Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires (80 page)

The
Glow-Worm
traveled down the Sugovica into the Danube. After a week, the ship made a rendezvous with the five-thousand-ton cruiser HMS
Cardiff
, onto which the emperor and empress were transferred for the remainder of their voyage. Zita wrote in her diary, “We transferred ship at eight in the evening for supper on the
Cardiff
. I was given the Admiral’s cabin, the Emperor that of the Commander.”
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A British officer on board recalled seeing the couple for the first time: “a strong military escort lined the way from the train to the vessels. Then came the ex-King in Field Marshall’s uniform, and Queen Zita in a blue costume.… as he went on board the ex-King showed a cheerful countenance and was extremely gracious to everybody.” But the observer also added, “He set his face from the beginning against receiving any representative of the Hungarian government on the grounds that the government was in rebellion against him.”
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During the voyage, they were told the ship would not be sent to retrieve their seven children back at Herteinstein. Zita nearly collapsed when she was told: “The children! Are we to be carried off without our children?”
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A few days later, she was able to report, “Joyous news this afternoon: I received a telegram from Colonel Strutt in London that all is well with the children. Our first news of them for eighteen days.”
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Zita’s pregnancy made the journey especially hard on her, and Charles suffered from seasickness. “The Emperor and I are both dreadfully sea-sick,” Zita wrote in her diary. “I go over twice to his cabin to see how he is – and pay dearly for it. The Emperor also comes twice over to me – and removes himself hastily.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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)

P
ermanently 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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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!”
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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.”
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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.

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 1932
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—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”
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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.”
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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.
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