Ah Maria, The Filial Son in Action

Queen Maria Theresa took the death of her husband hard, maybe harder than anyone else.

“ No human being is capable of adequately expressing the acute feelings with which the heart of a son is overwhelmed, who loses forever a father, by whom he is convinced he was loved….He was my teacher, my friend. I am now twenty-four years old. Providence has given me the cup of sorrow in my early days.”

So wrote Joseph to his mom shortly after the death of his father. To judge Joseph solely by his writing one would come away with the impression that the lad was the most loving and devoted of children. The most caring and thoughtful brother his siblings could hope for. His letters to his mother were filled with sentiments of the most lavish devotion. In action, he crossed her whenever it was convenient.

This habit was much in evidence when the issue of reforms came up. The first item on Joseph’s reform agenda was court spending. There was always a bit of that to be trimmed, so mom didn’t particularly object. Joseph being Joseph, he started with whatever he personally did not like.

He didn’t like hunting, so away went the gamekeepers and huntsmen that dad employed. He disliked “outward show and frivolous amusements.” This probably included the opera singers and dancers that his father liked to entertain in his private box at the theater. Gone. Much else was to follow.

A very large number of servants, many of whom had been with the family since before Joseph’s birth, were summarily fired. While Maria did not object to a bit of economizing around the palace, she was appalled at his heartless treatment of people who were practically family. He didn’t treat his family any better.

While Maria and Francis were, compared to their peers, especially King Louis of France, rather frugal, there was a bit of pomp and frippery. At least, with public money. Francis could spend lavishly when it suited his needs, such as a house in a very up-scale neighborhood of Vienna for his girlfriend the Countess Wilhelmina Auersperg. But that was “public money.”

Private money was a different matter. Francis managed to salt away 22 million gulden by the time of his death. He helped Maria put away a considerable sum as well. Very inexplicably, he left it all to Joseph. Two million of that sum was earmarked for Tuscany, where brother Leopold was Grand Duke. Tuscany was desperately poor and Leopold needed that money to keep the lights on. Joseph wouldn’t let him have it.

In fact, none of his siblings got a penny of their father’s fortune. Joseph got the lot. To be fair, he didn’t spend it on himself, at least, not that much. The bulk of it went to the state treasury to pay down the national debt. That significantly reduced Austria’s borrowing costs and saved money in the long run, but his brothers and sisters can be forgiven for not seeing the Big Picture at the time.

Not surprisingly, an unholy row broke out between Leopold and Joseph over the Tuscany money. It became so bitter that Maria was forced out of her self-imposed exile to deal with it. Once out, she never went back. “I stupefy myself with work, till I have no time to think or feel.”

In returning to work though, she found herself handicapped by the loss of two trusted advisers. First, Count Haugwitz died. He was much more than an adviser. He was a deeply trusted friend. For Maria, a woman whom by her nature and by her role did not have many close friends, the loss was grievous indeed.

The second loss was that of Count Leopold Daun, the head of the army. She still had Count Tarouca, but he was very old and couldn’t last much longer. She also still had Count Kaunitz, but he had never been a friend so much as a business partner. And as Maria would quickly discover, sided with Joseph on many important matters. Indeed, Joseph and Kaunitz were two peas in a pod on matters of state. And as far as Joseph was concerned, everything about himself was a matter of state.

This would cause Kaunitz trouble as time went on. Although he agreed with Joseph, and Joseph was emperor, Kaunitz owed everything to Maria. She, and she alone, made him the man that he was. He sometimes had to withdraw completely from state matters that mother and son did not, and never would, compromise on.

Religious toleration was one such issue. There could not, in Maria’s Catholic faith, be any room for Protestants in the public sphere. No Protestants get to see the wizard, not no way, no how. This placed her at loggerheads with her son, who considered himself a veritable fountain of Enlightenment ideas.

This was a thing about Joseph. His ideas were not necessarily bad ideas, indeed, many of them were his mom’s ideas in the first place. Not that he would have ever admitted that. It was his attitude that if an idea occurred to him, it was not only his, but it must be brilliant. And being Emperor, he had a Divine Mandate to beat everyone over the head with his idea until they accepted it.

Not surprisingly, this attitude often led to very bad things happening, like, for instance, the partition of Poland between Prussia, Austria, and Russia in 1772. Maria was mortified that her flesh and blood would do something that she considered to be nothing more than banditry very thinly disguised as state necessity. And she said so, to no avail.

The bald-faced greed exhibited by Joseph and Kaunitz shocked even Frederick. Wrote Maria to Kaunitz; “What will France, Spain, and England say if we bind ourselves so closely with those we so desperately need to contain and whose polices we have condemned as evil? I declare that this would amount to a formal denial of everything my government has been for thirty years.
Let us seek to check the crimes of others….
Let us be considered weak rather than dishonest.”

Her pleading was in vain. Worse, as far as Joseph was concerned, he was just getting warmed up.

— Mr. Al