Tea at Trianon: The Austrian Order of the Golden Fleece

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, February 13, 2022

The Austrian Order of the Golden Fleece

From Guy Stair Santy at Chivalric Orders:

The Habsburgs would probably have abandoned their claim to Sovereignty of the Order of the Golden Fleece after the Treaty of Utrecht if they had not found themselves in possession of the Treasure of the Order, which had been retained in Brussels. The Emperors Leopold and Joseph had not awarded the Order and neither had the Archduke Charles, Habsburg Pretender to the Throne of Spain, until after his election as Emperor in 1711 when, in the following year, he nominated twenty-one new knights. The Austrian branch of the family had never found it necessary to found their own separate Order of Chivalry after the disappearance of their own Order of the Eagle in the early sixteenth century. By virtue of the de facto possession of the Order's regalia, the Austrian Sovereigns were able to maintain its original character, at least in theory. Never united with the Austrian Archducal or Imperial Crown (although it was implicitly included in the renunciation made by the Archduke Franz Ferdinand on behalf of his unborn issue), it was not employed as a political instrument. The Order was only given to members of the Imperial family, the representatives of great noble families or foreign royalty and has remained an exclusively Catholic institution.

The Emperor Charles VI (de facto Chief and Sovereign of the Order from 1711-1740) was the last male of the Habsburg dynasty and, on his death, the Sovereignty of the Habsburg Order passed not to his daughter (Maria-Theresa, who became Sovereign of Austria, Queen of Hungary and Bohemia, etc) but to her husband, Francis, former Duke of Lorraine and, since 1737, Grand Duke of Tuscany. The Emperor Charles was succeeded as Holy Roman Emperor by the Elector Charles of Bavaria but, with the latter's death in 1745, Francis was elected Emperor. On his death in 1765, the Sovereignty of the Order passed to the first Prince of the new house of Habsburg-Lothringen (Habsburg-Lorraine), the Archduke Joseph, who had been elected King of the Romans in 1764 and became Emperor immediately upon his father's death. Emperor Joseph II was appointed co-regent of Hungary and Bohemia by his mother, whom he succeeded as King in 1780. Leaving no surviving issue on his death in 1790, he was succeeded in the Hungarian, Bohemian and Netherlands Crowns by his next brother, the Grand Duke Leopold of Tuscany, who resigned the latter state to his next brother and was elected Emperor shortly afterward. Leopold only ruled for two years when he was succeeded as Emperor and Sovereign by his eldest son Francis, who was elected Emperor as Francis II and presided over the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806.

Francis had been proclaimed Emperor of Austria in 1804 and, by artful political maneuvering (in which he was aided by the considerable skills of his long-serving prime minister Clement, 2nd Prince of Metternich-Winneburg), managed to hold much of his disparate Empire together, eventually only losing the Belgian Netherlands following the Congress of Vienna of 1814-15. He died in 1830 and his feeble-minded son and successor, Ferdinand I, abdicated in 1848 to the young Franz Josef I, whose father (the third son of Francis I) had renounced his own rights in his favor. Franz Josef presided over enormous changes in the Austrian Empire, the loss of its Italian territories and forfeiture of much of its German and Silesian lands to Prussia. Despite the many disparate languages and cultures that caused endless internecine quarrels, the rise of nationalism that continually strained the fragile Habsburg union, and the industrialization which led to the rise of a whole new social class, the Emperor managed to maintain his central authority and the respect and love of the majority of his subjects. Franz Josef maintained a simple and austere personal life, without surrendering any of the majesty of his office, he was warm hearted and pious and a determined advocate of the rights of minorities (for example the Jewish population of the Empire was directly protected by him).

The advent of the First World War marked the collapse of the Habsburg Empire; Franz Josef died in 1916 and was succeeded by his great-nephew, the Archduke Charles, as Emperor Charles I, IV as King of Hungary. Married to Princess Zita of Bourbon-Parma, who survived him for sixty-seven years (she died in 1989), he was a deeply religious and spiritual man who was ill-prepared for the task of saving the unity of the Habsburg Empire or his various Crowns. Having been forced to renounce the exercise of government in Austria (without abdicating as Emperor on 11 November 1918), and as King of Hungary two days later, he was declared deposed by the new republican government and expelled from Austria in April 1919. The dynasty was formally deposed by the Hungarian Assembly on 5 November 1921 and the Regency established by Admiral Nicholas Horthy (who ruled the country until 1944) refused to allow him to enter the country. The Emperor Charles died in very straightened circumstances at Funchal, Madeira on 1 April 1922; the cause for his Beatification (he has already been declared Venerable) is currently being considered. (Read more.)