Hugh Baakens' Diary

Western Cape link to a blessed emperor

DOWN in the Western Cape there lives a woman called Charlotte van der Byl, who has a grandfather of whom she must be very proud because, quite recently, the Pope beatified him, a process putting him perhaps on the road to becoming a saint.

The grandfather? The Emperor Karl I of Austria Hungary.

And the granddaughter, the former Princess Charlotte of Liechtenstein, whose mother was the Archduchess Elizabeth of Austria, daughter of Karl and his wife, the Empress Zita. The empress died aged over 100, fairly recently, being accorded a traditional imperial funeral with her coffin laid among her forebears in the Kapuchinerkirche in Vienna.

Your columnist learnt about Karl’s elevation towards sainthood in the London Daily Telegraph, which reported that the move has brought about some controversy.

Apparently some critics have asserted that he was an alcoholic adulterer who advocated the use of poison gas in the First World War, during which he succeeded his great-uncle, Franz Joseph, as emperor.

But the Vatican believes that he has performed a miracle – a requirement for sainthood. It seems a Polish nun based in Brazil was cured of severe leg sores and varicose veins after praying to Karl.

Another qualification for potential sainthood is that the emperor’s body was found almost intact when his coffin was opened in 1972.

Well, the beatification went ahead in Rome, attended by representatives of the Austrian and Hungarian governments, 200 descendants of the Habsburg family and 4 000 pilgrims.

It might be centuries before Karl is declared a saint, if he is at all.

But how proud his family must be at this honour to a man who had good intentions but could scarcely have inherited a throne at a more difficult time.

On this page we show Karl at his coronation in Budapest as king of Hungary in the latter days of the First World War.

The ancient helmet-like crown of St Stephen remains Hungary’s national treasure today. But sadly it, and the imperial crown of Austria, brought him no luck at all.

Young and inexperienced, he could not have been more unlucky than to inherit Kaiser Wilhelm II as an ally.

Karl wanted peace and sent his two young brothers-in-law on efforts to achieve this. But this caused him even more trouble and, with the spread of revolution towards the end of the First World War, he abdicated his throne and, with his family, made it safely to Switzerland.

Later came an abortive effort to recover his Hungarian throne, which led to his being escorted to Madeira on a British warship. He spent his last years there and died in 1922 aged only 34.

His youngest daughter, Archduchess Elizabeth, was born posthumously and her daughter is Charlotte.

Just one further footnote. Hugh once slept in the bed of Archduchess Elizabeth.

It happened in Cape Town, where Hugh stayed from time to time at Taunton House, then a private hotel next door to the Mount Nelson.

When he checked in, he was told he would be saying in the room occupied the night before by the Archduchess Elizabeth.

It was a bed like any other. And there were no peas that he could feel under the mattress.

Some ex-Zimbabweans might remember Charlotte van der Byl. Her husband, P K van der Byl, since deceased, was a minister in Ian Smith’s UDI government.

They had three sons and Charlotte still lives on the farm at Caledon from which her late father-in-law, Major the Hon Piet van der Byl MP, would send his dirty shirts to London on the mailship to have them laundered.

Now he was quite a character, too – though nobody has thought of putting him on the road to sainthood.

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