Caspar Hauser

Ok, the time has come for the story of the Baden dynasty and Caspar Hauser. As told through a few choice snippets.

[Margrave Charles Frederick] was already an elderly man (...) when he felt the desire to have a companion during his declining years. This old man's whim was potentially dangerous, and Princess Amelia, the wife of the hereditary prince, was worried. Since the death of her mother-in-law, she had occupied first place at court and had no intention of yielding it to a newcomer who, during the old sovereign's lifetime, would take precedence over her. Only someone who has not been a hereditary princess can fail to realise how painful such a humiliation can be!

Indeed. I have, once, so I know exactly.

Princess Amelia went in search of a ncie girl, someone beautiful but unobtrusive, who would know how to charm the margrave's old age, but discreetly. She thought she had found the very person in one of her maids of honour, Luisa Geyer von Geyersberg [I am not making this shit up]. In the absence of great beauty the girl had spirit - especially a spirit of intrigue - and she revealed it by rapidly captivating the heart of Charles Frederic (...) It was decided that the children born of this marriage should have no other righrs beyond bearing their mother's name (...) [and] would only be called to succeed if the Baden line became extinct. In fact, there was little chance tht this would happen (...) Two years passed which apparently justified this assumption, and then, in August 1790, the [countess von Hochberg - formerly von Geyersberg] gave birth to a son, Leopold von Hochberg. From that moment there was no holding her: a second son, William, was born in 1792, a third, Alexander, in 1794, and in 1795 came a daughter (...)

In 1812 [the legitimate descendant of Charles Frederick] Grand Duchess Stephanie gave birth to a son, and the rage of the countess von Hochberg, on seeing the crown recede from her sons' heads, reached its height. It was then (...) that she had the utterly fantastic idea of stealing the new-born child and using it as a pawn in the game (...) The plan was crazy: she ran every risk of being caught (...) but through a strange combination of circumstances, the first part of [it], at least, was successful. Thanks to accomplices in the palace, she succeeded in substituting for the royal child, who was only a few days old, another child born the preceding week to a poor family in Carlsruhe (...) Unfortunately for the countess, her plan did not entirely succeed. In fact, no sooner had he been placed in the grand ducal cradle than the plebeian child was seized with convulsions and began to howl. This woke the girls who were looking after him. In the uproar this sudden illness caused, nobody noticed the exchange. The doctor summoned to the child could not have realised it since it was not he who had delivered the grand duchess (...). The child died the next day and suffering had changed his little face so much that not even his father could have guessed that he was not his (...) The court went into mourning and the countess von Hochberg found this grand ducal baby highly embarassing. It was a bad moment to suggest his return in exchange for the elevation of the Hochbergs to the rank of princes of Baden.

In short, the child was given to a peasant family, under the supervision of countess von Hochberg, who later had a falling out with her sons, for whose titles she fought so bravely, and decided to divulge his identity to the legitimate Baden branch. The legitimate Baden branch reacted by incarcerating the boy in some fortress, where he lived in total isolation for a few years, before being released by his jailer - who got fed up with playing nanny - into Nurnberg. A veritable caveman, who ate with his hands and knew only a few broken words of Franconian, but nonetheless bore a letter of recommendation adressed to the captain of the guard. Needless to say he became an instant celebrity. I was very surprised to find that I'd actually heard of Caspar Hauser before reading that story. It's weird, the places pop attaches itself to culture sometimes.

The Germanies continued

Time for some more Secrets of the Gotha, as the backlog is getting pretty big:

The Duchy of Brunswick and the Kingdom of Hanover

Brought up in England by his uncle the prince regent, the future George IV, he had lived there until 1851, when he had gone to France in a baloon and stayed there.

(I wonder if "Go to France in a baloon and stay there" was the 19th century version of "Fuck off and die")

The King [Ernst-Augustus I] who had spent all his life in England, had remained very British and did not care much for Hanover: his capital was too small for his lioking, and the sight of his subjects irritated him. His son was spared this irritation since he lost his sight when young through whirling a chain which flew out of his hand and struck him in the eyes. His Hesse-Darmstadt cousins, who were economical by nature, took advantage of this infirmity in a rather sordid way. They did not turn the fountains full on when he came to stay with them.

***

George V's son, called Ernest-Augustus like his grandfather, was, during the first years of his life, the hope of the dynasty and the delight of the old king, who had him brought in every evening after dinner so that he could play with him. This reunion between grandfather and grandson gave rise to scenes so strange that one must quote the countess of Muenster, who observed them during on of her visits to the court:

'It was very touching to see the old man, who tended to be very severe and impatient, hold out his arms to this ugly, but nevertheless well brought-up child, while the child seized the little tuft of white hair which still adorned his grandfather's forehead, and, uttering piercing cries and kicking at his neck, fought to get hold of the king's monocle. This last exploit was somewhat dangerous, and as a rule, at this point in the game, the king tried to get rid of the struggling, angry child - by no means an easy operation. The last amusement which the boy asked for and obtained every day was as follows: the king would open his mouth, put his tongue out, and the child would rub his hands and cheeks against it (...) When the rite was completed, the king would rise and say: "Now let us go to the nursery for the bath." A ceremony which everyone considered very necessary after the licking procedure. Once we reached the nursery, chairs were arranged round a bath tub full of warm water to which a sweet perfume had been added. All we had to do then was to sit down and watch the spectacle of the child and his bath. When the sound of splashing grew louder, or a cry of delight was heard from the child, the poor crown prince [sic], who was blind, would turn towards us and ask with a laugh: "What part of his body are they washing now?"

'I need not add that this question was sometimes embarassing.'

***

Instead of the kingdom of Hanover, the duchy of Brunswick, which had been administered since 1866 by a regent, was solemnly returned to the grandson of the last sovereign, as a wedding present. William II [Emperor of the unified Germany, which incorporated Hanover] gave his daughter [who was marrying the abovementioned heir] the famous Brunswick jewels, which had been confiscated [along] with the country.

I think confiscating countries is definitely the way to go. Think big!

The Duchy of Coburg

Their daughters' only dowry was great virtue protected by even greater ugliness. They found it hard to obtain husbands: the eldest, Sophia, had married an Austrian gentleman, Count Mensdorff-Pouilly; the second, Julia, had fallen to the Grand Duke Constantine, grandson to the Tsarina Catherine, who, when he had been asked to choose between the three sisters, had cried: 'If I have to have one of them, I'd prefer the smallest. I'll marry the ugly little creature!'

***

The new duchess, ex-duchess of Edinburgh, was the only daughter of Tsar Alexander II, and thus born Grand Duchess Marie of Russia. Deeply conscious of her imperial origin, she had never been able to accustom herself to being in England only the wife of a younger brother of the royal house (...) She regretted in English fog the snows of her country, and when her husband was called to succeed to the throne of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha she went to reign in Coburg, delighted that she could at least satisfy her appetite for domination. Until her death she remained convinced that there was nothing in the world more pleasant than being a grand duchess of Russia. She never failed to remind anyone who in conversation forgot to address her as 'Imperial Highness' (...) She survived the 1914-1918 war only to see the disappearance of her former duchy and the collapse of the Russian empire (...) It is said that she died of shock on the day when she received an official letter from the new German government addressed simply to 'Frau Coburg'.

The saga of the court of Baden and Caspar Hauser deserves a separate post, so that's all for now.

Intermission

Will try to write something about Cracow, or the season premiere of Damages, or both, at some point, but right now I should really be working, so instead here's a glance at what is probably my favorite political entity of all time:

At the end of the eighteenth century, the Germanies, as they were then called, were composed of an infinite number of territories, some of them fairly large, most of them minute. Their masters, who were absolute monarchs as far as their subjects were concerned, were themselves dependent on an elected emperor, the head of the Holy Roman Empire of Germany. In the past the Holy Roman Emperor, who was the virtual heir to the crown of Charlemagne, had possessed undeniable power, but since the treaty of Westphalia [ending the Thirty Years' War in 1648] his real strength had declined to the point where it was no more than a moral authority which made him, like the pope, one of the spiritual masters of Europe. This elective sovereignty had moreover become hereditary in the house of Austria, the most powerful dynasty within the Holy Roman Empire and the only one which commanded sufficient prestige to earn the votes of the great electors. [They] were nine in number (six lay: Bavaria, Bohemia, Saxony, Brandenburg, the Palatinate, Hanover; and three ecclesiastical: Maine, Cologne, Trier-Coblenz) (...)

The Holy Roman Empire had tried its best to unite the Germanies, so different from one another that the only link between them was the post conducted by the house of Turn und Taxis, in blue coaches which ran non-stop across the vast empire. The princes of Turn und Taxis, grand masters of the Posts since the early sixteenth century, earned from this privilege one of the most considerable fortunes of the period. It allowed them to indulge in ostentation far greater than monarchs with greater possessions could afford.

The electorates represented the great powers but there existed as well nearly eight hundred countries. Many only extended over a few square miles but possessed rights as deserving of respect as those of Bavaria or Saxony. The empire was divided into ten circles, and the circle of Swabia alone, for example, included ninety-seven sovereigns, four ecclasiastical princes, fourteen secular princes, twenty-three prelates, twenty-five members of the ban of nobles and thirty imperial cities. Some principalities did not possess a thousand inhabitants, but they considered that their princess, who often lived like modest country gentlemen, equalled the greatest monarchs on earth. They greeted them with remarks of the greatest respect: 'Your most serene pigs have condescended to eat my humble potatoes,' a peasant said to one of these potentates.

Having read all that, can you really blame me for hating Bismarck?

A pony?

Time for some more aristocratic hilarity. This edition is devoted to France (focusing on the imperial, rather than royal or - God forbid - republican episodes though).

The surprising dynastic ties of the First Empire:

One curious detail: his marriage to Joséphine linked Napoleon to the reigning house of Osman, in Turkey. A young cousin of his wife, Aimée Dubucq de Rivery, had been carried off by Barbary pirates during a sea-crossing, sold as a slave in Constantinople and had then become the Sultana Validé, mother of the future Sultan Mahmud II.

Queen Hortense of Holland:

The marriage of Louis Bonaparte and Hortense de Bauharnais, the daughter of Joséphine, was very happy but inexplicably blessed by heaven. The queen, although she always lived as far away from her husband as possible, still gave him numerous and beautiful children. King Louis, who was horrified by such shameless behavior, had confessed his marital disappointments to the pope, and in one of his vehement epistles had compared his wife to Messalina. In fact Queen Hortense was no more than a charming flighty girl who was the first to be surprised by her pregnancies and confused those responsible. 'Hortense always gets muddled over the fathers of her children,' said Napoleon, not without indulgence, for some suspected that he was the father of her eldest son

And the reigning couple of the Second Empire:

The empress' well-known coldness soon extinguished the ardour of Napoleon III's passion, but she retained her hold over his mind. As General du Barrail subtly remarked: 'She dominated him not so much by her charms as by the memory of the numerous occasions on which he had failed to appreciate them.'

Napoleon III had only one son by his marriage, the prince imperial. His birth in 1856 had been greeted with the same demonstrations of joy as that of the king of Rome, but neither of them ascended the throne for which their births had been so ardently desired. The anxiety and joy of Napoleon III were so great at the moment of the birth that he could only reply 'no' by a shake of his head when the empress, anticipating the worst, asked him if it was a daughter. 'It's a boy!' she cried, relieved. But the emperor, becoming more and more emotional, again replied 'no'. 'Then what is it?' she moaned, completely panic-stricken.

Next up: the German countries, which is where the real fun begins.

Denmark

The anatomy of a name. How silly Karolina must now feel complaining about her hyphen:

While great dynasties live in the perpetual fear of not being able to arrange suitable marriages for their offspring, small dynasties - or more precisely the dynasties which reign over small states - live in the hope of concluding some profitable union. They draw a definite advantage from their political weakness: that of not being a cause of discord between their powerful neighbors (...) Following the example of the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, or Hesse-Darmstadt families, the Holsteins, who were descended from the ancient house of Oldenburg, practiced a policy of matrimonial intrigue, which as the centuries passed ensured them appreciable possessions whose names went on being added to their own. Thus in the eighteenth century the reigning house of Denmark was officially called Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg.

And a handy tip for any social gathering:

The children were brought up in Spartan fashion, and Vladimir d'Ormesson relates in his Enfances diplomatiques that the young princes and princesses had been trained to hold conversation with empty chairs on which a label indicated 'British Ambassador', 'Bishop of X...', 'President of the court of appeal', etc. He tells amusingly that each week, at the Opera, in order to give the public the impression that they were holding lively conversation during the intervals, the princes and princesses had acquired the habit of counting up to a hundred and then starting all over again:
'1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6,' said the Prince Royal.
'7, 8, 9, 10, 11,' replied the Princess Royal.
'12, 13, 14,' Princess Ingeborg would interpolate with determination.
'15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22,' replied Princess Thyra, who was a chatterbox.
'How gay our princes and princesses are this evening!' the public would think with delight.

How gay indeed.

She is better than this

I'm about one third through Secrets of the Gotha - a slightly outdated who's who of European royalty, mostly focusing on the anecdotal and scandalous. It's a book that got referenced a lot in the stuff I'd read for my thesis, so I was very pleasantly surprised to find it at that huge NYC bookstore... damn, forgot the name already. Oh well, nevermind. The style is nauseatingly pretentious at times, but that's probably to be expected, given the subject matter. And there are some pretty priceless bits too, like this letter from Napoleon Bonaparte to Eugène de Beauharnais:

Cousin, I have arrived in Munich; I have arranged your marriage with the Princess Augusta and I have already announced it. This morning the princess came to see me and I had a long conversation with her. Enclosed is her portrait on a cup. She is better than this.

Or this one, about the daughters and the mistress of Leopold II, King of the Belgians, all cheated out of an enormous inheritance (Leopold was one of the richest monarchs of the 19th century, due to the fact that the Congo was his personal property - as opposed to being a colony of the Belgian state):

In order to occupy her time as she grew older and earn some money [Princess Louise] began to write her memoirs. They appeared as Autour des trônes que j'ai vu tomber (Thrones I have seen collapse), and are a long plea 'pro domo' in which she takes up again all her grievances against her husband, the Hapsburg-Coburgs and her own family. Shortly afterwards her sister, the Princess Stephanie, published her regrets for a throne which had escaped her under the nostalgic title Je devais être impératrice (I should have been empress). As for [the late King's mistress] Baroness Vaughan, who did not want ot be left out, she gave to the world a little book of recollections modestly entitled Presque Reine! (Almost a Queen!)

More to come, probably.