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

by Justin C. Vovk

  The Cardiff spent nearly three weeks traveling down the Danube and across the Mediterranean. They had no possessions with them, no money, not even a change of clothes. Their plight was poignantly summed up by an Austrian observer who was onboard: “They journeyed down the Danube into exile, to a destination still unknown to them, separated from their children, their country, without any means, completely destitute.”1225 The greatest comfort the couple received on the voyage was the opportunity to hear Mass and receive Communion, but even the empress’s steely nerves were tested on the arduous journey. “Terribly bad sea,” she wrote in her diary. “One could hardly sleep for being thrown about so much. The Emperor is dreadfully ill. This would have to be the day when the clocks are put back an hour so it all lasts longer.”1226 Zita’s comment about the clocks be put back was a reference to daylight saving time, which had only come into effect three years earlier and was taking some getting used to.

  With great relief, the couple disembarked almost a month later at the town of Funchal on Madeira. Zita reported in her diary that day, “The Lord be praised. We have arrived at Funchal … Despite the fact that the Portuguese had deliberately announced the wrong time for our landing, quite a large crowd had gathered in the pouring rain to give us a welcome.… Journey’s end.”1227 Their departure on board the Cardiff signaled the final exit of Emperor Charles I from the political scene. There was now no doubt of the permanence of this exile. There would be no return visits to their former territories for Charles and Zita. They had taken their last journey into exile together. It would be their last journey as husband and wife.

  26

  “I Can’t Go On Much Longer”

  (January–April 1922)

  Permanently exiled from continental Europe, Emperor Charles I was a broken man. He and Empress Zita, now refugees, were forced to settle in the Madeiran town of Funchal, at the Villa Victoria, an annex of the famous Reid’s Hotel. Christmas 1921 was especially gloomy. The couple spent the day in quiet prayer, reflecting on their misfortunes. Since the Allies had decreed that none of their former staff could join them in exile, they were entirely alone, save for a Portuguese nobleman named Dom João d’Almeida. A kindhearted man, Dom d’Almeida “volunteered his services as an aide-de-camp and now represented all the ‘court’ they possessed.”1228

  In January 1922, Empress Zita’s second son, Robert, came down with painful appendicitis and needed an immediate operation. Zita rushed to Zurich, where her son was convalescing at a nuns’ hospital. The Allies took her return to the continent with significant gravitas because they were afraid she would make another attempt to reclaim the Hungarian throne. An article that appeared in the New York Times on January 13 described the precautions being taken in Zurich: “The Swiss papers state that Zita, who is considered an intriguer and the real head of the Hapsburg restoration movement in Europe, must be watched closely during her short stay in the country in order that the Swiss government may not be fooled for the third time by her intrigues.” When Zita, dressed in plain traveling clothes so as not to attract any attention, arrived at the train station in Zurich, she was “delighted” to find several of her children, who had come from Hertenstein to greet her.1229 The moment Zita walked into her son’s ward, his face lit up in such a way she could not describe it. The Swiss authorities watched Zita’s movements constantly. On the days she was at the hospital, every nun leaving the building was forced to submit to a police search and have her veil lifted to ensure it was not the empress trying to escape in disguise.

  While she was in Zurich, Zita sought out a lawyer named Bruno Steiner. In November 1918, Charles had entrusted a priceless array of jewels—which included the empress’s diamond crown; a collection of Lorraine jewels; eight golden fleeces; the famed Florentine diamonds; and various other jewels, gemstones, and brooches—to Steiner for safekeeping. Some of the single stones themselves were estimated to be worth nearly fifty thousand francs. When Zita managed to locate Steiner’s residence, she was dismayed to find that he was gone. Her brother Xavier began a search for him, eventually tracking him to a hotel in Frankfurt. The prince confronted the shocked lawyer, who insisted that the jewels were safe in a nearby bank. When Xavier returned to the hotel at 7:00 a.m. the following morning to collect the items, Steiner was gone, presumably with the jewels, never to be heard from again.

  True to form, the empress never allowed her children to see how frightened and panicked she must have been by Steiner’s treachery, nor did she have much time in Zurich to ponder this disaster. Two weeks after Robert’s operation, Zita was forced to leave Switzerland. She managed to secure permission from the Allies to bring her children back with her. Robert remained in Zurich, recovering under the care of an old family friend, and he would be sent to Madeira when he was well enough to travel. As Zita and her children arrived in Funchal by boat on February 2, she was enthusiastically welcomed home by her husband, who had tears streaming down his face at the sight of his family.

  The Roaring Twenties marked the beginning of Great Britain’s true entrance into the new century. The Great War was left behind as a casualty of the previous decade, and there was a great expectancy of the new wealth, glamour, and extravagance that would flood in from the United States. On the front lines of this new modern epoch were Queen Mary’s children—David, Bertie, Mary, Harry, and George—who had grown into attractive, popular socialites. David in particular had a reputation as a playboy. As much as the king and queen loved their son, they did not understand him. They felt an insuperable chasm separated them, forged in the early years of the twentieth century. The king and queen were anachronisms of the old system of royalty whose hallmarks had been conservatism, duty, and propriety. At court, the king was determined to hold on to the traditions of the past. He insisted on everyone wearing Victorian fashions, with properly matching coat, tails, and hat. Years later, David recalled his father’s hatred of change: “He disapproved of Soviet Russia, painted finger-nails, women who smoked in public, cocktails, frivolous hats, American jazz and the growing habit of going away for the weekends.”1230 Sadly for George and Mary, the postwar world eagerly forgot the era whose values and traditions they fought to preserve. Many people blamed the old system of royalty for the war, since many of the leading participants were grandchildren of Queen Victoria.

  The twenty-eight-year-old Prince of Wales symbolized everything that the new generation craved. His love of pleasures and women, of which he made no secret, disturbed his parents. His mother chalked it up to a certain “restlessness” he felt from living at Buckingham Palace. To find relief, David became a familiar face on London’s social scene. The king wrote to his wife, “I see David continues to dance every night & most of the night too. What a pity they [reporters] should telegraph it every day, people who don’t know, will begin to think that he is either mad or the biggest rake in Europe, such a pity!”1231 To help their son shed his playboy image, the king and queen sent him on a world tour shortly after the war. Everywhere he visited, David was met with rapturous acclaim. “We are much looking forward to the return of our dear son after his triumphal (I think I may say this without being vain) tour for such it has been,” the queen wrote to an old friend. The list of places on the royal visit included Japan, Australia, and India in the east, and both Canada and the United States in the west. Mary wrote happily after David’s stop in Canada, “he really is a marvel in spite of his ‘fads’ & I confess I feel very proud of him.”1232

  King George had particular difficulty accepting his sons as grown men, even though he would grant each of them peerages. Bertie, following in his father’s footsteps, became the Duke of York in 1920—the traditional title given to the next heir after the Prince of Wales; Harry was named Duke of Gloucester in 1928; and George inherited the title that had last belonged to Queen Victoria’s father, Duke of Kent, in 1934. In exchange for these honors (which also increased the princes’ allowances), King George expected his sons to fall in line with a minimum of fuss.

&
nbsp; The king and queen’s daughter, Princess Mary, was not like her brothers. There was little doubt that she was her parents’ favorite child, and when she announced in 1921 that she wanted to get married, the queen gave her heartiest approval. King George did not acquiesce so easily. The prospect of losing his only daughter saddened him deeply. With some prodding from his wife, he eventually gave his consent. In England, the marriage of the monarch’s eldest daughter—traditionally known as the Princess Royal, though Mary did not receive this title formally until 19321233—was a serious affair that commanded a certain degree of respect and dignity. The title of Princess Royal was first used by King Charles I in the seventeenth century for his eldest daughter. Over the centuries, it became a significant honorific, though it did not elevate the bearers’ rank or status constitutionally. The most famous Princess Royal was Augusta Victoria’s mother-in-law, Vicky, the Empress Frederick. Her marriage to the then Prince Frederick Wilhelm of Prussia in 1858 was intended to cement a new alliance between England and Prussia. Naturally the question everyone wanted to know was, would Princess Mary follow suit and contract a glittering dynastic marriage?

  Prior to the war, the queen had hoped to see her daughter paired off with a Hanoverian prince, but the war’s outcome drastically reduced the pool of acceptable royal candidates. By 1921, the only thrones left in Europe, aside from Britain, were Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Romania, Albania, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Of those that remained, most were discounted for reasons of religion and politics. But what of the many royal princes from elsewhere in the world? A British princess marrying into a dynasty from another continent—Asia or the Middle East—was regarded as unthinkable. In 1958, after divorcing his second wife, Queen Soraya, the shah of Iran hoped to marry Princess Alexandra of Kent, one of George and Mary’s future granddaughters. The idea was not even considered, and the shah was forced to look elsewhere for a wife.

  Being a forthright young woman, devotedly English, it is almost certain Princess Mary would never have considered marrying outside Europe. As such, it came as no surprise that she forsook any possibility of an arranged union and chose to marry for love. The man she set her heart on was a nonroyal, Viscount Henry Lascelles. This made her one of only a handful of modern English princesses to marry a commoner. Queen Victoria’s fourth daughter, Princess Louise, married the Marquess of Lorne (who became the Ninth Duke of Argyll in 1900). The king’s sister Louise of Wales married the Earl (and later the First Duke) of Fife in 1889. The marriages of the two princesses Louise helped prepare the English people to accept their royal family marrying commoners. Before Princess Louise married the Marquess of Lorne, no English princess had married one of their own countrymen since Henry VIII’s sister married the Duke of Suffolk in 1515.

  As for Princess Mary’s fiancé, Lascelles was the “immensely rich”1234 son of the Earl of Harewood, a business tycoon from the Yorkshire area. He was also fifteen years her senior. The age difference between the couple raised more than one eyebrow, but he was accepted as a member of the royal family with some ease. He had been a friend of the king’s for years, and as a member of the aristocracy, he would not be taking the princess off to live in some foreign court. That her daughter’s breaking with tradition did not bother Queen Mary can be seen in her diary: “At 6.30 Mary came to my room to announce to me her engagement to Lord Lascelles!… Of course everybody guessed what had happened & we were very cheerful & almost uproarious at dinner—We are delighted.”1235 It helped that the queen thought highly of Lascelles, not to mention that her daughter was clearly in love. “They are both very happy & Mary is simply beaming,” she wrote to her brother Dolly, now the Marquess of Cambridge. “We like him very much … I personally feel quite excited as you can imagine.”1236

  The wedding took place at Westminster Abbey on February 28, 1922. One of Mary’s bridesmaids was her friend Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, who would later marry her brother Bertie and eventually become queen of England. In their February 28 issue, the Times reported, “Everybody knew beforehand that only one thing could possibly be wanting to make Princess Mary’s wedding day a perfect one, and that was sunshine. The sun shone brightly, and so it was perfect.”1237 The king and queen were deeply saddened by their daughter’s departure from their close-knit family circle at Buckingham Palace. After the wedding reception, George admitted that “it was terribly sad to think that she was leaving us.… I went up to Mary’s room & took leave of her & quite broke down.… Felt very low & depressed now that darling Mary has gone.”1238 The queen made a similar comment shortly after the wedding in a letter to her son David, who was in India at the time.

  The wonderful day has come & gone, & Mary is married & has flown her home leaving a terrible blank behind her as you can well imagine. Papa & I are feeling very low & sad without her … Nothing could have gone off better than the wedding did, a fine day, a beautiful pageant from start to finish, a fine service in the Abbey, Mary doing her part to perfection (a very great ordeal before so many people).… Enormous crowds everywhere & a great reception when we stepped on to the Balcony [of Buckingham Palace] … Mary & Harry L. drove off at 3.45 – Papa & all of us throwing rice & little paper horse shoes & rose leaves after them. Papa & I felt miserable at parting, poor Papa broke down, but I mercifully managed to keep up as I so much feared Mary wld break down. However she was very brave & smiled away as they drove off in triumph to the station.1239

  The queen’s remark about stepping out onto the balcony refers to the iconic tradition for members of the British royal family to appear on Buckingham Palace’s balcony after the ceremony to greet the cheering masses. This much-loved tradition was in place as early as 1858, when Queen Victoria’s daughter Vicky married Fritz. Since that time—with the notable exception of the prolonged court mourning for Prince Albert after 1861—almost every royal couple has followed suit and made the appearance.

  After their daughter’s marriage, George and Mary shrank from public life. Now in middle age, the couple who had fallen in love during the reign of Queen Victoria now had trouble understanding the new generation that was taking control of the Roaring Twenties. Mary and George preferred quiet evenings spent at Buckingham Palace reading, knitting, or sipping tea. Although they continued their official duties with enthusiasm, “in private the King and Queen preferred dignified seclusion, eating alone with each other, protected by the walls of their palaces from the post-war kaleidoscope of socialism, jazz and fast young women.”1240 Their son Bertie was particularly concerned about his parents. He wrote to his brother David the day of their sister’s wedding.

  Things will be very different here, now that Mary has left & Papa & Mama will miss her too terribly, I fear, but it may have a good effect in bringing them out again into public. I feel that they can’t possibly stay in & dine together every night of their lives & … I don’t see what they are going to do otherwise, except ask people here or go out themselves. But we shall know more about this as days go on.1241

  The days came and went, but there was little sign that the king and queen were changing their ways. Their comfortable domestic routine from their years as newlyweds was resurrected at Buckingham Palace. It would serve them well for many years as additions to their family arrived. But in only a few short years, this bliss would be shattered and would threaten the British monarchy with its greatest crisis in modern history.

  Once Archduke Robert was reunited with his family in Funchal, the Habsburgs moved out of Reid’s Hotel into a more permanent home. A local banker offered them the use of his estate, the Villa Quinto, perched nearly two thousand feet high on a mountainside overlooking Funchal. Constantly damp and plagued with mildew, it was barely livable for a young family. There was no electric lighting, and the only running water was on the first floor and in the kitchen; most of the time, it was freezing cold. To conserve the little bit of hot water they did have, Zita washed her children’s clothes only once a week. She made it a habit to dress them in dark fabrics
so that dirt would not be as noticeable. Communication was also a constant problem. Charles and Zita wanted to keep abreast of events in Austria and Hungary, but the only way they could contact the outside world was to send letters down the mountain into Funchal via automobiles or ox carts, but this was something they could not afford.

  Lack of money was perhaps the greatest crisis facing the Habsburgs. There was a heated debate among the Allied powers over what the imperial family would do for money. Colonel F. B. Mildmay—a British member of Parliament who was no fan of the Habsburgs—unexpectedly took up their cause. In a memo to Lord Cecil Harmsworth, the undersecretary of state for foreign affairs, Mildmay explained why Britain had a responsibility to Zita and her family:

  I am not out to sympathize with the fallen rulers of enemy countries, but I am anxious to know whether, directly or by implication, the British government, in common with those of our Allies, made itself responsible at [the 1919 peace conference of] Versailles for receipt by the family of the late Austrian Emperor of the bare means to live. I am told, on authority which to me is unquestionable, that if any responsibility does lie with us, and with the powers who signed at Versailles, are open to a charge of culpably ignoring it.…

  I suggest, but I may be quite wrong, that the powers banished the Emperor to this far island and then washed their hands of him, not troubling as to how he was to live.… The Austrian Government then seized their private fortune and property, and ever since 1918 the family has been living on the proceeds of the Habsburg family jewellry[sic] which is not very valuable. When they got to Madeira, little was left, so that real want and distress compelled their acceptance of the free house…at which moment [the emperor,] his wife and six or seven children had nothing but starvation to contemplate.…