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.