It was a humiliation but Ferdinand was ecstatic. Perhaps fearing another suicide in the imperial house, the Emperor announced he would permit the marriage provided Ferdinand swore an oath that he would never elevate Sophie's status or grant succession rights to their children. He wrote to his uncle: "I can and will never marry anyone else, for it repels me and I am unable to tie myself to another without love, making her and myself unhappy, while my heart belongs and will always belong to the Countess." Most of the Habsburg family tried to talk Ferdinand out of the forbidden romance, with one of them telling him: "I don't fall in love with my lackeys."īut he would not be put off.
Therefore if Ferdinand wed Sophie it would be a morganatic union that would ban her from membership of the imperial house and bar any children from the succession.Ī senior courtier warned Sophie's brother that his diplomatic career was at risk if the union went ahead and stories were spread in the press that Sophie was an adventuress who had set out to bewitch the Archduke and had already shared his bed. When the younger man insisted his mind was made up the Emperor pointed out that by law the Choteks were ineligible for marriage to the royal family. Franz Josef gave his nephew a week to reconsider, saying: "Love makes people lose all sense of dignity." The furious Isabella complained to the Emperor that Ferdinand had made fools of her family and humiliated her daughter simply to carry on a scandalous affair with her lady-in-waiting.įerdinand denied any misconduct but revealed he had already asked Sophie to marry him. When the romance was discovered Sophie was unceremoniously sacked. But when Sophie and Franz Ferdinand met at a ball in Prague in 1894 they fell in love. Sophie went to work as a lady-in-waiting to Princess Isabella, a Habsburg grandee who wanted Ferdinand to marry her own daughter. But her father had no inherited wealth and had to rely on his salary as an Austrian diplomat. The fiercely traditional Franz Josef's view of his heir was not improved when the Archduke announced his intention to marry a Bohemian aristocrat called Countess Sophie Chotek.Ĭosmopolitan, intelligent and vivacious, Sophie was related to the Habsburgs as well as to the Hohenzollern dynasty in Prussia and the princes of Liechtenstein. Seven years later Karl Ludwig drank polluted water from the River Jordan and died of typhoid, putting Ferdinand directly in line.ĭistrusting his nephew, the Emperor declined to make him a crown prince. That made Ferdinand's father the heir to the throne. At the age of 12 he inherited the estates and fortune of the Archduke of Austria-Este, making him hugely wealthy.Ī greater change came in 1889 when his cousin, Crown Prince Rudolf, shot his mistress and himself in a suicide pact at the imperial hunting lodge at Mayerling in the Vienna woods. The assassination took place three days before his 14th wedding anniversary and the treatment of the wife who died with him symbolised the stuffy out-datedness of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy.Ī new book by royal historians Greg King and Sue Woolmans focuses on the sacrifices Ferdinand made to marry Sophie, who was treated as a pariah by the snobbish and anachronistic Habsburg court simply because she wasn't deemed royal enough.īorn in Graz, Austria, in December 1863, Franz Ferdinand was the eldest son of Karl Ludwig, younger brother of the Emperor Franz Josef.
In as much as Ferdinand is remembered personally, it is as a stolid and unpopular figure with jug ears and an ornate moustache, disliked and distrusted by his uncle, the elderly emperor, and famed for his volcanic temper, meanness with money and immense appetite for hunting (he shot 274,889 animals in his lifetime). That double assassination, during a visit so obviously perilous that the Archduke had tried several times to cancel it, has gone down in history as the incident that triggered the First World War.
The Archduke's wife also collapsed and at first it was assumed she had fainted. In doing so he stalled it, giving Princip the chance to shoot the 50-year-old heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne from just five feet away. The man at the wheel only realised his mistake when a senior member of the party saw they were going the wrong way and told him to turn the open-topped car around. He was right about that but nobody had thought to tell the driver. After an unsuccessful bomb attack on the visiting Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie by one of Princip's nationalist comrades less than an hour earlier, the young Bosnian Serb assumed the route would have been changed. Nineteen-year-old Gavrilo Princip wasn't expecting the royal convoy to pass his vantage point outside a delicatessen in Sarajevo's Franz Josef Strasse.
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