Daughters of the Empress (with Veronica Buckley)

0:00Dana Schwartz:This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.

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1:09Dana Schwartz:But isn't the whole point of progress to make things more human? That's why at TD, when we design a product, whether it's getting you paid early or making debit card replacement easy, we ask one simple question. How does this help people? That's how we're making banking more simple, more seamless, and more intuitive. But most importantly, that's how TD is making banking more human. Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Menke. Listener discretion advised. Hi, this is Dana Schwartz. I'm so thrilled to be here for a very special episode of Noble Blood for a conversation with the author Veronica who's written a new book, Seven Sisters, Captives and Rebels in Revolutionary Europe's First Family, which tells the stories of the daughters of Maria Theresa, the Habsburg Empress of Austria, the Holy Roman Empire.

2:09Dana Schwartz:Of course, her most famous daughter is Marie Antoinette, I would say to most people. But all seven of the daughters that survived to adulthood lived fascinating lives, It was fascinating, tragic, interesting, all of the above. Ms. Buckley, thank you so much for joining me.

2:29Veronica Buckley:Thank you very much for having me. It's lovely to be here, Dana.

2:32Dana Schwartz:So one thing that struck me, right when we start this book, we get the famous Habsburg catchphrase that sort of summed up their dynasty. Others make war. You, happy Austria, marry. Can you sort of explain what this perspective was, what that catchphrase meant?

2:49Veronica Buckley:Yes, well, I mean, in those days, we're talking about the 18th century. Warfare was a sort of normal aspect of noble people's lives, the noble men, of course, and also a normal aspect for many of the other classes in society, though not automatically so. There were a lot of people, of course, involved in agriculture and so on. So huge numbers of people in Europe were involved in fighting, basically. And in those days, they had a system which is called the sort of great power system, which we're in a wee bit, a little bit sort of reverting to at the moment, where the people who had the most power simply took what they could and everybody else had to put up with it.

3:33Veronica Buckley:Now, the problem is that when you do that, even if you are the most powerful, you lose a lot of people. You lose a lot of your population, you lose a lot of your agricultural produce, a lot of your trade goes down the tubes and all of that sort of thing. The Habsburgs, who had once been the most powerful dynasty right across the German-speaking world and the Spanish - and Italian-speaking world, had now split into two families, the Spanish Habsburgs and the German Habsburgs. Even though they were based in Vienna, which is, of course, now in Austria, they regarded themselves as Germans. and they decided that it was costing them too much to keep fighting like this.

4:18Veronica Buckley:So they very cleverly decided it was better to simply marry into other royal families and other prominent families to gain territory, to gain prominence, to gain political power that way. And of course, what that meant was you needed to have big families because you needed a lot of princes who could be the rulers, and you needed a lot of princesses who could be effectively bartered to other people's princes to make these connections work. So you married your girls off in order to ensure peace for a time. Of course, it never lasted very long, but it was better than fighting all the time.

5:04Dana Schwartz:So Maria Theresa, who's just a fascinating figure, when her father dies, it takes her eight years, the war of Austrian succession, to actually cement her position on the throne. But once she does, she is a formidable ruler and, like you said, fulfills her duty of having children incredibly well. How many total children did she have?

5:28Veronica Buckley:She had 16 children and five of them died. Oh my gosh. Yes, absolutely amazingly. And five of them died as either babies or young children. Now, she didn't regard this as problematic to have 16 children. She regarded it as a very good thing, because her first idea of her personal duty as a Habsburg monarch was to continue the dynasty. and what this meant was have as many children as possible. Sons were more valued because they were Habsburgs themselves and would have they would inherit Habsburg territories but daughters were also useful as I said because they could be dynastically paired off with other people to increase territory and influence and she encouraged her daughters to have big families too.

6:25Veronica Buckley:She said to many of them at civil times, I want to see you producing a baby every year.

6:31Dana Schwartz:Your book focuses mainly on the seven daughters who survived to young adulthood. But one just logistical question I have is these daughters have so many names. They all have Maria at the beginning of their names. They have long names. How did you choose how to refer to them in your book because I've seen them referred to by different names throughout different points in their life. Obviously, someone like Marie Antoinette, we know by her French name, but that wasn't the name she was given when she was Austrian. So as a historical writer, how did you make the decision of how to refer to these women?

7:11Veronica Buckley:Okay, well, this is a nightmare. And as you say, all of the women have the first name Maria, because that's the German version of Mary or Marie. and it's a bit like as if they were nuns because, you know, all nuns basically had at that time or until recently the first name Mary and then another name afterwards, Sister Mary so-and-so. And they didn't necessarily call themselves Maria, but in the documents, of course, that's how they're referred to. Now, at home, they spoke in the family, Maria Theresia's family spoke only German. They spoke a Viennese dialect of German. And, of course, they were supposed to learn French, which was the international diplomatic language.

8:04Veronica Buckley:The lingua franca. The lingua franca, absolutely. And when they're writing to each other, certainly the older members of the family wrote always in French because this was the sort of elegant thing to do. And sometimes they would intersperse their letters with bits and pieces of German or something else, but mostly German. Now, the problem was that this has led a lot of historians to assume that they were known within the family by the French versions of their names. So Marie Antoinette, whose name, of course, was Antonia, Maria Antonia, in French, that would be Marie Antoine. But she was not called Antoine in the family.

8:54Veronica Buckley:She was called Antonie, which is the German abbreviation of Antonia. But if you're reading letters written in French, of course, it looks as if they all called her Antoine, which they didn't. So the way you work it out, well, for example, there was one of the daughters named Yosefa. And brother Yosef married a woman whose name was also Yosefa. So this is obviously complicated. So in the book, I decided to call the sister Yosefa just Yosefa, because I don't put Maria in all the time because you would be driven mad by Maria's basically. but with the wife of Yosef, I call her Maria Yosef.

9:38Dana Schwartz:It would increase your word count. The book would be doubled in length.

9:41Veronica Buckley:Yes, absolutely. And then you've got a real problem on your hands. And there, of course, there were several men in the family all called Ferdinand or France or goodness knows what. So you have to make a distinction. So one is king so-and-so, one is don so-and-so, and these are the ways you do it. But it takes a bit of working out, And you have to be always alert when you're working through the sources, because quite often they're talking about several members of the family at the same time. And though they know them, they know who they're talking about, you could quite easily confuse them. So you do have to be careful with all these names.

10:18Veronica Buckley:It's much easier nowadays.

10:19Dana Schwartz:And one thing that I also imagine is very confusing is they would reuse names, I believe, right, of children who passed away in infancy. They would use those names again.

10:29Veronica Buckley:That's right. That was a standard thing historically, not just among royal families, but at a time when there was a very high incidence of infant and child mortality. A lot of children were named after their deceased elder siblings. So, for example, Carolina, who became the Queen of Naples, Maria Theresia had two daughters before her who were named Carolina. So she was actually the third Carolina. Now, luckily for me, the two first Carolinas died in infancy, so there wasn't much in the records about them. I didn't have to worry. But had they died as older girls, it could have been a bit confusing.

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12:33Dana Schwartz:So let's get into some of these girls specifically. I want to jump ahead to number, I believe, number three of the surviving daughters, Elizabeth, because I was fascinated by her story. This is a figure that I frankly did not know much about. To put it in very superficial terms, she was still unmarried. at 24, briefly engaged to the widowed king of France, who would have been the grandfather of the man her sister Marie Antoinette would marry. But then she was tragically disfigured by smallpox. Can you tell me a little bit about where Elizabeth's life took her?

13:13Veronica Buckley:Yes. Elizabeth was the beauty of the family. And she knew it. And she made a lot of it. And she was always, her mother complained, she was always flirting with her. all the guardsmen and any prince who turned up at court and so on. But because she was so beautiful and because her two elder sisters, their fate was more or less organized, she was likely to marry about half a dozen different powerful people, the king of Poland, the king of France, the king of Spain and other important people. And because of that, nothing could be agreed until she was actually quite old, because if you recall, Marie Antoinette was married at 14, so 24 was very old at this point.

13:58Veronica Buckley:But the problem was that while all of these things were being arranged, and certain people were eliminated because they were too old, or weren't rich enough, or whatever the problem was, she contracted smallpox. And she was dreadfully disfigured by smallpox. Several of her siblings, actually including Marie Antoinette, also had smallpox, but they only had little marks on their skin afterwards. But she was completely disfigured. And after that, of course, she had no, let's call it personal value on the marriage market. She wasn't a beauty anymore. the only thing that was going for her was that she was still a Habsburg princess and that was still an important political.

14:46Dana Schwartz:Although by this point she was old, much older than was considered prime marriageable.

14:52Veronica Buckley:Yes, that's true. Comparatively old she was in her mid-twenties, but that still would have been all right, particularly since the kings of France and Spain were in their fifties by then. And she was still of an age to bear children and so on. So But, you know, in the end, people didn't want to marry. These men didn't want to marry a grossly disfigured woman. They had options. And she remained unmarried. And when her mother died and her brother Yosef became the emperor, he was already the emperor, but he became the ruler, the sole ruler of the Habsburg monarchy and the Holy Roman Empire. He couldn't stand her and he drummed her out of town effectively.

15:41Veronica Buckley:And he sent her off to the provinces, to Innsbruck, itself a charming town in the mountains in Austria, where there was a very grand court, a very grand palace, recently refurbished because it had seemed that Maria Theresia herself might want to retire there because that is where her very beloved husband had died. And Elizabeth became what was called the secular abbess of this foundation for noble ladies. Now, this doesn't mean she became a nun. In fact, her mother was very against nuns. She thought that celibate life was abnormal and she was opposed to it. She herself had a very lively and happy sex life with her husband and was very keen for her children to have the same.

16:35Veronica Buckley:Of course, 16 children. And it's very interesting because they were the only royal couple in Europe at the time who spent every night together. Not that Franz Stephan didn't have other ladies. He did. But he always came home at night. And it's interesting Maria Theresia thought this was very important, not just for having children, but also because, of course, it gave the couple an opportunity to spend some quiet time together. away from court troubles, away from political things, where they could just talk over normal things. So she was very much against their girls becoming nuns. And Elizabeth and also the eldest daughter, Mariana, who also became a secular abbess, they really had courts of their own.

17:29Veronica Buckley:They were princesses. They were treated as princesses. They were the head of their courts. And although in their courts there were nuns, they weren't nuns themselves. And most of the noble ladies who lived in them, although they were expected to live, you know, obviously decent Christian lives, they were allowed to go to balls and parties and theatres and things like that. And if they wanted to leave and get married, they were able to do that. So actually, Elizabeth could have done that too if anybody had turned up. But once she went there to Innsbruck, nobody did turn up. So she remained there.

18:13Dana Schwartz:It doesn't sound like too bad of a life, to be completely frank.

18:17Veronica Buckley:It wasn't too bad of a life because, first of all, you were spared yearly baby producing, which is not in itself an easy thing. And a lot, a lot of people, of course, a lot of women died in childbirth. And in fact, at that time, a lot of women would prepare for childbirth by basically preparing for a funeral. Because the chances were that they might not survive. So it wasn't too bad. It was very comfortable. She had a good income. If she wanted to, she could have had quite a lot of political influence. But she wasn't really interested in that. She liked the theatre and so on. So she had, you know, a good time.

18:59Veronica Buckley:She was also very nice to the ladies who were in the foundation with her. She didn't expect them to be too particular about their religious duties. She was, of course, a firm believer and she observed the normal proprieties, but they didn't have to spend every second hour on their knees in prayer and so on. She wasn't very harsh like that. And as long as she could afford it, she made sure they were very well fed and had lots of life going on in the court.

19:29Dana Schwartz:That's wonderful. I will say one thing that emerges throughout the stories of these daughters is that they were Habsburg dynastic pieces before they were individuals. Their personal happiness did not seem as important or I would say, frankly, wasn't as important as their roles in the family dynasty. And I think that story is very striking with, I believe it's the fourth surviving daughter right in the middle, Amelie, if I'm pronouncing that right. Yes, that's right. Who had married a man that she did not choose to marry. Can you speak a little bit about how Amelie's marriage came to be?

20:10Veronica Buckley:Yes, Amelie. Well, it's a doubly sad story, really, because she fell in love with a very suitable prince who fell in love with her and wanted to marry her. And it looked as though they were going to marry. But at the end, it was decided that he wasn't quite important enough. There were other people interested in marrying a Habsburg princess. And the Habsburgs needed a stronger connection to northern Italy. and there happened to be a northern Italian prince in Parma who was looking for a bride, or rather the people looking after him were looking for a bride because he was only 15, and they decided that Amelie would be the person.

20:55Veronica Buckley:At first, in fact, they thought Elizabeth would be the person, but Elizabeth was quite a bit older than the prince, and so they chose Amelie instead. Now, this, of course, broke her heart for two reasons. First, she lost the prince she loved. And second, she was forced to marry a man she couldn't stand. This prince was quite a bit younger than she was and really just a boy, whereas the man she loved, Prince Karl of Zweibrochen, he had been a soldier and he was a handsome man and spoke many languages and all of this kind of thing. So she was palmed off, not only to a man she didn't want, but she was an archduchess of Habsburg and the man she married was only a duke.

21:45Veronica Buckley:So she was demoted from archduchess to simple duchess, which is pretty bad considering that two of her younger sisters were promoted from archduchess to queen. So she felt it as a very, very humiliating step. And when she got to Palma, she found that her husband, unsurprisingly, since he was so young, was very much in thrall to the real ruler, the first minister of Palma. And she found that an extra humiliation. She felt that at least he should be able to stand up and be boss in his own territory, as it were. So she caused an enormous amount of difficulty there. Really caused a lot of trouble to no ultimate effect except that she did make herself loved by the people by spending a great deal of money that she didn't really have by giving it in charity and so on.

22:43Veronica Buckley:She herself had 15 children and it shows you how strong this dynastic pressure was that after the first four children she and her husband separated. They lived in separate palaces in different towns. Nonetheless, they had 11 more children together. He would visit her and they would have sex and she would produce a child more or less every year. The sad thing is that all those later 11 children died young. So she really, although she had 15 children, only four of them survived to adulthood. It's quite a tragic life. It is a tragic life. And because she was always making trouble, she was never allowed to come home.

23:31Veronica Buckley:All the others made visits to Vienna, to their mother and their sisters and their nieces and so on. And she was never allowed to do that because she was regarded as too troublesome. So she had a very, very sad life in that respect, although she did have good friends, loyal friends who supported her to the end, which is nice to think of. And her two daughters also did this. The surviving daughters also looked after her to the end.