This is not a Court history, and there is no need to gloss them over,—they shall be described with absolute frankness, and in plain language. The stipulation which the prestige of the House of Habsburg was held to require was this: that affronts should be publicly put on the bride before, during, and after the ceremony. The view officially taken of her may be said to be summed up in the carefully worded speech which the Emperor, gorgeously attired in his Field-Marshal’s uniform, read at a special meeting of his Privy Council. Every phrase in it should be noted with care:—
“I have invited the members of my House, my Privy Councillors, and my Ministers to attend to-day’s ceremony because the declaration which will be made is of the highest importance to the monarchy. Inspired by the wish always to provide as best I can for the members of my high House, and to give my nephew a new proof of special love, I have consented to his marriage with Countess Sophie Chotek. The Countess descends, it is true, from noble lineage; but her family is not one of those which, according to the customs of our House, we regard as our equals. Now, as only women from equal Houses can be regarded as equal in birth, this marriage must be regarded in the light of a morganatic marriage, and the children which, with God’s blessing, will spring from it cannot be given the rights of members of the Imperial House. The Archduke will, therefore, to make this certain for all time, to-day take an oath to the effect that he recognises all this, that he recognises his marriage with Countess Chotek to be a morganatic one, that the consequences are that the marriage cannot be regarded as one between equals, and that the children springing from it can never be regarded as rightful children, entitled to the rights of members of our House. I beg the Minister of my Imperial House to read the oath which the Archduke will swear.”
The Emperor’s voice is said to have been “full of emotion” while he recited this solemn manifesto. One would like to attribute at least a little of the emotion to regret that his family pride required him to insult a woman who, far from doing him any harm, had saved his nephew’s life by coaxing him to obey his physicians; but it is difficult to picture Francis Joseph as melted to tenderness by the idyll of the cod-liver oil. In any case, his emotion, whatever it may have been, was not allowed to interfere with the ceremony, which was continued with an ecclesiastical pomp indicating that Francis Joseph does, indeed, at times, mistake himself for God and the Archdukes for archangels, who are failing to behave as such.
It was Francis Ferdinand’s turn. Bowing to the Emperor, he advanced to the table, on which stood a crucifix, laid his first and middle fingers on the Testament which was held up to him by the Archbishop of Vienna, and read the oath from a paper which he held in his left hand. This is the remarkable text of it:—
“I, Francis Ferdinand, by the grace of God, Archduke of Austria, swear to God the Almighty that I recognise the House Laws always, and, in the case of my marriage with Sophie, Countess Chotek, specially; that I accept the oath read to me, with all its clauses, and therefore recognise that my marriage with Sophie Chotek is a morganatic one; that the children which, with God’s blessing, may spring from this marriage, will not be equal in birth, and, according to the Pragmatic sanction, will not be entitled to succeed to the throne, either in Austria or in Hungary.”
The two speeches sound like the last lingering echoes of mediævalism; and Francis Joseph, in spite of the successive shocks which experience has given him, probably retains more mediæval ideas than any other contemporary ruler. The superiority of the Habsburgs to the rest of mankind—at all events, of Austrian mankind—is not, for him, a proposition which needs to be demonstrated; it is a law of thought. He does not argue about it, or expect others to argue about it, but finds it in his consciousness together with his conceptions of space and time. What others may do counts for nothing in comparison with what the Habsburgs are; and that though a simple-minded seeker after truth who should ask what they are, could be told little in reply except that they are the Habsburgs. Gold similarly is esteemed a nobler metal than iron, though it cannot be fashioned into such effective swords or ploughshares.
On that principle, therefore—the principle that to be is more than to do, and that the function of those who can do is to serve those who are—Francis Joseph took his stand: thoroughly believing in it—himself at once the worshipper and the worshipped; no more regarding his declaration of his own immeasurable superiority to other men as an insult to those to whom he declared himself superior than the judge so regards his admonition of the convicted prisoner in the dock. One can only insult one’s equals. Any day on which the Head of the House of Habsburg decides a point of precedence takes rank as a Judgment Day—a day on which there can be only one answer to the question: Shall not the Judge of All the Earth do right? It was a matter of course that the prelates of the State Church lent themselves to the doctrine; for that is what the prelates of a State Church are for.
So that it was a matter of course that Francis Ferdinand should be required to proclaim urbi et orbi that he was marrying beneath him; that the marriage should be condemned to be a hole-and-corner affair which even the bridegroom’s brothers did not attend; that the bride’s status should be left so undignified that it was not permissible to her to attend the opera with her husband, or to sit in the Imperial stand with him at the races. But though that was Francis Joseph’s official attitude as an Emperor and a Habsburg, he was also a man and a brother, capable of tolerance and condescension—increasingly capable of it as the years went by. Flexibility, good nature, weariness of the long struggle with the Zeit Geist—one does not know to which of these things to attribute the modification of his tone; but he has modified it. Francis Ferdinand has been taken back into favour and allowed to hold the highest offices suitable for him; and Countess Sophie Chotek has been promoted to be Duchess of Hohenberg. She does not yet rank with the Archduchesses, but she does take her place in the hierarchy immediately after them.
How will she rank eventually, after the inevitable day on which Francis Joseph is gathered to his fathers? That is a question which must soon, in the course of nature, present itself; and it would be a great mistake to suppose that it was settled, once and for all, when Francis Ferdinand stood before the crucifix and swore that his wife was, and that his children would be, inferior persons, unworthy to be related to him. It is not merely that “Jove laughs at lovers’ perjuries,” or that Francis Ferdinand’s heart rejects the Habsburg superstition to which we have seen him rendering lip service. One must also remember that knots of this kind can never be tied so tightly that no way of untying them can be found by adroit and willing hands.
No doubt the Archduke is a religious man who understands the nature of an oath; but he was “brought up by the Jesuits,” and one suspects that he has not been brought up by them for nothing. All Catholics are addicted to casuistry, and the Jesuits specialise in it; nor does one need any extra-ordinary shrewdness to divine the insidious questions which may be invoked as solvents of a situation which Francis Joseph believed himself to have made hard and fast. Let us set them forth in order:—