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

by Justin C. Vovk

  “I am sure that Your Majesty will,” Shaftesbury replied.1422

  For Christmas that year, the royal family gathered at Sandringham as usual. Queen Mary spent much of the time up in her room, coming down only occasionally to join everyone for tea. In the new year, Mary was anxious to get out into London, especially to see the preparations being made at Westminster Abbey for the coronation of Elizabeth II, planned to take place in June. In the spring, an examination by Mary’s doctors revealed that her breathing difficulty and chest pain were caused by lung cancer in an advanced stage, undoubtedly the result of being a social smoker, as well as a lifetime married to a heavy smoker. With the end near, the Duke of Windsor received permission to come from Florida to visit his mother. In February, Mary took her last drive through London. The bitter winter cold devastated her health, forcing her to take to her bed again at Marlborough House. But even in her last weeks, she refused to give up her most beloved habits. On March 24, 1953, Mary was resting in bed when she asked one of her ladies to read aloud from a book about her beloved India, the land that lived in her heart for so many decades. Later, a number of relatives, including the Duke of Windsor and Queen Elizabeth II, visited her bedside. That evening, as she fell asleep, Queen Mary of England, the last empress of India, slipped into a coma. Late in the night, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, trembling from emotion, informed Parliament that she died at 10:35 p.m.: “Mr. Speaker, I rise to move adjournment of the House. I have with great regret to make the announcement that Queen Mary has died.”1423 The entire House, which had been in session late into the night, erupted in cries of grief, especially from the Leftist Socialists. A few blocks away at Marlborough House, an attendant posted the news of the queen dowager’s death on the gates outside. Mary’s last wish was that Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation not be postponed in the event of her death. It was a difficult request, but the young queen acquiesced to her beloved “Grannie’s” desire for duty above all else.

  The people of Great Britain deeply mourned the loss of Queen Mary. She had lived through the careers of more monarchs than any other queen consort in English history, spanning the entire reigns of George V, Edward VIII, and George VI, and ending at the beginning of Elizabeth II’s reign. Millions of people identified with her in a way not usually seen with queen consorts. It may have had something to do with the fact that she was the first English queen consort to be born and raised in country since the time of Henry VIII in the sixteenth century. She became a symbol of hope and perseverance for her people throughout the cataclysmic first half of the twentieth century. “Queen Mary was loved as no Queen before her had been loved,” wrote one newspaper.1424

  When the time came, the people whom Mary had served for decades gave her a fitting funeral. On March 29, her coffin—draped in her red, gold, and blue standard—was taken by gun carriage from the Queen’s Chapel at Marlborough House to Westminster Hall for the lying in state. On the day of the funeral, drums beat mournfully as tens of thousands of soldiers followed the casket on its long march through the streets of London. Thousands more lined the streets to pay their last respects to the woman who had been “the people’s queen” for forty-five years. Several prominent foreign royals came to pay their respects, including the Duke and Duchess of Brunswick, the king of the Belgians, the queen of the Netherlands, and the crown prince of Norway. The coffin was taken by train from Paddington Station in London to Windsor Castle. Along the entire route, thousands of people stood silent and bareheaded as her coffin was taken “slowly and majestically” away.1425 Her body was buried beside her husband, King George V, at the Memorial Chapel. In death, she rejoined her fiancé, her husband, and her three sons.

  30

  The Last Empress

  (1940–89)

  The death of Queen Mary meant that of the four imperial matriarchs who had once ruled Europe, Empress Zita was the only one left. She spent the duration of the horrific Second World War in relative safety in North America, but these were not idle years for her or her family. Her older sons Otto, Robert, and Felix became familiar faces in Washington as they fought for Austrian interests in the postwar era. They had even managed to convince President Roosevelt to develop an elite Austrian liberation unit of the armed forces. Referred to as the Free Austria Movement, but officially designated the 101st US Infantry Battalion, the team disbanded on its first day from lack of interest from the recruits, who were mostly composed of Austrian exiles and émigrés.

  In keeping with her kinetic lifestyle, Zita, her children, and their staff moved around frequently. During the first years of the war, they took up residence at Royalston, the Massachusetts country estate of the wealthy New York banker Calvin Bullock, who was a friend of Felix’s. But Zita did not believe Royalston was a suitable home to raise her younger children, Charlotte, Carl Ludwig, Elisabeth, and Rudolf. At the end of the summer of 1940, she made the decision to relocate her family to Quebec. This was a move made out of necessity, since her younger children were still not fluent in English, but French was a language they had nearly mastered. It was a hard decision for Zita, since their new home, the Villa Saint-Joseph, was a dilapidated old house long since abandoned. Located at 239 Chemin Saint Louis, it belonged to the Sisters of Joan of Arc, a local Catholic order of nuns. After moving in on October 1940, one of the first tasks Zita undertook was the conversion of one of the house’s rooms into a chapel, so that the family could have Mass every day, presided over by a local Canadian priest.

  This was a difficult time for the family. In 1941, Hitler used his personal authority to strip Zita, her children, and their relatives of their European citizenship. This made them essentially stateless. During this period, their finances were more strapped than ever. An increase in the size of their household was also a problem when Zita’s younger sister—the mentally disabled Princess Isabella—and their mother, the seventy-nine-year-old Duchess of Parma, arrived. Even the food they ate was barely palatable. Zita was forced to make meals from the foliage growing around the house. “Almost every day we make salad and spinach dishes from dandelions,” Zita told a friend, “and we’ve tried to gather and bring home more and more of them because we consume such quantities ourselves that there is nothing left over for the servants.”1426 One of the visitors to Saint-Joseph during this time was Queen Mary’s sister-in-law Princess Alice, whose husband, the Earl of Athlone, was the governor-general of Canada during World War II.1427 Alice recalled her meeting with Zita.

  Zita still wore the same [sic] dress as she did when she became a widow—down to the ground, right up to her hands and up to her chin, with no ear-rings or any bit of jewellery [sic].

  In contrast, she was very talkative, well-informed and cultivated.… She had her old mother with her, who was much more worldly.

  We sat down to a typical German tea of Butterbrod and little square cakes and biscuits. Only Ariel [Alice’s lady-in-waiting] and I were allowed cups of tea—the others drank tumblers of water … I thought they seemed very poor.1428

  The end of the war brought many changes with it—not only for the world, but for Zita and the Habsburgs as well. For the first time, her family unit began breaking apart as the older children struck out on their own. Otto and Adelhaid, both of whom had earned their doctorates, returned to Europe. They obtained passports courtesy of Monaco, thanks largely to the efforts of Charles de Gaulle. Otto returned to Europe to work on behalf of Austria in the political jockeying for power, and Adelhaid went to Paris to help the wounded and injured from the war. Felix also left, traveling to Mexico where he started his own business. In 1948, Otto and Robert embarked on an extensive tour of the Middle East, Pakistan, India, Vietnam, China, the Philippines, and the Pacific speaking on the postwar reconstruction and the need for European unity as a means to securing future peace. It was while speaking in these exotic countries that the archdukes first began working for a paycheck.

  Zita opted to remain at Saint-Joseph for the time being but found herself being drawn back to Europe. She
spent several years after the war touring Canada and the United States, soliciting aid for war-torn Austria. At the top of her list of goals was to have Austria declared as one of the countries occupied by Hitler and not allied with him. If she succeeded, Austria would be the recipient of much-needed aid. In 1948, the empress was invited to speak at a special gathering of the wives of the members of the United States Congress. Her passionate words made an impact. Austria was accepted as a beneficiary of the Marshall Plan, the American program designed to rebuild Europe through monetary support. With her sons now taking up the imperial mantle, many saw this as “the last political act of Zita.”1429

  With the reconstruction of Europe proceeding, and with the sun setting on her own political influence, Zita naturally turned her attention to the future of her family. As her children grew older, she eagerly followed their marriage prospects. The late 1940s and early 1950s saw a series of family weddings, one quickly after the other. The youngest of the Habsburg brood, Elisabeth, was the first to marry. She fell in love with Prince Heinrich of Liechtenstein, and they were married in May 1949 at the Château de Lignières, a property owned by Prince Xavier of Bourbon-Parma, the bride’s uncle. The following year, the empress returned to Europe once again for Carl Ludwig’s wedding to Princess Yolande de Ligne. She was the daughter of the prominent French ambassador Eugène, the Eleventh Prince de Ligne. She was also a descendant of the famous Prince Charles-Joseph de Ligne, who had served at the Court of King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette in the 1770s and 1780s.

  Time did not diminish Zita’s belief that the Austrian monarchy might one day be restored under the Habsburgs, but the issue of the dynastic succession was still unresolved, since none of the empress’s sons had any children of their own yet. Once Elisabeth and Carl Ludwig married, all eyes naturally shifted to Otto. At first, he expressed little interest in finding a wife. His name had been connected to Princess Maria Francesca of Italy, the daughter of King Victor Emmanuel III, but the rumors of their engagement in the 1930s came to naught. It was not until a chance meeting in 1950 that the archduke met the woman with whom he would spend the rest of his life. Princess Regina of Saxe-Meiningen was a young nurse working at a refugee camp in Bayreuth, where Otto had set up a small villa as his base of political operations. “It was in the summer of 1950 at a camp refugee centre in Munich that I met Regina for the first time,” Otto recalled.1430 Both were children of exiled royals. Regina’s father had been taken prisoner by the Russians during the war and died at a POW camp in Siberia. Both had their property and income confiscated, and both were politically ambitious people with a drive to see Europe restored to greatness.

  The young royals soon fell in love and were married six months later. Their wedding on May 10, 1951, was held at the Church of the Cordeliers in Nancy, the capital of the province of Lorraine, which had been ruled by the Habsburgs since Maria Theresa’s marriage in 1737. In charting a course for his dynasty’s future, Otto paid homage to the shared imperial ties between Austria and Britain. Along with his brother Robert, Otto had grown close to Queen Mary, whom he began calling his “Dear Aunt.” Shortly before the queen dowager died, Otto wrote to her with the news of his upcoming wedding, “knowing the deep friendly feelings which Your Majesty has always shown to my family and myself.” In one of her last direct communications with another royal family, Mary sent Otto and Regina a “magnificent wedding present.”1431

  The wedding was a true imperial pageant. Deputations arrived from across the former Austro-Hungarian Empire—at least, from those states on the western side of the Iron Curtain. Regina’s long lace veil had been worn by one of Maria Theresa’s daughters at her wedding in the 1760s. Atop her head sat the same glittering diamond crown that Emperor Franz Joseph had presented to Zita in 1911. The myrtle blossoms in her bouquet came straight from the gardens at Schönbrunn. The service was presided over by nearly three dozen clergy from Austria and Hungary and was attended by more than two hundred royals. So many people attended that the large church was literally packed from wall to wall, with many guests standing in the aisles and along the back wall. Empress Zita, who celebrated her sixtieth birthday the day before the wedding, was seated in the front row and looked somber but simplistically majestic. Like Queen Victoria, she too wore a black dress and long veil to her son’s wedding, though her ensemble was accented by a row of flawless pearls, the glittering Star Cross Order, and the imperial sash. After a nuptial mass performed by the bishop of Nancy, the newlyweds and their relatives made a triumphal procession through the crowded streets of Nancy. Excited well-wishers cheered the family and threw their hats in the air as a sign of respect. So many people had flooded into the streets, onto balconies, and on rooftops that the Nancy police found themselves unable to restrain the crowd’s wild enthusiasm.

  With her children now married, Empress Zita took the opportunity to return to Europe permanently.1432 She made a home for herself in the tiny nation of Luxembourg, which was ruled by her sister-in-law Grand Duchess Charlotte. This afforded Zita the opportunity of being near her aged mother, the Duchess of Parma, who lived at her brother Felix’s home, Berg Castle. After the duchess celebrated her ninetieth birthday in November 1952, Zita took it upon herself to care for her mother personally. When the duchess passed away at the remarkable age of ninety-seven in 1959, the empress began a quest to find a private home for her own twilight years.

  In 1963, she found a small castle called Saint Johannes in Zizers, Switzerland, which was maintained by the kindly Johannes Vonderach, bishop of Chur. Zita’s suite of four rooms was barely enough to house herself, her sister Isabella, and a lady-in-waiting, but it was simple enough for the unpretentious empress. She especially valued the private chapel that was part of her suite, allowing her to continue her daily routine of Mass and prayer each morning. At Saint Johannes, Zita received regular visits from her family living nearby in Austria, Liechtenstein, France, and Italy. By the mid-1960s, she could proudly boast of having more than thirty grandchildren. Zita’s friend and biographer Gordon Brook-Shepherd noted the following:

  Otherwise, by the start of this Zizers era, Elisabeth had already borne her Liechtenstein husband five children (four of them boys); Yolanda had given birth to four for [Carl Ludwig] (two of them boys); Robert and Margherita had five (two of them girls); while Xenia had also borne Rudolf four children (only one girl). Felix and Anna proved the most prolific of all, producing no fewer than seven children between 1953 and 1961, of whom four were sons. That left the head of the family [Otto], on whom the succession initially rest. From the strictly dynasty point of view (though from no other) Regina caused some concern by bearing five daughters (Andrea, Monika, Michaela, Gabriela and Walburga) in rapid succession between 1953 and 1958. Then, in 1961, came Charles, the first of the couple’s two sons, and the direct heir was in place.1433

  As Zita entered her twilight years, resistance in Austria toward the imperial family started declining. In 1968, the Austrian government announced that all Habsburgs born after April 10, 1919, when the dynasty was formally deposed, could return to their homeland. For the first time, the door of opportunity was open for Zita’s grandchildren to visit, but she was still denied entry. This policy was particularly painful for the empress in 1971, when her daughter Adelhaid died suddenly in Pöcking, Bavaria. The circumstances surrounding her death have never been made public. The archduchess was buried in Tulfes in the Tyrol, but her mother was denied permission to attend the funeral because of the Habsburg Law. Otto, who had always been close to Adelhaid and had finally been issued an Austrian passport to travel within Austria on October 31, 1966, represented his family at the funeral—Otto received an Austrian passport and citizenship on February 8, 1957, under the condition that he accept the name Dr. Otto von Habsburg instead of his imperial titles. Ironically, his Austrian passport was valid in every country except Austria.

  The late 1960s and early 1970s engendered a resurrection of sorts of monarchy in Europe. In 1975, history was made when the
Spanish monarchy was restored under the old Bourbon dynasty. In the last years of his life, Spain’s Fascist leader General Francisco Franco showed growing interest in seeing a return of monarchy. He developed an unusual relationship with the last queen and Empress Zita’s old friend, Queen Ena—King Alfonso, after leaving his wife, had died in exile in Rome in 1941. Through mutual cooperation and interest in the welfare of Spain, these two astute political figures paved the way for the queen’s grandson Prince Juan Carlos to become king upon Franco’s death. Sadly, Ena died in 1969, but the return of a deposed monarchy—especially one that had strong Habsburg links—was a moment of great hope for royals across Europe. In an interesting twist, King Juan Carlos’s wife, Queen Sofía, was a great-granddaughter of Empress Augusta Victoria through her daughter the Duchess of Brunswick. For Empress Zita, this restoration gave her tremendous hope for the future. But like Queen Ena, Zita knew that the sun had long set on her life in politics. She began to look to the future.

  With all of her surviving children now entering middle age, Zita found herself surrounded by several dozen grandchildren, many of whom had already entered adulthood. This inevitably led to a number of happy family milestones, as Zita’s grandchildren began marrying. Carl Ludwig’s son Christian became the subject of a media frenzy when he married Marie Astrid of Luxembourg, one of Europe’s most beautiful princesses, in 1982. Marie Astrid had garnered her fair share of attention, since she was one of the few eligible princesses from a reigning European house. Her name had also been mentioned as a possible wife for Queen Elizabeth II’s son Prince Charles. Two years after this royal wedding was yet another, in 1984, when Robert’s son Lorenz married the wealthy Princess Astrid of Belgium. Such family triumphs were undoubtedly gratifying for Zita, who had watched as her family was blacklisted by the surviving royal houses of Europe after World War I.