Ah Maria, What Did Daddy Do?

The story of Marie Antoinette’s mother:

If Maria Theresa was unschooled in the finer points of empire management she was not unprepared. Although her father, Charles VI, had excluded her from public affairs he could not prevent her from observing them. She was also very conscious of something her father chose to willfully and unrealistically ignore for years; the fact that mom would never bear a male child. Maria Theresa knew she would one day be queen. If not as an iron clad fact, then at least as a firmly held belief.

She was very distressed by what she saw. Although she loved her father, it was clear that dad was running the empire into the ground. He considered himself a savvy player on the European diplomatic scene. He was nothing of the sort. Neither were his ministers. Not even the ones who were treating with the enemy for personal gain.

Charles VI was never in direct line for the Austrian throne. As a second son, the throne of Spain would pass to him. This suited him perfectly well. He was looking forward to that day, and that day came when Charles II of Spain died. Unfortunately King Louis XIV of France thought the Spanish throne would be just the thing for his boy, Philip.

There weren’t many others who felt that way, particularly the English and the Spanish. But nobody asked them. Since this was eighteenth century Europe the only way to settle the matter was to go to war. This war, aptly named the War of the Spanish Succession, was raging when the Holy Roman Emperor and older brother Joseph I was carried away by smallpox in 1711.

Charles was somewhat preoccupied at the time. The French were attacking in Catalonia. It wasn’t going well for Charles, to put it mildly. The news that he was the new emperor was most unwelcome. Not only did it mean that his brother was dead, but he would have to give up his beloved Spain for Vienna.

He did leave his wife behind as a sort of pledge that he would one day return. It was certainly a grand gesture. No idea what his wife thought of it. He never did go back. At some point his wife rejoined him. Alas, nothing is recorded as to what she might have said to him when they were finally together again.

To the end of his days he pined for Spain. The Viennese court conducted itself in the rigid, humorless Spanish ceremonial manner. The new emperor always dressed like a Spanish grandee: black doublet and hose, black shoes, scarlet stockings. This was in sharp contrast to the more relaxed atmosphere that the Hapsburg court in Vienna was used to.

With the loss of Spain, Charles focused on that thing any good dynast would want. A son. The emperor’s wife, Elizabeth Christina of Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel turned out to be everything Charles could have hoped for in a wife. I say hoped for because the two of them never set eyes on each other until long after they were married by proxy.

Charles had resigned himself, as a matter of state, to his father arranging the marriage. At the time Charles was in Spain, having it off with a certain Countess Althan. Apparently those two had been at it for some time. He didn’t expect that to change just because he was getting married.

But, no matter. The new wife went out to meet her new husband in Barcelona. He had been told by all and sundry that Elizebeth was a fine specimen of womanhood, girlhood actually, she was only fourteen at the time, but Charles took these reports with a grain of salt. People said nice things about her because they had to, he assumed. After all, the marriage was a done deal. Who wanted to risk cheesing off the new emperor by telling him his new queen looked like an old army mule. When he finally met her you could have knocked him over with a feather.

She was stunningly beautiful. And very intelligent. He wrote to her father, in part, “Although on every side I had been told in advance of the exceptional beauty and remarkable qualities of my angelic queen and consort (who is winning all hearts here), now that I have seen her everything that has been said about her is but a shadow devoured by the light of the sun. I have no words to express my exceeding happiness and satisfaction.”

Unfortunately for Charles, the marriage would produce no male children. She had one male child, but he died. Although he did not wish to do so, Charles had to make sure one of his children followed him. If that child was a girl, so be it. To this end he wrote a sacred document, the Pragmatic Sanction of 1713.

According to one historian; “This term was used for a certain kind of imperial decree which could be promulgated by the emperor in his own right without the necessity of first obtaining the agreement of the Electoral Diet.” The Pragmatic Sanction was not the first of it’s kind, but it was the most famous because of the trouble it later caused.

Charles needed the Sanction to prevent the children of his late brother from claiming the throne because he had failed to produce a male heir. He got what he wanted in the end, his daughter, Maria Theresa inherited the throne. This did not prevent one of the disinherited children, a niece married to Charles Albert, Elector of Bavaria, from challenging the succession and causing Maria Theresa no end of woe.