Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires (94 page)

The emotional funeral at Saint Stephen’s was held at 3:00 p.m. on April 1, 1989, sixty-seven years to the day since Emperor Charles I died in Funchal on Madeira. The primary mourners included two hundred members of the Habsburg and Bourbon families, accompanied by another six hundred guests from other royal houses from around the world. More than six thousand people attended the service, while thousands more lined the streets outside—panegyrists claimed there were around four hundred thousand spectators, while conservative estimates placed it as low as forty thousand. Millions more watched the funeral on television. So many people arrived from across the former Austro-Hungarian Empire that the service was read aloud in German, Hungarian, Slovenian, Croatian, Czech, Polish, and Italian. The four-and-a-half hour funeral mass was conducted by two archbishops and four bishops.

When the service was completed, the funeral procession moved from Saint Stephen’s to the Church of the Capuchins less than two miles away, where the Habsburg family crypt is located. It was here, among 144 Habsburgs—including twelve emperors and sixteen empresses—that Zita was laid to rest. The final delivery of her coffin was a moment deeply immersed in Austria’s imperial traditions. The master of ceremonies at the head of the funeral procession knocked three times on the church’s door. The first time, the guardian monk asked who was seeking entry. The queen of Bohemia, Croatia, Slavonia, and so on, the master of ceremonies declared. He did not know her, the monk replied. After a second knock, the monk again asked who was seeking entry. Zita, the empress of Austria and queen of Hungry, the master of ceremonies announced. Again, the monk answered he did not know her. On the third knock, after the monk asked who was seeking entry, the master of ceremonies said it was Zita, a mortal sinner. The door opened wide and the pallbearers placed the coffin in the crypt.

The
New York Times
sent one of its staff to report on the funeral, which was described in vivid detail in its April 2 issue.

Old Vienna dusted off its imperial finery today to lay to rest Austria’s last Empress, paying a regal tribute to a woman who remained quietly true to her lost crown and to the late Emperor through seven decades of exile. For the first time since the 600-year Austro-Hungarian monarchy was dissolved in 1919, the ornate black imperial catafalque – borrowed from the Museum at Schonbrunn Palace – rolled past the old palaces and baroque temples of central Vienna to the imperial burial vault. There, under the Capuchin Church, Zita, Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary, was laid to rest among the richly decorated caskets of the Hapsburgs.
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More than twenty years later, Zita’s life, death, and legacy are still felt, especially in Roman Catholic circles, whose faith she so devotedly defended. As recently as 2010, a Catholic periodical published an article about Zita, giving her a moving epitaph.

Following the example of Charles, whose memory she kept alive, she never abdicated her rights, and it was as Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary that she was interred on April 1, 1989, in the Crypt of the Capuchins in Vienna. The popular fervour of which she was the object in the course of this ceremony [her funeral] showed an astonished world that, after seventy years of the republic, Zita remained in Austria the
Landesmutter
, the “mother of the country,” a terrestrial image of Her who is venerated at the sanctuary of Mariazell in the heart of the former Empire under the title of “
Magna Mater Austriæ, Magna Domina Hungarorum, Mater Gentium Slavorum
.”
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Empress Zita’s death at Saint Johannes and funeral in Vienna in 1989 brings to a close the final chapter in the lives of these four very special women, each of whom reigned as consorts of the last European emperors. Raised in an era where responsibility, commitment, sacrifice, and duty before self were elevated as the highest ideals, they embraced their new lives, adapted, and came to love their countries and peoples. They gave all they were for their husbands, their families, and ultimately, their empires.

Epilogue
 

Recent events in Central and Eastern Europe and the collapse of the Soviet empire built in Yalta…have drawn attention once more to the historical events which have led to the present situation. We must go back to their roots, which lie deep down, especially to the affairs of World War I and their consequences. Had different decisions been taken then the tragedies of our continent, whether Hitlerism or Communism, could perhaps have been avoided.
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—Dr. Otto von Habsburg, 1990

T
he impressive state funeral of Empress Zita of Austria was a fitting tribute to Europe’s last imperial consort, who also had the distinction of being the longest-living monarch—reigning or consort—in Austrian history. Her funeral brought the memory of the imperial era into the modern world and put a face on the profound impact of a very special group of royal women. As the gothic black funeral catafalque wound its way through the crowded streets of Vienna, one of the most important eras in European history came to a symbolic end.

Empress Zita never lived to see her dearest wish come true, the restoration of the Habsburg dynasty to the Austrian throne. She did, however, proudly live to see Otto take his place on the world stage. In 1979, he became the first Habsburg to return to an active role in politics when he became a member of the European Parliament, which paved the way for the formation of the European Union. Otto worked as a senior member of that parliament for thirty years, advocating the development of former Habsburg territories like Croatia, Hungary, and Slovenia that suffered under decades of Communism. He remarked in 2007, “we are a politically very engaged family so that for instance I arrived today from Hungary, where I had several meetings and shall leave the day after tomorrow for Croatia for a series of meetings there, too.” Even at the age of ninety-five, he maintained a “strong engagement in the political action” of twenty-first-century Europe.
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Otto’s two youngest daughters, Gabriela and Walburga, have followed in his footsteps and taken up careers in politics. Gabriela is the current Georgian ambassador to Germany, and Walburga is a member of the Swedish Parliament.

Archduchess Regina died in February 2010. Otto died the following year, on July 4, 2011, at the age of ninety-eight. Otto’s death came shortly after the decision by the Austrian government that now allows members of the Habsburg family to run for the presidency of Austria. Along with King George VI, the Duke of Windsor, and the Grand Duchess Anastasia, Otto von Habsburg was one of the most politically and historically significant of the twenty-six children born to the four empresses.
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His six-hour funeral on July 16 was a mirror reflection of Zita’s funeral twenty-two years earlier, presided over by diplomats, politicians, and crowned heads of Europe. Otto was laid to rest in the imperial crypt alongside his mother. His heart was embalmed in Budapest, the city that lived in his heart for decades. Otto and Regina had seven children and twenty-two grandchildren. The remains of Emperor Charles I continue to reside in the cemetery in Funchal where he was buried in 1922. His heart was later exhumed and moved next to his wife’s at the Muri Abbey in Switzerland. The Habsburg family’s requests for a state funeral in Vienna have been denied.

Zita’s second son, Robert, inherited the Habsburgs’ possessions in Italy when he was declared Archduke of Austria-Este, a title that was last held by the ill-fated Franz Ferdinand. Archduke Robert died in 1996. He was survived by his wife, Margherita, their four children, and eighteen grandchildren. Archduke Felix remained actively involved in Austrian politics, lobbying the government to return all of the Habsburg family’s possessions that were seized in 1919. He lived in Mexico City until his death in September 2011, only two months after Otto. Carl Ludwig, Zita’s fourth son, died in Brussels in 2007. He was buried next to his mother in the Habsburg family vault in Vienna. Archduke Rudolf, the empress’s first child born in exile, worked as a Wall Street broker and a banker for many years. His wife, Xenia, died in a car crash in 1968. In 1971, he married for the second time, to Princess Anna von Wrede, with whom he had a daughter. He died in Switzerland on May 16, 2010.

Empress Zita’s two surviving daughters each married into royal families. Charlotte, who had married the Duke of Mecklenburg in 1956, worked as a welfare worker in Manhattan’s East Harlem for many years. She sometimes used the name Charlotte de Bar in honor of the alias her mother used when they fled France during the Second World War. She died in a car crash in Munich four months after her mother in 1989. She and her husband, George, had no children. The youngest Habsburg, Elisabeth, married Prince Heinrich of Liechtenstein. She died in Graz, Austria, in 1993.

Following her death, Augusta Victoria’s legacy continued to live on in Germany. Women, especially those belonging to the Right Wing, cherished her memory. They made pilgrimages to her tomb at the Antique Temple where they laid wreaths, prayed, and sang songs in her honor. They praised her “as the passive sufferer, the compassionate mother of her children and ‘her’ people, the self-sacrificing wife, the charitable and religious woman—in short: the incarnation of German women’s loyalty and selfless grandeur.”
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In the Netherlands, the former Emperor Wilhelm II continued to live at Huis Doorn. In 1922, he married for the second time, to the impoverished Princess Hermine of Schönaich-Carolath.
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Eighteen years younger than Wilhelm, Hermine was the fifth child of Prince Henry XXII of Reuss-Greiz. At the age of twenty, she married the older, unimportant Prince Johann Georg of Schönaich-Carolath, who died unexpectedly in 1920. Although the Hohenzollerns and German monarchists protested the marriage, Wilhelm was happy with his second wife, to whom he granted the courtesy title of German empress. She insisted upon being addressed this way, even though her husband had long since abandoned using his own titles. Hermine’s relationship with Dona’s children was not easy, but she assured Sissy that she would “in piety and reverence uphold the memory of the dear, irreplaceable Kaiserin and respect the inner and essential ties between father and children [existing because of] the death of the noble Kaiserin.”
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In an effort to ingratiate herself with her stepchildren, Hermine hung Dona’s portrait in her boudoir. She later suggested that a biography of the late empress be commissioned. Wilhelm’s second marriage lasted almost twenty years, until his death from a series of heart attacks at Doorn on June 4, 1941. In an interesting twist, a second link between Wilhelm and Hermine took place when Wilhelm’s grandson Karl Franz married Hermine’s daughter Princess Henriette. The couple married in 1940 and had three children before divorcing in 1946.

Contrary to the hopes of the Hohenzollerns, the monarchy in Germany was never restored under Adolf Hitler. Any possibility of a Hohenzollern restoration in Germany ended forever in January 1934 when Hitler outlawed all monarchist organizations. In Wilhelm’s eyes, Hitler’s actions were tantamount to a declaration of “war against the house of Hohenzollern.”
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That did not stop any of his sons from continuing to serve the Nazis. After the Second World War, Auwi was arrested by American authorities and charged with war crimes. He was sentenced to two years of hard labor. Augusta Victoria of Germany and Alexandra of Russia were already connected by their respective marriages. Two generations later, the descendants of these two empresses were again united when Dona’s great-grandson Franz Wilhelm—the son of Prince Karl Franz and Princess Henriette—married the Grand Duchess Maria Vladimirovna, the current claimant to the Russian throne (though her claim is highly disputed by the various surviving branches of the Romanov dynasty).

At the time of Queen Mary’s death in 1953, only three of her children were still alive. The Duke of Windsor lived in exile with Wallis for the rest of his life. During World War II, he scandalized his family by expressing pro-Nazi sympathies. “I have not one drop of blood in my veins which is not German,” he reportedly boasted in the 1930s.
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In response, he was made governor-general of the Bahamas and thus sent far away from Britain where he could not cause any further trouble for the monarchy. In the 1950s, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor returned to France, where they died in 1972 and 1986, respectively. Queen Mary was never fully reconciled with Edward, even though he did attend her funeral, and she never met Wallis face-to-face again. The couple had no children. Throughout the remainder of her life, Princess Mary, Countess of Harewood (as she was styled after 1932) remained an honorary member of the British Armed Forces. In 1965, she died from a massive heart attack. The queen’s last surviving son, the Duke of Gloucester, served as governor-general of Australia. He died in 1974. His wife, Alice, survived him by thirty years, dying in 2004 at the age of 102. At the time of her death, she was the oldest person in history to be part of the British royal family.

Queen Mary’s granddaughter Elizabeth II has reigned since 1952. On May 12, 2011, she became the second-longest-reigning sovereign in English history—the first continues to be Queen Victoria. Should Elizabeth be on the throne in 2015 at the age of eighty-nine, she would not only surpass Queen Victoria but would also become the longest-reigning female monarch in history. In June 2012 she celebrated her Diamond Jubilee. An estimated 1.2 million people arrived in London on June 3 to watch as a flotilla of one thousand boats paraded down the Thames to pay tribute to the queen and the royal family. The 2012 Diamond Jubilee surpassed even Queen Victoria’s in 1897.
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The queen and Prince Philip have been married for sixty-five years. Her mother, Elizabeth, was styled as the queen mother until her death in 2002 at the age of 101. Mary’s great-grandson Charles remains heir apparent and Prince of Wales. Now sixty-two years old, Charles—like his mother—reached a milestone of his own in 2011: he is currently the longest-serving heir to the throne in British history. His personal life has been buffeted by many scandals, especially his highly publicized wedding to Lady Diana Spencer in 1981, from whom he was divorced in 1996. Their equally publicized, vitriolic separation “was the single most important event in the history of the British monarchy since the abdication of Edward VIII in 1936.”
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In 2005, Charles married Camilla Parker-Bowles, who is styled as HRH the Duchess of Cornwall.

In Russia, the grisly murders of Nicholas, Alexandra, and their family at Ekaterinburg in 1918 were, sadly, only the beginning of the Bolsheviks’ murderous rampage against the House of Romanov. In the weeks and months that followed, seventeen members of the imperial family—cousins, aunts, and uncles of the tsar—were rounded up and brutally executed. Alexandra’s sister Ella was arrested by the Cheka on Lenin’s orders. The grand-duchess-turned-nun was dragged out in the middle of the night, blindfolded, and thrown into an abandoned iron mine in Alapaevsk with other Romanovs and political prisoners. The group was killed by two hand grenades and a brushwood fire. It was later reported by some of the killers that, up until the end, Ella and the others could be heard singing hymns from the bottom of the dark mine shaft.

The shroud of secrecy and misinformation that surrounded the deaths of Alexandra Feodorovna and her family led to decades of speculation over their fate. In June 1920, Count Benckendorff, the former grand marshal of the imperial court, reported in his diary, “I am still without definite news with regard to the fate of the Emperor, Empress and their children.”
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Much of the misinformation can be traced to the fact that not all of the bodies were buried together; an error on the part of the murderers meant that two bodies were buried separately from the rest. Those that were buried together were placed in a hidden grave deep in the Koptyaki Forest. It was not until 1920, after three official investigations, that some of the details came to light regarding the ultimate fate of the Romanov family. Even the official reports were based on conjecture and circumstantial evidence, all of which was cast into doubt a few years later by an event that would precipitate one of the greatest royal mysteries in history.

In February 1920, a woman appeared in Berlin who was eventually believed to be Alexandra’s youngest daughter, Grand Duchess Anastasia. The woman, who took the name Anna Anderson, convinced many royalists that she was the grand duchess, having escaped execution in Siberia. Not everyone was convinced. Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, Anastasia’s aunt, had no doubt this woman was an imposter. Tsarina Alexandra’s siblings Princess Irene of Prussia and Grand Duke Ernest Louis of Hesse concurred. Anderson generated enough interest that several plays and films romanticizing her life—including the Academy Award winning
Anastasia
starring Ingrid Bergman—have been created. When she died in Virginia in 1984, state authorities made a surprising and unexpected de facto acknowledgment of her identity in her death certificate. The document listed her given names as Anastasia Nicholaievna, her parents as “Czar Nikolai” and “Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt,” her place of birth as Peterhof, and her occupation as “Royalty.”
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In keeping with her wishes, her remains were cremated.