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The Marriage of Blessed Karl and Princess Zita

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Editor’s note: today is the feast day of our patron, Blessed Emperor Karl. When Pope St. John Paul II beatified Emperor Karl (Karol Wojtyła’s own namesake, in fact), he chose October 21st as his feast day, which is the anniversary of Karl and Zita’s wedding. Here we publish an excerpt from the biography written by our contributing editor, Charles Coulombe, with the kind permission from TAN Books.

[T]he emperor [Franz Joseph] called Charles to Vienna for a heart-to-heart talk. There had been rumors linking Charles romantically to various noblewomen. But still smarting from the affair of Franz Ferdinand over a decade before, Franz Josef told his great nephew that he must make a choice from one Europe’s other imperial or royal houses. Little did the exasperated old monarch know that his requirements for his heir were to be fulfilled with a love match! Of course, his own had been one such, and a disaster, but the strong-willed Zita was no Sissi.

In May of 1911, the Archduchess Maria Theresa invited both Charles and Zita with two of her sisters for a weekend at her hunting lodge in Sankt Jakob in Walde, in Styria. There, nine years before, young Charles had shot his first gamecock under the guidance of the imperial huntsman Erhard Orthofer. Now he was on a far sweeter hunt. “It was here, during a week of beautiful May weather away from military duties and official work that Charles was able to get to know Zita. They spent long hours talking together and it was here that he proposed marriage to her. They were away from the nods and smiles and interest shown by others at balls and dances, and could be themselves.”[1] Alas, in 1922 this romantic haven burned down, save its clocktower. On the site is a Gasthaus run by the Orthofer clan, whose dearest possession is the imperial table at which the couple sat; Zita herself would return here at age ninety-one.

When the news went through their extended family, there was joy mingled with relief. Zita was not only lovely, clever, and in every personal way popular, she was eminently qualified genealogically. The emperor was particularly pleased with everything about her—not least her merry personality. The official announcement was made of the engagement at Pianore on June 13, 1911, the feast of St. Anthony. The wedding was set for Schwarzau on October 21. But before the autumnal nuptials, there loomed two official duties. The one was simple enough; Zita must make a pilgrimage to Rome and get the blessing of Pope St. Pius X on the forthcoming wedding, but Charles must represent his great uncle at the coronation of the newly acceded king of Great Britain and Ireland, George V.

His readiness to do so solved a protocol issue. Austria-Hungary had been unrepresented at the coronation of Edward VII in 1902. Franz Josef had been too old to travel that far and Franz Ferdinand’s marriage presented all sorts of problems with etiquette. Sophie would not have been able to dine with her husband, sit with him, or even ride in the same carriage. But this time, as heir presumptive to Franz Ferdinand, Charles could represent the country and the dynasty at what was certainly the largest gathering of royals in Europe since Queen Victoria’s funeral. The forty-one who were to be present represented every country in Europe (save France, Portugal, and Switzerland), the Ottoman Empire, Ethiopia, China, Japan, Siam, and Morocco. Charles set off for London.

Meanwhile, Zita went to Rome at Charles’s request to seek the papal blessing upon their marriage. As a child, she had been there for the silver jubilee of Pope Leo XIII in 1902. But this occasion was different. To honor the princess’s engagement to the archduke, the pope would offer Mass for Zita and her family in his private chapel and grant them a private audience afterwards. Pius settled with them in his library and started out by saying, “I am very happy with this marriage and I expect much from it for the future. . . . Charles is a gift from Heaven for what Austria has done for the Church.” So far, so good. But a bit later, things became a little peculiar when the pope referred to Charles as the heir apparent. Tactfully, Zita pointed out that Charles was in fact only second in line to the throne, after Franz Ferdinand, but the pope said that nevertheless he would soon be emperor. Taken aback, Zita replied that Franz Ferdinand would surely not abdicate. But St. Pius X, looking a bit perturbed, said “If it is an abdication . . . I do not know.”[2] His words would haunt those present in the years to come.

In the meantime, Charles had arrived in a London filled with foreign guests. As something of a junior royal, the archduke found himself lodged in Belgravia in the same house that another guest—Queen Victoria’s grandson, Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught (future governor-general of South Africa)—would die in in 1938. The Lady magazine, reporting not only on the coronation itself but the plethora of balls, banquets, and other goings on gave minute descriptions of each of the foreign royals. Of Charles, it gushed, “And the Archduke Charles Francis Josef of Austria representing his uncle the Emperor, a handsome young prince who, by the way, was formally betrothed the day before he came to England to the Princess Zita of Bourbon-Parma, a daughter of the late Duke of Parma and sister of the present. The bride-elect is only 19 and very pretty, and she is the 12th child in a family of 20 brothers and sisters!”[3] It was here, of course, that Charles made the acquaintance of George V, a meeting that would have a key effect later on.

Once back home and reunited with his fiancée, Charles found the ensuing months prior to the wedding quite busy. He and Zita enjoyed each other’s company, and the week before their wedding, they went to Wiener Neustadt for the Austrian Flying Week in honor of the dual monarchy’s nascent air force. But at the same time, they had serious discussions regarding their similar views on religion and politics. The night before the wedding, Charles told his bride, “Now we must help each other get to Heaven.” For them both, marriage was a sacrament, a sacred and holy thing, as was the crown whose burden the two of them would have to shoulder together one day.

The wedding itself took place at the chapel in Castle Schwarzau. It is today virtually unchanged, but because the castle is now a woman’s prison, it is hard to see nowadays. It was quite different on October 21, 1911, when a huge number of Habsburgs and Bourbons gathered to celebrate what looked to have the makings of an extremely happy marriage. Film clips show a happy extended clan, and even Franz Josef is smiling and jolly. He had every reason to be. The day before, Zita was treated by the local villagers in costumes, songs, flowers, fireworks, and a torchlight procession. One of the guests was an individual fated to play an important role in their lives: an Hungarian naval officer named Nicholas Horthy.

Charles was dressed in the uniform of the Seventh dragoons with his Golden Fleece order around his neck, while Zita’s satin dress was festooned with Bourbon lilies and she wore a tiara given by Franz Josef. Charles entered the chapel between his mother and the emperor. The celebrant was an old friend of the bride’s family, Msgr. Gaetano Bisleti, who was also an envoy from St. Pius X. (He would be made a cardinal just over a month later; in 1922, as cardinal protodeacon, he would announce the election of Pope Pius XI and later crown him with the tiara.) The ceremony was in French, in deference to the bride’s origins, but the sermon was in Italian. Charles had the words engraved in the rings that the couple exchanged: Sub tuum praesidium confugimus, sancta Dei genitrix (Under your protection and umbrella, we flee, Holy Mother of God). When the banquet was finished and a fitting toast given by the emperor, the couple departed by car on their honeymoon to Villa Wartholz. The villagers lined the road, and air cadets from Wiener Neustadt dropped flowers on the newlyweds from the sky. The archducal pair made a short pilgrimage to Mariazell to dedicate their marriage and their lives to the Magna Mater Austriae. From there, they stopped at the “Gasthaus Elephant” in Brixen in what is now South Tyrol, and thence on to Dalmatia, where such resorts as Franz Ferdinand’s island of Lokrum beckoned.


[1] Joanna and James Bogle, A Heart for Europe: The Lives of Emperor Charles and Empress Zita of Austria-Hungary (Gracewing Publishing, 2000), p. 29.

[2] Ibid., p. 32.

[3] Ibid., p. 34.

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