BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Maria Theresa
"‘How did she use her children? She's 16 children, 13 survived, and she used them as pawns, didn't she?
‘Yes, Maria Teresa very much uses her children as pawns. Many listeners will be able to recall one of the versions of the Natans picture, which Maria Theresa had painted regularly, which shows the Imperial couple with their children. And year after year, there's an ever increasing brood. And on the pictures, there's a small copy in the Wallace collection in London. On the pictures the boys are beside their mother, the girls are beside their father, which I think illustrates the fact that Maria Theresa is the real figure of power. And Maria Teresa uses her children as political capital. One of the Latin mottos which is often repeated about Austria is tu felix Austria, nube. So other countries wage war, but you happy Austria, you marry. And Maria Teresa is very successful in this respect. She uses her children in particular, to consolidate the political realignment of the diplomatic change over the Renversement des Alliances, which has seen her align with France. She starts off with her heir Archduke Joseph, and she marries him to Isabella of Parma. His first wife, Isabella of Parma is the granddaughter of Louis XV of France through her mother, which launches this sort of axis between the Austrians on the one hand, and the Bourbons on the other. And Maria Teresa, daughter with her other children, her other daughters in, her daughters in particular, she marries them off to Catholic future heads of state.’
‘How did she keep, she was determined to keep them under her thumb, wasn’t she? She didn't just let them go and marry these people.’
‘Maria Theresa thinks she can control every aspect of her children's lives, or at least wants to control every aspect of her children's lives. Of the children who married only one was allowed to choose her suitor… Maria Theresa with her children is very much a control freak. She writes instructions to her children, so political instructions, how to behave. She tells them how to pray, how often to pray. But she also gets involved in questions like the appointment of wet nurses for her grandchildren. The sorts of steps you should use to get out of a carriage if you're pregnant in order to avoid any accidents, and so on.’…
‘How did she relate to her subjects?’
‘She very much follows the Habsburg ceremonial and one of the key aspects of that ceremonial is the role of petitioning where people who come and see them and ask for favors or ask for advice’...
‘Somebody sweeping the streets can go in and say, I've got a favor to ask.’
‘Yes, I mean, you'd probably be made sure that you look presentable when you went in, but anybody will go in. And there are plenty of stories of peasant farmers from Lower Austria, who are concerned about the person their daughter's going to marry, and they drive to Vienna to go and have a word with the Emperor or Empress. And the estimate for Joseph, Joseph The Second is that he meets personally about a million of his subjects. There may be duplicates, but there are a million occasions in which he meets very ordinary people, and his mother likewise’
‘But she had this man-woman advantage, she turned it to her advantage didn’t she? She could be a weeping woman in front of people, in front of Hungary, the diet there, the parliament, there saying, I need help and weep and have her baby in her arms. She had to do, do a bit of being the man in order to get what she wanted. Is that right?’
‘I think you've got it there. I mean, she she certainly is a heavy drinker, right up until, till certainly 10 or a dozen years into her reign. Ultimately, childbirth gets the better of her. She stays up late. She plays cards. She's playing for big sums of money, but she normally wins. Beyond that, she presents herself as she calls herself, Mother of my People. She calls herself Mother of my Army. She weeps at the Hungarian Diet of 1741. And as she partitions Poland in 1772, she weeps as well. And as Frederick the Great commented on that occasion, the more she wept, the more she took. She can turn the tables. The big one is in 1743, when Prague has just been liberated, the Bavarians have been sent packing. And she then has the ride of the women through Vienna, and they ride down the ring into the Spanish riding stables, firing pistols as they go. And they then engage in a mock joust in the Spanish Riding School’
‘She is very good at doing it symbolically, a lot of the iconography plays with both sides of the coin. So there's the iconography of Maria Teresa on horseback brandishing a sword in Hungary, as this King, Queen of Hungary, and on the other hand, there is Maria Teresa, the mother of many children. And I think it's very much something which she uses to her advantage playing both sides’...
'All of Maria Teresa's first granddaughters, except one were called Maria Teresa after her'...
‘We do have a letter from Joseph after he's been to court, which reports back about his conversation with Louis the 16th and says, Well, this is what happens when they're in bed together. He doesn't seem to know how to go about it. You know, nothing happens... there are very technical details. It's not altogether unheard of. Louis the 15th, for instance, writes to his grandsons, about sex and about their sexual organs and about whether or not they need operations and so on. So I think they’re, in a sense, much less prudish about this than we are’...
‘We haven't talked about superstition. I love the story about the ambassador was it an ambassador who was taken ill and rushed to church to have these burial service and as he was going down the nave, a kicking and a yelling from inside the coffin. This is interpreted as the devil trying to get out and so is her even more and put in a vault and left there’...
‘That was in 1702. And I think it's a very good example of how things have changed. In 1702 it was actually the Bohemian Chancellor, has a stroke in Vienna, taken up, buried in Prague, and then we have the incident with the coffin. And it'd be difficult to think of the same thing happening 50 years later, I think, you know, that's if he wants to judge, you know, the however one wants to look at the the disenchantment of the world, the the removal of superstition, of course, there still is superstition. Maria deals with it very firmly in 1755. When we have the vampire scare in Moravia, where the, in all emotes [sp?] they start digging up corpses and burning them. And she, she doesn't send in in the priests. She sends in the doctors, she sends in the medical profession. They take over the churchyard, exhume and investigate, and report back that there is no supernatural events at all, everything can be explained in purely rational terms. So bodies that haven't decomposed, just because the weather's cold, this type of thing and that that that I think shows the way that a new rational structure is beginning to exert itself, certainly within the court, within government.’...
‘She interferes in every aspect of life. Some of those interferences we may think are beneficial, such as forcing peasants to take their children to school. In fact, there weren’t the schools built, so it was it was it was, it was a fairly pointless exercise in many areas. Trying to reduce, this is a typical meddling when you don't know what's happening. She tries to reduce the amount of days that peasants have to work on the land for their masters in Hungary, but she doesn't know how many days they really are working. So she fixes it at three, which actually means that for most of the peasants, they're working more than they did before’...
‘Maria Teresa didn't educate her daughters to rule. She educated them or had them educated to a certain extent, to be consorts, but no more than that. And she trapped them, because on the one hand, she wanted them to be sort of decorative, well brought up, produce heirs and conform to a traditional female role and nothing more than that. But on the other hand, she really hoped that they would interfere so discreetly that it wouldn't be visible, but in order to further Austria's aims, so I think certainly with her own daughters, she left them very much with a sort of poisoned chalice, as a as a legacy.’...
‘What do you think was the thing that marked her reign most specifically?’
‘I think, possibly her use of iconography and pageantry, there are far more portraits of Maria Teresa for instance, than of her father. She uses her image to project a number of aspects of her character, or things in which she believes she uses public ceremony in order to create loyalty into a firm’"
