Death by Fame: A Life of Elisabeth, Empress of Austria by Andrew Sinclair | eBook

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Death by Fame

A Life of Elisabeth, Empress of Austria

By Andrew Sinclair

St. Martin's Press

CHAPTER 1

Young and Free

Royal marriages rather than wars made the shape of kingdoms of the West until the age of nationalism. The map of Europe did not have to be rolled up; it was blessed and inherited. The Victorian age was the last century when the sovereigns of German stock still had enough family influence to stop conflicts as well as start them. Cousins communicated with other cousins from their courts, ignoring their generals and prime ministers. They married each other, risking the mental instability and haemophilia of the inbred. They hardly trusted anyone outside the hereditary circle of a few hundred of their blood. They feared assassination by anarchists and republicans, the enemy and the insane. They did not take kindly to their proscription by history. They still tried to rule and live by form and wed their daughters well.

The relationships between the Austrian Habsburgs and the Wittelsbachs, who had been supreme in Bavaria in southern Germany for more than seven hundred years, had more to do with alliances and diplomacy than love and kisses. The Habsburg Empire in Central Europe was the heir of the Holy Roman Empire, which had included most of the German kingdoms and principalities and duchies. Yet the rise of Prussia in the eighteenth century had given an alternative leader to the gaggle of German-speaking states, as well as reviving memories of a Thirty Years Civil War between the Protestant north and the Catholic south. Who was to head a united Germany? Which would be the capital, Vienna or Berlin?

The wounds which gaped between the ambitions of the expanding powers of Prussia and Austro-Hungary, of Russia and of Britain, were bandaged by the royal sympathies and ties between the four countries. After its Revolution, France had fallen out of the game of marrying between the crowns, while Spain faded into irrelevance and Italy struggled towards unity. Born as the contemporaries of the new technology which would destroy their traditions, four connected children would play out their roles of privilege and decline. These were Victoria, the eldest daughter of the Queen of the British Empire; Ludwig the Second, the King of Bavaria; Franz Josef the Second, the Austrian Emperor; and his wife Elisabeth, whose life was both a tragedy and a prophecy.

The marriage web between the crowns of Bavaria and Austria and Prussia was woven into a net of fragility. Curiously, the conquering Napoleon had converted Bavaria into a kingdom in 1805 to create a French buffer state between the rival Germanic powers. By the astute marriages of his daughters into France and Austria, the Wittelsbach King had maintained his rank after Waterloo and the Congress of Vienna. For Max Josef the First had married twice and had twelve children. His first wife was a princess from Hesse-Darmstadt, connected to the British royal family. His successor was King Ludwig the First, an eccentric and artistic monarch, whose cousin was Duke Max in Bayern. His heir, who would become Ludwig the Second, was born just before his grandfather was forced into abdication and exile by a scandalous affair with the dancer Lola Montes and the revolutions of 1848, which shook so many dynasties. The capital Munich, however, had been rebuilt by him in the classical and Mediterranean mode, another Athens and Venice of the North on the Isar River.

Duke Max of Bayern had interbred into the eligible Wittelsbach royal women. His wife Ludovika had made a bad match by taking her cousin. Her sister Elisabeth was the Queen of Prussia, while Sophie was married to the Archduke Franz Charles, the heir to the Austrian Empire. Ludovika lived in minor style, very much the poor relation. Her winter home was a palace in the new Ludwigstrasse beside the attractive English Garden. Its large rooms were decorated with frescos by Kaulbach, but its size was petty compared with the vast residences of her sisters. Duke Max, however, bought a summer castle on Lake Starnberg only eighteen miles from Munich, overlooking the Wetterstein mountains. But Possenhofen was ugly and rural, the four squat towers round its keep flanked by stables and outbuildings. Only its magnificent park and rides made it a very heaven for children, who could run down its wooded slopes and banks towards the water.

The first child born to Ludovika in 1831 was called Ludwig and the second Hélène – her husband so admired Greek names. Six years later, Elisabeth was born in the Munich palace on a Sunday on the eve of Christmas, which would become her favourite festival. Her godmother was her aunt, the Queen of Prussia, but her father soon deserted her to visit his nephew Otto, who had reached the throne of the new kingdom of Greece, before he continued on to Turkey and Arabia and Egypt, where he bought four Sudanese slave boys in the market to bring home. Although a cavalry general in the Bavarian army, he preferred to ride with the circus performers or the gypsies, also playing his zither and singing and drinking with them. His familiarity with the peasant who taught him to twang strings had no sexual overtones: the Duke loved women far too much and too often. He set a pattern of rebellion to his children by preferring to wear Loden and Lederhosen, while spending his time in taverns rather than Court occasions. He loved hunting in the mountains and the forests; but in the city, he sought the company of dramatists and poets. He wrote under the pen-name of 'Phantasus', and his works were as fantastical on the whole as his life, most charming with little meaning, and seductive without commitment. He even set up a drinking club of fourteen Knights of the Round Table, at which, as King Arthur, he drank them under it.

Duke Max officially sired five girls and four boys, one of whom died as an infant. He had dozens of other children among the actresses of Munich and the peasant girls near Possenhofen. When his infidelities became too public, his wife would not speak to him and brought up the children in a separate part of the Munich palace. They only knew that he was home by his faraway whistling. The periods of distance, however, were always ended by another pregnancy and birth, for Ludovika could not finally resist her handsome and engaging husband, who did at least teach deportment to all of his daughters. As if they were ponies in dressage, they learned to trot elegantly. Their father told them to be angels with wings on their ankles.

Among the brood, her second brother Karl Theodor became the favourite of Elisabeth. He was known as 'Gackel' or 'Cock', she was called 'Sisi'. The older Hélène was more beautiful than the young Sisi, who was round-faced with almond eyes, although she grew a magnificent crop of auburn hair; but their governess, the Baroness Luise Wülffen, kept them apart, because of Sisi's bad influence on her elder sister. She was a day-dreamer, lost in her imagination of the ancient Germanic myths and legends, the tales of chivalry and giants. Restless and energetic, she had literally to be tied to her chair, for she was too active to do her lessons. Only sketching the landscape and the horses made her sit quiet.

Sisi always adored her wandering father and tried to join him in his sports and games. She became a fearless rider, loving the park of Possenhofen and her ponies. Occasionally, Duke Max took her out on his expeditions into the country to meet the people and join in their pursuits. 'If you and I, Sisi,' he told her, 'had not been princely born, we could have performed in a circus.' His frequent absences from home only made Sisi admire him and seek his affection even more. When she later became an empress, she said that the only honest money she had ever earned was the copper coins tossed to her father and her, when they performed outside beer gardens for a song and dance act, dressed as strolling players on their long rides.

She was eleven years old in 1848, the year of the revolutions. Her future husband Franz Josef of Austria was eighteen, slender and strong and hardly ever out of uniform and braid. Even as a youth, he learned to be a stickler for duty under the fierce guardianship of his Wittelsbach mother Sophie. Her cousin and later her close friend, the young Ludwig of Bavaria, was only three, but he would turn out to be even more artistic and otherworldly than her father or his own grandfather, who had made a Mediterranean city out of Munich. Both Franz Josef and Ludwig found their lives forever changed by the forced abdication of the ruling sovereigns of their states in the aftermath of the repression of the flames of the revolts in Vienna and Munich. Franz Josef himself would become the Austrian Emperor, and the infant Ludwig's father, the Crown Prince, would become King Maximilian the Second, while his heir was already building dream castles with toy bricks. At the age of eleven, Sisi would meet Franz Josef for the first time at Innsbruck, where his family were compelled to flee in the year of revolutions before he assumed power; but he ignored his childish cousin, leaving his intense younger brother Karl Ludwig to court her hopelessly with flowers and sweets and a watch on a chain.

England was singular in being spared the turmoils of that turbulent year. It was already a democracy, in which the popular Queen Victoria and her Consort Prince Albert ruled through their ministers, who advised them. Their eldest daughter Victoria or 'Vicky' was eight years old and would marry the heir to the throne of Prussia and become the mother of the Kaiser Wilhelm the Second, while her sisters would be the wives of the Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt and the Prince of Schleswig-Holstein, claimed by Prussia as well as Denmark, whose royal daughter Alexandra would be united with the Prince of Wales. The Queen's grandchildren also would wed well and occupy the thrones of Russia and Norway, Spain and Rumania and Greece. Through her progeny, the sovereign of the British Empire would create the most extraordinary and personal intelligence system in Europe of the nineteenth century. And the purpose of all her incessant diplomacy would never alter. She wanted peace between the nations, so that none of her widespread relatives went to war against each other. How could her children or their offspring try to kill their nephews or cousins because of a strip of land?

Of the young people brought up strictly within royal conventions, Elisabeth was almost the only one who ran wild in her summer and salad days. With her boyish father as her model, she became a fine horsewoman and a trick rider and something of an athlete, impossible to achieve for the other princesses of Europe, who were cooped inside their corsets and their crinolines from an early age. Vicky had some exercise as a child, because of her mother's belief in sea bathing. If Elisabeth was to be the first empress dedicated to fitness and travel, Queen Victoria had already set the fashion for holidays by the beach. Until the reign of her predecessor, King George the Fourth, the seaside had seemed to promise an early death from exposure. Sun was to be avoided, certainly on ladies' complexions. But the British Queen entered the waves discreetly from her bathing machine, still preserved at Osborne House in the Isle of Wight. And where she dipped, her children and the nation followed.

Hunting and riding had long been the recreation of kings, and some rulers followed Duke Max in preferring the company of foresters to courtiers. Duke Max himself always went out with Johann Petzmacher, the son of a tavern-keeper from Vienna and an expert on the zither: when his daughter Elisabeth rode with them, she was introduced into blood sports without a tremor. The aristocrats had always hunted, and they always would. However romantic and sensitive she and her father were, the killing and eating of animals in the chase seemed natural to Elisabeth. Also from her father, Elisabeth took her love of poetry, while his tales of his travels incited a wanderlust in her. Both of them were under the spell of Heine's lyrics, yearning and melancholy and witty. She hid copies of hisNocturnes and Intermezzo in a little case at the bottom of her wardrobe, her most intimate possession. In one epigram the poet pretended to be King Ludwig the First writing to the King of Prussia:

    You Hohenzollerns of my blood,
    Don't make a fuss of the Wittelsbach mode.
    Don't go at me over Lola Montes,
    I knew her more, you knew her less.

As a poet, Elisabeth imitated her father in his facility and his output. Hundreds of her early poems are still preserved in the Swiss Federal Archives. They show a love of nature and a shy and adolescent heart, which she lost to a young man with brown eyes, who was sent away, and then to a count with blue eyes, to whom she sent 'the moon as a whisperer'. She did not take too well to formal education, unlike her elder sister Hélène, who was being groomed in conscientiousness and duty to serve Franz Josef as his wife, if he should ask her to become the Empress of Austria, as her matchmaking mother dearly desired. Determined to marry off her five daughters well after the disappointments of her own marriage, Ludovika would scheme more assiduously than a general in her strategies for success.

Bavaria was still the piglet in the middle between Austria and Prussia. Two years after the fires of the revolutions were put out, Prussia proposed the creation of a North German Federation, which would include Hanover and Saxony, and so end the Federation of all Germany, led by Austria, which itself proposed a separate southern group. Aided by Bavaria, Austria put four army corps in the field against weak Prussian forces in Silesia. The King of Prussia hesitated before deciding to fight and wrote to the young Franz Josef: the Queen of Prussia wrote to her sister Sophie, the Emperor's mother. Royal intercession prevented an armed confrontation. Yet this diplomatic triumph for Austria had a black lining. 'War would perhaps have been better,' the Austrian statesman Prince Schwarzenberg said, 'and would have brought a peace lasting fifty years.'

Royal marriage was still diplomacy by other means. And so Franz Josef paid a visit to Berlin in the winter of 1852. His eye fell on one of the King's nieces, Princess Anna, who was intelligent and handsome and slender. Unfortunately, she was already committed to another princely alliance with the Hesse-Kassel family, and she was a Protestant, although she could convert her faith and break her engagement. The objections were far from insuperable. The Austrian Emperor's mother Sophie thought that Anna would be manageable, and so she implored her sister Elisabeth, the Queen of Prussia, to help her pull off the match. But nothing that the two Wittelsbach women might do would persuade the King to agree to an alliance by blood with the power which had just humiliated him. Franz Josef would have to seek a wife within his mother's family in Bavaria.

First, he would have to survive the nightmare of the royal families of Europe, the attack of an assassin. He had supported the brutal repression of Hungary in its fight for independence led by Kossuth. Strolling round the walls of the Hofburg in Vienna, he was assaulted by a tailor's apprentice, who stuck the point of a long knife into the back of his neck through the gold braid on the collar of his uniform. Cut and bleeding, he fell to the ground. His military aide, Count O'Donnell, caught the culprit and delivered him to the police. No reprieve was granted, and the Hungarian Libenyi was duly hanged. For a month, the Emperor had to convalesce from his wound and loss of blood. But when he took up public life again, he did not forget or forgive the country of the would-be murderer, and it was more important than ever that he should produce an heir before another assassin cut him down.

Therefore, in the summer, his mother Sophie invited her other sister Ludovika with her two elder daughters, Hélène and Elisabeth, to stay with her family at the retreat of Ischl among the mountain lakes of Salzkammergut. Hélène was intended to be the right wife for the young Emperor. Nobody considered that Elisabeth would attract him, although she had grown into a beauty with an oval face set on a long neck under coils of auburn hair that reached undone to her knees. Later in her life, she would remark, 'Marriage is an absurd arrangement. One is sold as a child at fifteen.' But as a Catholic and a virgin and a princess, she could not avoid the matrimonial market, in which the Wittelsbachs had traded their girls for so long and with such profit.

The Emperor tumbled at first sight of Elisabeth with her slender and elegant bearing. Invited to tea with his Bavarian relations, the moment that he saw her in a simple black mourning dress, 'he was then convinced that his choice would fall upon her. He shone,' his mother wrote to the Queen of Saxony, 'and you know how his face shines when he is happy. The dear little one did not doubt the deep impression which she had made.' She was embarrassed by all the people around them and did not dare to eat, although she was always gracious in spite of her timidity.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Death by Fame by Andrew Sinclair. Copyright © 1998 Andrew Sinclair. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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Death by Fame: A Life of Elisabeth, Empress of Austria

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Death by Fame: A Life of Elisabeth, Empress of Austria

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Death by Fame

A Life of Elisabeth, Empress of Austria

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