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Hyphenations have been standardised.

Footnotes have been renamed in numeric order.

Changes made are noted at the [ end of the book.]

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THE LIFE OF THE EMPEROR FRANCIS JOSEPH

Photo Bieber

THE EMPEROR FRANCIS JOSEPH

THE LIFE OF THE EMPEROR FRANCIS JOSEPH

BY

FRANCIS GRIBBLE

LONDON EVELEIGH NASH

1914

PREFACE

There exist plenty of surveys of the modern history and political conditions of Austria. Mr. Henry Wickham Steed’s “The Habsburg Monarchy” is the most recent, and probably the best, though Mr. R. P. Mahaffy’s “Francis Joseph I.: His Life and Times”—a smaller and less pretentious book—is also very good. One knows equally well where to turn for gossipy compilations—some of them authoritative, and others devoid of authority—dealing with the inner life of the Austrian Court. Sir Horace Rumbold has treated the subject with the dutiful reticence of a diplomatist in “The Austrian Court of the Nineteenth Century”; Countess Marie Larisch and Princess Louisa of Tuscany, occupying positions of greater freedom and less responsibility, have in “My Past” and “My Own Story” lifted the veil with indignant gestures, and pointed fingers of scorn at the intimate pictures which they have revealed. M. H. de Weindel, again, has written of “François-Joseph Intime”; while the enterprise of an American journalist has contributed “The Keystone of Empire,” “The Martyrdom of an Empress,” and “The Private Life of Two Emperors—William II. of Germany and Francis Joseph of Austria.”

This bibliographical list—to which additions could easily be made—might seem to indicate that the ground has already been well covered; but that is not the case. There exists no life of Francis Joseph, and no History of Austria, in which the personal and political aspects of the subject are considered in their relation to each other. The assumption of writers who have previously treated the theme has been that tittle-tattle is tittle-tattle, and that history is history, and that the two can never meet. The two things, however, are liable to meet anywhere; and in the country and period here under review they are continually meeting. Austria is not one of the “inevitable” countries, like England and Spain, bound to have a separate existence under some form of government or other because of their geographical situation and the national characteristics of their inhabitants. There is no Austrian nation: only a medley of races which detest each other, bound (but by no means welded) together for the supposed convenience of the rest of Europe, and unified only by the fact that its component parts all appertain to the dominions of the House of Habsburg.

It follows that the personality of the Habsburgs matters in a sense in which the personalities of rulers who are mere figure-heads does not matter; and that personality—the collective personality as well as the separate personalities of individual members of the House—can only be gauged by those who study their private lives in conjunction with their public performances. The history of the property (seeing that it comprises peoples as well as lands) includes and implies the history of the owners of the property. Our spectacle, in so far as one can sum it up in a sentence, is that of an Empire continually threatened with dissolution under the control of an historic family continually displaying all the symptoms of decadence. The political and the personal factors in the problem are perpetually interacting; and one of the questions which the political prophet has to consider is: Will not the decadence of the family hasten the dissolution of the Empire?

Whence it follows, as a secondary sequence, that, in the history of modern Austria, tittle-tattle matters; for it is only by the careful study of the tittle-tattle that we can hope to discover whether the Habsburgs of to-day are true or false to the proud and impressive traditions of their House. In their case, as in that of any other House, a stray story of a romantic or scandalous character might properly be ignored as appertaining to the domain of idle gossip; but when stories of that kind meet us at every turn—and meet us with increasing frequency as time proceeds—we are no longer entitled to dismiss them with superior indifference. They are significant; the key to the situation is to be found in them. Tittle-tattle, in short, when one encounters it, not in sample but in bulk, ceases to be tittle-tattle, but attains to the dignity of history, and furnishes the raw material for the generalisations of the political philosopher.

The annals of the House of Habsburg furnish a case in point—the best of all possible cases. There is no House in Europe whose annals are richer in incident and eccentricity; and the eccentricities, whether romantic or scandalous, are such as to challenge the scientific investigator—whether he be a student of eugenics or of politics—to group them and see what inferences he can draw. The present writer has decided to take up the challenge; and, in order to take it up, he will be obliged to deal with a good many matters besides the political manœuvres of the Emperor and his Ministers. “John Orth” pelting the Emperor with the insignia of the Order of the Golden Fleece; “Herr Wulfling” cracking nuts in a tree with Fräulein Adamovics; Princess Louisa of Tuscany, first bicycling with the dentist in the Dresden Park, and then appealing to her son’s tutor to come and “compromise” her in Switzerland—all these are matters which may suggest reflections quite as far-reaching as anything that we read about Francis Joseph’s skill in extricating his country from embarrassments with rival Powers and keeping the peace (in so far as it has been kept) between Ruthenians and Galicians.

It would be presumption, of course, to represent this biography as the full and final portrait of Francis Joseph as he really is. The complete material for such a definite portrait of a sovereign is never made available during the sovereign’s life-time; and the portraits drawn by people who have occupied privileged positions at Court are generally the most colourless of all: misleading—and, as a rule, designed to mislead—by excess of eulogy. Discretion, in such cases, takes the place of criticism; the “selection” is not that of the artist, but of the courtier. The illustrious personage thus officially or semi-officially portrayed “comes out” not as an individual, but as a type: as conventional and as unconvincing as the stock “heavy father” or “gentlemanly villain” of melodrama. Sir Horace Rumbold’s polite portrait of Francis Joseph is one of many marked by those limitations. The popular Austrian portraits are still more distinctly marked by them.

One need not wonder, and one must not complain. The path to candour was blocked by the obligations, in the one case of hospitality, and, in the other, of loyalty; but there is no reason why the historian who is not under such obligations should not criticise more freely. His object is neither depreciation nor flattery, but truth—as much of the truth as is attainable at the given moment; and he must therefore resist the common tendency of the biographers of contemporary rulers to credit their subjects, not only with their own particular virtues, but with all other people’s virtues as well. The only result, in moral portraiture, of attributing virtues with too heavy a hand is to produce a picture in which the wood cannot be seen for the trees.

That error must be avoided, as much in the interest of the subject of the portrait as in that of the public to which it is to be submitted. The real virtues will be more conspicuous if no imaginary virtues are allowed to block our view of them, and if other miscellaneous qualities which contrast with them are given their due tribute of attention. Cromwell, it will be remembered, insisted that the artist should paint him “warts and all,”; and if the Life of an Emperor is not to be written in that spirit, one might just as well refrain from writing it, for there would be nothing to be learnt from it when it was written.

FRANCIS GRIBBLE.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

THE LIFE OF THE EMPEROR FRANCIS JOSEPH

CHAPTER I

The collapse of the Holy Roman Empire—The impossibility of reviving it—The German Federation—The Holy Alliance—The policy of sitting on the safety valve—The consequent explosions—The problems consequently prepared for Francis Joseph—The Head of the House of Habsburg—Inseparable connection between the events of his public and private life.

In order to clear the way, and set the stage for the drama of the Emperor Francis Joseph’s life, we must go back to the dissolution of that Holy Roman Empire of which the Emperor of Austria was, at the end, the titular head. Happily, we have not very far to go.

The Holy Roman Empire—in fact, as a cynic has said, neither Holy nor Roman, and scarcely worthy to be called an Empire—collapsed in the Napoleonic wars. The Battle of the Nations at Leipzig, the “world’s earthquake” at Waterloo, the Congress of Vienna: none of these things availed to set the Holy Roman Empire on its feet again.

Perhaps a really great man might even then have been able to restore it and make something of it, using it as a decorative setting for glorious achievements; perhaps not. The experiment was not tried, because there was no great man available to try it. The sovereigns of those days, with the sole exception of Alexander of Russia, were pitifully lacking in personal prestige. Whatever Napoleon had failed to do, he had at least succeeded in destroying the prestige of the hereditary representatives of ancient dynasties. The House of Habsburg, in spite of Napoleon’s marriage to a daughter of the House, had suffered as much indignity as any other royal family, and more than most. That marriage, indeed, was itself esteemed an indignity; even the old friends of the House were doubtful whether it still deserved respect.

Moreover, while Austria was rather weak, Prussia was very jealous—not altogether without reason. In the earlier stages of the final combination against Napoleon, Prussia had borne the burden and heat of the day, while Austria sat, with a double face, shilly-shallying on the fence. Now, it might be said, Austria represented the Past and Prussia the Future of the German world; and the Future was in no mood to tolerate proud airs or lofty pretensions from the Past. In the absence, therefore, of a commanding personality among the sovereigns, the revival of the Holy Roman Empire was impossible; and the centre of gravity of the German world was shifting.

Still, something had to be done; some organisation had to be contrived to give cohesion to the medley and provide the Continental Concert with a reasonable prospect of a quiet life. So there sprang into being two organisations which concern us:—

• 1. The German Federation.
• 2. The Holy Alliance.

Their detailed history need not delay us; but we must pause to see how they created the difficulties with which Francis Joseph, coming to throne as a boy of eighteen, had to cope, and posed the problems which he would have either to solve for himself or to see roughly, and even violently, solved for him by others.

Just as the Holy Roman Empire was scarcely worthy to be called an Empire, so the German Federation was scarcely worthy to be called a Federation. It was loose and cumbrous, inefficient and inert. There was no Federal Tribunal, no Federal army, no Federal diplomatic machinery; in all these matters the component States—ruled by thirty-eight separate sovereigns—retained their independence. The Federal Assembly, which met at Frankfurt, was, in effect, only a Congress of the Ambassadors of those States, with the Austrian Ambassador in the chair. No important step could be taken without the unanimous consent of the Ambassadors; and there was no important piece of business on which they were all of one mind. The position of Austria at the head of the Assembly was one of dignity without authority, conferring little more actual power than falls to the president of a debating society.

So loose an arrangement obviously could not endure. One of two things was bound to happen; the bonds of union must, in the course of time, either be tightened or be broken. The seeds of destruction were present in the organisation from the first in the shape of Austro-Prussian jealousy: that jealousy between the Past and the Future to which we have referred. The interests and aspirations of these two dominant States conflicted. Neither of them was strong enough to bring the other to heel; neither of them was weak enough, or humble enough, to acquiesce in the other’s hegemony. It remained only for one of them to turn the other out of the Federation, and fashion a real Federation—a real Empire, perhaps—out of the remaining constituents. That inevitable process—delayed for more than fifty years, but eventually altering the whole outlook of Austrian policy—was to provide the central problem of Francis Joseph’s reign; but many other problems, hardly of less significance, were first to arise out of the programme of the Holy Alliance.

The Holy Alliance, of course, was, in fact, no more Holy than the Holy Roman Empire, and was, perhaps, hardly worthy to be called an Alliance. It was an agreement, or mutual understanding, rather than an Alliance, inspired by hatred and terror of the new ideas disseminated by the French Revolution; and those are hardly unjust who describe it as a conspiracy, suggested by Metternich, and acquiesced in by the principal Continental sovereigns, for keeping all subject peoples in the places which the Congress of Vienna had assigned to them. And that in a double sense. In the first place, autocratic forms of government were to be maintained in all countries which the Holy Three regarded as within their sphere of influence. In the second place, subject nationalities were to be kept in subjection to the Powers which the Settlement of 1815 had placed in authority over them.

It follows that the policy of the Holy Alliance was a policy of sitting on safety valves; and its history is the history of a series of Conferences and Congresses held to decide who should sit on which safety valve in the name of all. It was agreed, for instance, that Austria should sit on the safety valve in Naples, and that France should sit on it in Spain; and there was much talk—though also much difference of opinion—about sitting on the safety valves in Portugal and Greece. The Holy Alliance fell to pieces, after a much shorter life than that of the Holy Roman Empire, because Russia maintained against Austria, and England maintained against France, that certain safety valves should not be sat upon.

Moreover, safety valves were many, and the upward pressure was of a continually increasing force. If Metternich and Castlereagh, and the Emperors of Austria and Russia, and the King of Prussia, had, like the Bourbons, “learnt nothing” from the French Revolution and its sequel, the common people, from university professors to artisans, had learnt much. They might desire a breathing-time before committing themselves to desperate courses. The breathing-time might be protracted because the despotisms were reasonably benevolent towards people who did not meddle with politics; because the administration was honest, and the taxes were not oppressive. Still, sooner or later intelligent men were bound to tire of submission, and clamour for Parliaments and the recognition of “nationalities.” Byron—the friend of the Carbonari before he was the friend of Greece—was hounding them on to do so.

In England Byron was notorious for his indecorum; but, on the Continent, he was famous for his audacity. The improprieties of “Don Juan” did not shock Continental Liberals; but its courageous political criticisms stirred them. The lines over which they gloated—though they must have had a difficulty in translating them—were such lines as these:—

Lock up the billy bald-coot, Alexander!

Ship off the Holy Three to Senegal!

Teach them that sauce for goose is sauce for gander,

And ask them how they like to be in thrall!

Such passages—and there are plenty of them—express the temper to which the Continental Liberals were gradually coming. When they came to it, and found such men as Metternich, and Bomba of Naples, and Charles X. of France, sitting on the safety valves, explosions could by no means be prevented. The political history of the period is the history of those explosions and their consequences; and we all know that there were two principal series of such explosions—the explosions of 1830, and the explosions of 1848. The noise of the first detonations was, as it were, a salute fired in the year of Francis Joseph’s birth; the louder roar of the second greeted his accession.

First Italy and then Hungary exploded; and Francis Joseph, as a boy of eighteen, had to face the confusion and try to calm it. The story of his bearing in the presence of the turmoil must not be anticipated; but we may look sufficiently ahead to note that a new Austria, differently constituted, and looking out of a new window in a new direction, had gradually to be re-created out of what might very well have been a wreck. The old Austria over which Francis Joseph began to reign in 1848 was a Teuton Power holding the most prosperous provinces of Italy in its iron grip. That grip has been reluctantly relaxed until only the pressure of one little finger remains; and the new Austria over which Francis Joseph rules to-day has only a small Teuton nucleus, associated with a Magyar nucleus nearly as large, trying in conjunction with it to assert predominant partnership in a large and increasing community of Slavs, and casting envious, but not very hopeful, glances across the Danube towards the Balkan States and the Ægean harbours.

So great has been the evolution accomplished within the reign of a single ruler: a ruler who, at the beginning of his reign, did not dare to set his foot in his own capital, and, long before the end of it, had come to be regarded as the one indispensable man in the Empire—the one man whose life must be preserved and prolonged at all hazards, for fear lest his death should entail the collapse of the edifice which he had reared—the one man who sometimes appeared to command the affection of all his subjects. It would be a striking story, even if one related the Emperor’s political achievements without reference to his personal life; but the two things, though commonly separated by political historians, are not really separable.

Certainly they are not so separated by his own subjects. They not only admire the statesman who has acquired a prestige to which he was not born, and has used it to recover by diplomacy what he has lost in war; they also cherish an affectionate sympathy for the man at whom calamity has dealt blow after blow, whom no blow, however cruel, has struck down, and who, in spite of innumerable sorrows, has continued to confront the world with a dignified, if melancholy, composure. He has had, they perceive, no less trouble with his family than with his Empire; and they have sometimes thought of him—or at least been tempted to think of him—as the one splendidly sane member of an eccentric and decadent House.

It follows that one must write of Francis Joseph, not only as an Emperor, but also as a Habsburg—the head of the most interesting of all the royal houses: a House whose members, unpredictable in their insurgent extravagances, have, again and again, moved the Courts and Chancelleries of Europe to consternation. Our picture must be, not only of a great and successful ruler, but also of a brave old man, tried in the fire but not consumed by it, bowed down by sorrows but not broken by them, maintaining the mediæval majesty of royal caste in the presence of his peers, at a time when other Habsburgs—one Habsburg after another—were flinging the prejudices of royal caste to the winds and making, as it must have seemed to him, sad messes of their lives, after the manner of those reprobate relatives who, even in middle-class families, are spoken of, if at all, with bated breath.

That being our theme—or a portion of it—we may next speak of the Habsburgs collectively; and we will begin by considering what the eugenists have to say about them.

CHAPTER II

The House of Habsburg from the standpoint of Eugenics—The “Habsburg jaw”—Degeneracy the consequence of consanguineous marriages—Sound physiological instinct of King Cophetua—And of those Habsburgs who have followed his example—Morganatic marriages—The family organism fighting for its life—Has Francis Joseph understood?—Indications that he has understood in part.

The House of Habsburg furnishes the “horrible examples” in two recent works on the new science of Eugenics: L’hérédité des Stigmates de Dégénérescence, by Dr. Galippe, and L’Origine du Type familial de la Maison de Habsburg, by Dr. Oswald Rubbrecht. The arguments in both cases are based, not only on a study of history, but also on a collation of portraits; and though the writers differ on some points of detail, their general conclusions are identical. For both of them the Habsburgs are “degenerates”; both of them attribute the degeneracy to the same cause. It is, they agree, the cumulative effect of what is technically called “in-breeding”—of a long succession of inter-marriages among comparatively near relatives.

One hears of the physiological law thus violated, whenever the question of a marriage between cousins is mooted. The tendency of such a marriage, we are always told, is to perpetuate and accentuate typical characteristics and weaknesses, both physical and moral. A single marriage between cousins may produce no perceptible evil result; and one can cite cases in which it appears to have produced remarkably brilliant results.[1] But a series of such marriages, continued through generation after generation, invariably and inevitably tells. The family, or the community, in which such unions are the rule, loses vigour and develops peculiarities—a special, readily recognisable, physiognomy, and an unstable mental equilibrium. The transmitted eccentricities—more particularly the mental eccentricities—may skip a generation or leave an individual exempt; but they are always lurking in the background—always to be expected to reappear.

[1] Darwin married his first cousin, and all his sons were men of remarkable ability.

It has been so, and is so, according to Drs. Rubbrecht and Galippe, with the Habsburgs. We have all heard of the “Habsburg jaw”; and Dr. Rubbrecht traces it to its mediæval source, and, standing before a long row of family portraits, carefully and scientifically depicts the Habsburg face:—

“In addition to the underhung lower jaw and the large lower lip, the Habsburg physiognomy presents the following characteristic features: excessive length, and, sometimes, excessive size of the nose; ‘exorbitism,’ more or less pronounced, with a forehead often of considerable height. One would say that the head, squeezed in by lateral pressure, had undergone a concomitant vertical allongation, and had been stretched, and pulled up and down at the same time. According to Dr. Galippe, the lateral flattening of the skull is the fundamental characteristic, and all the other abnormalities follow from it.”

That is what Dr. Rubbrecht makes of the portraits. He generalises only as a student of physiognomy, and does not discuss mental and moral issues, or presume to predict the future. Dr. Galippe is more outspoken:—

“The Habsburgs” (he writes), “having, by their intermarriages, developed a degenerate taint, and having transmitted it, either separately or in conjunction with other taints, both physical and psychical, to the families matrimonially allied with them, have brought into existence a specific type of human animal, by the same means which the breeders of dogs and horses employ for the creation of a new sub-species.”

As for the general consequences of such in-breeding, he continues:—

“Even those aristocratic families which present no original mark of degeneracy disappear quickly. It follows, a fortiori, that those families which, possessing such characteristics, perpetuate them by contracting marriages within the degrees of consanguinity, are doomed to a still more speedy extinction.”

As for the case of the Habsburgs in particular, he concludes:—

“The Habsburgs of Spain have long since been swept off the stage of history, disappearing in sterility or insanity. The Habsburgs of Austria, numerous though the representatives of the House are at the present time, will end by disappearing in their turn as an historic family, if they persist in their errors,—that is to say, in their marriages with blood relations.”

It is a new way of looking at an old problem,—a new thought suggested by the latest of the sciences; and it opens the door to reflections of great and urgent moment to many other royal houses besides that of Habsburg. In a general way, it has long been held to be almost as improper for Kings and Queens to marry their subjects as for angels to marry the daughters of men. A purer and bluer blood ran in their veins than in the veins of their subjects; and to adulterate that blue blood with red blood was to degrade it. They must, therefore, seek their brides and bridegrooms within the magic circle. Kings must marry Queens, and Princes must marry Princesses; and the distinctive exclusiveness of reigning houses must be maintained by a succession of unions between cousins.

That view of the matter has continued to prevail in royal circles—and also in high political and diplomatic circles—long after the students of heredity have established conclusions unfavourable to such courses. The arguments can hardly have failed to reach the ears of those whom they concerned; and the feeling—tacit, if not avowed—has presumably been that Kings, and Queens, and Princes and Princesses are so great and good and glorious that the laws of Nature do not apply to them. But that is not the case. Science shows that Kings cannot override the laws of Nature even in the countries in which they are permitted to override the laws of the land; that the price which Nature exacts for exclusiveness is degeneracy; that hardly any royal family anywhere has failed to pay that price; that the percentage of insanity has, through the ages, been higher among hereditary rulers whose blue blood has thus been protected from admixture than in any other class of the community; and that the sound physiological instinct is that on which King Cophetua acted in the legend, when the bare-footed beggar-maid appeared before him:—

As shines the moon in clouded skies,

She in her poor attire was seen;

One praised her ankles, one her eyes,

One her dark hair and lovesome mien.

So sweet a face, such angel grace,

In all that land had never been:

Cophetua swore a royal oath:

“This beggar maid shall be my queen.”

It is this example of King Cophetua—and the moral which the eugenists read into it—that we shall need to bear in mind when we endeavour to appreciate those incidents in the latter-day history of the House of Habsburg which are commonly supposed, whether rightly or wrongly, to have been most distressing to the head of the family. That history has largely, and indeed mainly, if not quite entirely, been a history of revolt on the part of the sons—and even the daughters—of the House against the splendid restrictions and inherited obligations which hedged them about as members of an uniquely illustrious race.

The revolt has expressed itself in many ways: some of them, in the world’s view, creditable and even honourable; others in a greater or less degree scandalous. We have seen—and we shall see yet again in these pages—one Habsburg throwing off the panoply of state, to live his own mysterious life in the remote Balearic Isles, and another Habsburg disappearing for ever—unless those are right who assure us that he bides his time, in hiding, for some dark political reason, and will “come again”—as the navigating officer of a merchant vessel. There have also been intrigues which have ended in tragedy, and morganatic marriages with actresses and other persons deemed “impossible” in imperial circles; and there has been at least one elopement of a Habsburg Princess, who, having failed to live harmoniously with a Crown Prince, found that even a professional pianist could not permanently satisfy her craving for romance.

One knows the ordinary comment on these proceedings: “All the Habsburgs are mad,—all of them except Francis Joseph; and here is another Habsburg proving himself (or herself) as mad as the others, if not madder.” The remark is not profound; but it is often, in a rough way, true. John Orth, “Herr Wulfling,” Princess Louisa of Tuscany:—all these (and not these only) have done strange things,—things which one would hesitate to put forward as the sole and unsupported proofs of the possession of well-balanced minds. This is not the page for the detailed account of such proceedings; but it is pertinent and proper, even here, to remark the startling frequency of their occurrence. It is not a case of the discovery of a single skeleton in a single cupboard—a phenomenon which any research into any family history is apt to bring to light. The impression, when one reviews the recent annals of the House of Habsburg, is of continuous rattling of skeletons in all the cupboards, and of one sane and strong man—the accepted and now the hereditary Head of the House—going gravely through his troubled life, not unmoved, indeed, by the ghostly noises, but, at least, without allowing his composure to be too visibly disturbed by them: a man of whom one may say, giving a somewhat new sense to old and hackneyed lines:—

Si fractus illabatur orbis,

Impavidum ferient ruinae.

But that is not the only view of the matter which it is permissible to take. One may also, with the conclusions of science to back one, regard the eccentricities of the more eccentric Habsburgs, if not as the best proofs of sanity that they are capable of giving, then as instinctive and desperate, if not always very intelligent, endeavours to escape from the imminent fate which the eugenists have foretold for them. The family, we may take it, no less than the individual, is an “organism,” albeit only partly conscious of itself; and our spectacle, we may add, is that of an organism blindly fighting for its life. The fight may not be very wisely conducted, not having been begun until the work of destruction was too far advanced; but it is nevertheless a fight worth fighting, and one of which we should follow the vicissitudes, not with horror or with merriment, but with intelligent sympathy. For degeneracy is too high a price to pay for haughty exclusiveness; and it is better to flee from the City of Destruction late in the day, followed and attended by the cry of scandal, than to remain in it and be overwhelmed.

That, at any rate, is the appreciation of the Habsburg scandals—or of a good many of them—which will commend itself to eugenists and sociologists, who will esteem the revolts sound in principle, even though they allow them to be occasionally extravagant in detail. The individual makers of the scandals need not be assumed to have acted from any higher or deeper motive than the satisfaction of what has more than once proved to be only a passing inclination. The whole circumstances of their upbringing, and the precepts of duty and propriety impressed upon them from childhood, make that unlikely. But the physiological instinct behind the admitted motive has been a sound one. Looked at from the viewpoint of the individual, it had been the instinct of King Cophetua; looked at from the point of view of the race, it has been the instinct of self-preservation.

It has been the tragedy—or one of the tragedies—of Francis Joseph that the years of his reign have coincided with the years of this stage in the Habsburg struggle for continued existence. Chosen for his august and exalted post as the sanest and healthiest Habsburg available—albeit the son of an epileptic father and the nephew of an epileptic uncle—he has looked down from above on the exciting incidents and varying vicissitudes of that struggle. One does not know whether to regard his tragedy as the greater on the assumption that he understood the inner meaning of the spectacle or on the assumption that he did not understand it. In the former case there would be more of pathos, in the latter case more of irony, in the drama; but it is impossible to say for certain whether he has understood or not.

The probability, in the lack of direct evidence, is that he has understood in part. One might draw that inference from his occasional indulgence, as well as from his occasional severity, towards the rebels against the laws, both written and unwritten, of his House; and one has no right to infer the contrary from the fact that he himself has not rebelled. He is a Habsburg as well as an Emperor, and may very well have felt the impulses which appear to have become common to the race, though he has had both exceptional reasons and exceptional facilities for repressing them. One knows, at any rate, that he, like so many other members of his family, has sought, and won, the friendship of women outside the charmed circle of the royal families, and that the lady in whose company he seems, in the last years of his long life, to find the most agreeable respite from the cares of State, is not an Archduchess, and was once an actress. That fact must surely have helped him to understand.

But these are matters for subsequent consideration. The ground is now clear; and we may proceed, without further delay, to genealogy and biography.

CHAPTER III

Francis Joseph’s ancestors—Francis, Duke of Lorraine—Francis II.—Leopold II.—Collaterals—The Spanish marriages of the Habsburgs—Their alliances with Portugal, the various Bourbons, and the Wittelsbachs of Bavaria—Moral and mental defects thus perpetuated and emphasised—Francis Joseph as the sane champion of a mad family.

The Habsburgs can be traced back to the seventh century before we lose them in the crowd of common men. The branch of the family to which the Emperor Francis Joseph belongs is that known as the House of Habsburg-Lorraine, founded by the marriage of the Empress Maria Theresa to Francis, Duke of Lorraine, in 1736; and the House of Lorraine has an independent genealogy, only less ancient and illustrious than that of Habsburg itself, being descended, through the House of Anjou, from Hugues Capet, the ancestor of the royal house of France. Anjou was given, in 1246, by Saint Louis, to his younger brother Charles, whose grand-daughter married her cousin, Charles de Valois; and the House of Anjou kept the Duchy of Lorraine until Francis abdicated on the occasion of his marriage, in favour of Stanilas Lecszinski, whose daughter married Louis XV.

This Francis seems to have been a mixed character, not entirely commendable. He is credited with virtue in his private life; but it is also related of him that he farmed taxes, lent money at usurious rates of interest, and acted as a kind of army contractor to Frederick the Great, at a time when that monarch was at war with Austria. He was the father of Marie-Antoinette, and also of the Emperors Joseph II. and Leopold II. Joseph left no issue, but Leopold, who married Marie-Louise, daughter of Charles III. of Spain, had a large family, only two members of which need be mentioned here:

1. Francis II., who became Emperor in 1792, and was on the throne when Napoleon broke up the Holy Roman Empire.

2. The Archduke John, whose romantic marriage with the daughter of a postmaster set a precedent for those morganatic unions which have recently become so frequent in the House of Habsburg.

Leopold II. is described by the historians as a benevolent despot—a reformer according to his lights—who displayed great intolerance in religious matters, and died young through the unbridled indulgence of his amorous proclivities. Francis II. is an Emperor of whom it would be necessary to speak evil at length, if he, and not his grandson, were the subject of this narrative: a double-faced and incompetent ruler, who needed all the help he got from Metternich; a petty domestic tyrant, who behaved abominably towards his daughter Marie-Louise, his son-in-law Napoleon, and his grandson the Duc de Reichstadt. How he deliberately threw Neipperg at his daughter’s head for the express purpose of undermining the affection which her husband had, to his disgust, inspired in her, is a story which belongs to other pages than these. Here we will merely note that he married four wives, and by the second of them—Marie-Thérèse-Caroline-Josephine de Bourbon—had two sons, who now concern us:—

1. The Emperor Ferdinand, who succeeded to the throne in 1835, but bowed his head before the storm and abdicated in 1848, though he did not die until 1875.

2. The Archduke Francis Charles, who, as Ferdinand had no children, should have succeeded him, but whom his wife, the Archduchess Sophie, daughter of Maximilian I. of Bavaria, persuaded to resign his rights in favour of his eldest son, the present Emperor, Francis Joseph.

That is all the genealogy which we need for the moment. It shows us the Habsburgs as a feeble folk—getting feebler as times got more tempestuous; and it also shows us Francis Joseph launched upon his stormy political career at the age of eighteen—launched upon it as the rising hope of a decadent family—a youth of energy and promise, with no sign of decadence about him, supple but strong, exempt, as far as could be judged, from the family taints of physique and character, and designed to restore the threatened dignity of the Austrian Empire, by confronting the new era in a new spirit. His accession will be our historical starting point; but, before we come to it, we must turn aside for a brief glance at some of those collateral ancestors whose traits, if there be anything in heredity, we may expect to see reappearing—not invariably, but here and there, and now and then—in their descendants, the Habsburgs of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The list of the allied houses includes, of course, practically the whole of Catholic Europe, and a portion of Protestant Europe as well. To attempt to review them all would be to lose oneself in an interminable maze; but the collateral sources of particular contamination can be noted, and we shall see house after house contributing—some of them only on one, but some of them on several occasions—its strain of madness to the great family with which it was its privilege to intermarry. We may begin with the House of Burgundy, and end with that of Bavaria, taking on our way the Houses of Spain, Portugal, Medicis, and Bourbon Parma.

Charles the Bold of Burgundy fell into a melancholy madness after his defeat by the Swiss at Morat, and died a madman. His daughter Marie, Duchess of Brabant and Countess of Flanders, married Archduke Maximilian of Austria, son of the Emperor Frederick IV. Their son, Philippe le Bel, married that daughter of Ferdinand of Arragon who is known to history as Joanna the Mad. Those are the unfavourable circumstances in which we see Habsburg blood introduced into the royal family of Spain; and the subsequent history of the family presents two features pertinent to our survey:—

1. A long series of degenerates among the Kings and Infants of Spain.

2. A long series of marriages between Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs.

No full account of the manifestations of the madness of Spanish rulers, Princes, and Princesses can be given here; they are too numerous, and also too gross for general reading. The briefest of summaries must suffice. Joanna the Mad travelled all over Spain with her husband’s coffin, wailing and lamenting, at the top of her shrill voice, whenever the funeral procession halted. Joanna’s son, the great Emperor Charles V., lived on the border-line which separates genius from insanity, and was, at any rate, an epileptic, like that Archduke Charles whose campaigns against Napoleon were punctuated by untimely fits. His son, Philip II.—known to English history as the husband of our Bloody Mary—is described by the historians as “half-mad”; and Philip’s brother Charles was notoriously a homicidal maniac. Philip III. was comparatively sane; but even he tried to poison his sister. Charles II. was nicknamed “the bewitched,” and was so afraid of the dark that three monks had to sit every night at his bedside, in order that he might sleep in peace. Philip V. was, for years, a bedridden imbecile; and Ferdinand VI. was a victim of religious melancholia, Etc. The catalogue is far from complete; but it may suffice as a preface to the statement that one finds eight or nine Spanish marriages in the Habsburg matrimonial annals.

One encounters a very similar list of lunatics in the annals of the royal House of Portugal; and with that house also the Habsburgs have again and again intermarried. The pathology of the Medicis and the multitudinous Italian Bourbons, whose blood also runs in the Habsburg veins, is hardly better; and it can scarcely have been in the expectation of introducing a healthier strain that they sought alliances with the Wittelsbachs of Bavaria. Sanity, in that house, is represented by the King who sacrificed his kingdom to the beautiful eyes of Lola Montez; madness by the Kings Louis and Otto, whose extravagances and eccentricities have been related in innumerable volumes of memoirs and newspaper articles, and who are Francis Joseph’s cousins.

Assuredly no Eugenist will assert that that heredity is good. On the contrary, the impression derived from a close examination of it is that of several strains of insanity and decadence converging, much in the way in which a multitude of Swiss mountain torrents converge to form the Rhone. But even that analogy is unduly favourable; for the sources from which fresh blood has been introduced into the family have not been indefinitely numerous. The same source has been tapped over and over again by the renewal of consanguineous marriages in one generation after another, with the result that the Habsburg type—with all its peculiar physical, mental, and moral characteristics—has been perpetuated and emphasised.

The physical characteristics were long ago recognised by the family itself with pride, and by outsiders with a curious wonder akin to envy and admiration. Napoleon so remarked it at the time of his betrothal to Marie-Louise, as M. Frédéric Masson relates:—

“When” (M. Masson writes) “Lejeune, who had just arrived from Vienna, showed him a sketch of the Archduchess which he had made at the theatre, ‘Ah!’ he exclaimed in delight, ‘I see she has the Austrian lip.’”

In Brantôme, again, we find a much earlier reference to the feature. He tells us how Eleanor of Austria, the wife of Francis I. of France, examined the sculptured tombs of her ancestors at Dijon; and he proceeds:—

“Some of the bodies were in so good a state of preservation that she could distinguish many of their features, and, among other things, the shapes of their mouths. Whereupon she suddenly exclaimed, ‘Ah! I always thought we got our mouths from our Austrian ancestors; but I now see that we get them from Marie of Burgundy and the other Burgundians. If ever I see my brother the Emperor I will tell him so. Indeed, I think I will write to him on the subject.’ The lady who informed me of this told me that the Queen spoke as one who took pride in the characteristic; wherein she was quite right.”

That this physical peculiarity was, in the case of the Habsburgs, the outward sign of mental and moral divergences from the healthy norm was evidently as little suspected by Napoleon as by Brantôme. It is the discovery of the students of a comparatively new science; and it is a discovery of which the biographer must be careful to make neither too little nor too much. Eugenics is not yet an exact science; and the laws of heredity remain obscure. They are laws, it would seem, which, though generally true, cannot be relied upon to operate in any particular way in any particular case. The life of a family almost invariably confirms them, whereas the life of an individual may often appear to confute them; and we may often see genius flowering on the same plant as insanity.

The history of the Habsburgs in general—and the life of Francis Joseph in particular—supports that view of the matter. The Archduke Charles, who was so nearly a match for Napoleon, and actually beat him at Aspern, was not a very distant relative of the Archduke Otto who used to dance in a Vienna café, attired only in a képi, a pair of gloves, and a sword-belt. The Archduchess Christina, who proved such an admirable mother to the little King of Spain—though she has transmitted a double portion of the Habsburg jaw to him—was no less a Habsburg than the Princess who so signally and so publicly failed to find happiness in the love of Signor Toselli. And so on, and so forth; for the contrasts of the kind to which one could point are endless. One is left with the impression that the family, taken as a family, is mad, but that certain isolated members of it have been as sane as the rest of us, and abler than the majority; and one needs the impression before one can justly appreciate the drama of Francis Joseph’s life.

He has stood before Europe, for more than sixty years, as the picked champion of the Habsburgs: picked not only for his ability, but also for his strength of character and conciliatory tact—for all those qualities, in short, which one looks for from a sane man in an exalted station. He started, as we have seen, under the burden of a singularly bad heredity; and he has carried that burden through life with patient endurance—and with an air of dignity—as if personally unconscious of the taint, while the lives of those nearest and dearest to him were furnishing undeniable proofs of it at every turn. He has shown himself, to conclude, the true head of the house, by nature as well as by pragmatic sanction.

So much made clear, we may proceed to chronicle the bald facts of his birth and childhood.

CHAPTER IV

Francis Joseph’s childhood—The severe education which prepared him for his rôle—Difficulties of that rôle—The Liberal revolt against the Metternich system—The idea of nationality—Hübner’s surprise that anyone should object to Austrian rule—Every Austrian a policeman at heart—The Italian rising of 1848—Francis Joseph in action—Radetzky’s remonstrances—Francis Joseph’s return to his studies.

Francis Joseph was born at Schönnbrunn on August 18, 1830. His father was the Archduke Francis Charles, and his mother the Archduchess Sophie, daughter of Maxmilian I. of Bavaria. He grew up and was educated in the period of peace between the two great revolutionary storms which shook Europe free from the Metternich system: a period which begins with Metternich supreme, and ends with Metternich in flight from an angry mob. He owed his throne, the steps of which he mounted, as a lad of eighteen, in the midst of the second epoch of turmoil, to his mother’s influence. She was an able and imperious woman; she made up her mind that her son would make a better Emperor than either her brother-in-law or her husband; she pulled the wires and got her way.

The boy’s education was thorough and practical: just the sort of education which he would have been given if his destiny had been in view from his birth. He was taught the whole duty of a soldier in each of the several branches of the service: to point a cannon as well as he could mount a horse; to dig a trench as well as he could handle a sabre or a rifle. He was also taken through complete courses of history, literature, mathematics, chemistry, astronomy, and natural history, instructed weekly in the maxims of statecraft by Metternich himself, and compelled to acquire innumerable modern languages: Hungarian, Czech, and Polish, as well as French, Italian, and, to a limited extent, English. It was an intellectual preparation which might easily have addled his brain, and does appear to have made him prematurely serious. Even before the troubles of his family compelled him to shoulder its responsibilities, he was remarked as being grave, earnest, and reserved: the good boy of his family, it was thought—and as clever as he was good.

Of course, there are anecdotes indicating that he loved his people—and, above all, loved his army—from his earliest years. The most famous of them shows him to us, moved to pity by the sight of a sentry sweltering in the August sun, stealing up behind him, and dropping a small coin into his cartridge-box, to the delight and admiration of his aged grandfather: a subject picture by Kriehuber keeps the memory of that incident alive. “Poor man! But now he is not a poor man any longer,” he is said to have said, jumping about with joy at the thought that he had made someone happy. Very likely it is true; very likely it is also true that he, who was soon to be one of the best horsemen in his dominions, began life with a horror of horses. Those about him knew what sort of a man they wanted him to be, and did their best to make him such a man. There was a regular Habsburg system of education, though not all the Habsburgs have done credit to it. The great Maria Theresa had laid it down that “they must not be coddled or spoiled”; and the Emperor Joseph had expressed similar sentiments in emphatic language:—

“It may be enough for one of my subjects to say that, whereas his son will be of service to the State if he is well educated, the neglect to educate him does not matter, as he will have no public functions to perform. The case of an Archduke—a possible heir to the throne—is very different. The most important of all public functions—the government of the State—is absolutely incumbent on him. The question, therefore, whether he is or is not well educated, is one which it should be impossible to raise. He must be well educated; for there is no branch of the administration in which he might not do infinite harm if he had not the necessary knowledge to cope with his task and were unprovided with fixed principles of conduct.”

It is a prescription as admirable as any to be found in the copy-book; though the rigid application of it has not prevented a good many Habsburgs from turning out, from the Habsburg point of view, badly. It is a call to every Habsburg in turn to “be a Habsburg,” in the sense in which George III.’s mother appealed to him to “be a King”; and it rests upon a conception of the House of Habsburg as a house specially and divinely called into being in order to practise the art of government in central Europe. One may almost say that it assumes a caste of anointed rulers differing from their subjects as angels differ from the children of men; but it stops short of the corollary that rulers are born, not made. It lays down, rather, that the caste, in order to retain and exalt its qualities as a caste, must always be specialising from infancy to age. In that way, and in that way alone, its members might dispense with genius.

On the whole, they have had to dispense with it: their figures do not tower above the figures of their ministers, like those of Alexander I. of Russia and Frederick the Great of Prussia. Metternich is not the only Austrian minister who has been infinitely greater than any of the Emperors whom he served. Not all of them, again, have continued to specialise a day after the compulsion of tutors was withdrawn. A great many of them, on the contrary—a constantly increasing number of them in these latter times—have openly revolted against every restriction which made the caste characteristic. But the caste has continued, buttressed by the system, an object of regard, and almost of veneration, thanks to certain model Habsburgs, who have consented to the restrictions, and profited by them. Francis Joseph steps on to the stage of history as such a one: a specialised Habsburg, approaching nearer to genius than the others, but also gifted with a tactful adaptability which has enabled him to realise that the dead past must be allowed to bury its dead from time to time. Let us indicate the political troubles which called him into activity.

The revolutions of 1830 had been, in the main, abortive: a symptom of general discontent, but not its complete and successful expression. The work done at the Resettlement of 1815 had been shaken by it, but had not, except here and there—in Belgium, for instance—been upset; and that resettlement had been planned in the interest of reigning houses, not of peoples. The reigning houses continued to sit on the safety valve; and the steam which was trying to find vent through the safety valve consisted of:—

• 1. Liberal ideas in general.
• 2. The idea of nationality in particular.

To both those groups of ideas the Austrian Government was bitterly opposed; with both of them it was to have trouble. Its political prisons were famous throughout Europe as the homes of distinguished men, and its subject populations seethed with discontent. The idea of nationality was particularly obnoxious to it because it did not itself repose upon a national basis. “Austria,” said Mazzini, with a gesture of disdain, “is not a country, but a bureaucracy”; and Austria was, in fact—what Metternich said that Italy was—a geographical ex-pression. It simply comprised the possessions of the House of Habsburg, which had, for generations, added field to field by means of prosperous marriages,[2] or accepted territory as the recompense of services rendered in war. The Emperor of Austria was also King of Hungary, King of Lombardy, King of Bohemia, etc., etc.: the head, as it were, of an ancient firm formed to carry on the general purposes of government in central Europe, and regarding men and women merely as material to be governed.

[2] The idea was set forth in the famous hexameter line: Bella gerant alii: tu, felix Austria, nube.

The system had its advantages—it kept the peace provisionally in what might otherwise have been one of the cockpits of Europe. That was what the French diplomatist meant when he said that, if the Austrian Empire had not existed it would have been necessary to invent it. But it was not popular, and it tended to make every Austrian statesman a policeman at heart. Even Metternich was a policeman at heart: a policeman of genius—a policeman of wide culture and charming manners—but still a policeman. He and his subordinates simply could not understand that people of other races might object to being policed by Germans. The Germans, they considered, were the best policemen in the world; and that should be an end of the matter. Count Hübner—a most intelligent Austrian—threw up his hands in amazement at the obstinate prevalence of the contrary opinion:—

“To-day” (we find him writing in his diary) “the magic word which moves the masses—not the proletariate, but the intelligent public—is nationality. Germans, Italians, Poles, Magyars, Slavs! It is a formula capable of throwing the universe off its hinges—the lever which Archimedes sought in vain. The ringleaders have discovered it. With this lever they have, in the course of a few days, upset the old social system, and dazzled the eyes of the purblind with the deceptive promise of the perpetual happiness of the human race.”

The peoples of central Europe, in Hübner’s opinion, should have been as proud of their subjection to the House of Habsburg as the domestic servants whom Thackeray met on the top of the coach were of their position as the flunkeys of the Duke of Richmond. Italian national aspirations, in particular, seemed to him merely comical. He derided the Italians as mongrels—a medley of Gauls, Celts, Goths, Germans, Greeks, Normans, and Arabs; he recalled the internecine strife which had raged among their Republics in the Middle Ages. He comforted himself with the reflection that they spoke different dialects in different parts of the Peninsula, and he concluded: “I cannot believe in a United Italy.”

Yet Italy was being united—and the Austrian Empire was apparently crumbling into its component parts—at the moment when he wrote, in July, 1848. Already, from the beginning of that year, anxiety had been widespread; and, in February, events in France had given a signal of unmistakable significance. “If Guizot falls,” Mélanie Metternich exclaimed, “then we are all lost.” Guizot did fall; and Louis-Philippe fell with him. The news reached Vienna; and it seemed as if Austria was in the melting-pot, though the trouble began, not in Vienna, but at Milan, where an Archduke reigned as Viceroy, and that sturdy octogenarian Radetzky commanded the army of occupation.

Charles Albert, King of Sardinia—the great-grandfather of the present King of Italy—had promised to be “the sword of Italy,” on one condition. He would not collaborate with mere conspirators, but if there were an insurrection he would march to the aid of the insurgents. His terms were accepted, and there was a riot which became a revolution, though, in its inception, it presented some of the distinguishing characteristics of comic opera.

The revolutionists began by decreeing that as the Austrian Government depended largely for its revenues on the tobacco monopoly, no one in Italy should smoke. Austrian soldiers retorted by swaggering through the streets of Milan, smoking several cigars at once. Female patriots knocked the cigars out of their mouths, and pelted them from the house-tops with flower-pots and other missiles; while male patriots, armed with various weapons, molested them in other ways. There was street fighting, and there were killed and wounded. The patriots were many; the garrison was small; Charles Albert was known to be coming. Radetzky had no choice but to withdraw his troops within the famous Quadrilateral of Fortresses, leaving the provisional government set up by the revolutionists in possession. It seemed to the sapient Hübner a case of black ingratitude towards the admirable Austrian police.

But Austria was not, this time, to be beaten. Within the Quadrilateral Radetzky was safe; and, in due course, he marched out and defeated Charles Albert at Custozza. Few reinforcements had reached him, but they sufficed; and among the officers who came to serve under him was included Francis Joseph—not yet eighteen years of age. It was his first appearance in the field; and Radetzky was not particularly glad to see him. The scene which passed between the stripling and the veteran is best described in the Life of Radetzky included in General Ambert’s Cinq Epées:—

“Radetzky addressed the new arrival in peremptory military language. ‘Imperial Highness,’ he said, ‘your presence here is exceedingly embarrassing for me. Consider my responsibility in case anything should happen to you! If you should be taken prisoner, for instance, the accident would annihilate at a stroke any advantage which the Austrian army might have gained.’ ‘Marshal,’ replied Francis Joseph, ‘it is quite possible that it was unwise to send me here; but, as I am here, honour forbids me to depart without facing the enemy’s fire’; and his eyes filled with tears as he spoke.

“No objection could be taken to an explanation so simple and gallant; and it was agreed that the Archduke should take part in the next battle, which was fought a few days later (the battle of May 6, at Santa Lucia). Here are the precise words of the report, addressed by Radetzky, immediately after that sanguinary struggle, to the Minister of War: ‘I was myself an eye-witness of the intrepidity displayed by the Archduke, when one of the enemy’s shells burst quite close to him.’”

“Austria does not lack Archdukes,” he said gallantly, when implored not to expose himself to danger; but his battle was only of the nature of a holiday treat. He was still in statu pupillari—occupied with the severe studies by which he was preparing himself for his great rôle; and when he had done enough for honour, he returned to them. It was then, or soon afterwards, that he was confidentially informed of the great trust about to be reposed in him; but the intimation neither puffed him up with pride nor disturbed his diligence. He brought out his books again—immense tomes dealing with Roman, civil, criminal, and canonical law—and resumed his reading, almost as if everything depended upon his passing an examination in high honours. Not if he could help it should the arrival of his hour find him unready for it.

And his hour was near, for the times were critical. Trouble at home had followed hard on the heels of the trouble in Lombardy, and, being more complicated, had been more difficult to deal with.

CHAPTER V

The risings of 1848—Princess Mélanie Metternich’s excited account of it—Disorderly flight of Metternich from Vienna—The House of Habsburg saved by “three mutinous soldiers”—Abdication of the Emperor Ferdinand in favour of his nephew, Francis Joseph—Hübner’s description of the ceremony.

If we want to look at the disturbances which broke up the old order in Austria through contemporary eyes, our most helpful document will be the Diary of Metternich’s wife, Princess Mélanie—so called, tout court, as an indication that she ranked, like the Archduchesses, as one of the Olympian goddesses of Viennese Society. One seems, as one reads it, to be listening to the shrieks of a fluttered bird; for Princess Mélanie understood as little as a bird would have understood, the true significance of the uprising. Sheer wantonness was, for her, the sole motive of the revolutionists; black ingratitude towards good rulers was their distinguishing characteristic; and the outcome of the agitation could only be “the end of all.” All that because the students and the artisans had announced that they desired a “Constitution.”

Already we have seen Princess Mélanie predicting that, if Guizot fell, all was lost; and, after the events of February, 1848, in Paris, she saw horrors accumulating on horror’s head:—

“Poor Germany is already in a blaze. Never were times graver or more solemn. Every hour brings forth a fresh event, and fresh troubles are perpetually being added to those already in existence.”

All the thrones in Germany were, in truth, being shaken, though they were all eventually to recover; and now the privileges of the Austrian throne itself were being challenged:—

“Kossuth has moved a resolution which the Chamber of Deputies has approved. These people actually demand nothing less than a Constitution for Austria!... The agitation is general, and the terror is great. People are so alarmed—especially the great financiers—that they propose concessions to the popular demand, and see no chance of safety except in making them. One would say that Hell had broken loose. God alone can dam the torrent which threatens to swallow up everything.”

At first, the trouble was confined to Hungary; but the contagion spread:—

“Here, too, the public is very much disposed to ask for a Constitution, and our various provincial assemblies are beginning to pass the most regrettable resolutions. May God enlighten us and give us the strength to be firm! That is all that I pray for.”

And then:—

“The news from Germany gets worse and worse. There no longer is any Germany in the true sense of the word, for all the German sovereigns have been compelled to make concessions.... One really needs superhuman moral force to withstand this popular agitation.”

So the trouble came nearer and nearer; and it became clear that Metternich himself was the object of popular hostility. Threatening letters were received. A piece of paper was found affixed to Metternich’s door, bearing the words: “Down with Metternich. We want concessions!” Princess Mélanie herself received a significant warning, at one of her own receptions, from Félicie Esterhazy:—

“She let fall the following laconic remark: ‘Is it true that you are going away to-morrow?’ ‘Why?’ I asked her. ‘Because we were told that we had better buy candles in order to be able to illuminate to-morrow, as a great event was about to happen.’”

A great event did happen on the morrow—though not the event which Félicie Esterhazy had in view; and Princess Mélanie witnessed it. She saw a demonstration on the Ballplatz, and heard an agitator, lifted on to the shoulders of his companions, shouting:—

“Long live the imperial house! We want concessions in conformity with the spirit of the times (cheers). Give us freedom of the press (cheers); let justice be administered publicly (cheers); let there be freedom of thought (cheers)! Let those who have outlived their usefulness resign and go (tremendous acclamations)!”

And Princess Mélanie complains that “no one interfered with this indecent demonstration,” and that “no one attempted to silence the brawlers.”

She called the demonstrations “indecent” because they were obviously aimed at her husband, who, far more than the Emperor, symbolised that ancien régime which the students and artisans were resolved to end. The Emperor, indeed, was merely a weak-minded, good-natured old gentleman to whom no one wished any harm. He was as ready to grant concessions as to give alms; and his subjects knew it, cheered him when he drove through the streets, and decorated their barricades with his portraits. Their objection was not to him, but to his police, who took Princess Mélanie’s old-fashioned view of concessions: notably, therefore, to Metternich, the policeman of genius.

It was idle for Metternich to protest, as he sometimes did, in after years, that, though he might sometimes have governed Europe, he certainly had never governed Austria. The people knew—or thought that they knew—better. The chief article in their simple creed was that Metternich must go; and the sole question for Ferdinand and his Court and Ministers was whether Metternich should or should not be thrown overboard as a Jonah who brought ill luck to the Austrian ship of state. The upshot appears from these entries in Princess Mélanie’s Journal:—

“At half-past six, Clement was sent for to the Palace.”

“Yes, Clement has resigned.”

The circumstances of the interview in which he did so were afterwards related by him to Hübner:—

“The Archduke Louis came to me and said: ‘These gentlemen tell me that, if you could make up your mind to resign, order could be re-established.’ I asked, ‘What is it that your Highness desires me to do?’ He replied, ‘It is for you to decide what to do.’ Thereupon I instantly resigned the office of Chancellor, and went into the adjoining apartment to inform the Delegates of the States that I had done so. One of these gentlemen spoke of generosity, and said that my resignation put a worthy coping-stone upon a long career. ‘No, no,’ I said. ‘It is merely a concession to the revolution.’”

But he not only had to quit office; he also had to leave Vienna, where his life, in spite of his resignation, was not safe. He could not even leave at his leisure, but had to depart in a hurry without packing, dining with his friends, the Taaffes, and then driving off, in great haste, to Feldsberg, whence he made his way through Germany and Holland to England, where he landed just in time for his son Richard to be sworn in as a special constable, and bludgeon the Chartists, shoulder to shoulder with the future Napoleon III. The fluttered Diary records it all in a succession of shrill screams: What has Metternich—once the policeman of Europe—done to deserve such treatment! How black is the ingratitude of man! But Princess Mélanie might as well have exclaimed against the black ingratitude of water, which, under the exciting influence of heat, expands into steam, and blows up the man who sits on the safety-valve, without the least regard to his personal charm and intellectual culture.

So ironical is fate; and there was a still more cruel irony in the fact that the House of Habsburg, which owed so much to Metternich, seemed rather relieved to be rid of him, regarding his policy as an asset but his personality as an incubus. Alone among the members of the Imperial House, Francis Joseph’s mother remembered to write a polite letter, inquiring how he was getting on, and confiding to him the hopes which were concentrated in her son, his political pupil:—

“My poor Franzi has been my sole consolation in our hours of trouble. In the midst of my anguish and despair, I have continued to bless God for giving me such a boy. His courage, his firmness, his judgment have been unshaken—altogether beyond what one would expect from a lad of his age—and have encouraged the hope that God will grant him a great career, since He has given him the strength to face all the risks of life.”

But though the Archduchess Sophie wrote in that charming vein, she was herself one of those who had agreed that Metternich had better be sacrificed, as he was so inconveniently unpopular; and Metternich replied, not without a sense of bitterness, that he thought very highly of Francis Joseph, and had a great affection for him, and was quite confident that he would succeed in life as well as his mother could wish, if only he remembered and applied the maxims of statecraft which he himself had taught him. But he also, at the same time, chuckled through his tears, observing that the jettisoning of the Jonah did not seem to have saved the ship.

For order did not yet reign in Vienna; on the contrary, the revolution was going from bad to worse, and the Court had to leave the capital. First it went to loyal Innsbruck, in loyal Tyrol—whence Francis Joseph paid his visit, already mentioned, to the Army of Italy. Then it returned, under the illusion that things were going better; and then it went off again to Olmütz. Hungary and Bohemia, as well as Italy, were in open rebellion; and Vienna continued to throw up barricades from time to time. Unwelcome Ministers were forced on the Emperor, made concessions, and then gave place to others who promised still more concessions. The conditions of 1789, said the people who knew history, were giving place to the conditions of 1793. At any moment they might expect to see the guillotine “going always,” and the Emperor’s head rolling from the block into a basket.

Nor did the House of Habsburg, in that dark hour, save itself. On the contrary. “The monarchy,” as Felix Schwarzenberg put it, “was saved by three mutinous soldiers”: Radetzky, the octogenarian who would not grow old; Alfred von Windischgraetz, the unbending aristocrat, who was vastly more imperialist than the Emperor; Jellaçiç, the swaggering and self-sufficient Ban of Croatia. They agreed, to put it bluntly, that the Emperor Ferdinand was an old fool who had been bounced by his Ministers into giving orders which it behoved them to disobey. So Radetzky, being ordered to evacuate Lombardy, remained there; and Windischgraetz, being ordered to hold a portion of his forces at the disposition of the War Minister, replied that he could not spare them; and Jellaçiç, being dismissed from his command, refused to give it up. In that way, they collared the situation and saved it.

The Hungarians, marching on Vienna, were met by Jellaçiç and driven back. Windischgraetz, after first putting down the rising in Bohemia, marched down to Vienna and laid siege to it. Radetzky reinforced him, and then the end was near. Windischgraetz, in truth, had other reasons besides his loyalty to make him furious. His own wife had been one of the victims of the insurrection—shot while she stood at an open window to watch the rioting; so that it was not in the least likely that he would hesitate to shoot, or allow the insurgents to surrender otherwise than at discretion. First, therefore, he bombarded Vienna; and then he forced the gates and stormed the barricades. There was a certain show of resistance, but then, after a few military executions, order did really reign, and the House of Habsburg was really saved, except in so far as the Hungarians were still a menace to it. And the Emperor Ferdinand’s first act, when his safety was assured, was to abdicate in favour of his nephew, Francis Joseph.

It was an abdication which had, long since, been contemplated, and even arranged. Metternich, the Empress, and the Archduchess Sophie had put their heads together and settled it. None of them had any illusions about the Emperor, and it does not appear that the Emperor had any illusions about himself. None the less, the secret had been well kept. Hübner, Schwarzenberg, and Windischgraetz were the only people who knew what was going to happen, or for what purpose the members of the royal family, and the functionaries connected with the Court, were suddenly summoned to assemble in the imperial residence at Olmütz at eight o’clock in the morning:—

“At half-past seven” (writes Hübner, whose function it was to take the minutes of the meeting) “the apartments adjoining the throne room were gorgeous with civil and military uniforms. There were present all the Archdukes and Archduchesses, with their ladies and gentlemen in waiting, the Canons of the Chapter of Olmütz, and a few ladies belonging to the aristocracy. Intense curiosity was imprinted on every countenance. The most remarkable guesses passed from mouth to mouth at this brilliant gathering, but—strange to say—no one guessed the truth. The Archduke Maximilian asked me what it was all about. The Archduke Ferdinand of Este addressed the same question to the War Minister, and received, as did the brother of the future Emperor, an evasive answer.”

Soon the proceedings began:—

“Punctually at eight o’clock, the folding doors of the throne-room were thrown open to give admission to the Archdukes Maximilian, Charles Louis, and Ferdinand of Este, to the Archduchesses Maria Dorothea, widow of the Archduke Joseph, and Elizabeth, wife of the Archduke Ferdinand, to the Ministers, to Marshal Windischgraetz, to the Ban of Croatia, and to Count Grunne, Master of the Horse of the Archduke Francis Joseph.... When the door was closed on us, their Majesties, followed by the Landgrave Frederick of Furstenberg, Prince Lobkowitz, the Emperor’s aide-de-camp, and the Landgravine of Furstenberg, grand mistress to the Empress, together with the Archduke Francis Charles, the Archduchess Sophia, and their son, the Archduke Francis Joseph, entered. Their Majesties took their places on two armchairs in front of the throne, and the Archdukes and Archduchesses took theirs on chairs arranged in the form of a rectangle on either side of the throne. The Ministers, Marshal Windischgraetz, and Ban Jellaçiç stood facing the Emperor. There was a deep and solemn silence.”

The silence was broken by the Emperor himself, reading the statement prepared for him: the simple statement that important considerations had decided him to transmit his crown to his nephew. Then it was the turn of Felix Schwarzenberg. Ordinarily an impassive man, he now read, in a voice shaking with emotion, the three documents which gave legal validity to the transaction: the declaration that Francis Joseph had attained his majority; the declaration that Francis Joseph’s father renounced his own rights in his son’s favour; the Emperor’s formal act of abdication. One after the other, the three documents were signed by those whom they concerned; and Francis Joseph knelt—for the last time—to Ferdinand, to receive his blessing.

Sei brav, es ist gerne geschehen, were Ferdinand’s words. Literally it means: “Be good; I did it willingly.” Practically it meant: “Never mind me. I don’t feel hurt in the least. On the contrary, I’m well out of it.” He ceased, and the retiring Empress embraced the boy Emperor. According to Hübner, the Archduchesses sobbed aloud, and there was not a dry eye in the room; and while the eyes of the company were still moist, the door was once more opened, and the courtiers, assembled in the ante-chamber, were informed of what had passed. That done, Francis Joseph rode out to review the troops, and receive their acclamations; while the Emperor Ferdinand and the Empress Marianna quietly took the afternoon train to Prague.

Thus the change was effected, quite simply, and almost without ceremony. It almost looks as though everything was done in a hurry, so that no one might have time to question the wisdom of doing it. “Farewell to my youth!” said Francis Joseph when, addressed for the first time as “Your Majesty,” he realised the change in his condition, and the responsibilities to which he was committed, so soon after his eighteenth birthday. But he had never known what it was to be young, as boys of humbler station know it; and his opportunities of unbending, as some monarchs unbend, were to be few. He was the sole hope of the Habsburgs; he had to shoulder the whole burden of the Habsburgs; and he was to find it heavy. Princess Mélanie, when the news of his accession reached her, trembled for him:

“How is an Emperor of eighteen years of age to steer his course amid such conflicting currents? I shudder when I think of him—the last hope which now remains to us. May God bless him, and give him energy, while giving his counsellors the wisdom which they will need!”

The grounds of her anxiety—particular as well as general—appear on the same page of her Diary:

“They tell me that a Republic has been proclaimed in Hungary, with Kossuth as Dictator.”

Which meant that Ferdinand had indeed reason to regard himself as “well out of it,” and that Francis Joseph had not ascended an undisputed throne, but one for the defence of which he would have to fight desperately hard.

CHAPTER VI

Attitude of the Hungarians towards Francis Joseph—They denounce him as a traitor, and banish him from Hungary—Contempt of Austrians for Hungarians—The conquest of Hungary with Russian help—Repression and atrocities—Women flogged by order of Marshal Haynau—Marshal Haynau himself flogged by Barclay and Perkins’ draymen in London, and spat upon by women in Brussels—Popular song written on that occasion.

The state of things which Francis Joseph found on his accession was this: In Vienna, all was over except the shooting and the shouting. Tyrol—the Vendée of Austria—was, as it always had been, loyal. In Bohemia, Windischgraetz had crushed the insurrection as he might have cracked a nut. But Italy and Hungary were still formidable, and had to be reconquered.

In Italy there was a renewal of the fighting; and the work done at Custozza had to be done over again at Novara—Charles Albert then taking a leaf out of the book of the Emperor Ferdinand and abdicating in favour of his son, the famous Victor Emmanuel. In Hungary, the work of conquest had hardly even been begun; and though Jellaçiç had held the Hungarians up at the gates of Vienna, they were in a position to hold him up many times before he could get to the gates of Buda-Pesth. So that the position was extremely critical.

It had been hastily assumed that Francis Joseph would be popular in Hungary. He had once been sent there, as a boy, to represent the Emperor at some public function, had made a fluent speech in the Hungarian language, and had been vociferously cheered. No doubt the precocious bonhomie of his manner had made a favourable impression; but that was not enough at a time when the old Hungarian privileges and the new Hungarian constitution were at issue. The affability of the sovereign was no substitute for the rights of his subjects; and the Hungarians would only consent to love, and be loyal to, the Austrian Emperor “on terms.”

And those terms could not be granted. Francis Joseph, brought up in the school of Metternich, would hardly have been disposed to grant them if his hands had been free; and the men who stood by him—and over him—such men as Windischgraetz and Felix Schwarzenberg—would not have let him grant them if he had wanted to. As they had already saved Vienna for him, so they now proposed to save Austria and Hungary for him—but in their own way, and not in his. Knowing what they wanted, they told him what he wanted; and they had control of the machinery. In order to understand their proceedings, we must define their attitude, noting that they were, in the first place, aristocrats, and, in the second place, Teutons.

THE EMPEROR FRANCIS JOSEPH AT THE TIME OF HIS ACCESSION IN 1848.

As aristocrats, they held that, as Windischgraetz put it, “mankind begins with the baron,” and that no men except the nobly born had any rights which it was proper to take seriously—that they themselves belonged, in short, to a divinely designated ruling caste. As Teutons they regarded themselves as belonging to a divinely designated ruling race—the natural superiors of Italians, Hungarians, and Croats. Their conception of a sound imperial policy was, therefore, to employ the Hungarians to cut the throats of the Italians, and the Croats to cut the throats of the Hungarians; while they, directing operations, unified and Germanised the Empire.

The Hungarians, however, were a stubborn race who had no desire to be Germanised. They were, they urged, an independent people whose relations to the Habsburgs were defined by the Statutes of 1723; and they should not recognise Francis Joseph as their ruler until he had been crowned by their Archbishop at Pesth, and had sworn to obey the laws of the Kingdom of St. Stephen. That was the reply which they flung in Francis Joseph’s teeth when he issued a proclamation indicating his intention to “unite all the countries and tribes of the monarchy into one integral State.” Hungary, they maintained, was not part of a State, but a State in itself, and should remain one. The Habsburgs, in trying to incorporate them in Austria, were “traitors to the liberties of Hungary,” and should be banished from Hungarian soil for evermore. On those pleas issue was joined, and the Hungarian war of 1849 began.

It is one of the forgotten wars of European history: a particularly savage war, and one of which the issue hung for a long time in the balance. The heroic Georgei, whose name was then a household word, proved himself very nearly a match for the swaggering Ban of Croatia; and it looked, for a time, as though, even if Francis Joseph did reconquer his Kingdom, the days of Austria as a first-class Power were numbered. Palmerston, for one, thought so, and said so, declaring, in the House of Commons, that “if, the war being fought out to the uttermost, Hungary should, by superior forces, be utterly crushed, Austria, in that battle, will have crushed her own right arm.”

But Palmerston was wrong; and Austria, neither for the first nor for the last time in her history, defeated the predictions of the prophets. She has been called the Sick Woman, as Turkey used to be called the Sick Man, of Europe; but the Sick Woman has had a wonderfully elastic constitution, and has been wonderfully favoured by the chapter of accidents. Again and again in her history we have a vision of disjecta membra re-attaching themselves, as it were, to the disabled trunk, so that it could once more get up and walk. It was so in 1849, when, the Poles having risen to help the Hungarians, the Russians, knowing what they themselves might have to fear from victorious Poles, crossed the frontier to Francis Joseph’s rescue. That accident—happy or unhappy as one likes to regard it—turned the scale in the nick of time; and the rest was butchery, akin to that of the White Terror in France, but worse—a blood bath which scandalised Europe: the campaign of Haynau—called the Hyaena because of his grim chuckles at the sufferings which he caused—against the defenceless.

Certain excesses had been committed, in the early days of the revolutionary excitement—the War Minister, Latour, among others, had fallen a victim to mob violence. Those excesses were now avenged, not merely on the mob, but on the middle classes and on the Magnates. Croatian soldiers were turned loose on Hungarian towns, with a free hand to loot and ravish. Hungarian officers—officers who were also noblemen—were impressed as private soldiers, and placed in Austrian regiments, with the deliberate purpose of breaking their spirits. That was the treatment meted out even to some members of the great Hungarian houses of Esterhazy and Batthyany; and a Baron Podanitzky, who had been impressed in the artillery, was actually flogged in the streets of a Hungarian town on some absurd charge of having lost part of a bag of corn entrusted to his care.

Even women were flogged. Here is the deposition of one of them, published at the time in every newspaper in Europe—the truth of the story being confirmed, after inquiry on the spot, by the special correspondent of The Times:—

“Some imperialist troops entered Ruskby. It is probable that my enviable family happiness had created enemies at Ruskby, and that they were resolved to destroy it, for I am not aware that any of us had committed any fault. I was suddenly, without a previous trial or examination, taken from my husband and children. I was dragged into a square formed by the troops, and in the place in which I reside, and in the presence of its population, which had been accustomed to honour me, not because I was the Lady of the Manor, but because the whole tenor of my life deserved it, I was flogged with rods. You see I can write the words without dying of shame; but my husband took his own life. Deprived of all other weapons, he shot himself with a small cannon.”

The story was contradicted, on the ground that no such place as Ruskby could be found on the map; but the only error was the printer’s. The scene of the outrage was Ruskberg. The punishment was inflicted by the orders of a Captain Graber; and its victim was Mme. de Madersbach, the widow of a partner in the ironworks of Hoffmann and Madersbach. It was, of course, only one of the informal, and, as it were, accidental outrages. The formal outrages took the form of military executions. Generals and Colonels of the Hungarian Army, and Members of the Hungarian Chamber of Deputies were put to death—some of them hanged and others shot—until hardly one of them was left; and most of those who were left were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment in irons; while diplomatic machinery was set in motion—happily in vain—to obtain the extradition of the few fugitives who had succeeded in taking refuge with the Turks. The demand for their surrender, addressed to the Sultan, on behalf of the Austrians, by the Tsar, gave the Moslem an opportunity which he did not miss of administering a rebuke to the Christian:

“Your adjutant” (the Sultan wrote), “has demanded the extradition of the Hungarian refugees. The demand being made to excite hate against yourself as well as against me, I desire Your Majesty will not insist on carrying that point.”

The most cruel of all the cruelties—the one, at all events, which made the greatest stir in the world—was the execution of Louis Batthyany, some time Prime Minister of Hungary. He was the grandson of the Batthyany who had saved the great Maria Theresa, when Frederick the Great chased her on to Hungarian soil, raising the cry—it was raised in Latin—Moriamur pro rege nostro; but the memory of that great service did not save him; and Countess Marie Larisch’s statement, in “My Past,” that “he eluded the executioner by poisoning himself in prison,” is incorrect. He attempted to cut his throat with a blunt penknife, and failed; and was only shot, instead of hanged, because the dragging of a wounded man to the gibbet might have made too great a scandal. His widow made his son swear an oath that never, in any circumstances, would he speak to Francis Joseph, or in any way acknowledge his existence; and the handsome young Elemar Batthyany kept his oath, and long years afterwards used to cut the Emperor in the hunting field, while making love to the Empress behind his back.

If one could hold Francis Joseph personally responsible for these atrocities, one would, indeed, have to regard him as a sinister youth who has since grown into a sinister old man. One must hope, on the contrary—and one may fairly hope, as he was less than nineteen at the time—that he was only the dummy of a sanguinary camarilla, and the obedient son of a hard-hearted, ambitious, and self-righteous mother. But he assumed the posture of a sinister youth, whether he assumed it consciously or not, by refusing mercy even when mothers, who had succeeded in obtaining audience, knelt weeping at his feet, and pleaded for the lives of their sons, and replying cynically to a remonstrance against Louis Batthyany’s execution that “the Imperial word had been pledged that every Austrian subject without distinction should be equal in the eye of the law.” So that the Vienna correspondent of the Kölner Zeitung wrote:—

“Hanging and shooting—shooting and hanging. Such is at present the manner in which the men in power say good morning and good night to the nations of Austria. The strong hand in Austria is a bloody hand, and the slaughter once begun is so tempting that our rulers cannot think of leaving off. The whole of the civilised world protests against the present doings in Hungary. Schwarzenberg and his fellows cause public opinion to extend its imprecation to a greater person—to the Emperor whom the people ought not to be taught to associate with cruelties and deeds of blood, violence, and vengeance. Under the absolute government of former times, the people of Austria were fond of their Emperor; for whatever they suffered they threw the blame on the aristocracy and the bureaucracy. They said: ‘If the Emperor could but know of it, he would help us.’ At present nobody thinks of saying such a thing. They say, ‘The Emperor knows it and he does it.’”

Cynicism reached its height—one cannot say whether it was Francis Joseph’s own cynicism or not—in the attempt to maintain the gaiety of the Court in the midst of this Reign of Terror. As Baroness von Beck puts it:—

“Ball followed ball, soirées were announced, and assemblies were held, but Rachel wept still for her children, and refused to be comforted. The Lloyd published day after day the most magniloquent reports of the Court festivals, long lists of the beauties who assisted at them, descriptions of the gorgeous costumes with which they were adorned; but they were read without any emotion. It would not do; the city was in mourning; such fantastic attempts at mirth were out of season. They jarred upon the public feeling. If they ever won a moment of public approbation, it was like a smile upon a widow’s countenance, speedily followed by a blush of reproach at her momentary forgetfulness of the one great sorrow.”

When the Archduchess Sophia drove out, in fact, the common people often surrounded her carriage, in order to shout the names of the murdered Hungarians in her ear; and Countess Karolyi, whose son had been one of the victims of the repression, cursed Francis Joseph in scathing words which seem to sum up all the possibilities of human hate:—

“May Heaven and Hell blast his happiness! May his family be exterminated! May he be smitten in the persons of those he loves! May his life be wrecked, and may his children be brought to ruin!”

A memorable curse truly, and one which one might, if one chose, take for the text of this biography, showing how time has brought the fulfilment of it, drawing the punishment out slowly, relentlessly, unceasingly. The tragedy of the Square of Queretaro, where Francis Joseph’s brother faced a firing party of Republican executioners; the tragedy of the Vatican, where his sister-in-law lost her reason; the tragedy of Meyerling, where his only son perished in his shame; the tragedy of Geneva, where his wife was struck down by the dagger of the assassin—all these things, and many others also, might be represented as so many stages in the untiring and undeviating march of Nemesis—fulfilments of the curse, and illustrations of the familiar lines:—

Raro antecedentem scelestum Deseruit pede poena claudo.

Perhaps; but, if Francis Joseph’s punishment was to come slowly, that of his instrument, Marshal Haynau, was to come quickly.

The day soon arrived when the Emperor realised that he must break his instrument. The butchery could not go on for ever, and the butcher—this Hyaena of Brescia—could not always be kept in evidence. When he had served his purpose, he must go. So his command was withdrawn from him; and he retired into private life, and went upon his travels. His travels took him to London, whither his reputation had preceded him. He called upon the banker Rothschild, who gave him an introduction to the brewers Barclay and Perkins, whose brewery he had expressed a desire to “go over.”

Whether the banker deliberately set a trap for a hyaena or merely wished to oblige a client remains uncertain, even after a careful perusal of the letters of explanation which he sent to The Times. What is quite certain is that the draymen employed by Messrs. Barclay and Perkins knew that Haynau was coming, knew that he was responsible for the public flogging of women, and resolved to deal with him accordingly. Hardly had the brewery gates closed on him, when a truss of straw fell on his head from above, and then the trouble began.

A coherent account of the adventure might be difficult to give; but there are certain details of it concerning which all the witnesses are agreed. Marshal Haynau was beaten with rods, as his victims had been beaten, and some of the rods were broken across his back. He fled for refuge into a dustbin, and was pulled out of it by the beard. Somehow or other, he escaped from the brewery and ran like a hare down the street; but he was caught, knocked over, and dragged along the ground by his fierce moustaches. A woman threw a pair of scissors out of the window of an upper chamber, appealing to the men to cut those moustaches off. Ultimately he ran into a public house, and there managed to evade his pursuers until the police delivered him.

The story was a nine days’ wonder. The Times arose in its majesty and rebuked the draymen for their presumption in imagining that the misdeeds of people of importance were any concern of theirs; and The Times might as well have rebuked a volcano for forgetting its dignity and giving way to eruptions. The general sentiment found expression in a public meeting—also reported by The Times—whereat a vote of thanks to the draymen was carried unanimously, and Messrs. Barclay and Perkins themselves were warned that, if any one of their employees was punished for his part in the transaction, no British workman, from Land’s End to John o’ Groat’s House, would ever again drink a glass of Barclay and Perkins’s beer.

Then the writers of popular songs took the matter up, and this sort of thing was circulated on broad-sheets:—

There was an Austrian General strong,

Who flogged the ladies with a thong;

He had a beard twelve inches long,

His name was Marshal Haynau.

He from his country had to run:

He loved the knife, the cat, the gun,

And cruel deeds of late was done

By this old Marshal Haynau.

From Barclay’s brew-house he did scout;

The women bawled, the men did shout;

His hat fell off, and his shirt hung out,

Oh, poor old Marshal Haynau!

At length he found a place to hide,

All at the George by Bankside,

But not till they’d well tann’d his hide,—

Barclay and Perkins’s draymen.

Then for Barclay’s men we’ll give a cheer.

May they live long to brew our beer!

And from their masters nothing fear,—

Barclay and Perkins’s draymen.

Nor was it in England only that Marshal Haynau was visited by public opprobrium. His offences were still remembered, two years afterwards, when he ventured to visit Brussels. There also, at the Vauxhall Gardens, the police had to protect him from the mob; and public opinion did not allow the punishment of the women who spat in his face in public, hissing at him the word “Hyaena.” So intensely had the Austrian excesses stirred the indignation of Europe; and the only way in which Francis Joseph was able to express his resentment at the rough handling of the butcher who had done his dirty work was by refusing to send a representative to London to attend the funeral of the Duke of Wellington.

CHAPTER VII

Why Francis Joseph was called “The child of the gallows”—His affront to Napoleon III. and its consequences—The Bach system and the objections to it—Francis Joseph’s bonhomie—The attempt on his life—Impressions formed of him by the King of the Belgians, and Lady Westmorland—The story of his romantic marriage.

It is a curious fact that Francis Joseph, who was to find the hangman so much work to do, was given, at his birth, the nickname of “the child of the gallows.”

The story is that his mother, in the later days of her confinement, threw the scalding contents of a coffee-cup in her husband’s face, and declared that she could be safely delivered of a child on one condition only—that a free pardon were granted to some criminal lying under sentence of death; and there was nothing for it but to satisfy her whim. The only Austrian subject fulfilling the conditions was clearly guilty of the blackest crimes; but he was let out of prison, to his amazement, at the hysterical request of the Archduchess Sophia, whose bowels of compassion then closed, never to be reopened.

Assuredly neither she nor anyone else prompted her son to compassion when Italy and Hungary lay helpless at his feet. The clemency accorded to a vulgar criminal was not to be extended to political offenders until the heads of all the tallest poppies had been cut off for the greater glory of the Habsburgs and their bureaucrats; and the policy of repression enjoyed an illusory success. If the strong hand was a bloody hand, the bloody hand was a strong hand; and Austria did not “muddle through” her difficulties, but carved her way through them. She had nothing as yet to fear from Prussia; she strode with jack-boots through Hungary and northern Italy; and the House of Habsburg—bankrupt, but with the most effective army in Europe—could once more afford to be arrogant. So that we find Francis Joseph, as soon as his position was secure, manifesting his family pride by a proposal that Napoleon III. should be insulted.

Napoleon—the triumph of his coup d’état having been confirmed by a plebiscite—had written to his royal and imperial cousins to announce his accession; and the question arose whether he should be welcomed as a member of the family, or snubbed as a parvenu intruding in exclusive circles. Should he be saluted, according to the time-honoured formula, as “Sir and Brother,” or should he be rebuffed by a cold and contemptuous mode of address? Francis Joseph and his advisers favoured the latter course. The Emperor, that is to say, who had waded to his throne through the blood and slaughter of his subjects, despised the Emperor whose subjects had merely elected him, and proposed to keep him in his place by addressing him curtly as “Sir.”

It was to have been a concerted insult, simultaneously administered by the Heads of the Houses of Habsburg, Hohenzollern, and Romanoff; and the Foreign Ministers of the three countries exchanged despatches on the subject. In the end, however, only the Romanoff showed the courage of his arrogance; and the Habsburg, after going far enough to offend, allowed himself to be intimidated into an appearance of courtesy. But Napoleon was not conciliated. He bided his time, resolved that the cousin who had devised the affront should pay for it. We shall see him presently exacting payment on the fields of Magenta and Solferino; but we must first follow Francis Joseph as he enters upon the path of reconstruction at home. It was the period in which his personality began to count.

He introduced what is called the Bach System—Bach being Schwarzenberg’s successor in the Ministry of the Interior, a bureaucrat, who wanted to Germanise everybody and everything, as German bureaucrats always do: a process which pleased the Czechs and Croats as little as the Hungarians. “This is good,” chuckled a Hungarian, in conversation with a Croat. “The Austrians give to you as a reward what they give to us as a punishment.” That, clearly, was a frame of mind symptomatic of trouble to come; but two things staved off the trouble for the moment. Austria was strong, and Francis Joseph was affable, and could give the impression that his bonhomie was his own and that his severities were his ministers’.

He travelled about his dominions, making himself as pleasant as he could; he released two thousand political prisoners, and reduced the sentences of others. The mere possibility of such a magnanimous act shows how terribly cruel the previous repression had been; but the clemency produced a certain effect. No doubt Francis Joseph’s reception in Hungary was, to some extent, stage-managed; but it was at least possible to pretend that it had been enthusiastic. The fact that he sat his horse like a centaur and spoke Hungarian like a native produced its effect; and he knew what to ignore, and how to turn a compliment. “I have met many Hungarians,” he said on his return from his first journey, “and every one of them was a man of heart.” It was what the French call le mot de la situation; and it helped.

Another thing which helped was the attempt made on his life at about this time by the journeyman tailor Libenyi, who tried to stab him in the back of the neck while he was walking on the Vienna ramparts, but struck a bone at the base of the skull, which turned the edge of the blade. He bore himself gallantly on the occasion, making light of the wound. “Do not be frightened, dear mother. My neck is merely a little stiff,” he said to the Archduchess Sophia. “It is no great matter,” he said to his officers. “After all, I was in no greater peril than my brave soldiers in Italy.” These, again, were mots de la situation, appealing to the imagination. The Hungarians had a chivalry of their own which bade them repudiate the dagger as a weapon. Batthyany’s widow and Karolyi’s mother—she who had uttered the curse—would no doubt have been equally ready to pray God to smite the Emperor, and to thank God for sparing him, in order that he might suffer; but the Empire as a whole—not the Austrian section of it only—saw him as a gallant young man who had had a fortunate escape. Deputations came from the remotest parts of his dominions to congratulate him.

He was making a good impression, too, on shrewd observers. Bismarck, then a young man, being sent on some mission to him, spoke of “the fire of his twenty years joined to the dignity and thoughtfulness of a riper age,” adding: “Were he not an Emperor, he would seem to me almost too grave for his years.” The King of the Belgians, a little later, reported very favourably of him to Queen Victoria:—

“The young Emperor” (he wrote), “I confess I like very much, there is much sense and courage in his warm blue eye, and it is not without a very amiable merriment when there is occasion for it. He is slight and very graceful, but even in the mêlée of dancers and Archdukes, he may always be distinguished as the Chef.... He keeps everyone in great order without requiring for this an outré appearance, merely because he is the master, and there is that about him which gives authority, and which sometimes those who have the authority cannot succeed in getting accepted or in practising. I think he may be severe si l’occasion se présente: he has something very _muthig_. We were several times surrounded by people of all classes, and he certainly quite at their mercy, but I never saw his little _muthig_ expression changed either by being pleased or alarmed.”

Lady Westmorland also wrote, at about the same time, to Mr. Hood:—

“I am very much pleased with the young Emperor, and especially with his tender affection for his mother, and his tender and respectful manner to her. He looks even younger than he is, and is not handsome, but has a well-built, active figure and a most intelligent and expressive face. He has a thoughtful face, and is perfectly unaffected. His mother is a very interesting person, and is wrapped up in this son, who seems likely to justify the pride she takes in him. The father is a very poor creature, who cares for nothing but having his leisure unmolested.”

The picture, save for the reference to the inadequate Archduke Francis Charles, is a pleasant one. The portrait of Francis Joseph is the portrait of a man whose personality was already a great asset to his country; not at all the portrait of a man who was conscious of having been cursed by the woman whose son he had slain, and feared that the blows of fate would smite him—blow after blow from youth to age—in untiring fulfilment of that curse. On the contrary, it is the portrait of a fairly strong man who is also a decidedly cheerful man, with a mind conscious of rectitude; and no doubt it is accurate as far as it goes, for one cannot expect portraits to be prophetic. But the years were nevertheless to be full of trouble: political trouble was soon to strip the Habsburgs of treasured territorial possessions; while family troubles were to make their name a by-word as that of the most tragic house in Europe.

The political troubles were to begin with the bungling of Austrian policy in connection with the Crimean war, when Austria tried to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, and gave offence to both. The Tsar, having saved Francis Joseph’s throne in 1849, now thought himself entitled to more gratitude than was shown to him. “The two stupidest Kings of Poland,” he said to Valentine Esterhazy, “were John Sobieski and myself”; for both of them had helped Austria in her hour of need, and been deserted by Austria when they were themselves embarrassed. Austro-Russian enmity in the Near East dates from that desertion; but the desertion was not complete enough to gain Austria the compensating friendship of France. So that presently, in 1859, France would help Sardinia to deprive Austria of the province of Lombardy, and Russia would stand by, chuckling at her discomfiture. But that, again, is an anticipation.

For the moment, indeed, all seemed well. Neither the political troubles nor the family troubles were as yet in sight; and it must have appeared, to any who gave a thought to the matter, that the Countess Karolyi had pronounced her curse in vain. Francis Joseph was the most eligible parti in Europe; and the time having come for him to seek a wife, he was not to have his marriage arranged for him by statesmen, to suit their policy, but to fall in love, almost as Princes do in fairy tales, in very romantic circumstances, though the romance, unlike so many of the Habsburg romances, was to be consonant with Habsburg dignity and self-respect.

It was not, of course, a Cophetua story. The Habsburgs are very fond of imitating King Cophetua; but they do so to their disgrace, and at their peril. Their names—unless good reason to the contrary can be shown—are changed. They cease to be Archdukes, become mere Orths or Wulflings, or Burgs, and are bowed, or kicked, as the case may be, out of the imperial circle. But a Cinderella story—that is another matter; and the story of Francis Joseph’s marriage is one of the most famous Cinderella stories of modern times. Every fresh narrator of it adds some fresh detail, whether romantic or picturesque; but the essential facts in all the versions of the story are the same. It is always a story of a match arranged by a match-making mother, and of Prince Charming himself taking the matter into his hands at the eleventh hour, preferring Cinderella to her sisters, insisting upon his own way, and getting it, amid loud popular acclamations.

The Archduchess Sophia flattered herself that she had settled everything over her son’s head. She wished to do a good turn to her poor relations—the Wittelsbachs, Dukes in Bavaria, and cousins of the reigning Bavarian House to which she herself belonged. There was a strain of insanity in the House of Bavaria—in both branches of it, in fact—as well as in the House of Habsburg; but the Archduchess Sophia did not think of that. The eugenists had not yet spoken, and she might not have listened to them if they had. Insanity, in those days, was regarded—especially in royal circles—as the accidental misfortune of the individual. “Tendencies” to insanity did not count; and any royal personage who was not mad enough to be locked up was thought sane enough to be married. Moreover, the Bavarian insanity was not, at the moment, very pronounced. Ludwig I. was not accounted mad because of his subjection to Lola Montez; and the vagaries of Ludwig II. and the raving mania of Otto still belonged to the future. It seemed to the Archduchess Sophia as right and reasonable as anything could be that the House of Bavaria and the House of Habsburg should intermarry yet again.

She talked the matter over with her cousin, Maximilian, Duke in Bavaria. He had a daughter, Princess Helen, of a suitable age—a very beautiful and charming girl; and it was settled between them that Princess Helen should become Empress of Austria. She was trained for that position as carefully as Francis Joseph was trained for the position of Emperor; and Francis Joseph quite approved of the plans which were being made for him—quite understood that his dignity limited his choice—quite believed that all was being contrived for the best by the best of all possible matrimonial agents. It was arranged that Princess Helen should be brought to Ischl to meet him; the subsequent announcement of his betrothal to her was, as it were, on the order of the day.

He went to Ischl, and met Princess Helen. She was very charming, but—still more charming, as it seemed to Francis Joseph, was her younger sister, Princess Elizabeth: the Cinderella who was kept in the background.

Elizabeth had not been trained for any great position. She was only sixteen: a madcap and a child of nature—accustomed, in so far as anyone in her station might be, to the untrammelled freedom of a highlander. She roamed the woods and the mountains—though not, as the author of “The Martyrdom of an Empress” tells us, with a gun in her hand, in pursuit of game. There are stories of her playing the zither, at the doors of cottages in remote Bavarian valleys, while peasant children danced to the music; and she was strangely beautiful, with haunting eyes and a wonderful wealth of hair. Depths of meaning looked out of those eyes: indications of those mysteries of her soul through which she was presently to figure as an unfathomable conundrum challenging a curious world. Francis Joseph—tall, handsome, blond, blue-eyed, a proud soldier and a gallant man, with no mystery or semblance of a mystery about him—looked into the girl’s eyes, and was conquered.

Elizabeth was not formally presented—it was almost by accident that Francis Joseph first saw her. He was alone in a room when she entered, in a simple white dress, with flowers in her hair, and greeted him with a “Good morning, cousin.” He kept her talking—and, of course, as he was the Emperor, she could not possibly run away and leave him, however shy she felt—for quite a long time; and he ended by saying that he hoped to resume the conversation at dinner, or at the dance which was to follow. But Elizabeth feared not. She was still “in the schoolroom”—not yet “out”—had “nothing to wear.” “Still if your Majesty insists ...” she hesitated. “I do insist,” said Francis Joseph. “Listen! We’ll play a comedy. Say nothing to anyone, but dress for the party, and come down to it.” “But I shall be scolded.” “No, you won’t. I’ll see to that—you can trust me.”

So the comedy was played; and, of course, when the Emperor expressed his pleasure at seeing the unexpected guest, the scolding flickered out; and, after that, matters progressed at a great pace, to the great chagrin, as one cannot doubt, of Sister Helen. The Emperor outraged all the proprieties by dancing half the night with the school-girl. When the dance was interrupted for tea to be served, he showed her an album containing coloured illustrations of the various national costumes worn in the eighteen States of Austria. “There,” he said. “These are my subjects. I wonder if you would like them to be your subjects, too.” Then they danced again; and when the cotillon came, he presented his little Cinderella with a bouquet of edelweiss, gathered with his own hands, with the result that everyone except Cinderella herself began to suspect that his intentions were serious.

His Cinderella, indeed, could hardly believe that his intentions were serious, even when her mother told her so. “What! Me an Empress! But I am nobody!” she exclaimed sceptically; but she had not long to wait before the sense of her importance was brought home to her, for at ten o’clock the next morning, Francis Joseph’s carriage rattled up to the door of her hotel. “Is the Princess Elizabeth up?” he asked; and the reply was that Princess Elizabeth had not finished dressing. “Then I will see the Duchess,” he said; and he went up and made his formal demand for his Cinderella’s hand, with the result that, half an hour later, all the members of the Imperial family then in Ischl were summoned to the little parish church, and there, to the strains of the Austrian national anthem, the betrothal was solemnly celebrated. His words to his affianced bride, as he came out of the church, are said to have been:—

“This is the happiest day of my life. I owe my happiness to you, and I thank you for the light which you have brought into my life.”

It was very sad, of course, for Sister Helen, who afterwards sought consolation—but perhaps failed to find it—by marrying the Prince of Thurn and Taxis. It was not altogether satisfactory to Duke Maximilian, who raised such objections as Laban raised when Jacob proposed to marry Rachel and leave Leah a spinster. It did not altogether please the Archduchess Sophia, who was a masterful woman, and would rather have got her own way than see her son insist successfully upon his. But it was a love match; and that, after all, is the main thing in royal as in other marriages. There was no need for the Court and Society journalists to rack their brains for reasons for describing the union as “romantic.” It was romantic on the face of it—as romantic as anything in any fairy-tale.

And yet——

And yet, as it proved, things were not exactly what they seemed to be; and that marriage, so romantically contrived and concluded, was to be the starting-point of tragedies; the beginning—if one is superstitious and takes that view of things—of the fulfilment of Countess Karolyi’s curse.

CHAPTER VIII

The failure of the marriage—Difficulty of explaining it—The two conflicting personalities—Francis Joseph’s personality obvious—The Empress Elizabeth’s personality mysterious—Her sympathy with the Hungarians, and its political importance—Her confession of melancholy.

The failure of a marriage—of a royal marriage as of any other—is necessarily wrapped in mystery. The full facts are never made known; and one always feels that the facts kept secret were probably more important than the facts disclosed. Moreover, personality—that mysterious thing which none of us ever reveals completely to any one observer—inevitably counts for more than the tangible events on which we can lay our fingers. So with this marriage of Francis Joseph’s. The outcome of it—what the world has been allowed to see of its outcome—can only be understood, in so far as it is intelligible at all, if we examine it in the light of a personality which perplexed Europe for a generation, perplexing it more and more as years went on.

Not two personalities, be it observed, but one. There are some personalities which fail to create an atmosphere of mystery even behind an impenetrable screen; and Francis Joseph’s personality is of that type. One always feels that, beyond what one knows of him, there is very little to be known. It is characteristic of all the Habsburgs that they cannot cross the road without striking an attitude which shows us exactly where they stand and what they think of things; and it is easy enough to accept the present Emperor as typical of the Habsburgs at their best. He comes before us, frank and brave, adaptable and affable, but, at the same time, proud as Lucifer; infinitely gracious to those who do not presume—readily regarded by such as a gallant soldier who has grown into a genial old gentleman, anxious to make things pleasant for everybody—yet seeming, at some crises of his fate, to mistake himself for God, and the Archdukes for the archangels; not because they behave as such, but because they are Habsburgs and ought to.

That is a perfectly simple type; one does not complicate it when one adds that Francis Joseph has always been a punctual observer of Roman Catholic ritual, and, taking the métier of Emperor seriously, has risen early throughout a long life in order to work at it with all the diligence of a devoted civil servant. All that—down to and including the occasional ceremonial washing of the feet of the poor, in imitation of his Master Christ—has been the straightforward fulfilment of an intelligible programme. If Francis Joseph had washed the feet of the poor because he had felt that they needed washing, and would not otherwise get washed, the case would have been different, and one would have suspected subtlety in his character. But he has only washed them gingerly—after servants had seen to it that they were already clean—in the manner of an actor aiming at spectacular display; and one no more finds anything subtle or elusive in that piece of symbolism than in anything else that he has done.

About the Empress, on the other hand, it is impossible to read a page from any pen—whether that page be written by an intimate or by a stranger—without feeling oneself in the presence of a mystery which the most favourably placed chroniclers have failed to penetrate. A novelist of genius might perhaps have invented her—Mr. Maurice Barrès, for one, is a little prone to write as if he had invented her; but she was not to be understood by courtiers, secretaries, and ladies-in-waiting. They recite her traits at great length, but almost in vain; telling us of her kindnesses, her eccentricities, her vanities, but still leaving us at sea—puzzled by the melancholy which preceded the apparent occasions for melancholy, and by the restlessness which chased her, like a gadfly, from the haunts of men, unless it was that she herself pursued—she knew not exactly what—and never found it. Countess Marie Larisch seems to have been more in her confidence than anyone else; but Countess Marie Larisch only saw what she was capable of seeing—which assuredly was not all. One may admit all Countess Marie Larisch’s facts, and yet doubt the completeness of her portrait.

And if Elizabeth’s confidante, in so far as she had one, did not understand, how was her husband—a mere man—a mere soldier—a mere Habsburg—to do so? He, being, as the French say, tout en dehors, could not possibly comprehend her who was tout en dedans. His happiness in marriage—as long as he actually was happy in it—must have depended on the assumption that his wife was as simple and translucent as himself: as simple and translucent as Cinderella or the Sleeping Beauty. He fell in love with her in that belief, as any other gallant young soldier might have done; and there is no doubt whatever that he was very passionately in love. “As much in love as any lieutenant in my army,” was his own way of putting it; and when his bride came down the Danube to join him, he ran to greet her on her boat before the gangway was made secure, and very nearly fell into the water.

That, as he did not actually slip in, was an auspicious beginning; and it is on record that Emperor and Empress and everybody else said, and sincerely meant, the right and proper and auspicious things. “The bride,” said the Austrian people—and the Hungarian people too—“is the most beautiful woman in all Christendom.” “I am glad,” Elizabeth wrote in the veteran Radetzky’s album, “that I am about to belong to a country which possesses an Emperor who is so great and good, and a hero of Radetzky’s valour.” “Never before,” said Francis Joseph to O’Donnell—the officer who had grappled with the tailor Libenyi, on the day of the attempted assassination—“did I feel so grateful to you for saving my life, for never before did I value my life so much”; and he showed his joy by pardoning prisoners and giving 200,000 florins to the poor; while the sympathies of the whole people followed the young couple when they departed on their honeymoon, and gathered edelweiss together, like any other honeymooning couple:—

“The recollection of that April day,” wrote a witness of the scene, “will never be effaced from my mind. The old among us felt themselves young again, the sorrowful became glad, the sick forgot their pains, and the poor their poverty. All alike were eager to see the companion whom the Emperor had chosen as the partner of his life. God only knows how many tears of joy ran down our cheeks, and what ardent prayers were uttered by our lips.”

It is easy to say, in the light of subsequent events, that the joy was too bright to last, and that the hope arose, only to be overcast; but it is difficult, setting superstition aside, to say why it was so, though it is not impossible to trace some of the steps by which it came to be so. In this exalted household two factors which are often seen at work in humbler households were presently, though not quite immediately, to play their part: a mother-in-law and an Egeria.

The pity was the greater because, from the point of view of politics and the dynasty, the Emperor’s beautiful bride promised to be, and indeed was, an asset of great value. The popularity for which he had to work hard she achieved without an effort by the indefinable charm of her youth and loveliness, especially among the romantic and chivalrous Hungarians, who had not yet forgiven Francis Joseph for the severities of 1849. She had Hungarian blood in her veins, though her Hungarian ancestors were remote; and she had no responsibility for the atrocities of the repression. On the contrary, she made it clear to Hungarians that she sympathised with their sufferings and delighted in their country: its vast spaces and its heroic patriots, indomitable even though conquered.

Amnesties, as we have seen, attended her arrival among them—amnesties which she may or may not have inspired, but of which she certainly got all the credit. Whatever she was or was not, she was, at any rate, tender-hearted and impulsive with the impulsiveness of a generous girl who feels instinctively that all the people who are locked up ought to be let out and given a second chance, unless they are really dangerous criminals. The Hungarians, in consequence, fell in love with her to a man, with a passion different from, but more enduring than, her husband’s; and one of them—Count Alexander von Bertha—wrote of her marriage:—

“It was the installation on the throne, under the ægis of beauty and charm, of the guardian angel of the Magyars, to whom the young Empress felt herself specially attracted by the memory of her patron saint who belonged to the House of Arpad.”

THE EMPRESS ELIZABETH OF AUSTRIA.

The allusion is, of course, to the Empress’s namesake, Saint Elizabeth of Hungary; and the sentiment stirred by the association bore practical political fruit. It is no depreciation of the work done in later years by Deák and Beust to say that their task would have been vastly more difficult if Elizabeth had not charmed the spirits of the Hungarians, and that it was largely owing to the spell which she had thrown upon them that Deák was able to announce, when asked to name his terms after the disasters of 1866, that Hungary demanded no more after Sadowa than she had asked before.

That was a great achievement—not to be made the less of because it was due to no conscious statesmanship, but merely came about through the idealisation of a beautiful and sympathetic woman by a childlike and romantic race, too long accustomed to be treated as pariahs by the domineering Teutons. If the laws of romance had governed the business of the world, it would have set the seal on the happiness of a marriage which had begun so happily; but it seems that, as a matter of fact, the happiness had taken wings and fled long before Elizabeth’s charm had conciliated her husband’s enemies to this good purpose—long, also, before the occurrence of those specially tragic events which were to make their reign memorable for tragedy.

At first, no doubt, she showed a naïve delight at her sudden elevation to imperial dignity. The dramatic change in her fortunes appealed to her imagination; and it seemed as if all the glories of the world were hers. But—vanity of vanities! The years passed—a few years only—and Elizabeth had learnt the Preacher’s lesson. Even then, one suspects, the desires which haunted her were vague. She did not know exactly what it was that she wanted; but she knew only too well that, whatever it was, neither her marriage nor her exalted rank had given it to her; and we soon begin to hear of her long journeys in pursuit of the fugitive shadow, and of the mysterious melancholy which had visibly settled on her. She was still a young woman when she said to a confidante, apropos of what one is left to guess: “I feel as if something had died in me.” She was not yet thirty when Countess Marie Larisch—a child who had climbed a tree—saw her in tears in circumstances which she has graphically described:—

“I nearly fell out of the tree when I recognised the Empress, who had apparently given up the idea of riding, and was walking quite unattended.... Elizabeth came slowly to my tree, under which was a stone seat. She sat down, clasped her hands in a despairing kind of way, and began to cry silently. I could see that she was greatly distressed, for her face wore a hopeless expression, and occasionally a sob shook her. She then wept unrestrainedly, and at last I wondered whether I dared attempt to comfort her. I bent down, and as the leaves rustled with my sudden movement, the Empress looked up and saw me.”

That is, perhaps, the most typical of all the pictures of her melancholy, though one could take many others from the writings of other chroniclers. She told the child she had been crying because her little daughter had been unwell during the night, but the child did not believe her. She told the child not to tell anyone that she had seen her cry, which she would hardly have troubled to do if her tears had had such a simple source. Some speeches attributed to her at other times would seem to indicate that she cried sometimes for lost illusions, like a child for a broken toy:—

“The happiness which men seek in sincerity and ask from it is controlled by tragic laws. We all live on the edge of an abysm of grief and pain, dug for us by the falsehood of social morality. That is the abysm which separates our actual condition from the condition in which we ought to find ourselves. An abysm is always an abysm. The moment we try to cross it, we fall and break our limbs.”

That is her own confession of melancholy; and we must make what we can of it in the light of what we know. It is not, perhaps, a melancholy of which we shall be able to discover all the causes, but we may be able to arrive at some of them. The quest will bring us back to certain matters already touched upon, and lead us on to other matters. We shall have to speak of the Egeria, the mother-in-law, the formal rigidity of Court etiquette, and the way in which Emperor and Empress endeavoured to escape in different directions from what they were both, in their several ways, coming to regard as irksome imprisoning restraints.

CHAPTER IX

Francis Joseph’s Egeria—Elizabeth’s mother-in-law—Elizabeth’s quarrels with etiquette—The beginnings of estrangement—The functions of Countess Marie Larisch in the imperial household—Captain “Bay” Middleton—Nicholas Esterhazy—Elizabeth’s fairy story—Her cynical attitude towards life.

Francis Joseph’s Egeria was the Archduchess Elizabeth, grandmother of the present King of Spain. It has been written that she “set her cap” at him; but she was a widow, and it was held that a widow was no proper bride for a Habsburg Emperor. So she became his Egeria, and a source of discord. The Empress could not get on with her; nor could the Empress get on with her mother-in-law.

The Archduchess Sophia was jealous to see this chit of a child winning the affection of the very people by whom she had herself been hooted in the streets of Vienna; jealous, too, because the child’s influence over the Emperor promised to be greater—as it was indubitably more salutary—than her own. Moreover, she was a woman with many old-fashioned prejudices; and she disapproved of Elizabeth, pretty much in the way in which Victorian mothers disapproved of revolting daughters, and for somewhat the same reasons. She saw this chit of a child—abominably brought up, as it seemed to her, in free-and-easy Bavaria—not only chafing under the fetters of immemorial etiquette, but actually tossing those fetters off with gestures of defiance. War between them was inevitable—war not the less deadly because it was not openly declared, but was waged by means of shuns and slights. Naturally, too, while the common people were in favour of the Empress, the courtiers of the old school sided with the Archduchess. Let us cite a few of the details.

Just as Marie-Antoinette had once scandalised the French Court by riding a donkey, so Elizabeth scandalised the Austrian Court by calling for beer—the excellent beer of Munich—and, according to some chroniclers, also for sausages, at the imperial luncheon table. She scandalised it a second time by refusing to throw her shoes away after she had worn them once; a third time by going shopping on foot, attended only by a single lady-in-waiting; a fourth time by taking off her gloves at a banquet at which etiquette prescribed that gloves should be worn, and laughing at the regulation when her attention was called to it. The anecdotes, thus summarised, seem trivial; but they have an inner significance as a record of an embittered conflict on that eternal theme: Which are the things that matter?

For the Archduchess Sophia the things that mattered were those rites and ceremonies which distinguished Habsburgs from inferior members of the human family. Whatever were the things that mattered to Elizabeth—and she might have found it difficult to say what they were—they certainly were not these things. So that her case which, at the beginning, recalled the story of Cinderella, comes also to remind us, after the lapse of a little time, of the story of that Village Maiden, who was wooed and married by the Lord of Burleigh; and one thinks of the lines which tell us how

her gentle mind was such

That she grew a noble lady,

And the people loved her much.

But a trouble weighed upon her,

And perplex’d her, night and morn,

With the burthen of an honour

Unto which she was not born.

Faint she grew, and ever fainter,

And she murmured, “Oh, that he

Were once more that landscape painter,

Who did win my heart from me!”

So she droop’d and droop’d before him,

Fading slowly from his side:

Three fair children first she bore him,