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.