Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires (61 page)

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.”
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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 minister, 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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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?”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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 say, 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.”
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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.”
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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!”
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The hospitals that were in place still fell dreadfully short in caring for the volume of soldiers returning from the front lines. There were simply not enough beds and supplies to go around. Fed up with seeing so many brave men coming back and receiving pitiful care, the queen founded her own hospitals in and around London. One of the more famous ones, the Queen’s Hospital in Roehampton, was designed specifically for soldiers who had lost limbs in combat. The hospital treated an estimated twenty thousand amputees during the war, but even that was believed to be only half of the men who had lost limbs between 1914 and 1918. Mary said it broke her heart to see “so many men without arms, legs, etc, etc.” Her hospitals created a sense of solidarity between the people and their queen. Many people saw her as
Regina Mater
, their mother-queen. When one member of Parliament was returning from visiting his daughter at the Queen’s Hospital at Stratford East, he bumped into the Prince of Wales, who asked where he had been. “To your Ma’s place, of course,” he replied. For the rest of Mary’s life, her hospitals would always be known as “Ma’s place.”
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