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

by Justin C. Vovk

  At the funeral, the new emperor and empress, who were holding the hands of four-year-old Crown Prince Otto, solemnly walked behind the coffin as it moved through the packed streets. Following the imperial couple were the kings of Bulgaria, Bavaria, Saxony, and Württemberg and nearly one hundred other visiting royals. The imperial couple—especially the boyish-looking Charles—marked a strong contrast to the visiting kings, all of whom were seasoned, middle-aged men. The funeral at Saint Stephen’s Cathedral was officiated by Cardinal-Archbishop Piffl of Vienna, four other cardinals, ten bishops, and forty-eight priests. After the service was finished, the funeral procession made its way to the imperial crypts deep beneath the Capuchin Church, located near the Hofburg. Charles was dressed in a simple general’s uniform, but it was Zita who drew all eyes. The grief-stricken empress looked ethereal in a black dress with a full-length veil over her face.

  So many people had filled the streets that Zita’s son Otto recalled years later, “It was like walking among sky-scrapers.”893 For many people, the funeral of their previous emperor provided them with the first glimpse of their new one. The imperial family made a vivid impression on the masses. Charles I seemed “a modest young man, looking boyish in field-gray, his head bared, and between him and the slim figure of his wife, entirely draped in black from head to toe, walked his son Otto, in his skirts, sash, white socks and golden ringlets.” The writer of these words concluded, “In a world fast disintegrating, it was a reassuring symbol of the bourgeois security which in fact Vienna and the Empire would never know again.”894

  Upon becoming empress, Zita found herself in similar circumstances to both Alexandra of Russia and Dona of Germany. Had Charles become emperor under different circumstances, he undoubtedly would have made an admirable ruler. The reality of the situation was quite different, though. Having succeeded so suddenly, he had formed no councils, trusted no ministers, and failed to establish his own identity outside of his great-uncle’s shadow. Even worse for him and Zita was the decaying state of their empire at the end of 1916. Under the duress of war, Austria-Hungary was literally tearing itself apart. Its many ethnic groups raised a chorus of voices calling for independence for the different nationalist parties. It was a sad reality that, despite Charles’s kindness, empathy, and gentility, events beyond his control were already engineering his downfall.

  Most of Europe seemed ambivalent toward Charles and Zita’s accession, but in Britain, the news was greeted with vitriolic remarks. Forgotten was Charles’s visit to London in 1911 for King George and Queen Mary’s coronation. Instead, he was now the emperor of a country who was at war with Britain. The Times was scathing in its opinion of the new emperor.

  There is no reason whatever to suppose that the young ruler will rise in character or in statecraft above the somewhat low average of Habsburg rulers.… When Francis Joseph succeeded to his uncle’s throne in his 19th year, he had already shown qualities that seemed to render him not unfit to his task. He was a young man, but a man. The Archduke Charles Francis Joseph not only in his 19th but even in his 25th year was a boy, and in some respects a young boy. Two years of war may have hardened and sobered him, but great surprises would be felt by those who knew him between 1908 and 1913 if he were to show in any respect the qualities of a great monarch.895

  Surprisingly, the same article was more optimistic in its assessment of Zita: “The Empress Zita is a simple, unaffected woman of great charm and attractive appearance.”896 In the United States, the New York Times was equally flattering in its description of the new empress: “From her early days she has been studious, and is an accomplished musician and well versed in literature, history, and philosophy. She is also fond of society and is a graceful dancer.”897

  The subdued court that Empress Zita presided over came as a jarring shock to many of the imperial hangers-on in Vienna. Many of their contemporaries had expected Zita and Charles to embrace a more fashionable, if not more sybaritic, court lifestyle that embraced extravagance and wealth. What they realized instead was that the emperor and empress were deeply attached to the simple things in life. They also remained committed to each other. Like Nicholas II and George V, Charles I was wholeheartedly faithful to his wife and their wedding vows. Zita never had to worry about any mistresses parading in and out of her husband’s bedroom. She always knew where his heart rested. Charles and Zita also possessed an innate goodness that annoyed some of the older, more cynical courtiers. In a combination of faith and character, they both made it a point to give people the benefit of the doubt and extended trust whenever possible.

  Many were surprised by the strange mix of Empress Zita’s personality. At times, she quietly submitted to her husband, obeying his decisions, but in other moments, she exerted a decisive tenacity that Charles happily embraced. One of the emperor’s senior military advisers remembered Zita’s daily presence at the military briefings held each evening. “She was habitually seated, reading a book or writing letters,” he recalled. “Her presence was purely passive. She sometimes asked me for information on such or such an event, but it was never about important affairs. It was rare that she permitted herself a remark while the Emperor was discussing political questions with me, but when she did so, the question was always judicious and never beside the point.”898

  Even after their accession, the couple continued to devote themselves first and foremost to God. Each day began with Mass and prayer. They abstained from alcohol, cigarettes, and the other vices for which they were criticized by Vienna’s smart set. The pair made it a point to let their Christian faith influence every area of their lives. Charles insisted on using Biblical principles as the basis for his reign, which led him to insist on taking milder measures on the war front. The older generals were sometimes frustrated by the pacifistic attitude of the young ruler, earning him the epithet Friedenkaiser—the Peace Emperor. But with Zita by his side, it did not bother Charles. Instead, he embraced the title.

  As empress, Zita was now the head of a number of charitable organizations in Austria, mostly children’s welfare societies and women’s volunteer groups. The people that she worked with in these organizations were deeply impressed by the new empress. At a meeting of the Christian Women’s League of Austria, one of the participants said of Zita, “I didn’t have the feeling I was talking to the highest-ranking woman in the Monarchy, but rather with a personality whose thoughts and aspirations are completely devoted to the well-being of her fellow man. With every word the Empress spoke, one noticed that it came from the heart.”899 She spent many hours each day answering letters from people asking for her help. One woman, the wife of a coach driver, wrote to Zita asking for help for her seriously ill daughter. Another woman asked her to assist in finding a school for an unfortunate child who possessed a stutter. Someone else hoped the empress could help her find a medicinal spa for her mother who was gravely sick.

  It certainly could not have been easy to preside over a tottering empire at such an obstreperous period, but Zita earned the respect of everyone with whom she came into contact. Lieutenant General Albert von Margutti, a member of the imperial court, received an audience with the empress in January 1917 and was impressed with her: “This time I was again fascinated, not only by the charm that emanated from her august person and by the unrivalled grace of her manners, but more by the turns of her alert and pleasant conversation, sparkling with intelligence and vivacity.” Margutti may have been charmed by Zita, but their audience was anything but lighthearted. It fell to Margutti to address with the empress a number of serious issues facing Austria-Hungary, including “the implacable determination of the Germans,… the danger of events precipitating the fall of Nicholas II and rebounding into that of William II and the Habsburgs.”900

  From the moment they ascended the throne, Emperor Charles I and Empress Zita would not know a moment’s peace or tranquility in their reign. At the time of Franz Joseph’s death, Austria’s political system was suffering a breakdown. Count Stuergkh, the prime minis
ter, had prorogued the Reichsrat, the Austrian parliament, saying with unsettling coldness, “Parliaments are a means to an end, where they fail, other means must be employed.”901 Stuergkh was later shot to death while he was having lunch in a Vienna restaurant by a young socialist named Friedrich Adler, who yelled out, “Down with absolutism! We want peace.”902 Horrified by such a senseless act of violence, Charles reconvened the Reichsrat in the spring of 1917.

  In addition to the political crisis and the overwhelming business of the war effort, the imperial couple was confronted with a matter that was integral to the stability of the dual monarchy. The issue revolved around Hungary, the ancient kingdom that had made up the backbone of the Habsburg Empire for six centuries. The Hungarian people were adamantly against the war. Hungary’s prime minister, Count Stefan Tisza, was the man who represented his country at Franz Joseph’s Crown Council of 1914 that voted to declare war. He had been the only council member against attacking Serbia. Tisza believed that by going to war, Austria-Hungary was signing its own death warrant. It was up to the new sovereigns to convince Hungary to rally behind the continuing war effort. The Hungarians had mixed feelings about Charles and Zita. Franz Joseph enjoyed a measure of loyalty from the Magyars because they were doggedly loyal to the memory of Empress Elizabeth.

  As far as the Hungarians were concerned, Charles and Zita were untried and untested. To help solidify the bond between Hungary and the new sovereigns, Charles and Count Tisza arranged for his coronation as king of Hungary. It was traditional to not have a coronation in Austria, but the crowning of a new king of Hungary was a deeply numinous event that tied the people to their sovereign. Hungarian law also stated that Charles could not reign until he was crowned, making a speedy coronation imperative. Zita shared her account of planning the coronation with her biographer Gordon Brook-Shepherd.

  Count Tisza stressed to the Emperor that, according to Hungarian law, he was only Erbkönig or hereditary king of Hungary until he was crowned and that, as such, he could neither promulgate nor even prolong certain basic laws. Some of these laws, including economic ones vital for the war, were due to expire at the end of the year. Hence the hurry: not even the full six months could, in these special circumstances, be allowed to pass.

  The Emperor consulted on the spot his experts. They all upheld Tisza’s argument and all declared the matter to be urgent. At this, the Emperor agreed, and the legal point explains the date chosen for the coronation, 30 December 1916, almost the eve of the new year.

  The Emperor knew what he was doing and he knew the formal effect this would have on his reform plans. But the legal arguments were unassailable and the need for haste was there. He agreed in order to be able to bring the war to a rapid end. The Hungarian problem he hoped to sort out after the war.

  In one sense, of course, the friction between the Hungarians and the other nationalities under them was the Empire’s biggest handicap. But these – we thought – were questions which must be left for peacetime. In war, Hungary was a pillar of the Dual Monarchy, and Tisza was the man of iron who carried that pillar.903

  Like a medieval display lifted from the pages of Hungary’s past, the coronation took place on December 30, 1916. It would be the last official ceremony for the Habsburgs as a reigning dynasty. It would also be the last imperial pageant that Europe would ever see. Budapest was transformed into a frozen wasteland by the painfully harsh winter that year. In spite of the cold, hundreds of thousands of people lined the route that Charles and Zita’s carriage took to the gothic Cathedral of Mathias Corvinus. The wildly cheering throngs of people pressed so heavily against the procession to catch a glimpse of the new king and queen that it took them four hours to reach the cathedral. That day remained forever engraved on Zita’s memory. “From the Suspension Bridge over the half-frozen Danube we detected the outlines of the Royal Castle emerging from the mist, lit up like a burning torch,” she recalled years later. “I wondered if those lights, so seldom seen in Budapest, would go on burning all through the reign of the new monarch, or would the palace return to its usual gloom?”904

  The coronation lasted for more than three hours. Once the Crown of Saint Stephen was placed on Charles’s head and the sound of trumpets heralded him as the new king, Cardinal-Archbishop Johannes Csernoch proceeded to anoint Zita. Dressed in a white brocade gown embroidered with gold and covered with roses and other emblems, she was led by Csernoch to the seat next to her husband, who simply brushed her right shoulder with the ancient Hungarian crown. “Receive this crown of glory,” he declared, “so that you know you are the King’s wife and are charged always to care for the people of God.” This simple act and declaration made Zita the crowned queen consort of Hungary. Zita’s son Otto watched the ceremony from the balcony of the cathedral, seated next to his eccentric uncle King Ferdinand of the Bulgarians. Decades later, he still vividly remembered his parents’ coronation: “In Vienna, I had been hemmed in as part of the proceedings [of Franz Joseph’s funeral]. But in Budapest I was an observer. I travelled separately to the coronation church where I could watch everything from a loge. I remember being particularly struck by Count Tisza for, like all Hungarian Calvinists, he was wearing a costume in black which stood out among the vivid colourful dresses of the majority of the Catholic nobility.”905

  The day’s events made a deep impression on the twenty-four-year-old Zita. “What impressed both of us most about the whole ceremony was the moving liturgical side of it all, especially the oaths taken by the king before his anointing to preserve justice for all and strive for peace,” she said. “This sacred pledge given in the cathedral was exactly the political programme [sic] which he wanted to carry out from the throne. We both felt this so strongly that hardly any words were necessary between us.”906 The ceremony was followed by only a brief dinner at the palace in Budapest. Zita noted that her husband “felt that festivities were simply not appropriate to wartime, when every day so many were dying on the battlefields.”907 The only formal portrait that was taken to commemorate the occasion shows the mustachioed Charles looking uncomfortable under the weight of his dark, heavy coronation robes and the jeweled Crown of Saint Stephen. It is Zita who draws all eyes to her. Seated with her arm around four-year-old Otto, the new queen-empress was the epitome of majesty and grace with her embroidered dress and long, flowing train. Her neck was adorned with strings of pearls, and atop her head sat her diamond-studded crown, which was even larger than her husband’s.

  As soon as the couple returned to Vienna, Charles immediately left for Austria’s military headquarters at Baden bei Wien, located a few miles south of Vienna. Following in Nicholas II’s footsteps, Charles took personal command of Austria’s armed forces, relieving Archduke Frederick, his older relative. The emperor moved his command center to Baden from Teschen to distance himself from Emperor Wilhelm II and Wilhelm’s dictatorial advisers. Unlike other commanders, Charles wanted his family with him on his long visits to military headquarters. But unlike Nicholas II, Charles did not leave his wife to govern in his stead, although it is likely Zita would have done infinitely better than Alexandra.

  At Baden, Zita and Charles strove to give their family as normal a life as possible. They purchased an old, two-story, yellow house that they named the Kaiservilla, located near the center of town. It was a simple building, with a sitting and dining room, a few living quarters, and two small rooms for the children to play in. The emperor “had to spend most of his days here and he wanted his young family to be there with him.” During the days, Zita was often left to oversee life at the Kaiservilla while Charles visited military bases to discuss the war with his generals. As often as possible, she encouraged Charles to take little Otto with him. Dressed in a little white suit, the tiny crown prince could be seen returning the salutes of the soldiers as he walked by. Years later, Otto recalled those times he spent at headquarters: “My sister Adelheid usually came with me when we travelled to these different places. We were already at that time, I would almost s
ay, a team, as we remained ever afterwards, and I particularly remember our visits to the air force base near Wiener Neustadt. My father decorated some of the officers who had done an outstanding job. Meanwhile we were shown the aeroplanes which impressed me very much.”908

  As the war continued for another interminable year, Queen Mary remained as indefatigable as ever, despite the fact that she felt the strains of the last two years as deeply as any of her subjects. In a letter to Lady Mount Stephen in 1916, she wrote, “The length of this horrible war is most depressing. I really think it gets worse the longer it lasts.”909

  While her husband visited France and met with his ministers from dawn until dusk, forty-nine-year-old Mary lost none of her determination. She personally oversaw almost every aspect of the home front, which included hospitals, nursing, munitions, and needlework for the troops. Workers were stunned to see their queen inspecting dirty factories and labor conditions, usually dressed like any ordinary person. When she was not in the factories, she was making the unenviable rounds at the hospitals for wounded soldiers that had been established across the country. Aristocratic families were patriotically turning their castles into field hospitals. One residence-turned-hospital that was particularly famous for the quality of care given to wounded soldiers was Glamis Castle in Scotland, home of Queen Mary’s future daughter-in-law Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon. One author made the following remark in a recent book about the British royal family: “During the First World War, the redoubtable Queen Mary was forever in and out of hospitals—sometimes three or four in an afternoon—visiting the wounded. It was on one of these tours that another and much younger family member being dragged around in her wake complained, ‘I’m tired and I hate hospitals.’ The queen’s reported response encapsulated the attitude of modern monarchy. ‘You are a member of the Royal Family. We are NEVER tired and we LOVE hospitals!”910