I have become fascinated with this devoted, tragic couple. From
Edwardian Promenade:
Franz Ferdinand’s life changed drastically when Crown Prince Rudolf
committed suicide at Mayerling in 1889. Prior to that, he was simply the
eldest son of the younger brother of Emperor Franz Joseph and the
ill-fated Archduke Maximilian, the short-lived Emperor of Mexico. His
father, Archduke Karl Ludwig, quickly renounced his succession rights,
leaving Franz Ferdinand, then a twenty-six year old army captain, as
heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne. From then on, Franz
Ferdinand’s life was highly regulated as he was groomed to rule a nation
comprised of almost a dozen ethnicities–who spoke just as many
languages–spread across a territory of 239,977 square miles. He was also
considered a very eligible bachelor, though the very, very strict and
suffocating laws that ruled the Hapsburg monarchy only considered
members of one of the reigning or formerly reigning dynasties of Europe
as an eligible marriage partner. Countess Sophie Chotek, a Bohemian
(Czech) aristocrat, was definitely ineligible.
Sophie, though a member of a prominent Bohemian aristocratic family
whose ancestry included some royal lineage from the female line, was
very much below the Archduke in rank and importance, and actually served
as lady-in-waiting to one of the Hapsburg relations. It was in this
capacity that she and Franz Ferdinand met and fell in love, whereupon
they conducted a secret courtship through letters for two years. He
managed to meet with Sophie under the guise of visiting her employers,
the Archduke Friedrich and Archduchess Isabella, but unfortunately, the
Archduchess assumed he’d fallen in love with one of her daughters. When
his true motives were discovered, scandal broke out in the house of
Hapsburg. Sophie was immediately dismissed from her position in the
Archduchess’s house, which forced Franz Ferdinand to openly declare his
love and his intentions to marry her and no other woman.
The Emperor and the Imperial family were furious, but Pope Leo XIII,
Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, and the German Emperor Wilhelm II all
interceded on Franz Ferdinand’s behalf. Franz Josef, faced with the
double humiliation of his heir falling for a lady-in-waiting and his
fellow monarchs taking him to task, finally consented to the
alliance–but on one condition. Franz Ferdinand had to agree to a
morganatic marriage and renounce the claim to the throne for any
children he had with Sophie. Sophie would not share her husband’s rank,
title, or precedence, which in the strict Hapsburg etiquette, forced her
to enter rooms behind every Archduchess, even if she were but a child.
After all of the furor surrounding their clandestine romance and the
fight to marry, Sophie and Franz Ferdinand were wed on July 1, 1900, at
Reichstadt in Bohemia, with only his stepmother and step-sisters as
witnesses. It was a wedding ceremony starkly unlike one he would have
received had he married a woman of his rank. The Emperor raised Sophie
to Princess of Hohenberg, with the style Her Serene Highness, which
helped a little, but not much. Because of the snubbing of his wife, and
the friction his choice of bride created between he and his uncle, the
Emperor, Franz Ferdinand and Sophie created their own family life
together with their three children. Though we all know of the tragic
ending of their lives one fateful day in June of 1914, the marriage of
Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Countess Sophie Chotek was both romantic
and pragmatic, for the heir to the throne renounced the typical dynastic
marriage for love. (Read more.)
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2 comments:
Great story, surely someone has made a movie about this.
Sophie always comes across as such a lovely, dignified person.
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