Ah Maria, If I Can’t Have Her, Then… I Take The Other One

After Prince Joseph of Austria’s lovely, lesbian wife died, he was forced to turn to another. But who could match such a nonpareil?

Before leaving the subject of Joseph and his marriage to the stunning Isabella of Parma, a post script. Not long after her death, he announced that if he had to re-marry, he would like his bride to be Isabella’s younger sister, Louise. If he could not have his beloved, he would have someone kinda like her.

There were a couple of problems with that. For one thing, she was already promised to the Spanish Infante, or male heir to the throne. For another, she was fourteen. Maria tried to get the King of Spain to release Louise from her promise to marry his son. Nope.

Joseph then declared that if he could not have Louise, he didn’t care who he married. That being the case, the choices narrowed down either to Princess Josepha of Bavaria, or Princess Kunigunda of Saxony (You’re on your own pronouncing that, by the way.) The fact that both of these kingdoms had, in the very recent past, attacked Austria was not brought up.

Although Joseph claimed he didn’t care, he quickly contradicted himself. He didn’t like either one of them. “Both were unprepossessing. Joseph wanted neither, but instead of putting his foot down, he contented himself with sniping at his parents and his would-be bride.”

He finally settled on Josephea. He had this to say about his blushing bride after first meeting her. “She is twenty-six. She has never had small pox (a very bad thing) and the very thought of the disease makes me shudder. Her figure is short, thickset, and without any vestige of charm. Her face is covered with spots and pimples. Her teeth are horrible.”

It was downhill from there. He wrote to Isabella’s father that nothing could replace the memory of his dear, dear wife. Although he could not bring himself to love Josephea, he would “treat her with every imaginable consideration.” He, to put it mildly, did not.

As he treated everyone else, so he treated his wife; with utter contempt. Worse, he derived much pleasure from needlessly humiliating her in public whenever he could. I say “needlessly” because if he had wanted to avoid her in private, he was perfectly free to do so. Being polite to her in public was a minimum requirement on his part, but he wasn’t willing to do even that.

Wrote Maria Christine; “I believe that if I were his wife and so maltreated I would run away and hang myself on a tree in Schonbrunn.” Wrote one historian. “He behaved worse than Frederick of Prussia, whom he had come to admire so much. Frederick at least behaved as though his wife did not exist.”

The only member of the family to take a shine to poor Josephea was Francis. A fact to which Josephea was deeply grateful. Unfortunately for her, Francis had not long to live after her marriage. After his death she became deeply withdrawn. She would remain so until her own death shortly after.

The marriage, not surprisingly, was childless. Leave it to Joseph to leave to posterity the reason why. “My wife has become insupportable to me….They want me to have children How can one have them? If I could put the tip of my finger on the tiniest part of her body which was not covered with pimples, I would try to have a child.”

Josephea did not live long after the death of her beloved father-in-law. And this, considering that she had no choice but to remain married to Joseph, was perhaps a good thing. The death of Francis was, for Maria, the beginning of the end of any real happiness that she could derive from life.

She had loved Francis deeply and had always been more than willing to overlook his indiscretions, even while finding such behavior appalling in others. If Joseph was unbearable as a prince, he was about to become a living hell as co-regent.