Claire Ridgway discusses the life of this remarkable Renaissance ruler and the influence of her highly cultured court on the young Anne Boleyn.Spending the formative years of her life in France had not only made Margaret fluent in the language but also very French in her ways. She was also highly educated and was accomplished at music and poetry. Belgian historian, Ghislain de Boom, described her palace at Mechelen (Malines in French) as “un école d’éducation princière et un centre de haute civilisation”[3], “a princely school and a centre of high culture/advanced civilisation”, and so it was. Her court was visited by the likes of Erasmus, and other well-known Humanists, and was known for its superb library which contained poetry, missals, historical work and work by authors such as Christine de Pizan, who was known for challenging mysogyny and the stereotypical views of women, as well as the works of Boccaccio, Aesop, Ovid, Boethius and Aristotle. Margaret was a patron of the arts and her court was also known for Margarets’s collection of paintings by masters such as Jan van Eyck, her collection of illuminated manuscripts and her collection of music books. She surrounded herself with men of letters, poets and painters. Margaret also enjoyed the tradition of courtly love, which Eric Ives describes as “an integral element in chivalry, the complex of attitudes and institutions which was central to the life of the Tudor court and elite”, “a defence against boredom and vice” and a way “to constrain gender relationships within an accepted convention”[4].In the 19th century, Louise-Marie d'Orléans, the first Queen of the Belgians, enjoyed dressing up as Margaret of Austria.
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| Queen Elisabeth of the Belgians with Princes Xavier and Sixtus of Bourbon-Parma |
The two Bourbon-Parma princes were brothers to the Empress Zita of Austria and so when her husband, Charles I, became Emperor of Austria and wanted to end the Great War peacefully it was only natural that they try to do so via Prince Sixtus and Prince Xavier who were officers in the Belgian army, led by King Albert I, who also wanted peace in Europe rather than fighting on to destroy the continent until one side had total victory and the other side total ruin. This is significant since King Albert had greater cause for anger and resentment than any other Allied leader, his country being the only truly innocent party involved. However, King Albert was very religious and Pope Benedict XV wanted a peace without victors and the only leaders who paid attention to him were King Albert and Emperor Charles of Austria.
At an early age, Maximilian developed a keen interest in the sciences, particularly botany and he was fascinated by the New World. In 1860, he journeyed to the tropical forests of Brazil on a botanical expedition. While there, he acquired two exceptionally large diamonds which have been named after him: The Emperor Maximilian Diamond and The Maximilian Diamond. The Emperor Maximilian was a 41.94 carat antique cushion-cut diamond with a strong blue fluorescence which gives the diamond a soft luminosity in daylight. The second diamond was of a greenish-yellow tint and weighed 33 carats. After his return to Europe, Maximilian presented this smaller diamond to Charlotte, who wore it as a pendant. It is not known where either diamond was cut but it is possible that they were cut in Brazil, which has long possessed a diamond cutting industry, albeit on the smaller scale than in some other countries...
...Legend holds that Maximilian was wearing the Emperor Maximilian Diamond in a small satchel tied around his neck when he faced the firing squad. Following the execution, his remains were sent to Vienna and the Emperor Maximilian Diamond returned to Charlotte. Upon news of his death, Charlotte’s condition worsened and she shut herself off from the outside world. The diamond was subsequently sold to help pay for expenses during Charlotte’s illness and it disappeared until 1919 when it returned to America. Maximilian’s widow lived on for another sixty years, hopelessly insane, dying in January 1927 in Brussels at the age of 86. Even in her final days, some say she still believed herself to be the Empress of Mexico.
In 1919, the Emperor Maximilian Diamond was purchased by a Chicago gem dealer, Ferdinand Holtz and was displayed in the 1934 Chicago World’s Fair as the highlight of the 'Century of Progress' exhibition. Despite several offers to buy it, Mr. Holtz refused to sell the diamond and it remained in his possession until his death in 1946. It was subsequently sold to a private collector in New York.
The name of the new owner has never been revealed and the diamond remained in her possession, mounted in a ring by Cartier, until Christie’s auctioned it in New York in 1982. It was expected that diamond would fetch $330,000 but it eventually sold for $726,000 to Laurence Graff, the London jeweler, who has a vast collection of notable and historic diamonds. In January 1983, Graff sold The Emperor Maximilian, together with two other important diamonds, in a single transaction to the same buyer, Madame Imelda Marcos, wife of the President of the Philippines. Subsequently, it was sold and re-cut in the 1990’s, to its current weight of 39.55 carats, and finally it was acquired by the present owner.
The Mayerling mystery concerning the tragic death of Crown Prince Rudolf and his mistress, Baroness Marie Vetsera, has remained unsolved to this day. On January 30, 1889, the couple were discovered dead at the royal hunting lodge in Mayerling...The most widely accepted theory is that there was a lover's pact: Rudolf shot Marie and then killed himself. Franz Joseph had wanted the lovers to separate but they could not bear life without each other. There is another theory that the couple were murdered and they were victims of a political conspiracy, cooked up by the French Prime Minister Clemenceau, who was conspiring to overthrow Franz Joseph and place the Germanophobe Rudolf on the throne. This way Austria could have loosened ties with Germany and signed an alliance with France. Rudolf refused to take part in the conspiracy and was killed to secure his silence. Certain facts point towards this theory. When Marie's remains were examined half a century later, an astonishing discovery was made. There was no sign of the use of firearms: instead, there was a large trauma on her head. Allegedly, Rudolf's body showed signs of a violent confrontation before death. The tragic deaths shocked the Austrian-Hungarian Empire and caused an immediate crisis of succession to the throne. The court did everything possible to cover up the scandalous incident (the official version was that Rudolf died of heart failure, with no mention of his lover), so it is likely the mystery will never be solved.It is important to note that the last Habsburg empress, Zita, supported the theory that Rudolf and Marie had been murdered. In 1982, she told the Viennese daily Kronen Zeitung that she believed the couple had been assassinated as part of a plot against the imperial family. Some might say this was merely a way of covering up the shame of a suicide in the ranks of the devoutly Catholic House of Austria, but Zita hardly had the reputation of being a liar. On the contrary, she was a woman of high character and I do not think her testimony can be lightly dismissed.
In Winterhalter's famous portrait the Empress Elisabeth of Austria wears glittering diamond stars in her rich, brown hair and a diaphanous gown. She looks so beautiful that it is not surprising that she was compared to the Fairy-Queen, Titania. Her beauty came at a price, however. The rather vain Queen spent hours caring for her hair, skin and figure.
The Mad Monarchist reviews the 1939 film Juarez, starring Bette Davis as the tragic Belgian-born Empress Carlota of Mexico. More HERE. It always strikes me that Belgian royals have faced many tragedies over the decades, and Carlota's sad fate is yet another example.
