Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires Read Free Page A

destruction of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and subsequent European events in the postwar period were too significant to be overlooked.
    I also chose to exclude Queen Mary’s daughter-in-law Queen Elizabeth, consort of King George VI. While technically she did become empress of India upon her husband’s accession in 1936, it was a title she was forced to relinquish upon Indian independence eleven years later. Queen Mary rarely ever used her imperial title. She and the other consorts of British rulers almost exclusively referred to themselves as queens. Mary’s role as empress of India and her de facto position as imperial consort of the British Empire made her inclusion in this book an obvious choice. I also did briefly consider including the beautiful yet tragic Empress Elizabeth of Austria, Franz Joseph’s wife, who was assassinated in 1898, but she was not the last empress of Austria. Like Empress Eugénie, she did not have a place in the story of Imperial Requiem .
    Throughout their lives, mostly after marrying, these women stayed in contact with one another. Their husbands wrote to each other, passing along news between their wives. They visited one another, sometimes on official state visits, sometimes on private holidays, and often for royal weddings, which at that time seemed to occur at least once a year. Some of the empresses—like Alexandra and Mary—were fond of each other. In other cases, such as with Augusta Victoria and Alexandra, they loathed their counterparts. Along with their shared experiences as consorts, these women were also connected through bonds of family, both by blood and marriage. Augusta Victoria, Mary, and Alexandra all had ties to Queen Victoria. Augusta Victoria’s mother was Princess Adelaide of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, daughter of the queen’s elder half sister, and Frederick VIII, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein. Mary was the daughter of Princess Mary Adelaide of Cambridge, Queen Victoria’s cousin and a granddaughter of King George III, and Francis, Duke of Teck. Both Mary and Augusta Victoria would marry grandsons of the queen as well. Alexandra had a direct link with the British matriarch. Her parents were Princess Alice, Queen Victoria’s second daughter, and Grand Duke Louis IV of Hesse. Zita was on a peripheral orbit when it came to familial connections with her three counterparts. Her parents were the deposed duke Robert I of Parma, and Infanta Maria Antonia of Portugal, one of Augusta Victoria’s second cousins.
    Each of these women came to occupy one of the four imperial thrones spread across Europe. In the far corners, there was Great Britain in the west and Russia in the east, where Europe merges into Asia. In the center, Germany was situated in the north, occupying the land between France and Russia. The dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary stretched toward Russia in the east and into the Balkans in the south. The countries and courts that these princesses married into bore striking similarities in spite of their differences, which could also be said of the women themselves. By the late nineteenth century, every European nation was governed by hereditary royalty, save for France and Switzerland. These royal states saw the rest of the globe as a frenzied game of imperialist conquest, with every Great Power scrambling to build an empire, both at home and overseas. This invariably led to conflicts, especially between Britain, Germany, and Russia, who were each struggling to become the ultimate power. But what drove these imperial monarchies? Why was it so important for them to be set apart as empires? One modern historian answered these questions this way:
     
[In] the 1870s, Britain and Russia, along with the other Western Great Powers, had launched themselves into a violent phase of territorial acquisition, carving up the globe beyond Europe into colonies and “spheres of influence.” There are many complex and conflicting arguments as to why the (mostly) Western, (relatively)