A Foreign Affair
Maria Eleonora Katharina von Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Wiesenburg, Duchess of Guastalla
The first half of the 18th century witnessed a great collapse among the “native” ruling houses of Italy. No fewer than four such families died out in the male line within a 30 year period: The Gonzaga dynasty of Mantua (1708), The Farnese dynasty of Parma (1731), the Cybo-Malaspina dynasty of Massa-Carrara (1731), and the Medici dynasty of Tuscany (1738). The main political effect of this collapse was the increasing consolidation of Italian states in the hands of the foreign houses of Bourbon and Habsburg, who fought over the spoils in a series of conflicts of which the War of the Austrian Succession was only the latest.
Although the main line of the Gonzagas had been the first of this group to go extinct in 1708, that was not quite the end of the Gonzaga house. The Gonzagas possessed a legitimate cadet branch which ruled the Duchy of Guastalla, a tiny state squeezed between the duchies of Mantua and Modena. It may be credibly argued that these cadet dukes had a legitimate right to inherit Mantua when the last main-line duke,
Fernando Carlo, died without issue in 1708. But Fernando Carlo had made the fatal mistake of siding with France during the War of Spanish Succession and had been branded a traitor by Emperor Joseph. Upon his death, which occurred while the war was still ongoing, his duchy was declared forfeit as a consequence of his treason and was seized by the emperor.
In the end it did not matter much, for the Gonzagas of Guastalla would not last much longer. The family seemed to be cursed by infirmity and misfortune. The penultimate Duke of Guastalla,
Antonio Ferrante Gonzaga, was a lame lackwit who found enjoyment only in the slaughter of God’s creatures. He met his end in spectacular fashion: As the story goes, after a long day of hunting in April of 1729 he had his body rubbed down with alcohol to stave off a chill, but came too close to the hearth, burst into flames, and died in agony. Since Antonio Ferrante left no issue the duchy passed to the last remaining male Gonzaga, his brother
Giuseppe Maria Gonzaga, who was not of sound mind. He suffered from a paranoid depression that was probably not helped by the fact that his brother was said to have held him captive for the previous fourteen years, secreted away somewhere in Venetian territory as to not be an embarrassment. He was regularly seized by uncontrollable weeping or catatonia and would frequently lock himself in his room, believing that he was surrounded by assassins. Music occasionally soothed his madness and he was sometimes composed enough to attend the theater, but he was completely incapable of governance.
Giuseppe Maria, the last Gonzaga duke of Guastalla
His succession triggered a power struggle in tiny Guastalla. Antonio Ferrante had cared nothing for administration and left affairs of state to his chief minister Count
Pomponio di Spilimbergo. Spilimbergo had every intention of retaining his hold on power, but he had a bitter rival in the duke’s sister
Eleonora Luisa Gonzaga. Eleonora was not exempted from the family curse and eventually went mad herself (before dying in 1741), but at that time she was merely power-mad, and allegedly plotted to have the count murdered. To neutralize the duke’s sister and keep the Austrians from seizing Guastalla as they had done with Mantua, Count Spilimbergo misled the Austrians into believing that the duke’s “condition” was but a passing illness that he would recover from in time. The Imperial Aulic Council declared the duke to be unfit to rule, but did not depose him. Until his “recovery,” it would be necessary to find him a regent - Count Spilimbergo, of course - and being the last of his line, he would also require a wife. The unfortunate girl chosen for this role by the Austrians was
Maria Eleonora Katharina von Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Wiesenburg, who in 1731 at the age of sixteen was sent to Guastalla to marry a 41 year old lunatic.
[A]
The house of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Wiesenburg was a cadet branch of the Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg family, itself a cadet branch of the Oldenburg dynasty which ruled in Denmark and Norway. The dynasty’s founder, Philip Louis, was an agnatic great-grandson of Christian III, the first Protestant king of Denmark. Yet although descended from a Protestant house, the line of Philip Louis did not remain so. His grandson Leopold was a Catholic and spent his life mainly in service to Austria, becoming an imperial privy councillor and receiving the Order of the Golden Fleece in 1721. Although the family was not sovereign, the three successive Wiesenburg dukes were nevertheless great landowners who amassed considerable estates within the empire through a series of shrewd investments and purchases. Ultimately, however, they shared the same fate as the aforementioned Italian dynasties: Duke Leopold died in 1744 having sired five daughters but no sons, and the house of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Wiesenburg became extinct in the male line.
Leopold, the last duke of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Wiesenburg
Although her own family lacked sovereign status, Maria Eleonora was a relative of many prominent princely families both Catholic and Protestant. Her father was, as mentioned, a patrilineal descendant of King Christian III. Her paternal grandmother was Karolina of Legnica-Brieg, considered the last member of the ancient Polish house of Piast after her brother, Duke Georg Wilhelm of Legnica-Brieg, died without issue in 1675. Karolina had laid claim her brother’s lands after his death but was denied by Emperor Leopold. Karolina was in turn the daughter of Louise of Anhalt-Dessau, a first cousin of Prince Leopold “the Old Dessauer,” the famed Prussian drill-master and one of King
Friedrich’s most renowned commanders. On her mother’s side, Maria Eleonora was descended from Catholic imperial nobility. Her maternal grandfather was Prince Hans-Adam of Liechtenstein, thus making her a cousin of
Joseph Wenzel, Fürst von Liechtenstein, who had commanded the Austrian armies in Italy in the victorious campaign of 1746.
The married life of the new Duchess Eleonora of Guastalla was not a happy one. The ducal couple had no children, and it is possible that despite lasting for 15 years the marriage was never consummated. Her misery was compounded by exile, as the duke and duchess were forced to flee from Guastalla in 1733 during the War of Polish Succession and were only able to return in 1736. But the duchess was not content to play the victim forever. Appealing to Vienna after her return from exile, Eleonora (now 21 years old) managed to gain investiture from the Aulic Council as her husband’s regent, and in 1739 drove Count Spilimbergo from the duchy entirely. From that point on she was for all intents and purposes the sole ruler of Guastalla, although she and the duke were again forced into exile in 1745 as Lombardy was overrun by the Bourbons. They were able to return after the fall of Piacenza in 1746, but later that year Duke Giuseppe suffered a stroke and died at the age of 56, bringing the House of Gonzaga to its final and ignoble end.
[1]
Duchess Eleonora maintained her regency over Guastalla after her husband’s death, but it was only a temporary expedient - she had no personal claim to it, and once peace came it was assumed the “vacant” duchy would follow the fate of Mantua and be seized by the Habsburgs. At 31 years old, she was left with no husband, no parents (both had died in 1744), and no children. Still, the prospects for her future could not be called grim. The late Duke Leopold had been a wealthy man and had left her a considerable sum of money as well as estates in Moravia and Lombardy. Her Moravian estates alone, comprising the towns of Gross-Meseritsch (Velké Meziříčí), Radostin, and Zhorz (Zhoř), were estimated to be worth a million livres. Her retreat into widowhood would at least be comfortable, and while she would have no more power she might at last enjoy peace. Fate, however, had other plans.
As the Austrian governor of Lombardy,
Ferdinand Bonaventura, Graf von Harrach certainly would have been familiar with Duchess Eleonora and her position in Guastalla, but he also had social and familial links to the duchess. Like her father, the late Duke Leopold, he was a high-ranking Austrian functionary and a knight of the Golden Fleece, and he held estates in Bohemia and Moravia not far from the Duke Leopold’s own Moravian holdings (now passed to his daughters). He was also a relative of hers by marriage, as Harrach’s older brother
Friedrich August was married to Princess
Maria Eleonora Karolina of Liechtenstein, a cousin of Duchess Eleanora’s mother Maria Elisabeth of Liechtenstein.
[B] Clearly Harrach sent Theodore off not only with a letter of introduction, but with some confidence that the Duchess of Guastalla was an acquaintance and relative whom he could trust to assist the king as he hid from his pursuers.
Theodore reached Guastalla on the 28th of November. He was traveling with a limited staff: To mislead the Genoese, he had sent most of his entourage to Parma on another road and arrived at Guastalla in a closed carriage with only his footman
Montecristo, his valet
Antonio Pino, and two Rhenish bodyguards.
[2] All we really know of his stay in Guastalla is that it lasted for ten days and that he was a a frequent guest of the duchess; Pino and Montecristo were among Theodore’s most loyal and discreet servants and never gossiped about their master. But the servants at the Ducal Palace whispered of a “distinguished stranger” who enjoyed the close companionship of the duchess, and rumors eventually spread. It was later said that the king “seduced” the duchess of Guastalla, who was captivated by the handsome and charming Theodore, a rogue monarch on the run from his enemies (who even had a mysterious Moorish manservant to complete the romantic image). Bawdy tales later circulated of the duchess dismissing her servants at night to spend time alone with her guest, or - rather more directly - lodging Theodore in a room linked by a secret door to her own bedchamber.
[3]
Inside the Ducal Palace of Guastalla
Wild and salacious tales of the aristocracy were not rare in the 18th century, and it is impossible to separate truth from fiction in this matter. Yet clearly Theodore’s respite at Guastalla sparked a relationship between the king and the duchess, who thereafter exchanged frequent letters. Only a fraction of this correspondence survives, and only from the duchess. Her letters are warm and affectionate, but hardly scandalous; she writes with regret of the distance between them, mentions how often she thinks of him, and assures him of the “constancy of my devotion.” As the surviving conversation is only one-sided, it has tended to reinforce a narrative of the rakish king seducing the rich widow. Clearly she was taken with Theodore, who aside from being one of the great celebrities of his day was universally said to be witty, charming, and still handsome at 53 (despite the acquisition of some grey hair during his decade of rule). Perhaps she was even in love with him. But the Duchess of Guastalla was not some wide-eyed naif; this was, after all, the same woman who had lived through considerable trials and who - hardly into adulthood - had outmaneuvered her opponents in Guastalla and seized power for herself. She could hardly be ignorant of politics, and her correspondence reveals that Theodore mentioned diplomatic and political endeavors in his letters which she readily commented upon.
Nor was Theodore a cold-hearted seducer. Although he had a variety of female companions in his day, he was not a playboy and had real emotional relationships with the women in his life, several of them purely platonic. He was involved with his share of young beauties in his earlier days, but he always tended to gravitate towards confident and independent-minded women, and the Duchess of Guastalla was certainly that. Perhaps the wealth of the duchess appealed to him - such motives would not be entirely out of character for Theodore - but it is no less plausible to ascribe cynical motivations to Eleanora, whose relationship with a king presented her with an alternative to being shuffled off into a comfortable but powerless obscurity.
[C]
After this interlude at Guastalla, Theodore rendezvoused with the rest of his entourage at Pistoia. The king had originally planned to find
Ricciardia Gonzaga at Novellara, which lay just a few miles from Guastalla, to continue the discussions started by Don
Matteo, Principe di Porto Vecchio, but this was not done - either because Theodore was still trying to lay low, because Ricciardia was not at Novellara at that time, or because Theodore was not particularly interested in a potential Cybo-Malaspina match. His attention now returned to securing a seat at the peace conference. Uncertain as to whether the exertions of his Florentine friends would amount to anything, he turned to another power which might serve his interests: the United Provinces.
Theodore probably had more contacts in the Netherlands than anywhere else, and they were highly placed. He was a friend, for instance, of the personal treasurer of the Prince of Orange, whom he wrote requesting his assistance with the credentialing of the Corsican emissaries. But he also reactivated his relationship with the syndicate, which was dormant but was far from dead. Some members had parted ways, but several of the principal investors yet remained and waited patiently for peace to reap their dividends. Theodore argued in his letters that since they would only see a return on their investment if Corsican independence was won, it was in their interest to assist him in seeing a Corsican delegate seated. Which of his letters proved most decisive is unclear, but this pressure achieved its desired result, and Don
Luigi Giafferi and his assistants were ultimately admitted to the conference as part of the retinue of
Willem IV, Prince of Orange and Stadtholder of the United Provinces.
[D] It was not Theodore’s first choice - the Dutch were clearly a British auxiliary in a way that the Austrians were not, and Theodore had preferred to keep the British at arm’s length - but it was better than being shut out entirely. Nothing was sure, but the Corsicans at least would receive their chance to stand before the representatives of the great powers of Europe.
From the perspective of the Diet and the cabinet, the king’s trip abroad had been a risky and ill-advised failure. Exactly as they had feared, his journey had nearly resulted in disaster at the hands of the Genoese, whose villainy knew no bounds. Although Theodore feigned absolute confidence in his “friends” abroad, he had no proof that the Austrians would seat Giafferi at Aix-la-Chapelle (and indeed they did not), and the search for a royal bride had proved fruitless.
Erasmo Orticoni was recalled, and Don Matteo could only offer the Diet his assurances that matrimonial matters would be easier once the legitimacy of the kingdom was settled.
Even after learning of the king’s success in having Giafferi seated with the Dutch, the Corsican leadership was measured in its optimism. They respected Giafferi, but knew that ultimately Corsica’s freedom rested on the decisions of the great powers - the same powers who for the most part had either ignored or fought against the Corsican national cause. Since 1729 the Corsican nationals had been accustomed to struggling on their own against the Genoese oppressor, and they were not entirely comfortable with the notion that their fate was now in the hands of strangers in a distant land.
Footnotes
[1] That, at least, is the story most favorable to Duchess Eleonora. An alternate interpretation favored by anti-Habsburg partisans makes her, not Spilimbergo, into the villain of the story, as the executor of a Habsburg plot to snuff out the House of Gonzaga so as to seize Guastalla and dissolve any lingering claim by the Gonzagas of Guastalla on Mantua. In this view Count Spilimbergo was a patriot trying to rescue the dynasty and maintain Guastallese sovereignty, while Eleonora was an imperial stooge who took her orders from Vienna, greedily usurped power in the duchy, and refused to share the bed of her poor troubled husband to ensure that his line would die with him.
[2] The separate journey of Theodore's entourage was itself eventful. Because the Genoese knew that Theodore’s party traveled with
two Moorish footmen, Theodore’s aide Saviero Carlieri is said to have darkened his face with coffee grounds and dressed in Montecristo’s clothes so as to stand in for the missing footman and make the Genoese think the party had not split. Later, an assassination attempt - which could not have succeeded anyway, as Theodore was not present - misfired when the party's carriage broke down, causing a would-be assassin who was waiting at a tavern down the road to get bored, drink too much, and get into a drunken brawl in which he brandished his pistol and was arrested by Austrian gendarmes along with a fellow co-conspirator.
[3] This seems unlikely, as the Ducal Palace of Guastalla is quite extant and no such passage is known to exist. Nevertheless, the tale is repeated to credulous tourists by the palace tour guides.
Timeline Notes
[A] Some texts have her third given name as
Carlotta rather than
Katharina. I’m not sure which is correct, but I’ve settled on the latter until I come across some definitive source.
[B] I apologize for all the Eleanors in this story. These families weren’t very innovative when it came to names.
[C] Which is, in fact, what happened. IOTL, Eleonora left Italy in 1748 when Guastalla was annexed by the Austrians (and subsequently handed over to Don Felipe, who became Duke of Parma, Piacenza, and Guastalla). I can find little about her later life except that she returned to her Moravian estates, never remarried, and died at Brno in 1760. Her personality is my own creation, although her (successful) attempt to seize the regency, her expulsion of Count Spilimbergo, and her rule as regent for the next decade thereafter all suggest to me that she was a capable and formidable woman. IOTL, when she died her lands and fortune went to her nieces Maria Eleonore and Maria Leopoldine of Oettingen-Spielberg. This inheritance launched them into elite society in Vienna, and they landed prominent husbands: Maria Eleonore married the Prince of Liechtenstein and Maria Leopoldine wed the son of Wenzel Anton Kaunitz, the powerful Austrian state chancellor and diplomat. Maria Eleonore exerted great influence on Emperor Joseph II, who is said to have been in love with her, and played a prominent role as an informal imperial advisor until Joseph’s death in 1790. It is this Maria Eleonore whose picture I’ve used for the Duchess of Guastalla in this update, as I don’t really have anything better, and they
were close blood relatives.
[D] Theodore managed to attend the conference IOTL in exactly this way, as part of the Prince of Orange’s entourage. Apparently he circulated a manifesto about Corsican independence (and his own royal rights, one presumes) which was ignored.
