Charles VI of Austria

“ But in the midst of his triumphs Charles learned, through the historian Commines, his ambassador in Venice, of the perfidy of his allies and of the new league that was formed against him by Henry VII. of England, Ferdinand of Aragon, Maximilian (recently elected emperor after the death of his father) , the Pope Alexander VI., the Republic of Venice, and the Duke of Milan. All these confederates combined in a common interest to drive the French out of Italy, and to attack France from different sides at the same time. ”

“ The ministers at Vienna feared, therefore, that the very sight of the queen, youthful, frail and powerless, would stir these barons to immediate insurrection, and that they would scorn such a sovereign to guide them in the fierce wars which her crown involved. But Maria Theresa better understood human nature. She believed that the same barons, who would resist the demands of the Emperor Charles VI., would rally with enthusiasm around a defenseless woman, appealing to them for aid. ”

“ In preparation for enforcing the decrees which he intended to have enacted by the council of Trent, Charles obtained from the pope thirteen thousand troops, and five hundred thousand ducats (one million one hundred thousand dollars) . He raised one army in the Low Countries to march upon Germany. He gathered another army in his hereditary States of Austria. His brother Ferdinand, as King of Hungary and Bohemia, raised a large army in each of those dominions. The King of France mustered his legions, and boasted of the condign punishment to which he would consign the heretics. ”

“ If Italian independence should be established upon the ruin of the Austrian arms, and the influence and example of the victorious Italian people be thrown into the scale against the Imperial Government in its struggle with the separatist forces that convulsed every part of the Austrian dominions, it was scarcely possible that any stroke of fortune or policy could save the Empire of the Hapsburgs from dissolution. But on the prostration or recovery of Austria, as represented by its central power at Vienna, the future of Germany in great part depended. ”

“ Austria now ostentatiously prepared for war. Frederick William, terrified by the danger confronting him, yet unwilling to yield all, sought the mediation of the Czar of Russia. Nicholas came to Warsaw, where the Emperor of Austria and Prince Charles, brother of the King of Prussia, attended by the Ministers of their States, met him. The closest family ties united the Courts of St. Petersburg and Berlin but the Russian sovereign was still the patron of Austria as he had been in the Hungarian campaign. ”

“ Philip still stood firm upon the Spanish throne, and Charles could scarcely gain the slightest foothold in the kingdom which he claimed. On the side of the Rhine and of Italy, though blood flowed like water, nothing was accomplished; the plan of invading France had totally failed, and again the combatants were compelled to retire to winter quarters.
For nine years this bloody war had now desolated Europe. It is not easy to defend the cause of Austria and her allies in this cruel conflict. The Spaniards undeniably preferred Philip as their king. ”

“ The Reformation is one, the claims of the House of Austria is the other." Austria did not benefit from the reign of Charles V. The emperor was too much absorbed in the affairs of the rest of his vast dominions, notably those of the Empire, rent in two by religious differences and the secular ambitions for which those were the excuse, to give any effective attention to its needs. The peace of Augsburg, 1555, which recognized a dualism within the Empire in religion as in politics, marked the failure of his plan of union (see Charles V.; Germany; Maurice of Saxony) ”

“ As Duke Charles had left no male heir, the King at once resumed the duchy of Burgundy, as a male fief of the kingdom; he also took possession of Franche Comte at the same time; the King’s armies recovered all Picardy, and even entered Flanders. Then Mary of Burgundy, hoping to raise up a barrier against this dangerous neighbour, offered her hand, with all her great territories, to young Maximilian of Austria, and married him within six months after her father’s death. To this wedding is due the rise to real greatness of the House of Austria ”

“ It was not the defeat of Solferino or the cession of Lombardy that exhibited the prostration of Austria's power, but the fact that while the conditions of the Peace of Zürich were swept away, and Italy was united under Victor Emmanuel in defiance of the engagements made by Napoleon III. at Villafranca, the Austrian Emperor was compelled to look on with folded arms. To have drawn the sword again, to have fired a shot in defence of the Pope's temporal power or on behalf of the vassal princes of Tuscany and Modena, would have been to risk the existence of the Austrian monarchy. ”

“ To be conquered by Austria was just as much conquest for Bavaria as to be conquered by any other Power; it was no step to German unity, but a step in the aggrandisement of the House of Hapsburg. The interests of the Austrian House were not the interests of Germany any more than they were the interests of Croatia, or of Venice, or of Hungary. Nor, on the other hand, had Prussia yet shown a form of political life sufficiently attractive to lead the southern States to desire to unite with it. ”

“ The war continued without decisive result for some time, and the fate of the duchy, which was still occupied by the French, was the subject of endless diplomacy. At the general peace Charles had to accept the hard conditions imposed by Louis XIV., and he never entered into effective possession of his sovereignty. In 1678 he married the widowed queen of Poland, Eleonora Maria of Austria, and for nearly five years they lived quietly at Innsbruck. The Turkish invasion of 1683, the last great effort of the Turks to impose their will on Europe, called Charles into the field again. ”

“ The Holy Roman Empire came to a sort of climax in the reign of the Emperor Charles V. He was one of the most extraordinary monarchs that Europe has ever seen. For a time he had the air of being the greatest monarch since Charlemagne.
His greatness was not of his own making. It was largely the creation of his grandfather, the Emperor Maximilian I (1459- 1519) . Some families have fought, others have intrigued their way to world power; the Habsburgs married their way. Maximilian began his career with Austria, Styria, part of Alsace and other districts, the original Habsburg patrimony ”

“ Charles found himself sovereign of Spain, and America, of Sicily, Naples, Sardinia, the Low Countries, Franche Comté, Austria, and the duchies associated with it. The same year (1519) he was chosen King of Germany and Emperor-elect, after a keen contest over the imperial crown, in which Francis I. of France and Henry VIII. of England were his competitors. On attaining this dignity, he conferred the Austrian possessions on his brother Ferdinand. But he remained the most potent and imposing monarch that Europe had seen since Charlemagne. ”

“ As a ruler of Bavaria, he showed a vague disposition to improve the condition of his subjects, but his profuse habits and his efforts to rival the splendour of the French court crippled his finances. His policy was one of much duplicity, for he was constantly endeavouring to keep on good terms with the emperor while slipping out of his obligation to accept the Pragmatic Sanction and intriguing to secure French support for his claims whenever Charles VI. should die. On hearing of the emperor’s last illness, he ordered his agent at Vienna to renew his claim to the Austrian inheritance. ”

“ Austria itself could only acquiesce in defeat: nor perhaps would the permanent interests of Europe have been promoted by its success. The championship of Germany which it assumed at the beginning of the war would no doubt have resulted in the temporary establishment of some form of German union under Austrian leadership, if the event of the war had been different; but the sovereign of Hungary and Croatia could never be the true head of the German people; and the conduct of the Austrian Government after the peace of 1809 gave little reason to regret its failure to revive a Teutonic Empire. ”

“ Austria proper was left to his eldest son Maximilian, Tirol to the archduke Ferdinand; and Styria with Carinthia and Carniola to the archduke Charles. Under the emperor Maximilian II. (1564-1576) , who was also king of Bohemia and Hungary, a liberal policy preserved peace, but he was unable to free his government from its humiliating position of a tributary to the Turk, and he could do nothing to found religious liberty within his dominions on a permanent basis. The whole of Austria and nearly the whole of Styria were mainly Lutheran ”

“ One element of reality lay in the professions which were not for the most part meant very seriously. There was probably now no statesman in Austria who any longer felt a jealousy of the power of Prussia. With Count Stadion and his few real supporters the restoration of Germany was a genuine and deeply-cherished desire; with the majority of Austrian politicians the interests of Austria herself seemed at least for the present to require the liberation of North Germany. ”

“ While the Protestant communities of Northern Germany identified their interests with those of the rising Prussian Monarchy, religious sympathy and the tradition of ages attached the minor Catholic Courts to the political system of Vienna. Austria gained something by its patronage ”

“ From the moment when Kaunitz retired from office, territorial extension became the great object of the Austrian Court. To prudent statesmen the scattered provinces and varied population of the Austrian State would have suggested that Austria had more to lose than any European Power; to the men of 1792 it appeared that she had more to gain. The Netherlands might be increased with a strip of French Flanders; Bavaria, Poland, and Italy were all weak neighbours, who might be made to enrich Austria in their turn. A sort of magical virtue was attached to the acquisition of territory. ”

“ Italy, rather than France, forms the central figure in any retrospect of Europe immediately before 1848 in which the larger forces at work are not obscured by those for the moment more prominent. The failure of the insurrection of 1831 had left Austria more visibly than before master over the Italian people even in those provinces in which Austria was not nominally sovereign. It had become clear that no effort after reform could be successful either in the Papal States or in the kingdom of Naples so long as Austria held Lombardy and Venice. ”

“ Differing from other states, and notably from France, whose administration, constantly libelled and insulted, takes its revenge by making the ‘governed’ its enemy, the public powers in Austria, subject to no control, assiduously endeavour to be the protector and the guide of the people. ”

“ Austria, in peace just as much as in war, had uniformly been held to be the natural ally of England against the two aggressive Courts of Paris and St. Petersburg. It seemed perfectly right and natural to Lord Castlereagh that Austria, when its own interests were endangered by the establishment of popular sovereignty at Naples, should intervene to restore King Ferdinand's power; the more so as the secret treaty of 1815, by which Metternich had bound this sovereign to maintain absolute monarchy, had been communicated to the ambassador of Great Britain, and had received his approval. ”

“ Italians of Austria will naturally be joined to Italy. Bohemians and Slovaks want independence in a common Czechoslovak state. Magyars care for only one thing, to maintain their tyranny over all Hungary, while the Germans want the closest union with or even annexation to imperial Germany. The only Austrian left is the emperor. Dismemberment of Austria will hurt Emperor Charles in pride and pocket, but it will be welcomed by the overwhelming majority of the people of the empire.
During the nineteenth century the Turk was the sick man of Europe. Today that ignoble role is played by Austria. ”

“ On the 8th of April a Treaty of offensive and defensive alliance was signed. It was agreed that if the King of Prussia should within three months take up arms for the reform of the Federal system of Germany, Italy would immediately after the outbreak of hostilities declare war upon Austria. Both Powers were to engage in the war with their whole force, and peace was not to be made but by common consent, such consent not to be withheld after Austria should have agreed to cede Venetia to Italy and territory with an equal population to Prussia. ”

“ Germany was now threatened with civil war. The Catholics demanded the enforcement of the edict of Worms. The reformers demanded perfect toleration—that every man should enjoy freedom of opinion and of worship. A new war in Italy perhaps prevented this appeal to arms, as Charles V. found himself involved in new difficulties which engrossed all his energies. Ferdinand found the Austrian States so divided by this controversy, that it became necessary for him to assume some degree of impartiality, and to submit to something like toleration. ”

“ Count Beust, while clearly laying it down that Austria was not bound to follow France into a war made at its own pleasure, nevertheless felt some anxiety lest France and Prussia should settle their differences at Austria's expense; moreover from the victory of Napoleon, assisted in any degree by himself, he could fairly hope for the restoration of Austria's ascendency in Germany and the undoing of the work of 1866. It was determined at a Council held at Vienna on the 18th of July that Austria should for the present be neutral if Russia should not enter the war on the side of Prussia ”