Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (97 page)

seguendo lo giudicio di costei

che è occulto, com’in erba l’angue
.

(‘For one nation rules and another languishes / according to her hidden judgement, / hidden like a snake in the grass.’)
⁹³

*
Florence’s district of Oltrarno, literally ‘on the other side of the Arno’, is the counterpart of Trastevere, ‘on the other side of the Tiber’, in Rome.

*
Like the names of the French Republic’s
départements
, all the names of republics created in Italy were based on geographical features. ‘Lombardic’ refers to the Plain of Lombardy; ‘Cispadane’ means ‘On this side of the River Po’; ‘Cisalpine’ means ‘On this side of the Alps’.

†
Not to be confused with San Miniato del Monte, which directly overlooks the city.

*
They inspired the opening sentence of Tolstoy’s
War and Peace
(1869): ‘  “
Eh bien, mon prince
, so Genoa and Lucca are now no more than private estates of the Bonaparte family.”  ’

*
Bought for a song by the Duke of Wellington in 1815, it is now housed in Apsley House, London.

*
More usually, the Congress of Prague, June–August 1813, when Napoleon had the opportunity of making peace with Russia and Prussia during an extended truce. After he rejected the terms offered, Austria joined the coalition against him, and he was forced into the unsuccessful campaign that led to his defeat at the Battle of the Nations at Leipzig.

Rosenau

The Loved and Unwanted Legacy

(1826–1918)

Rosenau

The Loved and Unwanted Legacy

(1826–1918)

I

Coburg, sometimes spelled Koburg, is a tidy country town close to the dead centre of the German Federal Republic. It sits astride one of the streams that flow down from the Thüringian forest into the circle of Upper Franconia in northern Bavaria. It makes its living from woodworking and furniture-making, and is home to some 42,000 inhabitants. Its historical monuments include the medieval hilltop fortress, the
Veste Coburg
, and the ostentatious former ducal palace, the
Schloss Ehrenburg
.
¹
Bayreuth, the city of Wagner, lies some 40 miles distant.

The town of Gotha, some two hours’ drive to the north, lies at the foot of the opposite slopes in the Free State of Thüringia, whose dense forests have given it the label of the ‘green heart of Germany’. It is a local administrative centre and, with 46,000 inhabitants, is slightly larger than Coburg; its name, meaning ‘Waters of the Goths’, appears as
Gotaha
in a document of Charlemagne’s era. Its principal modern attraction is the Friedenstein, a former ducal palace and ‘pearl of the early Baroque’.
²
Eisenach, overlooked by the Wartburg castle where Martin Luther took refuge, lies only 16 miles to the west, and Erfurt, the
Land
capital, a similar short distance to the east.

In the course of their long history, the towns of Coburg and Gotha and their dependent districts were sometimes ruled separately and sometimes together. Their part of Germany was famous for its teeming mass of small states, all of which had once claimed to be equal members of the Holy Roman Empire; Coburg and Gotha, on the borders of Saxony and Bavaria, usually fell within the Saxon political orbit. In the early nineteenth century, however, the two statelets were joined together in a territorial reorganization agreed among descendants of the kings of Saxony; and for the nine decades up to 1918, a sovereign duchy functioned there under a single line of ruling dukes.
³
In that era, the principal ducal seat lay neither in Coburg nor in Gotha, but at
Schloss Rosenau
, near Rodenthal. The united duchy was broken up after the First World War, when the citizens of Coburg voted to join Bavaria. After the Second World War, from 1949 to 1990, Coburg found itself in West Germany, while Gotha belonged to the Communist-ruled German Democratic Republic.

Nowadays, Rosenau Castle is owned by the Bavarian government. Originally founded in the fourteenth century as the hunting lodge of a rich merchant, the castle was bought by a duke of Saxe-Gotha in 1721 and remained in the possession of his descendants for two hundred years. It was twice allowed to fall into rack and ruin, once during the Napoleonic Wars and again after the Second World War. Having ceased to be a private property in 1918, it was taken over during the Third Reich by the National Socialists’ Women’s Service and then by the Luftwaffe. After the war, when General Eisenhower’s headquarters was located for a time at Gotha, it was used by the US army. By the 1970s, it became a derelict ‘national monument’.

The more recent restoration of Rosenau by Bavaria’s
Schlösser- und Gärtenverwaltung
, the ‘Castle and Garden Administration’, was started in 1990, and completed by the turn of the century. The aim was to bring the house and park back to the prime condition which they had enjoyed in the 1840s. ‘The palace, basically a medieval structure, had been rebuilt from 1808 to 1817 in the neo-Gothic style,’ explains the English website of the ‘Bavarian Palace Department’:

Particular highlights are the Marble Hall with its three aisles, and the residential apartments with their colourful wall decoration and original Biedermeier furniture from Vienna. Among the structures that have survived in the landscaped park with its ‘Swan Lake’ and ‘Prince’s Pond’ are the orangery, the tea-house (today the park restaurant), the Jousting Column (sundial), and parts of the hermitage.
⁴

Once the restoration was in progress, Rosenau attracted interest from connoisseurs of art and architecture the world over. British magazines sent experts out to report: ‘Today, after years of neglect, Rosenau has become once more the perfect Biedermeier dream of a little Gothic castle. Its small but pretty interiors full of stained glass, brightly colored painted and papered walls, and elaborately decorated ceilings are all now exquisitely restored to their former glory after a decade of patient work.’
⁵
Guided tours are provided every hour on the hour.
⁶
Visitors are impressed by the fact that Rosenau has been rescued from ruin twice over. Art and architecture, however, do not explain everything. Fascination with ‘the perfect Biedermeier dream’ far exceeds the intrinsic merit of Rosenau’s romantic views or its fine Marble Hall. Much of the excitement derives from its connections with a world-famous man and wife who loved each other deeply and who both loved Rosenau. In 2011, the 150th anniversary of the husband’s death provided the pretext for a series of exhibitions, concerts and readings, not only at Rosenau but also at the Callenberg and Ehrenburg palaces. The festivities were modestly billed ‘Coburg Commemorates One of its Famous Inhabitants’.
⁷

II

Franz Albrecht Karl August Immanuel (1819–61) was not a king. But he was definitely royal, both by birth and later by marriage. He was the second son of Ernst III, duke of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, and of Louise, princess of the neighbouring Duchy of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, and as such a scion of the senior, Ernestine branch of the Wettins, the royal House of Saxony.
*
As he grew up, his relatives long pondered the possibility of exploiting their links with leading foreign monarchies.

The prince was born and raised at Rosenau. The day following his birth, his paternal grandmother, the dowager duchess of Coburg-Saalfeld, wrote to her married daughter in England:

Rosenau, August 27
,
1819

[Louischen] was yesterday morning safely and quickly delivered of a little boy. Siebold, the
accoucheuse
, had only been called at three, and at six the little one gave his first cry in this world, and looked about like a little squirrel with a pair of large black eyes. At a quarter to 7 I heard the tramp of a horse. It was a groom, who brought the joyful news. I was off directly, as you may imagine, and found the little mother slightly exhausted, but
gaie et dispos
. She sends you and Edward [the duke of Kent] a thousand kind messages…
⁸

‘The little boy is to be christened tomorrow’, his grandmother continued. ‘The Emperor of Austria, the old Duke of Saxe-Teschen, the Duke of Gotha, Mensdorff, and I are to be sponsors.’ Baptism into the Lutheran Protestant faith was performed by an archbishop in Rosenau’s Marble Hall. Since the Austrian emperor was Catholic, he was appointed ‘sponsor’ rather than godfather; it was in his honour that the infant’s first given name was Franz. But for everyday purposes, his parents intended to call him Albrecht after the duke of Saxe-Teschen.

After the duke of Gotha’s death, when Albrecht was six, the two families of Coburg and Gotha decided to merge their duchies in a personal union. The result from 1826 was a united Duchy of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha – in German,
Das Herzogtum Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha
– whose two parts were separated by a substantial band of territory belonging to the Kingdom of Saxony. Albrecht’s father changed his title, becoming Duke Ernst I; and his elder brother, also Ernst, became the heir apparent. The new duchy’s attractive bicolour standard, the
Landesflagge
, displayed two horizontal halves: the upper half in apple green, the lower half in white.
⁹

Rosenau during Albrecht’s boyhood was basking in the glory of its first renovation. A local almanac noted the stark contrast with its condition only a few years earlier: ‘The busy court ladies enjoy views of beautiful nature, where not so long ago pigeons and swallows, owls and bats nested… When the present re-shaping of the castle began it was just the dirty and uncomfortable dwelling of boorish tenants; the fine Marble Hall was a dust-tip and wood-store.’
¹⁰
The Duchess Louise was particularly pleased with her own quarters: ‘I live on the second floor… I have a little living room, where if there are not too many visitors we generally drink our tea. The wallpaper is gold with dark blue vine leaves… My sitting-room… is grey, dark blue and gold.’
¹¹