royal wedding celebration

Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo & Juliet’ is often seen as the ultimate love story but I think it is really about something far less romantic and far more cynical than the tragedy of two young and star-crossed lovers. From the earliest scenes, Juliet makes references to death, and while that is often taken as a sexual euphemism, I think it can be taken literally as physical death. An overriding theme of the play is that this love cannot last. It must burn out quickly and passionately or Romeo and Juliet will become as unloving as their parents are. There is no romance between the older Montagues and Capulets – they merely tolerate each other. Shakespeare returns to the same theme in ‘Antony & Cleopatra’. These lovers are older but their romance emasculates Antony and makes him look feeble because, in Shakespeare’s mind, love seems to belong to the young.

Obviously, though loth to spoil so beautiful a story, with such beautiful language (and I love Shakespeare!!), Romeo and Juliet hardly love each other at all. I do believe in love at first sight, but it’s a strange thing that Romeo and Juliet meet
only a couple of times at a distance, marry quickly, spend one night together and then are separated (why didn’t Juliet run away with Romeo when he fled Verona?) so they hardly know each other at all. Both, though, are in love with the dream of love (after all, at the opening of the play, Romeo is mouching about in love with someone else) and since it is a dream that they love, not each other, they have to wake up...or die to keep their dream alive.


Alas, Shakespeare did not live to see 2 couples who really were star-crossed lovers, and who kept that romance and beauty alive through many tribulations, and ultimately died together. Franz Ferdinand and Sophie Chotek, and Tsar Nicholas II and Alix of Hesse, were true romantic heroes in my opinion. Not only did they have to overcome many hurdles in order to be together (Sophie, a lady-in-waiting, being deemed unworthy of an Archduke; Alix for so long unable to agree to convert to Orthodoxy and having to overcome opposition from her grandmother and future mother-in-law) but once married they had many more difficulties to overcome. These people loved one another, not the dream of being in love, and, as can been seen particularly in the later letters of Alix and Nicholas (during their separation during the war), they remained passionate about each other.

It almost seems fitting that they should die together; I cannot imagine either Alix or Nicholas outliving the other; nor can I imagine Franz Ferdinand without Sophie’s calming influence. So on Valentine’s day, I wish that Shakespeare had lived to write their stories and to show that love does not belong to the young; rather it deepens with age and can last until death....and beyond.

As startling as old film footage of people whom we admire from the past and suddenly glimpse for a moment, is the sound of old voice recordings. To quote, yet again, L.P. Hartley’s famous line, “the past is a foreign country...”, it often seems, on hearing original recordings that they even spoke a different language. The sounds of words were melodic and so different from how we speak today and, as someone who loves words, I find this so fascinating and listening to their voices is like eavesdropping in on a conversation or hearing an echo.

We have all heard the clipped tones of the broadcasters of the earliest BBC and Pathe news recordings and I used to think it was something to do with the recording equipment that made the accents sound so different from anything we hear now but now, having heard many more recordings, I think people really did speak differently even 100 years ago. Listening to this recording of Virginia Woolf, for example (rather like listening to the charming voice of Princess Alice of Athlone, to which someone kindly sent a link some post ago) it’s obvious that a voice/accent like this would not be heard today. The ‘a’ pronounced as ‘e’, (to say ‘a man’, you must say ‘a men’) the elongated vowels...how to describe it!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKwQ8kBMuJw

The Yorkshire accent is so different from this. We say castle not carsel, and bath, nor barth, but even audios of northerners from the past (not parst!) sound so different from how we speak today. The accent is more exaggerated – filled with expressions that no one really uses anymore and so much more pronounced than it is nowadays. It used to be – until very recently and well within my lifetime – a rather embarrassing thing to have a northern accent if you wanted to make anything of your life among southerners! Nothing but the standard southern accent was permitted on the BBC for many years....and it initially seemed strange to hear more familiar accents in newscasters’ voices. Nowadays it is all so different. Even Prince William speaks in such a different accent/tone from that of the Queen – perhaps because he has spent more time among people from different areas, or perhaps because the language is evolving so rapidly. I once read, though cannot vouch for the truth of it, that the American accent is very close to how people spoke in Elizabethan England and so the American pronunciation of Shakespeare is far closer to the original than anything produced by the R.S.C.

I actually believe that if we were all to travel back a hundred years, the accents and intonation around us would sound very different from what we hear today and would be very interested to learn of the development of the same phenomenon in other countries. I wonder what it would be like to hear Queen Victoria speak or to hear King Edward VII speak...in an ordinary room, without recording equipment. Did Hitler really sound so stark and mad? Did people really speak to one another in the clipped tones of those old recordings? How did Tsar Nicholas’ voice sound to the ear? What was the tone of Franz Ferdinand’s voice?...

Out of all the people I love from the past, the only voice I can really imagine is that of Prince Albert with his soft Coburg accent....

Isn’t it exhilarating when people of the past, whose names have been so frequently repeated in history lessons in a rather one-dimensional fashion, start to become really real to you? There is such a wonderful moment when a person who was nothing but a name on a page, remembered for one small incident of their life or death, seems to become flesh and blood again before your eyes. It is rather like bringing a cloudy picture into focus through a camera lens – once there was only a vague outline but little by little the vibrancy of colour and form take shape and there is a moment of absolute clarity.

The Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand is remembered primarily (and, for the most part, solely) as the man whose murder was the catalyst to the First World War. If you Google Franz Ferdinand, the main sites that appear recount only his death (or, more frequently, the more recent music band ‘Franz Ferdinand’!). Where sites or books go a little further than the event of his death, he is described simply as unpopular, aloof, angry and not really a very attractive character.

Some time ago, I became fascinated by this man for whom, for some obscure reason, I feel great warmth. Like so many historical royalties, he is written off so glibly in one or two sentences but, the more I learn of him, the greater warmth I feel towards him. No one is ever quite so one-dimensional as history seems to present him/her.

As this is set to be a year of joyful royal weddings in Britain, here is a wonderful clip of original film footage of another joyful royal wedding, a hundred years ago: that of the lovely Archduke (future Emperor) Karl of Austria, and Zita of Bourbon-Parma. Franz Ferdinand appears several times in the clip and far from being the aloof character of popular description, he appears like any other happy participant in any other happy wedding at any time in history.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whDQfFyoGEE

Incidentally, while attending one of many funerals last year (thank goodness it is now 2011 and 2010 is over!), it was striking to me to see the same mourners, the same setting, the same movement as is seen at every other funeral throughout the ages, whether it be on old film footage or in paintings. Weddings, births, Christenings and funerals - the continuity of life, the continuity of the cycle of life – there is something quite lovely in the way that, no matter how advanced and sophisticated we think we are, we still move with the same seasonal cycles, as individual families and as humanity as a whole.

Apart from the cars and the clothing, the lovely clip of Karl’s wedding, could be from any era. If you look at the faces of the people in the background, it is just a happy family occasion. There is something so beautiful about it and about the way that old film footage gives us an insight into the characters of people which often contrasts sharply with the story that is presented by historians.

I am so grateful to the person called ‘storicus’ who has uploaded so many beautiful videos to YouTube.

It is near impossible nowadays to understand the concept of a morganatic marriage – a marriage between people of different social ranks wherein the person of the lower social rank (almost invariably the wife) and any subsequent children are not eligible to share the titles or ranks of the person of higher rank. Usually the ‘inferior’ wife was given some other meaningless title, which accounts for so many obscure German and Russian titles – Princess of Battenberg, Princess von Hanau, Countess Carlow, etc. etc. The closest thing we have to it today is the title of Camilla, wife of the Prince of Wales, yet titled – for various reasons – Duchess of Cornwall. In Britain there have never been morganatic marriages – as Queen Victoria, who couldn’t understand the idea at all, wrote so simply, “Either people are married or they are not.”

The purpose of this bizarre state of affairs was to preserve the noble blood of great dynasties. I cannot imagine how anyone conceived the idea that royal blood is different from other blood and it would taint a dynasty to have a commoner’s blood thrown into the mix but the irony of the outcome of such ideas is so tragically apparent. It was a disease of the blood – the noble blood - haemophilia, which caused such havoc and agony in many royal houses; the attempt to preserve the bloodline in Austria led to so many marriages between double first cousins that the children suffered enormously, both physically and mentally; and there was also, throughout the 19th and early 20th century, a vast amount of royal blood spilled from the murder of Carlos of Portugal, through to the shooting of Archduke Franz Ferdinand
and the murder of the Russian Imperial Family. Royal blood flowed, too, on the battlefields of the First World War – the nephews of the Kaiser were killed alongside the cousin of George V of Britain and cousin of Tsar Nicholas II, and in the midst of battle it can hardly have been any less horrific for a prince than for an average ‘Tommy’.

I cannot imagine how stifling and how utterly nonsensical it must have felt to have been a prince or princess for whom the choice of a marriage partner was based primarily on dynastic considerations, with some strange idea that this would preserve some kind of superiority. I can imagine, though, how someone like the very intelligent Franz Ferdinand felt when the woman whom he loved devotedly was constantly humiliated because of her ‘inferior’ blood. He had seen Crown Prince Rudolf slide into a life of utter decadence due to the stifling of the Court; and had seen Rudolf’s mother drift deeper and deeper into depression for the same reason. Franz Ferdinand loved Sophie. In the Court and in the world at large he was seen as brusque and unsociable, but at home he loved his children, loved his wife deeply and it is small wonder that in such circumstances he despised the coterie of snobs who stood between him and his uncle, Emperor Franz Josef. Forty or so years earlier in England, Prince Albert wrote of the need to bring new, stronger blood into the dynasty. I think, perhaps, he and Franz Ferdinand (a man whom admire more, the more I learn about him – except for his mass-slaughter of animals) would have had some brilliant conversations had they been around at the same time, and between them might have brought about a great deal of good.

The whole notion of blood seems to go back to Biblical times when the Hebrews were wandering in the desert and discovered that the blood of certain animals made them ill or even earlier when Greek and Roman doctors believed blood was something mystical. There remained a superstitious view of it for so many years that even today we speak of ‘blue blood’ – a rather apt idea considering the presence of porphyria in some dynasties - and ‘full-bloodied’.

I am glad that, for all our faults, we never entertained the notion of morganatic marriages in Britain.

A couple of weeks before his fatal visit to Sarajevo, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria entertained Kaiser Wilhelm II at one of his favourite homes, Konospischt Castle,
just south of Prague. There, the Archduke had followed his passion to cultivate roses and the Kaiser brought along another avid rose-breeder, Admiral von Tirpitz.
Since Franz Ferdinand had recently been created an admiral in the Austrian navy to enable him to continue his work as Inspector of the Armed Services in Austria-Hungary, one might think, with hindsight, that the meeting of these three men was a political or military meeting in preparation for war. I think, though, that it was simply a social visit, which must have meant a great deal to Franz Ferdinand whose marriage to a lady-in-waiting had led him to feel so excluded from and angry about royal events within Austria.
As I see it, Kaiser Wilhelm and the Archduke formed a friendship which partly accounts for the Kaiser’s horror at his murder a couple of weeks later. (All the other Royal Houses of Europe were equally shocked – in Britain, George V declared a week of mourning; in Russia, Tsar Nicholas declared 14 days...other countries also were in mourning for him).

It has been a little baffling to see what brought together these two men, Franz Ferdinand and Wilhelm, who in so many ways seem so different, and to understand the basis of their friendship, which I believe was genuine. Their contradictions in character and belief are part of the fascination...and, yet again, bring the delight of seeing how this ‘family’ of monarchs of the era seem like a microcosm (or macrocosm) of the contradictions in everyone’s life.

Franz Ferdinand was brusque, unsociable and seemed to despise so much pomp and rigidity in the Habsburg Court.
Wilhelm loved to be the centre of attention, revelled in display and pageantry, laughed too loudly and enjoyed everything to do with display. Franz Ferdinand had forward thinking ideas about basing the government of the Austrian Empire on the American model – a sort of federal group of states.
Wilhelm despised the American dream as republican and in 1911 had the bizarre notion of sending battleships towards Manhattan. Franz Ferdinand was utterly devoted to his children and wife; they were always foremost in his mind and he was willing to suffer the humiliation of declaring his marriage morganatic in order to marry the woman he loved. Wilhelm had a difficult relationship with his sons, particularly the Crown Prince for whom he seemed to feel a kind of envy. Wilhelm cared intensely about what people thought of him. Franz Ferdinand didn’t care at all whether or not he was liked.

Apart from their friendship, both were in themselves so contradictory. Wilhelm loved and despised Britain at the same time. He was genuinely kind on occasions but could turn in an instant if he saw his kindness appearing as weakness. He adored his grandmother but had a love-hate relationship with his mother. He banned his sister, Sophie, from returning to Germany because she had converted to Orthodoxy then eagerly encouraged his cousin, Alix, to convert so that she could marry the Tsar. Franz Ferdinand loved roses and nature, but was also one of the most prolific hunters of his age, killing thousands of innocent creatures. He railed against the traditional Habsburgs way of doing things but was not willing to abdicate his position in line to the throne (as Franz Josef’s father had done). At home with his family, he was a doting father and romantic husband who adored his wife....yet to the outside world he appeared so unsociable.

What created a friendship between these two men? I think they both considered themselves outsiders within their own families. Wilhelm, I think, too, saw an opportunity of appearing as benevolent and wise advisor to a man who would soon become Emperor; Franz Ferdinand, I think, was so grateful that Wilhelm was gracious to his wife, who had been so humiliated by his own family.

Had Franz Ferdinand not been murdered, I wonder how it would have all played out...and imagine that the the friendship of these two unlikely men might have created a perfect balance between tradition and progress. Endlessly, endlessly fascinating since neither of them is as one-dimensional as most superficial histories portray them.