Part 10
Rarely, indeed, does the student in history come across two personalities so entirely in unison at almost all points as those of the Austrian Empress Marie Theresia and our own Queen Victoria. Both were essentially great Sovereigns, both essentially good women. Our own Queen exercised an authority which was in one sense even more remarkable than that of the Empress; for whereas the latter was a commanding figure in an age when the glamour of autocracy had not yet faded away, Queen Victoria, by sheer force of character, maintained the prestige of royalty against the flowing tide of a democracy which was becoming daily more and more self-asserting. Indeed, she did more than maintain it—she summoned it from the dead; for in the two reigns which preceded hers it had perished, as men then thought, without hope of resurrection.
In all save their outward appearance the likeness between the two august ladies was such that it almost seemed as if the one was the reincarnation of the other; as if the soul of the mighty Austrian had passed into the Queen. An earnest and deep piety was the foundation of both characters, though they would have been utterly opposed in the form of its exercise. Marie Theresia was the faithful daughter of the Church of Rome, Queen Victoria the no less faithful and loving child of the Reformation. In both religion was a passion.
There has been a recent republication of the “Memoirs of Frau Pichler,” the Viennese poetess and authoress, whose _salon_ at the end of the eighteenth and during the early part of the nineteenth century was so famous that people said that there were two things which no stranger coming to Vienna could afford to miss seeing—St. Stephen’s Cathedral and Frau Pichler. Those memoirs, admirably edited and furnished with copious notes by one Emil Blümml, throw an interesting light upon the private and intimate life of Marie Theresia, and as we follow these reminiscences, we cannot but be struck by the many links in the chain of similarity of which I have spoken above.
Both Queen Victoria and the Empress were deeply penetrated with that sense of the Royal Caste which is too apt to raise an insurmountable boundary against social intercourse. But if Royalty itself stands apart, there is also an instinctive aloofness from it in those who are of high position but yet subjects; so that the intimacies of Sovereigns and royal personages are found rather among their personal attendants than among the nobles and powerful officials who form their courts. Especially is this bound to be the case where princesses are concerned. Their tirewomen and dressers are far more capable than chamberlains and secretaries of state of judging their private idiosyncrasies; so, in order to know what manner of woman this or that queen may have been, we are fain to climb the backstairs—where such a way is open to us, as it is in the case of Marie Theresia.
[Illustration: THE EMPRESS MARIE THERESIA.
_From an engraving after a painting by Mytens._
[_To face p. 130._]
The adoption of Frau Pichler’s mother by the great Empress is just such a pathetic story, not without a pinch of the salt of romance, as would have touched the kind heart of Queen Victoria, and, indeed, we can well fancy her in like circumstances behaving exactly as Marie Theresia did.
In the month of May, 1744, the Wolfenbüttel Regiment of Infantry was moved from Hungary to Vienna. A poor old lieutenant, fifty years of age, named Friedrich Hieronymus, a widower, had contrived—with what pains and anxiety who can tell?—to take with him on the march his only child, a little daughter aged four. Hardly had he reached Vienna when he caught a chill, inflammation of the lungs set in and he died, full of terror for the future of his little Charlotte, whom he was to leave penniless and destitute in what was to him a foreign country, among strangers professing a religion which was abhorrent to him—for he was a Protestant. His last tender words were for her. “Poor child! what will become of thee?” Throughout her long life those painfully uttered words, torn from the dying man’s soul, remained graven in her heart, unforgettable. His brother officers, good charitable souls, probably themselves none too well furnished with this world’s goods, took charge of the babe, who became from thenceforth the “fille du Régiment.” The pathetic story came to the ears of Marie Theresia, who had a soft place in her heart for the Wolfenbüttel Regiment, which was named after the family of her mother, the Empress Elizabeth. She sent for the child, but the officers of the regiment, deeply imbued with a sense of loyalty to their dead comrade, did all that was in their power to hinder the babe from falling into the hands of an aggressively religious Catholic.
They hid her in a suburb of Vienna, but the Empress’s agents were too clever for them, and the child was brought to Court, where, as the Wolfenbüttlers had foreseen, she was brought up in the strictest doctrines of the Roman Church, under the charge of a Spanish lady, Isabella Duplessis, and was specially educated with a view to entering the Empress’s service as tirewoman. Her life was now very different from what might have been expected for the baby that followed the drum. She became the playmate of the Imperial children, amongst them of the unhappy Queen Marie Antoinette, and so the years went by in all the luxury of a sumptuous court.
Little Charlotte proved herself worthy of her good fortune; indeed, so quick and nimble-witted was she, that when she had reached the age of thirteen she was already deemed fit to enter upon her duties about her great mistress, not only as tirewoman, but also as reader. To this end she had been early handed over to the care of Gräfin Fuchs, the tenderly-loved nurse and governess of the Empress, who had such an affection for her that when she died she was buried in the vault of the Capucins, the last home of the Imperial Family.
In spite of the advice given by Hippolochus to Glaucus, it is not always an unmixed advantage so to excel as to make oneself indispensable. This little Charlotte soon found out, for her skill in hairdressing was such that the Empress, who was so particular about her hair that she would sometimes have it done and undone four or five times before she was satisfied, could not do without her. Marie Theresia, who was without a spark of coquetry and had neither eyes nor thought for any man but her husband, had all a woman’s instinctive love of display, and took a great delight in her beauty for its own sake.
None of the other tirewomen had Charlotte’s cunning fingers, and the same thing applied to her reading. German, French, Italian and Latin came to the child with equal facility, and all these were found in the dispatches which she had to read aloud to the Empress. French and Italian were the languages of the Opera and of the elegances of the Court. On one occasion when the Empress was expecting a baby, she had a bet with Count Dietrichstein as to the sex of the infant. She wagered for a girl, he for a boy—the Empress won. The Count sent her a piece of porcelain with a portrait of himself kneeling, and these words written by Metastasio, the Poet Laureate of the Court:
“Perdo, è ver, l’ augusta figlia A pagar m’ ha condannato, Ma s’ è ver che a te somiglia Tutto il mondo ha guadagnato.”
A pretty compliment! The babe, Marie Antoinette, born to be Queen of Beauty and of Sorrow, was worthy of it.
Talking of languages, it is strange to read of how small account German was at the Court of Vienna. The Emperor Francis I., as a Lorrainer, hardly understood it and never spoke it, and the people of his service were mostly Lorrainers or Netherlanders. The Empress herself did not speak correct German; she used the vulgarest Viennese patois, and Frau Pichler tells an amusing story of how a young Saxon lady, who had been appointed as one of her mother’s colleagues, came to her in despair one morning to beg her help. The Empress had ordered her to go and fetch “das blabe Buich.” What could her Majesty mean? Charlotte laughed, and told her to go and get “das blaue Buch.” The Saxon girl, Karoline Mercier, would not believe her—but the blue book it was. If she could not master German, the Empress, like Queen Victoria, was familiar with French and Italian. Our Queen was very fond of showing her fluency in German and French, and on her drives would often stop her carriage for the joy of a chat with some poor Italian organ-grinder in his own soft tongue. Latin, which the Empress knew intimately, was the means of communication with her Hungarian magnates. She loved the language and them, for so she was reminded of the day—the 11th of September, 1741—when she, threatened by half Europe with the loss of the states which the hostile Powers had once guaranteed, went to Pressburg, met the nobles of Hungary in their parliament, and appealed to them for protection for herself and her child, the future Emperor Joseph. Her cry for help was not in vain. Touched to the quick by the sight of the lovely weeping Empress, the proud Magyars, old and young, the flower of a noble chivalry, drew their swords and swore to die for the beautiful woman, who was their _King_. A universal conscription was decreed. It was a triple triumph, upon which she loved to look back—the triumph of Virtue, of Right, and last, but not least, of Beauty.
The service of Marie Theresia’s handmaidens was no sinecure. In summer she rose at five o’clock—in winter a little later—and rang for her girls, who had to appear fully dressed in hoop-petticoats, and with the marvellous edifices of hair which the fashion of the day exacted. To achieve this, the young ladies had to get up in the middle of the night, and this was especially hard upon Charlotte, who had night after night to read aloud for long hours after the Empress had gone to bed. But Charlotte was so quick, and knew the Empress’s taste so well that, whatever happened, she must be present at the morning toilette, and ready to attend upon her mistress during and after supper—a light meal, of which Her Majesty always partook in her private room. Busy worker as the Empress was, she seems to have depended entirely upon having her State papers read aloud to her, and so Charlotte became acquainted very early in life with many important State secrets. But she was a discreet little soul and knew how to hold her tongue, and so retained the confidence of her Imperial mistress so long as that wonderful woman lived.
The portrait which Frau Pichler has left behind her of the great lady, partly drawn from her mother’s stories of her, partly from her own memories of the days when as a little girl she used to be taken by special command to Schönbrunn or the Burg in Vienna, is fascinating. In her youth the Empress had been extremely beautiful, and though in middle life she grew large and unwieldy, and had to be taken up to her rooms in a lift—wafted through the air by fairies, as it seemed to the child whom she took with her—she retained to the end that wonderful gift of grace and of what is called “presence,” which is so keenly felt and so impossible to describe. Kindly she was, too, and of a motherly sweetness with children. Frau Pichler tells us how on one occasion, when the Empress had sent her to an adjoining room on some small errand, she slipped and fell, breaking her fan, and burst into tears. The kind Empress hurried after her, comforted her, and gave her a new fan—a precious relic, to be treasured as we may well believe for a lifetime.
Marie Theresia was the daughter of the Emperor Charles the Sixth, who, being without a male heir, named her as his successor by “pragmatic sanction”—a Byzantine term for an ordinance issued arbitrarily by the head of an empire or kingdom. She succeeded to the various thrones of her father on his death in 1740, and associated with herself as Emperor her husband, Duke Francis of Lorraine, who had been her play-fellow and whom she had married in 1736. In spite of his numerous infidelities, she adored him. Albeit, so far as politics were concerned, he was no great help to her; so though he bore the title of Emperor, she remained unaided at the helm. Hers was no easy task. In spite of scraps of paper and guarantees, a coalition between Prussia, France, Bavaria, the Palatinate, Saxony, Sardinia, Naples and Spain—a pack of hungry war-dogs, all tearing at her on every side, each howling for his pound of flesh—threatened to devour her. She had only England and Hungary on her side; but, like Abdul Hamid in our own times, she could count upon the quarrels between her foes. Prussia was the arch-enemy. Prussia, which we are now told, was the original subject of the “Hymn of Hate,” written, _teste_ the _Morning Post_, by the revolutionary Herweg in 1841, for which Herr Lissauer, who substituted England for Prussia, has been decorated by a grateful Kaiser.[12] Prussia, of which Heine wrote: “I utterly loathe this Prussia, this stiff, hypocritical, sanctimonious Prussia, this Tartuffe among the nations.”[13]
Like our own Queen, Marie Theresia was essentially a woman of business. She personally directed the affairs of her Empire, issuing her commands to her ministers, and the little orphan Charlotte, as we have seen, for many years acted as her secretary and reader. The duties were no sinecure, and although no doubt the position of a young lady of the Court was one of great luxury in some respects and greatly coveted, there were also some hardships with which those chosen maids had to put up. The Empress was large and corpulent; she could not bear warmth, and so her ladies had to perform their duties in a thorough draught, even when snow was being driven in at the windows, falling on to the State papers which Charlotte was reading aloud to her.
In spite of her dread of heat, so long as her limbs would carry her, the Empress, devout and exact in all religious observances, would on Corpus Christi day, in the height of summer, piously accompany the sacred procession on foot. One broiling June day she came back from this ceremony violently heated and tired, having walked half across the town under the sun, had to be undressed, and have her hair taken down, and sat in a thorough draught, eating strawberries and drinking lemonade, while Charlotte brushed and combed out her hair, which was so wet that the poor girl had to keep wiping her hands. How Marie Theresia would have enjoyed one of Queen Victoria’s picnics on Lochnagar in a November blizzard!
One of the difficulties with which those responsible for the management of the public ceremonials in which our Queen took part had to deal, was the regulation of the temperature. The enduring of heat was to her as to Marie Theresia, a misery and an impossibility. She could put up with any other discomfort and fatigue; but heat was unbearable. The Emperor Joseph, who did not inherit his mother’s imperviousness to cold, had to visit her in furs. Kaunitz, a privileged minister, was the only person who dared to shut the window. “How do you manage when you go to Balmoral?” I once asked Lord Beaconsfield, who was a chilly mortal. “The Queen is very gracious,” was the answer, “she excuses me from going there.”
In dealing with the affairs of State both rulers showed themselves to be women of strong character and indefatigable industry. Their methods, of necessity, differed widely. The one, as I have said above, was an autocrat; the other, a constitutional Sovereign, deeply imbued with the sense of her own limitations, and yet such a mistress of public business, of constitutional law and of precedent, that she often dominated the councils of her ministers, many of whom recognized in her their guide and instructress in cases of difficulty. Nowhere was this more evident than in her treatment of foreign affairs. There she was no more a negligible quantity than Marie Theresia had been; no matter who might be Secretary of State, there was always a very real power in the background, and that power was the Queen. It would be easy to multiply instances, but we need only point to two cases: the Danish Duchies’ question in 1864, where, in obedience to what she believed to be the wishes of her dead husband, she took what is now shown to have been an unfortunate line; and, secondly, the dispute with the United States on the Trent question in 1861, where she, with the assistance of the Prince Consort, used all her influence to hinder what would have been a disastrous war, an unthinkable calamity.
The mention of the Prince Consort brings into strong relief two pictures, in which it is difficult to say whether we are more startled by the likeness or puzzled by the violence of the contrasts. In both cases we see a marriage of true love, in each of which a prince of a small reigning family was raised, not for reasons of State, but by pure affection, to share the glories of a vast empire and a throne before which countless peoples bowed. There the likeness between the two husbands comes to an end.
In Prince Albert Queen Victoria found not only a faithful and devoted lover, but a helpmate, who was ever at her side, and, young as he was, shared the heavy burthens which she had to bear, and brought to her councils all the store of wisdom and statesmanship with which he had been endowed by that astute mentor, Baron Stockmar. Not the least part of his merit was his self-effacement; yet in spite of it he aroused unreasoning jealousies, for which his intimacy and the Queen’s with the same old German physician was in no small measure accountable. The Emperor Francis, on the contrary, was of no assistance to Marie Theresia. Strikingly handsome, physically as grand a man perhaps as Prince Albert, he had none of the Prince’s serious qualities. He was essentially and fatally charming, but of politics and the affairs of State he took no heed; all that he cared for were his flirtations, his bric-à-brac, and his collection of coins and medals.
He was what is called “a dangerous man,” and when “a dangerous man” is an Emperor to boot—Well! But such as he was, his Empress loved him with all her soul, content to take upon her own shoulders the drudgery of sovereignty, and leaving to him its gewgaws and the enjoyment of a brilliant idleness. If she ever knew of them she forgave him his infidelities, and, like our Queen, worshipping the ground upon which her husband trod, she never looked at another man, nor cared for any admiration but his. As Frau Pichler rather quaintly observes, had she done so her maidens must have known of it. We are told that no man is a hero to his valet. For a woman to be virtuous to her Abigail, she must be as chaste as Diana before those compromising visits to Endymion, of which we may be sure that her nymphs were well aware.
No breath of scandal ever dimmed the mirror of the Empress’s fair fame. Queen Victoria herself was not more stern in the repression of anything approaching loose or unseemly talk. She considered it to be the duty of persons in high places to repress any lack of decorum, and their privilege to set an example to be followed by others. To her daughter, the Queen of Naples, she wrote: “It is our duty to remember that a word in season or a grave look will silence those who indulge in unlicensed speech, and have an excellent general effect.” Nothing better nails to the counter the lies of Frederic the Great, so characteristically Prussian, than the fact that the capital, which up to her time had been notorious for the laxity of its morals, was described by Sir John Moore towards the end of her reign in very laudatory language. “I can imagine,” he says, “no city in Europe where a young gentleman would see fewer examples, or have fewer opportunities of deep gaming, open profligacy, or gross debauchery than in Vienna.” This, as her biographer, Mary Maxwell Moffat, says, is a great testimony to the uplifting influence of the Empress-Queen. That the influence was personal is proved by the relapse of Vienna during the nineteenth century. By precept and example, she cast out the swine, but when she was gone they came back again.
It was the irony of fate that neither the Empress’s virtues, her great beauty, her sweet disposition, nor the prestige of her glorious position were able to clip the wings of her flighty and too attractive husband. That she had some inkling of her failure is clear from the advice that she once gave to her favourite maiden Charlotte: “Be warned and do not marry a man who has nothing to do.” Queen Victoria was more fortunate. Her marriage remained a union of hearts, of which time itself had no power to relax the bonds.
In all that concerns art Queen Victoria was essentially a woman of her own time, and it is in no sense derogatory to her to say that it was certainly not a happy time. In the plastic arts she had not the talent of her two brilliant daughters, the Empress Frederic and Princess Louise. It is true that her sketch-book was the constant companion of her holidays, and illustrated the diary of her travels; but her execution did not go much beyond the boundaries of the school-girl’s album. The painters whom she chose to employ as portraitists—Winterhalter, Landseer, Von Angeli—were unluckily chosen. She admired and patronized Leighton, but she would not hear of being painted by Millais or Watts. Music was her delight, and so it was with Marie Theresia; both ladies loved the Italian school, both were themselves gifted with lovely voices and had been well trained. Indeed, in the Hapsburg family the talent was hereditary; all the older members of it were capable musicians, and Charles the Sixth would himself accompany their chamber music on the harpsichord.
Mrs. Moffat quotes a letter of Marie Theresia, in which she writes: “As for dramatic music, I confess that I would rather have the slightest Italian thing than all the works of our composers, Gaisman, Gluck and others. For instrumental music we have a certain Haydn, who has good ideas, but he is just beginning to be known.” Strange words, coming from the Sovereign of the capital which was to be the home, above all others, of the greatest composers of the world. Mozart she knew as a child of six, when he sat upon her lap to play, and, tumbling down, was picked up by the little Archduchess Marie Antoinette, to whom in gratitude he at once proposed marriage!