TRAGEDIES OF THE HAPSBURGS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLI, Issue 12602, 17 June 1904, Page 2 (Supplement)

TRAGEDIES OF THE HAPSBURGS.

It is about time people were getting used to the frequent -upheavals in the house of Hapsburg, writes the London correspondent of the Chicago Tribune, but apparently they haven't.

Society—Royal society, of course—is just as much scandalised over the recent "indiscretion" of the pretty Princess Elizabeth of Windisch-Gratz in shooting the actress whom she found in her husband's rooms as they would he if it had been committed bywell, say, Queen Alexandra, for the English Sovereign is looked upon by everyone as the redeemer of European Royalty's doubtful reputation. ', •• • . Americans, who do not lay claim to the blood of kings, regard the mutter much more philosophically, and remark calmly, Well, what can you expect? Hasn't it gotten to bo quite the thing to expect the Hapsburg family to furnish us with a new sensation periodically?" ■ . Look at the Princess' father, Prince Rudolf of Austria, and her grandfather, Franz Josef, and the' hosts of others at whose door you could lay the blame of poor Elizabeth's crime ; . And some of them add: "Poor child! For, after all, that is all the Princess is. Americans haven't been brought up to consider that because a girl of 20 years belongs to an Imperial family, and has been reared in the exalted atmosphere of Royalty, she is too far above ordinary femininity to have a woman's feelings and passions. The truth is, say the people who "know," the poor little Princess has more than her share of passions, a fact greatly deplored by Royalty at large, but which they do not Store up against her, but against her forbears. ' The sins of the fathers have been visited with a vengeance on this frail representative of the third and "fourth generations, for her impetuous love and hot hatred have come to her from ancestors and ancestresses of both her mother's and father's family. The laws of heredity are no respecters of persons. Every man has observed their workings among his own acquaintances. In the Royal tragedy at Prague they manifested themselves in a daughter of the Hapsburgs, the grandchild of Franz Joset, Emperor of Austria, and of Leopold, King of the Belgians. '' : Emperor and King, the lives of these two men have been such since their early manhood as to win them the undisputed title of the crowned roues of Europe—and the curse has carried. , _ Leopold's daughter Stephanie started a quarrel with her'father, which has not yet healed, by renouncing the rank that was hers through birth and through marriage to Franz Josef's son by taking for her second husband Count Lonyay, with whom she has never since been happy. Rudolf, her first husband, and the Emperor's heir, ended most mysteriously a short and stormv life in the little hunting'lodge of Meyerling, a bullet through his head, and tjie dead Baroness Vetsera at his side. When the Princess Elizabeth was a mere infant the Meyerling tragedy startled all Europe. She grew up in its shadow, and, once grown, she declared that, because of this scandal, she would not marry into r. reigning house. And now it looks a3 if the Prague tragedy will supersede that of Rudolf— this, although she is a bride of only two years and the wife of a man for whom she surrendered her royal rank.

TRAGEDIES OF MOKE MODERN TIMES. The tragic story of the family in eontemporary times begins with Elizabeth's grandfather, the Emperor of Austria. Simple of habit and brilliant though lie is, Franz Josef, almost from the day when a peculiar combination of circumstances placed him on the Imperial throne at the age of 18, has suffered from the temptations which . beset every ruler of men. Whew he married the beautiful Princess Elizabeth of Bavaria in 1854- the match was everywhere proclaimed an affair of the heart; but, if this was so, then the romance did not long survive tho wedding, and the intrigues of the Emperor continued to grow in number and publicity until he utterly broke his wife's spirit. To-day, at 73, he has the memory that Elizabeth, whose heart he brake, was killed by tho hand of an assassin in Geneva five years ago; that his daughter Sophie died suddenly in 1857; that his son killed himself; that his brother Maximilian was shot in Mexico; that his widowed daughter-in-law married against his wishes, and actually ran away with a young army officer; that his nephews, Archduke Henry and Ernest, disgraced themselves and finally contracted inorganic alliances; that another nephew, the Archduke John, had the bad taste to love a humble girl, and be lost at sea as a common sailor, John Orth; and now that his favourite granddaughter, after marrying a man of whom ha disapproved, shoots that man's mis, tress in Prague. The house of Hapsburg is at the moment the chief sufferer from, the _ outbreaks of princely reprobates, but. this is because the women of that house have suddenly burst the old-time ties that bound them and pushed to the opposite extremes. Profligacy, however, has "been the chief distinction of most of the Austrian descendants of the great Maria Theresa, though so far back as history concerns itself with the conduct of the princes, the daughters of Austria have left a lurid trail of almost masculine' turpitude, both in morals and in politics. To go back no further than to the women of' Maria Theresa's fine, nearly everyone of them was notorious for strenuous profligacy. Her oldest daughter, Maria Caroline, Queen of Naples, was the by-word of her time as the most unrestrained female reprobate of Europe. She was the patron and confidante of that notorious Emma Hamilton, wife of Sir William, the British Minister at Naples, and the paramour of the British admiral, Nelson. This Hapsburg Archduchess dominated her husband, the imbecile Ferdinand, and with the British agent, Acton, ruled the kingdom, until Napoleon kicked' the Bourbon dynasty out. The " goings on" as revealed in the diplomatic correspondence under Louis XV. and Louis XVI. rival anything recorded of Catherine of Russia or the Caesarean wantons, Another Archduchess, Marie Charlotte, the regent of the low countries, added her contributions to tho strain of adventurous gallantry, and though Marie Antoinette, the youngest of the sisters, preserved herself from the laxities of her kin, she none the less had to suffer for their sins, for the French people could not be made to believe that she was less wanton than her notorious sisters. -

Marie Louise, the Archduchess whom Napoleon was weak enough to marry when he put away Josephine, had been trained in the- preposterous system of ignorance that was usual in the bringing up of her family, but she soon showed that no training could repress the Hapsburg blood. With King Leopold's manner of life, passed between affairs with Parisian dancers and money-making by often doubtful and always savage means in Africa, most people are more or less familiar, but in justice to his daughter, Stephanie, it should bo said that her marriage to Franz Josef's son and heir, the Crown Prince Rudolf, was frankly one of convenience. The climax came on January 31, 1889, in a mysterious manner, the whole truth about which will probably uevei be told. All that is definitely known is that in the early hours of the morning, at his shooting lodge, in Mcyerling, neat Vienna, Rudolf was found dead in his beet