Zita was still so young and because of the responsibilities she would be taking on by being so close to the throne as the archduke’s wife. Charles managed to reassure her that the emperor was still in good health, and there was no reason to think Franz Ferdinand would not reign for many years.

  Once the proposal was actually made, Franz Joseph found himself taken aback, wondering whether or not it was a good idea. The “fact that Princess Zita belonged to a deposed Italian royal house did not strike the Emperor as a good augury.”631 In the end, the emperor accepted Zita because she was descended from two of the proudest royal dynasties in history, and for the first time in generations, a Habsburg was marrying a woman who actually strengthened the dynasty instead of destabilizing it. The famous nineteenth-century royal apologist Princess Catherine Radziwill noted that the “Austrian Imperial House has seldom been lucky in its choice of brides, and the public or private scandals which have arisen from time to time have been far too numerous for it to be possible to keep count.” She also noted that “one Archduke after another tried to emancipate himself from the thraldom in which the exigencies of a merciless etiquette kept them confined.”632

  The Habsburgs were one of the unluckiest dynasties when it came to royal marriages. Most notoriously was Franz Ferdinand’s recent morganatic marriage in 1900, but there were many others. The emperor’s son, Crown Prince Rudolf, had married the highly strung, overly sensitive Princess Stéphanie of Belgium. There was constant animosity between the crown princess and her in-laws. Charles’s uncle Archduke Ferdinand fell deeply in love with Berta Czuber, a university professor’s daughter. The couple married, but with consequences. Franz Joseph ordered Ferdinand’s name stricken from the official imperial family tree, stripping him of all titles, styles, and prerogatives. When he died in 1915, he was buried in Munich in an unremarkable grave marked “Ferdinand Burg.” The Habsburg women were not immune from marital woes either. One of the most disastrous marriages in recent memory was that of Archduchess Louise, who married the crown prince of Saxony in 1891. By 1903, the marriage had been rocked by one scandal after another and eventually resulted in Louise divorcing her husband. Her conduct was considered so damaging to both the Saxon and Austrian monarchies that Franz Joseph stripped her of her imperial titles, which the New York Times called an act “without parallel in the Imperial house.”633