Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires (82 page)

The foreign press could not deny the significance of the emperor’s passing. One Austrian newspaper recorded that “his death on a distant and remote island must bring a pang of nostalgia to all those who recall what we had lost, lost through relentless fate but also, in part, through him.”
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In Vienna, a requiem mass performed at Saint Stephen’s Cathedral was interrupted by cries of “Down with the Republic!” by monarchists. Empress Zita received numerous heartfelt condolences. “The whole Hungarian people mourns alongside Your Majesty,” the Hungarian prime minister Count Bethlen telegraphed. “I would like you to accept the expression of my deepest sympathy in the name of the royal Hungarian government.”
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By all accounts, the condolences offered by the Hungarian government were sincere. The
London
Times
reported the reaction in Budapest to Charles’s death.

The Regent, Admiral Horthy, and the Prime Minister, have sent heartfelt condolences to the Queen. The Government has ordered all public buildings to fly a flag at half-mast. Theatre performances and music are all forbidden. The wedding of the Regent’s daughter has been postponed. Church bells are tolling. The Cardinal Primate will personally celebrate the Requiem Mass. It is, at any rate, agreed that Hungary must by united expressions of mourning fulfil its chivalrous duties towards the Monarch banished by foreign decree. An imposing manifestation of mourning is expected …
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The passing of Emperor Charles I brought to the fore the tremendous changes that had taken place in the former crown lands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. “Along with the Habsburgs had fallen their ambitions,” wrote one historian. “Ukraine was Soviet; Poland was a republic; Austria was stripped of empire; Hungary had rejected its Habsburg king.”
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In less than a decade, Empress Zita of Austria was crowned, deposed, arrested, exiled, and widowed, all by the time she was thirty. The loss of her husband marked the most pivotal turning point in her life the same way her father’s death did in 1907. She was now solely responsible for the care of seven—soon to be eight—children, all ten years of age and younger. Following in the tradition of Queen Victoria and her own ancestor Empress Maria Theresa, the last empress of Austria wore only widow’s black for the rest of her life to mourn the loss of her beloved Charles, the man who had been hailed as the Peace Emperor during his reign of less than two years.

27
Return to Grace
 

(1922–28)

W
ithin two months of her husband’s death, Zita was forced to move her family yet again, since the widowed empress did not want her last child to be born in near poverty on Madeira. Less than a month after the emperor’s death, help for the family finally arrived from King Alfonso XIII of Spain, who was partially prompted by the compassion of his wife, Queen Victoria Eugenie (“Ena”). Upon his deathbed, Charles had placed the hope for his family’s future in the Spanish king. “He is chivalrous,” he told Zita, “he has promised me.”
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Alfonso unequivocally told the Allies that he was now going to help Habsburgs. The king was a natural proponent, since he and Charles I’s father were second cousins—his mother, Queen Maria Cristina, was an Austrian archduchess.

In May 1922, the Spanish warship
Infanta Isabel
arrived at Funchal to take Zita and her family to live in Spain. It was an emotional departure because, for the first time, they felt that they were really saying good-bye to Charles. As Zita watched Madeira shrink on the horizon, her “heart throbbed with a piercing ache. There, on that island, she was leaving behind her other self—that which had been most precious in her life.”
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In Spain, Empress Zita, her children, and their tiny staff disembarked from the
Infanta Isabel
in Cadiz where they boarded a train bound for the Puerta de Atocha Station in Madrid.

Looking somber and dignified in her black, widow’s dress, the empress waved to the tens of thousands of people who greeted her with shouts of “
Viva la Emperatriz
!” The king, the queen, and their highest-ranking officials amassed to greet Zita and the awestruck archdukes and archduchesses. When they arrived at the Royal Palace in Madrid, one witness recalled a conversation between Alfonso and Zita about her husband’s last illness.

King Alfonso related to her, how in the night before the death of the Emperor Charles, he was overcome with a feeling that, in the event of the Emperor’s death, if he, the King, would not take his widow and the children under his protection, his own wife and his own children would suffer one day the same fate. He only found peace, after he had firmly resolved to give the bereaved family a home in Spain, as the death of the Emperor seemed to be certain. King Alfonso was not less overcome than the Empress Zita, when she then told him what the Emperor Charles had said before his death [about Alfonso being chivalrous].
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Zita’s life of widowhood began in the Spanish capital, but within a few days, she and her family relocated to the palace of El Pardo in the Madrid suburb of Fuencarral-El Pardo. A luxurious palace, El Pardo was built as a hunting lodge in 1406 but had been refurbished numerous times over the centuries. The bright and cheery El Pardo was much better maintained than Eckartsau or Quinto, providing the most comfortable home that Zita and her family had known since their escape from Schönbrunn in November 1918. It was at El Pardo that Zita gave birth to her eighth and final child, a daughter, on May 31, 1922. Her family’s luggage had not even been delivered to the palace rooms when the contractions began. Unlike her previous deliveries, this one was long and difficult. The exhausted empress was in labor for nearly a day before finally giving birth to the tiny infant. The posthumous daughter of the last emperor of Austria was named Elisabeth, after Franz Joseph’s wife.

Little Elisabeth was sickly, and many did not expect her to live long. King Alfonso pressed for the archduchess to be baptized immediately. After a few days, her health improved. Zita’s postnatal recovery was not so quick. Her eighth delivery in almost as many years took its toll on the normally robust empress. She was bedridden for two weeks before she even showed a glimpse of recovery. But the sight of her newborn daughter beginning to thrive reinvigorated her spirits. So too did frequent visits from the Spanish royal family. Alfonso and Ena made regular trips to see the archdukes and archduchesses playing happily in their nursery at El Pardo. The queen also had her personal physician regularly check on Zita.

El Pardo soon became an appealing pseudocourt in Spain. A bevy of guests began frequenting the palace. The king was a regular face. So too was his mother, Queen Maria Cristina, who usually came with freshly picked lilies and violets for the empress. Everyone was surprised when Zita was paid a visit by Archduke Wilhelm, a member of the extended Habsburg family who had caused the dynasty no end of embarrassments. A vocal socialist with nationalist sympathies for Ukrainians, Wilhelm had spent much of the war years lobbying Emperor Charles for the creation of an independent Ukraine within the monarchy, with him as its king. After the fall of the dynasty, Wilhelm continued to cause controversy with his socialist sympathies and constant requests to Charles for money. When his own fortunes plummeted in 1922, he made for the royalist safe haven in Madrid under the protection of his relative the king. While in Madrid, Wilhelm sought to heal many of the wounds between his branch of the Habsburgs and Zita’s.

Another individual who visited Zita on an almost daily basis was Alfonso XIII’s wife, Queen Ena. Descending on El Pardo with characteristic calm and dignity, very much a Victorian paradigm like Queen Mary, Ena was eager to embrace Zita as a friend. After her father, Prince Henry of Battenberg, died at a young age, she was raised entirely by her mother, Princess Beatrice, and her grandmother Queen Victoria. All her life, she embodied the traits of ideal an English queen. By contrast, King Alfonso was a fickle, passionate man whose behavior was unpredictable at best. As young adults, the mismatched couple fell passionately in love, but their life together was marred by one misfortune after another. At their wedding in 1906—which had been attended by Ena’s favorite cousins Prince George and Princess May—the couple was nearly killed in a botched assassination attempt. Not long after that, their marriage began to fall apart when it was discovered that Ena—like her cousin Alexandra of Russia—had introduced hemophilia into the Spanish royal family. Unable to reconcile himself to the fact that the woman he had once loved so much had unwittingly helped to weaken the Bourbon dynasty, Alfonso sought comfort in the arms of as many women as he could find.

The days at El Pardo became uncomfortable when Alfonso began visiting the Habsburgs without his wife. The king, who was driven by his emotions, used his audiences with the empress to air his grievances about Ena. Zita, however grateful to the king for his charity, could see the impact this was having on her family and started looking for a home away from Madrid. The king pleaded with her to stay in the capital. Offering the family permanent use of El Pardo as an incentive, he encouraged the empress to send her children to school in the city. Zita’s friend and biographer Gordon Brook-Shepherd explained why she could not accept such an offer: “But however grateful she was for the rescue, Zita would have none of all this. Madrid was already in political ferment, hardly the educational background for Habsburg children, who anyway spoke no Spanish. What their mother needed was a home of their own, where she could supervise the academic programme [
sic
] herself, through house tutors whom she would select. Above all, she wanted to be closer to France, the home of her ancestors.”
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The political situation in Spain during the 1920s was one of the biggest contributing factors to Zita’s decision to take her family away from the capital. The government was led by the politically ambiguous General Miguel Primo de Rivera, whose administration was characterized by its emulation of Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Italy. During the first half of the decade, Madrid was seized by work stoppages and industrial impediments. Writing to Queen Mary, Queen Ena expressed her concerns: “I am sure you must all be anxious about the coal-strike & I do hope that this fearful catastrophe may still be avoided. Really what hateful times we are living in.”
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Having endured enough political turmoil in the last five years, Empress Zita was eager to take her eight young children out of the maelstrom that was engulfing Madrid. Thus her search began. Out of her element in Spain, Zita appealed to Alfonso and Ena for help.

“We do not need a palace,” she told the king. “Is there not a house in some small village?” After thinking about it for some time, he replied that there was an old palace called Uribarren in the Basque region.

“It is the draughtiest house in Spain, because it is made up of windows. But it can be had for a song,” he sallied.
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So in June 1923, Zita settled her family into their permanent home at the Uribarren Palace, in the Basque region of northeastern Spain. Uribarren was a medieval palace complex in the fishing village of Lequeitio, on the sandy shores of the Bay of Biscay. Whenever they wanted, the children could run and play along the beach or go swimming. The three-story, thirty-room palace provided the empress with everything she needed. It was commodious enough to accommodate her entire family. There was a chapel for them to pray in and read from the Bible. Its location was warm enough that they did not have to worry about dampness or catching a chill. For the first time since she ascended the throne, Empress Zita could finally breathe a sigh of relief. Her children were safe. They could finally move on with their lives in peace and quiet.

The residents of Lequeitio quickly took the imperial family into their hearts. It was these local residents that came to the Habsburgs’ rescue in early 1923. Count Torregrossa, Uribarren’s first owner, arrived in Lequeitio without warning, saying he wanted his palace back and evicting Zita and her children. The family spent the winter at the nearby resort of San Sebastian. The townspeople were so outraged by Torregrossa’s actions that they formed a committee and convinced him to sell them the palace, which they promptly turned over to Zita, rent-free, for as long as she needed it. When they returned in early 1924, Lequeitio’s four thousand residents assembled in front of the palace, cheering as they welcomed them back. The entire town had been draped in the Habsburg flag with Zita’s portrait hanging in almost every window. This outpouring of affection was testimony to the strength and power of Empress Zita’s character.

In the postwar era, instability was not confined to Hungary or Spain. The 1920s was a decade of considerable unrest for Britain’s imperial interests, both domestically and abroad. Owing to its close ties to other royal families, the British monarchy found itself increasingly called upon to be the savior of unlucky royals throughout Europe. In 1922, King George’s cousin King Constantine I of Greece was overthrown in a coup d’état after fifteen thousand soldiers marched on Athens. Constantine told the people he was “happy that another opportunity has been given me to sacrifice myself once more for Greece.”
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The rest of the Greek royal family was not immune from the political turmoil sweeping the nation. F. O. Lindley, the British ambassador to Greece, wrote on October 1, 1922, suggesting that “a British man-of-war be sent for since the lives of the Royal Family were in danger.”
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The British Royal Navy cruiser HMS
Calypso
was sent on an emergency mission to Greece to evacuate Constantine’s brother Prince Andrew and his family, who were in danger from the antimonarchist military junta. Andrew’s mother, Queen Olga, wrote George a letter of gratitude for rescuing her son and his family: “Words fail me to express all my gratitude to you for all you did to save my beloved Andrea! I can only say ‘God bless you.’”
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The rescue of Prince Andrew by the king of England would ultimately prove fortuitous, since Andrew’s son Philip would one day marry George’s granddaughter—Elizabeth II, the future queen of England.