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.