Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires (44 page)

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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.’”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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Once Zita and Charles formalized their engagement, they had little time to spend together. Along with her mother, siblings, and an official Austrian escort, Zita headed for Rome where the new pope, Pius X, had asked for a special audience with the bride-to-be. It was the first time in almost two hundred years that a Habsburg archduke was marrying a Bourbon-Parma princess. The symbolism was not lost on the pontiff that their wedding would unite two of Europe’s leading Catholic dynasties. Zita’s visit began with a private Mass for her family in the pope’s private chapel. “I am very happy with this marriage and I expect much from it for the future,” Pius told Zita. “Charles is a gift from Heaven for what Austria has done for the church.”
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The pope nearly caused a diplomatic incident among Zita’s Austrian escort when he referred to Charles as the heir apparent, forgetting his place after Franz Ferdinand. It was only Zita’s calm, quick reminder of her fiancé’s place in the succession that prevented any offense.

While Zita was in Rome, Charles was off on his own mission. He was sent to England to represent Austria-Hungary at the biggest royal event of the year: the coronation of King George V and Queen Mary. The choice to send Charles was made both to call attention to his position as the heir presumptive and also to obviate the awkwardness that would have arisen from Franz Ferdinand’s presence with his morganatic wife. They were forbidden by protocol from entering a room together, sharing a table at an official banquet, or even riding in the same carriage during the procession.

Planning for the event was a monumental undertaking. At Edward VII’s coronation, Queen Alexandra threw tradition out the window by disregarding a number of important etiquettes. Even her choice of trainbearers ruffled feathers. Queen Mary, the archtraditionalist, saw to it that these were set right. To remedy Queen Alexandra’s faux pas, she studied history books for hours, absorbing, analyzing, and dissecting all the various traditions that had been used for coronations of previous English kings. Mary wanted to be a statelier, less glamorized queen than her mother-in-law. One of the ways she set herself apart was in the clothes she chose for the coronation. The dress she chose for the ceremony was subtle, with silver, gold, and white woven throughout. Unlike her worldlier mother-in-law, Mary found the process of dress fittings burdensome. She wrote to Aunt Augusta of her “tiresome trousseau of clothes which has meant endless trying on. The fashions are so hideous that it has been a great trouble to evolve pretty
toilettes
.’”
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The city of London found itself playing “host to a huge number of foreign royals for what was to be, although no one involved in it was to know, the last gathering on the world stage of the royal houses of Old Europe before the wholesale social disintegration that was to come in the aftermath of the 1914–18 war.”
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There was an extraordinary display of dignitaries gathered for the event. Some fifty-eight delegations arrived from countries as far-off as Argentina and Zanzibar. The event had such a global impact that when the new shah of Persia came to the throne in 1925, he asked for a copy of King George V’s coronation upon which to model his own. As the greatest symbol of royal power in the world, London proved to be the ideal—not to mention the traditional—venue for the coronation. To further celebrate the event, the Festival of Empire was opened at the Crystal Palace on May 12, showcasing exhibitions from around the world. On the dull, chilly day of Thursday, June 22, 1911, the king and queen made their way to Westminster Abbey, the site of past coronations of some thirty-eight English monarchs, which was founded in AD 965 by Saint Dunstan and built up in the tenth century by Edward the Confessor. The procession from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abbey made a vivid impression on the queen. The embroidered coronation coach, pulled by eight cream-colored horses dressed with scarlet leather and touches of blue and lavender, was cheered on by hundreds of thousands of spectators standing behind decorated military officers from across the British Empire. Immediately behind the carriages of the British royal family was the coach that carried Archduke Charles, Crown Prince Willy, and Crown Princess Cecilie of Germany.

The queen entered Westminster before her husband’s grand entrance. Her six-yard-long train was carried by a team of six earls’ daughters. As she made her way up the abbey on the three-minute long procession to the altar, the altar boys cried out “
Vivat Regina Maria! Vivat, vivat, vivat!
”
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First to be crowned that day was the king. After receiving the scepter, orb, and crown, George V made his way back to the throne. Once he was seated, the queen’s crowning followed. Dressed in her white satin gown embroidered with gold and wearing a purple robe, Mary looked every inch a queen. When the moment came, she acquitted herself with dignity and grace, even though she had been crying as her husband was crowned. After being anointed, upon her head was placed a specially made crown sparkling with twenty-two hundred diamonds set in silver arches above a purple coronet. Once she returned to the throne, she and the king received tributes from the royal family and the other assembled dignitaries before exiting the church to the tune of “God Save the King.”

One guest at the coronation, the First Viscount Murray, noted Mary’s transformation that day from when she entered the church to after being crowned.

The Queen looked pale and strained. You felt she was a great lady, but
not
a Queen. She was almost shrinking as she walked up the aisle, giving the impression that she would have liked to have made her way to her seat by some back entrance: the contrast on her “return”—crowned—was majestic, as if she had undergone some marvellous transformation. Instead of the shy creature for whom one had felt pity, one saw her emerge from the ceremony with a bearing and dignity, and a quiet confidence, signifying that she really felt that she was Queen of this great Empire, and that she derived strength and legitimate pride from the knowledge of it.
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After the ceremony, the queen sent a heartfelt letter to Aunt Augusta, whose old age prevented her from attending. In it, she shared her own feelings about the ceremony.

You may imagine what an intense relief it is to us that the great and solemn Ceremony of Thursday is well over for it was an awful ordeal for us both especially as we felt it all so deeply and taking so great a responsibility on our shoulders—To me who love [
sic
] tradition & the past, & who am English from top to toe, the service was a very real solemn thing & appealed to my feelings more than I can express—Everything was most perfectly & reverently done—The foreigners seemed much impressed & were most nice & feeling.… Everyone regretted yr enforced absence & no one more than I did but you wld have found it most agitating—I never ceased thinking of you the whole time.
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