The Eagle and the Maple Leaf: The Austrian Imperial Family in Canada

This is part of a series looking at vignettes in the life of figures who featured prominently in The Emperors, and what happened after the fall of the monarchy.

The death in office of Canada's esteemed Governor-General, Lord Tweedsmuir, during the open months of the Second World War presented the Canadian government with a dilemma, for although they had intended for Lord Tweedsmuir's successor to be a native-born Canadian, the war made the replacement of the Governor-General a top priority and there was not time to go through all the potential Canadian candidates. The Royal Family were hugely popular in Canada and the people's support for them had been attested to by the outpouring of affection and interest surrounding King George and Queen Elizabeth's visit in 1939. Inviting a member of the Royal house to assume the post for the duration of the war therefore seemed a sensible solution, satisfying both the urgency and tact required in making the new appointment; King George VI's uncle, Alexander, Earl of Athlone, who had previously served the Empire as Governor General of the Union of South Africa, accepted the post and crossed to Canada in the company of his wife Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone (above.)

This energetic and capable couple were not the only royal arrivals in war-time Canada. Having been overthrown at the end of the First World War, the Hapsburg dynasty found itself the focal point of Austrians opposed to their country's Anschluss with Germany in 1938. The last emperor, Karl, had died in exile but his widow, Zita of Bourbon-Parma (right), had been active in monarchist politics throughout the 1930s and their son, Crown Prince Otto, was a vocal opponent of Nazism. As the Wehrmacht moved through western Europe, Zita no longer felt safe and dreaded the prospect of any of her children falling into Nazi hands. She had every reason to be afraid, for as they hurtled towards their own ruin in the fire and horror of war, the Third Reich had no respect for human life, royal or otherwise. Two of the Hapsburgs had already been captured - Maximilian, Duke of Hohenberg, eldest son of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination had helped start the First World War, had vanished behind the barbed wire fences of Dachau concentration camp in southern Germany, for daring to oppose the Anschluss, while the Archduke Albrecht emerged from Gestapo custody blind in one eye and partially paralysed as a result of the torture inflicted upon him. In time, the King of Italy's daughter, Princess Mafalda, was arrested for "subversive activities" and sent to her death at Buchenwald. 

The British Royal family had helped arrange the Austrian Imperial Family's evacuation from Austria in 1919, something I talk about in chapter 12 of The Emperors, and they came to their aid again by arranging safe transport for the Dowager Empress and her younger children to Canada. The family had fled Belgium after the Nazi invasion, making it through France, Spain and Portugal, and across the Atlantic to New Jersey, where they spent some time in New York and the Hamptons, but with the Germans having cut off all access to their bank accounts, funds were tighter than ever and Zita was reduced to making salad made from dandelion leaves. Eventually, the British once again came to her aid by facilitating her move to Quebec, a predominantly Catholic and French-speaking part of the Empire, which suited the Dowager Empress perfectly, since French was her first language and some of her children were still learning English. 

Zita (with her children, above), who always wore black in mourning for her late husband the Emperor, moved north, but her five sons chose to join the war effort. Otto, as the eldest, remained in America, making anti-Nazi propaganda films, raising money for Allied causes and coordinating Austrian exile groups; his younger brother, the Archduke Robert, went to London to work with other exiled representatives of countries which had fallen to the Wehrmacht; Karl-Ludwig and Felix both later signed up to join the US Army, and the youngest boy, Rudolf, smuggled himself back into Austria to join the Resistance.

Initially, it was Karl-Ludwig, Rudolf, Charlotte and the youngest daughter, the Archduchess Elisabeth, who accompanied their mother, along with their grandmother Maria Antonia of Portugal, Dowager Duchess of Parma, who had fled the Austrian revolution wearing nearly every piece of jewellery she owned. So much so that one British officer onboard the train thought she looked like an over-decorated Christmas tree. Felix went north to help find a house for them. In Montreal, they met with Princess Alice and her husband, the Governor-General, and I came across this account of their friendship in Princess Alice's hugely enjoyable memoirs, For My Grandchildren, which, as its name suggests, was constructed almost like a long letter, a reminiscence of an extraordinary life, for the Countess's grandchildren. 

We went to Montreal in October, where there was a reception for us and Granpa received a degree from the University of McGill and attended one of the luncheon-club dinners at which seven hundred people were present. These are only for men and all the big-shots attend them. Granpa had a long talk with Sir Edward Beatty, President of the Canadian Pacific Railway, about Canadian affairs... We saw Archduke Felix of Austria and the Archduchess, who were taking a house in Montreal. The Empress Zita had not yet arrived with her mother ... [She arrived a few weeks later] The four children, Carl, Rudolf, Charlotte and Elisabeth were also there. The Emperor had died in 1922, after being married to Zita for about ten years, during which time they had eight children and Granpa remarked that had he lived he and Zita might have exceeded the record set up by her parents, who had twenty-one! These four children, whose ages ranged from nineteen to twenty-three, were all well brought up, with charming manners, and appeared young for their ages. 

The Countess was slightly mistaken about the number of Zita's siblings - while her father Roberto had fathered over twenty children, they had been between two wives. Zita's mother, Maria Antonia, was his second, married after the death of his first, Maria Pia.

After Felix and Karl-Ludwig returned to America to fight in the war, the Governor-General and Princess Alice invited the Empress and her two youngest daughters, Charlotte and Elisabeth, to visit them and stayed in regular contact whenever they visited Montreal.

The Empress Zita of Austria and her two charming daughters, Charlotte and Elisabeth, came to stay with us. The Empress led an austere and secluded existence, and as a consequence the girls, although they were old enough to attend university, had little experience of social life. I well remember their excitement when we took them out to dinner and a movie in Quebec! They are both happily married now [Author's Note: After the war, Charlotte married Georg, Duke of Mecklenburg, and Elisabeth married Prince Heinrich of Liechtenstein]. The Empress's lady-in-waiting, Countess Kerstenbruck, used to visit our aides-de-camp in the staff room in order to have a sherry and a cigarette, as such indulgences were not permitted in the ascetic apartments of the Empress! They lived in a dreary little house with no curtains, no pictures and floors covered with linoleum which had been a priests' convalescent retreat. I felt very sad for her [Zita] and her eight children, and I thought they seemed very poor. She was strict with the girls, so that they knew no one and were always chaperoned by the lady-in-waiting to and from the university. Zita still wore the same dress as she did when she became a widow - down to the ground, right to her hands and up to her ears and chin with no ear-rings or any bit of jewellery. In contrast she was very talkative, well informed and cultivated. She spoke English fluently, but we spoke French to the children (they lived in Quebec), but they were learning English. [Zita] had her old mother with her, who was much more worldly She was looked after by one of Zita's hideous brothers - she had twenty-one brothers and sisters of the Parma family. We sat down to a typical German tea of butterbrod and little square cakes and biscuits. Only [a friend] and I were allowed cups of tea - the others, tumblers of water. 

Eventually, one of the Empress's sheltered daughters, the Archduchess Charlotte, remarkably flew the nest to return to New York under the pseudonym of Charlotte de Bar and enrolled as a social worker in East Harlem, one of the city's most underprivileged areas. Zita returned to Europe after the war, where she died at the age of ninety-six in 1989. 

Famous Shipping Disasters: The torpedoing of the "Carpathia" (1918)

Famous for rescuing the survivors of the Titanic disaster in 1912, the 8,000-ton Carpathia was one of the smaller members of the vast Cunard fleet. Over the course of her career, which began in 1903, nine years before she became famous because of the Titanic, the Carpathia had operated the route between Liverpool and Boston, undertaken cruises to the Mediterranean and sailed between New York and the Austro-Hungarian city of Fiume. 

In 1914, she was requisitioned for the Imperial war effort and assigned to help the Canadian Expeditionary Force move Canadian troops across the Atlantic to the Western Front. As with most requisitioned passenger ships, her voyage routes and purposes were often changed and she served in a variety of functions between 1914 and 1918. One of the troops she brought over for active service was the American soldier, Frank Buckles, a native of Missouri who went on to become the last living American veteran of the First World War; dying at the age of 110 in 2011.

On 17th July 1918, a date that was to become famous in European history for another event entirely, the Carpathia was sailing through the Celtic Sea, near the southern coast of Ireland, en route for Boston. The recent influx of American service personnel, some of whom the Carpathia had helped bring over, had hastened the defeat of the Central Powers and the Great War was now in its final months. But, at 9:15 in the morning, the Imperial German Navy showed that it still had some teeth; its submarine, U-55, fired two torpedoes into the Carpathia's side. Five men died in the initial explosions. Captain William Prothero ordered everyone into the lifeboats, which were quickly lowered, as the ship began to sink. Keen to hasten the ship's end, the U-55 vindictively fired a third torpedo and was menacingly approaching the lifeboats when the Royal Navy ship, Snowdrop, arrived and opened fire.

It was a measure, perhaps, of just how appallingly vindictive the First World War had become that the U-55 seemed to be preparing to target the survivors. In 1915, when another Cunard ship, the Lusitania, had been torpedoed, the German navy had insisted that they would never have fired a second torpedo into a sinking ship. By 1918, such niceties had vanished and three had been fired, with the possibility of attacking the survivors in the lifeboats only being prevented by the arrival of a British warship. 

The Carpathia sank in one hour and forty-five minutes; its wreck was discovered by American author Clive Cussler in the year 2000. 

Famous Shipping Disasters: The sinking of the "Empress of Ireland" (1914)

Despite being the worst maritime disaster in Canadian history, the 1914 sinking of the Empress of Ireland in the icy Saint Lawrence River has attracted relatively little subsequent historical attention, particularly in comparison to the interest still shown in the Titanic and Lusitania disasters. A 14,000-ton liner for the Canadian Pacific Steamship Company, the vessel operated the transatlantic routes between Liverpool and Quebec City. Built in Scotland in 1906, she was noted for her speed and for the comfort and elegance of her interiors (below.)

The Empress of Ireland disaster, which claimed 1,012 lives, occurred as the ship was starting out for one of her routine voyages to England. Sailing in thick fog, she collided with a Norwegian cargo ship, the SS Storstad. Within minutes of the collision, the Empress of Ireland had listed so far to starboard that it became impossible for the crew to launch half of her available lifeboats. Minutes later, there was a sudden lurch and then the ship stopped moving, leading many on-board to mistakenly believe that, mercifully, she had run aground. Fourteen minutes after the collision, the Empress of Ireland tipped over into the water and disappeared from sight, hurling hundreds of people into the freezing river water. Perhaps one of the most tragic facts reported in the British and Canadian newspapers at the time was that of the 138 children on-board at the time, only four survived the disaster. Among the survivors was the sailor "Lucky" Frank Tower, who had survived the Titanic disaster and went on to serve and survive the Lusitania, as well.

Since 1914, the Empress of Ireland has continued to claim lives, with several hardcore diving enthusiasts dying on expeditions to its murky wreck. In 2005, a Canadian documentary resurrected the theory that although most of the blame at the time fell on the Norwegian crew of the Storstad, the Empress of Ireland's captain, Henry Kendall, may have been partly to blame for the disaster by attempting to overtake the Storstad and that modern-day examinations of the wreck indicate that the ship's watertight doors had not been closed, as claimed - thus explaining the rapid speed of the sinking.

Obituary: Otto von Hapsburg, Crown Prince of Austria (1912 - 2011)

I was saddened to hear today of the death of His Imperial and Royal Highness Crown Prince Otto of Austria, Hungary, Croatia and Bohemia. His Imperial Highness was the eldest son of the last Emperor of Austria, to date, Karl I, who ruled the Austro-Hungarian Empire during its final traumatic years from 1916 to 1918. Despite Karl's heroic attempts to end the carnage of the First World War, the chaos and unrest which swept Europe in 1918, coupled with American hostility to the idea of negotiating with a semi-absolute monarchy, eventually swept the Hapsburgs off the throne they had held for nearly eight centuries and their vast empire disintegrated into eleven smaller nations and a generation of instability. Karl, his wife Zita and their children, including six year-old Otto, were banished and despite various attempts to restore the monarchy in Hungary, Emperor Karl died in exile on the Portuguese island of Madeira in 1922. His widow, now Dowager Empress, endured an extraordinarily long widowhood, dying in 1987. In recognition of the late emperor's devotion to the cause of peace, his abhorrence of violence and the strength of his devotion to the Christian faith, he was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 2004. 

In deference to the politics of the time, Otto, who was ten years old when his father died, chose not to adopt the title of "emperor" in exile and instead settled on being referred to as Crown Prince, showing that he very much considered himself to be an emperor-in-waiting. He relied very much on his close relationship with his mother and his large brood of siblings, all of whom showed characteristic Hapsburg determination in carving out new lives for themselves in the modern era. The Crown Prince's younger sister, Archduchess Charlotte, for instance, became a welfare worker in East Harlem.

Anniversary of the Coronation

Today marks the fifty-eighth anniversary of the Coronation of the Queen in Westminster Abbey, the great church where more recently her grandson married Catherine Middleton. 

Pretty magnificent footage from the BBC via YouTube of the day itself and the intricacies of the ceremony is shown below. The latter half is in colour.

For those interested, in Britain, Her Majesty's full official title is Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and of Her other Realms and Territories, Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith.

Upon becoming Sovereign, the Queen and her advisers decided that in reference and deference to the many other countries over which she was now Head of State, she would bear an individual title within those countries, representing her position as Head of the Commonwealth. This means that today, Her Majesty is also the Queen of Canada (in French, her full title is Sa Majesté Elizabeth Deux, par la grâce de Dieu Reine du Royaume-Uni, du Canada et de ses autres royaumes et territoires, Chef du Commonwealth, Défenseur de la Foi), Duke of Normandy (Guernsey and Jersey), Lord of Mann (the Isle of Mann), Queen of Barbados, Queen of Jamaica, Queen of The Commonwealth of The Bahamas, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Grenada, Queen of Saint Lucia, Queen of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Queen of Australia, Queen of New Zealand, Queen of Papau New Guinea, Queen of the Solomon Islands, Queen of Tuvalu, Queen of Antigua and Barbuda, Queen of Belize and Queen of Saint Christopher and Nevis ("St Kitts.")