Actresses as royal bonks

Yeah but he was single

JC is a bit of an all round cad isn’t he ? A proper Bourbon, keeping up the family name.

Queen Sofia always struck me as an elegant and attractive lady. Of course she might be mad, like Diana, but somehow I don’t think so.

Prince Philip was right, they’re for stepping out with, not marrying. I’m sure Katharina Schratt was great at blowjobs, but Franz Joseph wasn’t going to put up with her narcissistic actress bullshit full time, because that would be mental.

Franz Joseph’s whole family were either pretty mental or condemned by the gods in other ways. Not someone you wanted to be related to. Or in the case of Empress Elisabeth, married to.

Their only son, Crown Prince Rudolf, produced no male heir – a prolific adulterer, he had rendered his wife (Princess Stéphanie of Belgium) infertile with syphilis. A brooding romantic narcissist, he proposed a suicide pact to one young mistress, Mizzi Kaspar, who promptly reported concerns about his wellbeing to the police (in a tale as old as time, they took no action; Kaspar later died of syphilis). Undeterred, Rudolf carried out a scandalous murder-suicide with the infatuated seventeen-year old Baroness Mary Vetsera (who naively believed they were star-crossed lovers and even that she had a chance of displacing the Princess) at the Mayerling hunting lodge.

Empress Elizabeth was a cousin marriage arranged by Franz Joseph’s mother: a meal-skipping exercise freak with a obsession for preserving her youthful beauty and painfully thin physique (5 ft 8 and 50 kg, sometimes dropping as low as 43 if during bouts of weight loss). She had fallen into a recurring depression when their daughter Sophie died in infancy, but it was the shocking death of their son Rudolf that sent her into a state of permanent mourning. She largely abandoned Vienna and Franz Joseph, preferring to wander Europe incognito. After she was assassinated by an Italian anarchist, Franz Joseph was apparently relieved that the death was not suicide.

The family tale was not much happier for Franz Joseph’s three brothers and one sister. Archduchess Maria Anna died of epilepsy, aged 4. Youngest brother Archduke Ludwig Viktor was a gay cross-dresser who refused to marry the princesses offered to him and was known as a frequent attender of the Central Bathhouse Vienna, where he caused a scandal by getting publicly slapped by a military officer who rejected his advances.

Archduke Maximilian had a successful period with the Austrian navy, promoting the importance of seapower and launching scientific expeditions, before making one of the most ill-advised career changes in history – accepting the invitation of the occupying French to be installed as Emperor Maximilian I of Mexico. He had previously turned down the role when approached by Mexican royalists – clearly the wiser choice given that the first man to declare himself Emperor of Mexico, Agustín de Iturbide, had been swiftly executed for his troubles a few decades earlier, despite (a) actually being Mexican, (b) having designed the Mexican flag, (c) being the hero who secured Mexican independence from Spain. Maximilian had none of these advantages (despite adopting two of Agustín’s grandchildren), was obviously going to be seen as the French imperial stooge that he was, and the situation in Mexico was so unstable he wasn’t even able to arrange his own coronation in the three chaotic years of his “reign”. Scratching around for the positives, at least Maximilian got a great artist to depict his death in Manet. One such painting, part of a series of five, is one of the highlights of the National Gallery, London.

Finally we come to Archduke Karl Ludwig, who became heir to the throne after the Mayerling incident, and whose son Archduke Franz Ferdinand became heir after his death – ’nuff said, really, since that’s where things start moving really downhill. But it was Franz Joseph’s ill-advised annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908 which had set this ball in motion. It would be harsh to blame Franz Ferdinand for the millions who were slaughtered in the four years after his assassination (you could even take the Niall Ferguson approach and extend that to 1945, expanding the death toll even further) but he did show a stereotypical royal asshole’s lack of awareness of the violent public mood by insisting on an open-top car-ride through the streets of Sarajevo on Saint Vitus Day, when Serbs celebrate the Battle of Kosovo.

Compounding the idiocy, he survived an initial assassination attempt, a bomb which had wounded several of his entourage, and had plenty of opportunity to rethink his next steps while safely ensconced in the Town Hall. Rather than wait for a military escort out of the city, and despite it being unclear whether the first assassin was acting alone or (as surely was more likely, and was in fact the case) as part of a larger nationalist network with support from a foreign intelligence service, the ridiculous decision was made to return to the motorcade and visit the wounded in hospital. More astonishing still is the way the military escort plan was apparently vetoed because the army had been on manoeuvres and it was felt they would not have dress uniform available that was suitable for a royal occasion! Yet even this idiocy need not have doomed Franz Ferdinand, were it not for the change of “plan” being so chaotic that nobody informed the drivers about the new route that was supposed to avoid the potentially dangerous crowds – resulting in the fateful wrong turn to the position Gavrilo Princip was waiting.

To do justice to FF, who is mostly remembered for one thing (albeit One Big Thing), it’s worth mentioning he’d already brought the monarchy into scandal by marrying a lady in waiting. As this was a morganatic marriage, he’d had to renounce any claim to the throne by his descendents (he went on to have two sons, and a daughter who died in 1990).

Having taken Austria-Hungary into a World War which would dismember it, Franz Joseph died in 1916. He could not be succeeded by his son Rudolf (murder-suicide at Mayerling), nor the older of his brothers, Maximilian (executed Emperor of Mexico), nor any heir through Maximilian (his only children were the grandchildren of Emperor Agustín whom he had adopted), nor the next brother Karl Ludwig (died of typhoid aged 62 after a visit to the Holy Land, apparently having drunk contaminated water from the Jordan), nor Karl Ludwig’s oldest son Franz Ferdinand (assassinated in Sarajevo), nor the children of Franz Ferdinand (scandalous morganatic marriage), nor Karl Ludwig’s second son Otto (a layabout and serial adulterer, who at Vienna’s Hotel Sacher was at one time seen jumping nude from a private dining room in front of a British peeress and another time seen on the hallway entering a woman’s room naked except for a a sword – syphilis resulted in his nose being replaced by a prosthetic, and his agonising death aged 41) so the throne fell to Otto’s son Charles I. People often say the British monarchy is in trouble but Liz-Big Ears-Wills is so much simpler isn’t it?