Pod Insights Noble Blood Daughters of the Empress (with Veronica Buckley) About this episode Veronica Buckley, author of the new book SEVEN SISTERS https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/600079/seven-sisters-by-veronica-buckley/, joins us to discuss the daughters of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, who remade Europe with their marriages.
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Transcript 5,904 words · 13 speakers
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1:34 Dana Schwartz? Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Mankey. Listener discretion advised. Hi, this is Dana Schwartz. I'm so thrilled to be here for a very special episode of Noble Blood for a conversation with the author Veronica Buckley, who's written a new book, Seven Sisters: Captives and Rebels in Revolutionary Europe's First Family, which tells the stories of the daughters of Maria Theresa, the Habsburg Empress of Austria, the Holy Roman Empire. Of course, her most famous daughter is Marie Antoinette, I would say to most people, but
2:13 Dana Schwartz? all seven of the daughters that survived to adulthood lived fascinating lives, fascinating, tragic, interesting, all of the above. Ms. Buckley, thank you so much for joining me.
2:27 Speaker 04 Thank you very much for having me. It's lovely to be here, Dana.
2:30 Dana Schwartz? So, one thing that struck me, right when we start this book, we get the famous Habsburg catchphrase that sort of summed up their dynasty: "Others make war, you, happy Austria, marry." Can you sort of explain what this perspective was, what that catchphrase meant?
2:47 Speaker 04 Yes, well, I mean, in those days, we're talking about the 18th century, warfare was a sort of normal aspect of noble people's lives, the noble men, of course, and also a normal aspect for many of the other classes in society, though not automatically so. There were a lot of people, of course, involved in agriculture and so on. So, huge numbers of people in Europe were involved in fighting, basically. And in those days, they had a system which is called the sort of great power system, which we're in a wee bit, a little bit sort of reverting to at the moment, where the people who had the most power simply took what they could, and everybody else had to put up with it. Now, the problem
3:32 Speaker 04 is that when you do that, even if you are the most powerful, you lose a lot of people. You lose a lot of your population, you lose a lot of your agricultural produce, a lot of your trade goes down the tubes, and all of that sort of thing. The Habsburgs, who had once been the most powerful dynasty, right across the German-speaking world and the Spanish and Italian-speaking world, had now split into two families: the Spanish Habsburgs and the German Habsburgs. Even though they were based in Vienna, which is, of course, now in Austria, they regarded themselves as Germans. And they decided that
4:13 Speaker 04 it was costing them too much to keep fighting like this. So, they very cleverly decided it was better to simply marry. Into other royal families and other prominent families to gain territory, to gain prominence, to gain political power that way. And of course, what that meant was you needed to have big families because you needed a lot of princes who could be the rulers and you needed a lot of princesses who could be effectively bartered to other people's princes to make these connections work. So you married your girls off in order to ensure peace for a time.
4:57 Speaker 04 Of course, it never lasted very long, but it was better than fighting all the time.
5:03 Dana Schwartz? So Maria Theresa, who is just a fascinating figure, when her father dies, it takes her eight years, the War of Austrian Succession, to actually cement her position on the throne. But once she does, she is a formidable ruler and, like you said, fulfills her duty of having children incredibly well. How many, how many total children did she have?
5:26 Speaker 04 She had 16 children and five of them died.
5:31 Dana Schwartz? Oh, my gosh.
5:31 Speaker 04 Yes, absolutely, amazingly. And five of them died as either babies or young children. Now, she didn't regard this as problematic to have 16 children. She regarded it as a very good thing because her first idea of her personal duty as a Habsburg monarch was to continue the dynasty. And what this meant was have as many children as possible. Sons were more valued because they were Habsburgs themselves and would have, they would inherit Habsburg territories. But daughters were also useful, as I said, because they could be dynastically paired
6:15 Speaker 04 off with other people to increase territory and influence. And she encouraged her daughters to have big families too. She said to many of them at several times, "I want to see you producing a baby every year."
6:29 Dana Schwartz? Your book focuses mainly on the seven daughters who survived to young adulthood. But one just logistical question I have is these daughters have so many names. They all have Maria at the beginning of their names. They have long names. How did you choose how to refer to them in your book? Because I've seen them referred to by different names throughout different points in their life. Obviously, someone like Marie Antoinette, we know by her French name, but that wasn't the name she was given when she was Austrian. So as a, as a historical writer, how did you make the decision of how to refer to these, these women?
7:09 Speaker 04 Okay, well, this is a nightmare. And as you say, all of the women have the first name Maria, because that's the German version of Mary or Marie. And it's a bit like, it's as if they were nuns. Because, you know, all nuns basically had at that time or until recently, the first name Mary and then another name afterwards, Sister Mary so and so. And they didn't necessarily call themselves Maria, but in the documents, of course, that's how they're referred to. Now, they, at home, they spoke in the family. Maria Teresia's family spoke only German.
7:51 Speaker 04 They spoke a Viennese dialect of German. And of course, they were supposed to learn French, which was the international diplomatic language.
8:02 Dana Schwartz? The lingua franca.
8:04 Speaker 04 The lingua franca, absolutely. And when the, when they're writing to each other, certainly the older members of the family wrote always in French, because this was the sort of elegant thing to do. And sometimes they would intersperse their letters with bits and pieces of German or something else, but mostly German. Now, the problem was that this has led a lot of historians to assume that they were known within the family by their French, the French versions of their names. So Maria Antoinette, whose name, of course, was Antonia, Maria Antonia.
8:45 Speaker 04 In French, that would be Marie Antoin. But she was not called Antoine in the in the family. She was called Anthony, which is the German abbreviation of Antonia. But if you're reading letters written in French, of course, it looks as if they all called her Antoine, which they didn't. So the way you work it out, well, for example, there was one of the daughters named Joseph.
9:12 Speaker 04 And brother Joseph married a woman whose name was also Joseph. So this is obviously complicated. So in the book, I decided to call the sister Joseph just Joseph, because I don't put Maria in all the time, because you'd be driven mad by Marias, basically. But with the wife of of Joseph, I call her Maria Joseph.
9:36 Dana Schwartz? It would increase your word count. The book would be doubled in length.
9:39 Speaker 04 Yes, absolutely. And then you've got a real problem on your hands. So and there, of course, there were several men in the family, all called Ferdinand or France, or goodness knows what. So you have to make a distinction. So one is King so and so, one is Don so and so. And these are the ways you do it. But it takes a bit of working out and you have to be always alert when you're working through the the the sources, because quite often they're talking about several members of the family at the same time. And though they know them, they know who they're talking about, you could quite easily confuse them. So you do have to be careful with all these names. It's much easier nowadays.
10:18 Dana Schwartz? And one thing that I also imagine is very confusing is they would reuse names, I believe, right, of of children who passed away in infancy. They would use those names again.
10:27 Speaker 04 That's right. That was a standard thing historically, not just among royal families, but at a time when there was a great deal, the very high incidence of infant and child mortality. A lot of children were named after their deceased elder siblings. So for example, Carolina, who became the Queen of Naples. Maria Teresia had two daughters before her who were named Carolina. So she was actually the third Carolina. Now, luckily for me, the two first Carolinas died in infancy. So there wasn't much in the records about them. I didn't have to worry. But had they died as older girls, it could have been a bit confusing.
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15:01 Dana Schwartz? So let's get into some of these girls specifically. I want to jump ahead to number, I believe, number three of the surviving daughters, Elizabeth, because I was fascinated by her story. This is a figure that I frankly did not know much about. To put it in very superficial terms, she was still unmarried at 24, briefly engaged to the widowed king of France, who would have been the grandfather of the man her sister Marie Antoinette would marry. But then she was tragically disfigured by smallpox. Can you tell me a little bit about where Elizabeth's life took her?
15:40 Speaker 04 Yes, Elizabeth was the beauty of the family. And she knew it, and she made a lot of it. And she was always, her mother complained, she was always flirting with all the guardsmen and any prince who turned up at court and so on. But because she was so beautiful, and because her two eldest sisters, their fate was more or less organised. She was likely to marry about half a dozen different powerful people, the King of Poland, the King of France, the King of Spain, and other important people. And because of that, nothing could be agreed until she was actually quite old. Because if you recall, Marie Antoinette was married at fourteen, so twenty-four was very old at this point.
16:26 Speaker 04 But the problem was that while all of these things were being arranged, and certain people were eliminated because they were too old, or weren't rich enough, or whatever the problem was, she contracted smallpox. And she was dreadfully disfigured by smallpox. Several of her siblings, actually including Marie Antoinette, also had smallpox, but they only had little marks on their skin afterwards, but she was completely disfigured. And after that, of course, she had no, let's call it, personal value on the marriage market. She wasn't a beauty anymore. The only thing that was going for her was that she was still a Habsburg princess,
17:12 Speaker 04 and that was still an important political.
17:13 Dana Schwartz? Although by this point, she was, she was old, much older than was considered prime marriageable.
17:19 Speaker 04 Yes, that's true. Comparatively old, she was in her mid twenties, but that still would have been all right, particularly since the kings of France and Spain were in their fifties by then. And she was still of an age to bear children and so on, so that was the crucial thing, of course. But, you know, in the end, people didn't want to marry, these men didn't want to marry a grossly disfigured woman, they had options. And she was, she remained unmarried, and when her mother died.
17:51 Speaker 04 And her brother Joseph became the emperor in, he was already the emperor, but he became the ruler, the sole ruler of the Habsburg monarchy and the Holy Roman Empire. He couldn't stand her and he drummed her out of town effectively. And he sent her off to the provinces, to Innsbruck, itself a charming town in the mountains in Austria, where there was a very grand court, a very grand palace, recently refurbished because it had seemed that Maria Theresa herself might want to retire there. Because that is where her very beloved husband had died.
18:35 Speaker 04 And Elizabeth became what was called the secular abbess of this foundation for noble ladies. Now, this doesn't mean she became a nun. In fact, her mother was very against nuns. She thought that celibate life was abnormal and she was opposed to it. She herself had a very lively and happy sex life with her husband and was very keen for her children to have the same. Of course, sixteen children. Yes, and she's, it's very interesting because they were the only royal couple in Europe at the time who spent every night together.
19:13 Speaker 04 Not that Franz Steffan didn't have other ladies, he did, but he always came home at night. And it's interesting, Maria Theresa thought this was very important, not just for having children, but also because of course it gave the couple an opportunity to spend some quiet time together, away from court troubles, away from political things, where they could just talk over normal things. So she was very much against their girls becoming nuns. And the Elizabeth and also the eldest daughter Mariana, who also became a secular abbess. They really had courts of their own.
19:57 Speaker 04 They were princesses, they were treated as princesses. They were the head of their courts. And although in their courts there were nuns, they weren't nuns themselves. And most of the noble ladies who lived in them, although they were expected to live, you know, obviously decent Christian lives, they were allowed to go to balls and parties and theatres and things like that. And if they wanted to leave and get married, they were able to do that. So actually, Elizabeth could have done that too if anybody had turned up. But once she went there to Innsbruck, nobody did turn up, so she remained there.
20:40 Dana Schwartz? It doesn't sound like too bad of a life, to be completely frank.
20:45 Speaker 04 It wasn't too bad of a life because first of all, you were spared yearly baby producing, which is not in itself an easy thing. A lot, a lot of people, of course, a lot of women died in childbirth. And in fact, at that time, a lot of women would prepare for childbirth by basically preparing for a funeral, because the chances were that they might not survive. So it wasn't too bad. It was very comfortable, she had a good income. If she wanted to, she could have had quite a lot of political influence, but she wasn't really interested in that. She liked the theatre and so on, so she had, you know, a good time.
21:26 Speaker 04 She was also very nice to the ladies who were in the foundation with her. She wasn't, she didn't expect them to be too particular about their religious duties. She was, of course, a firm believer and she observed the normal proprieties, but they didn't have to spend every second hour on their knees in prayer and so on. She wasn't very harsh like that. And as long as she could afford it, she made sure they were very well fed and had lots of life going on in the court.
21:57 Dana Schwartz? That's wonderful. I will say, one thing that emerges throughout the stories of these daughters is that they were Habsburg dynastic pieces before they were individuals. Their personal happiness did not seem as important, or I would say frankly, wasn't as important as their roles in the family dynasty. And I think that story is very striking with, I believe it's the fourth surviving daughter, right in the middle, Amelie, if I'm pronouncing that right.
22:26 Speaker 04 Yes, that's right.
22:27 Dana Schwartz? Who had married a man that she did not choose to marry. Can you speak a little bit about how Amelie's marriage came to be?
22:38 Speaker 04 Yes, Amelie, well, it's a doubly sad story, really, because she fell in love with a very suitable prince who fell in love with her and wanted to marry her. And it looked as though they were going to marry, but at the end, it was decided that he wasn't quite important enough. There were other people interested in marrying a Habsburg princess, and the Habsburgs needed a stronger connection to northern Italy. And there happened to be a northern Italian prince in Parma, who was looking for a bride, or rather, the people looking after him were looking for a bride, because he was only 15. And they decided
23:21 Speaker 04 that Amelie would be the person. At first, in fact, they thought Elizabeth would be the person. But Elizabeth was quite a bit older than the prince, and so they chose Amelie instead. Now, this, of course, broke her heart for two reasons. First, she lost the prince she loved. And second, she was forced to marry a man she couldn't stand. This prince was quite a bit younger than she was, and really just a boy, whereas the man she loved, Prince Karl of Zwiebrücken, he had been a soldier, and he was a handsome man, and spoke many languages, and all of this kind of thing. So she was palmed off, not only to a man
24:05 Speaker 04 she didn't want, but she was an archduchess of Habsburg, and the man she married was only a duke. So she was demoted from archduchess to simple duchess, which is pretty bad, considering that two of her younger sisters were promoted from archduchess to queen.
24:24 Speaker 04 So she she felt it as a very, very humiliating step. And when she got to Parma, she found that her husband, unsurprisingly, since he was so young, was very much enthralled to the real ruler, the first minister of Parma. And she found that an extra humiliation. She felt that at least he should be able to stand up and be boss in his own territory, as it were. So she caused an enormous amount of difficulty there. Really caused a lot of trouble, to no ultimate effect, except that she did make herself loved by the people by spending a great deal of money that she didn't really have,
25:07 Speaker 04 by giving it in charity and so on. She herself had fifteen children, and it shows you how strong this dynastic pressure was, that after the first four children, she and her husband separated. They lived in separate palaces in different towns. Nonetheless, they had eleven more children together. He would visit her, and they would have sex, and she would produce a child more or less every year. The sad thing is that all those later eleven children died young. So she really, although she had fifteen children, only four of them survived to adulthood.
25:49 Dana Schwartz? It's quite a tragic life.
25:51 Speaker 04 It it is a tragic life, and she was, because she was always making trouble, she was never allowed to come home. All the others made visits to Vienna, to their mother, and their sisters, and their nieces, and so on. And she was never allowed to do that, because she was regarded as too troublesome. So she had a very, very sad life in that respect, although she did have good friends, loyal friends, who supported her to the end, which is nice to think of. And two, her two daughters also did this, the surviving daughters also, knocked off to the end.
26:25 Dana Schwartz? If I'm correct, the only one of the daughters who married for love was uh their mother's favorite, Marie-Christine, who
26:36 Dana Schwartz? I almost want to say we've done an episode of Noble Blood on her very intimate letters with her sister-in-law, Princess Isabella of Parma. But of course, after that period, she would go on to be allowed to marry for love. Can you talk a little bit about about her? Because I just find her delightful.
26:56 Speaker 04 Yes. Marie-Christine, her brother, Joseph, who became the emperor, he was married to Isabella. Isabella is an interesting case in her in her own right, because she was actually lesbian. And she was very much in love with Marie-Christine, her sister-in-law. Marie-Christine was not lesbian and didn't return Isabella's passion. But she was a good friend of hers and was very fond of her. And listened to what she said and took advice from her in terms of art. She was a very good artist and so on. And also in
27:37 Speaker 04 the way she managed her mother. Isabella was an absolutely charming and really quite a brilliant woman. And she managed to manipulate anybody, anybody she wanted to. And she taught some of these arts of manipulation to Marie-Christine, which meant that Marie-Christine became, after Isabella's death, Maria Theresa's favorite. Now, she was in love quite quickly, not immediately, but quite quickly with Prince Albert, who had absolutely nothing, was one of 12 children, was penniless, his father was a demoted king of Poland, all this kind
28:18 Speaker 04 of thing. But the thing was that by this time, Joseph, the eldest son, was already married, had two little girls, and
28:31 Speaker 04 Maria Theresa could afford to allow one of her daughters to marry for love. If Joseph had not had any children by that time, Marie-Christine would have had to marry somebody dynastically more important. But also, it is very clear that by this time, Maria Theresa, who had very recently, only months before, lost her dearly beloved husband, she saw in Marie-Christine and Albert, Prince Albert, a sort of resurrection of herself and her husband when they were young, because they had married for love.
29:14 Speaker 04 And so she went against all, you know, everybody's advice, went against the wishes of her late husband and so on, and allowed the two of them to marry. And it was very, very, actually really grotesquely unfair, giving Marie-Christine and Albert half of all the money and everything that was supposed to be shared out among the eleven of the children. So you can imagine there was quite a bit of annoyance about this, quite a bit of jealousy. Although it wasn't only jealousy, but Marie-Christine was, she liked to play rather the grand lady, she was a very grand lady.
29:56 Speaker 04 She was herself a beauty, she was a gifted linguist and a very elegant woman. And she was the light of her husband's life, he just worshipped her. And so they had a very, what appears to have been, judging by their correspondence and so on, a very happy marriage and a very unusual marriage for the time, an absolutely companionate marriage. Although they didn't manage to have any children, their only child died as a baby. Marie-Christine had Puerper fever, which is childbed fever, which can itself be and was often fatal for the mother and was also in this case fatal for the daughter.
30:41 Speaker 04 And it left Marie-Christine infertile, so she never had any other children. But they did have a very close marriage and later on, they adopted one of Brother Leopold's sons and he became their darling.
30:58 Dana Schwartz? That's at least one comparatively much happier story. And now to turn our attention towards sort of the most famous tragedy, the baby of the family, Marie Antoinette, who I don't think I need to remind our audience, was beheaded in the French Revolution. But one thing that I did find striking in your book is how her sisters reacted. Can you speak a little bit to how her family felt after the French Revolution?
31:28 Speaker 04 Well, it's interesting that in the beginnings of the revolution, quite a lot of them were in favor of it. They were not hopeless reactionaries. They were reformist people, but they were really still, let's call it, they were, of course, absolute monarchs. They felt that reform should be introduced by the monarch. And Marie Antoinette's favorite sister was Carolina, who was the Queen of Naples. And it is interesting to see that even Carolina, at the last stage of Marie Antoinette's imprisonment,
32:10 Speaker 04 she had given up hope for her survival. And it is interesting to see the letters going backwards and forwards between the different siblings. Can we get her out? No, we can't get her out. It will look bad if we try to do something that will make her situation worse. If we send in an army, they will kill her. We'd better not do that. Can we trade her out? What can we do? But it seems that even those who loved her most had really given up hope for her life long before she was condemned to death. Of course, she was condemned to death and executed within a 24-hour period.
32:54 Dana Schwartz? One other, I think, interesting thing about this book is how Carolina, as you mentioned, the queen of Naples in Sicily, reacted after the French Revolution in Naples specifically, how she sort of circled the wagon, so to speak.
33:11 Speaker 04 Absolutely, and she was not alone in that. Even Leopold, who was by now the emperor, and the Habsburg emperor, and he had been the most liberal and forward-thinking of all of the children, really. Even he had to backtrack, and they saw, well, help, this is completely out of hand. This is not what we meant at all. We wanted reform, but this is chaos. And of course, by then Napoleon was, well, Bonaparte, not yet the Emperor Napoleon, was on the rampage throughout Europe and fomenting revolution, the revolutionary forces were fomenting revolution everywhere they went.
33:52 Speaker 04 And Carolina, it is clear from her letters, she really believed that she would be beheaded too. And in fact, there were attempts on her life, and there were plans to kill her, which were foiled, luckily.
34:07 Dana Schwartz? I know that mothers aren't supposed to have favorite children, even though obviously Maria Theresa did. But in researching and writing this book, did you find that you had a favorite of the daughters?
34:20 Speaker 04 You know, a lot of people have asked me this, and it's not easy to answer that. When I was working on somebody in particular, I think, oh, this person's my favorite, and then this other person's my favorite, and this. I think possibly, you know, you feel, you really get involved with these people, and you are living sort of day to day with them and feeling for them, of course, as if they were still alive. And of course, when you're picking up the letters that they themselves wrote, and looking at their handwriting, shaking perhaps, with tears blotting the pages, whatever, you know, you can't help but be affected.
35:01 Speaker 04 I think if I could know more about any of them, it would probably be Amelie.
35:09 Speaker 04 The problem with Amelie is because she had such terrible handwriting, many, many, many letters that she wrote, including letters that she wrote to the King of Spain, apparently urging him to intervene to save Marie Antoinette, were rendered, were declared illegible by all the scribes at the courts, you know, her, her handwriting was always bad and it just got worse and worse and worse so that in the end, there are countless letters of hers. Nobody is sure what they actually say, not even handwriting experts. And so
35:45 Dana Schwartz? Oh, no.
35:46 Speaker 04 You know, I think maybe with sort of sophisticated AI systems at some point, we'll be able to decipher them. But the actual ciphers, and there are many letters in cipher, the actual ciphers are much easier to decipher than Amelie's normal handwriting. Added to the fact that her French and her Italian were both terrible and it doesn't help. So I think if I, if there was one that I, if I needed, would like to know a bit more about, I think it would be Amelie, but I don't know that that's likely to happen anytime soon.
36:18 Dana Schwartz? Well, that's a wonderful answer. The book is Seven Sisters: Captives and Rebels in Revolutionary Europe's First Family by Veronica Buckley. Thank you so much for joining us today. This was such a wonderful interview and thank you for this book. I learned so, so much.
36:33 Speaker 04 Thanks very much, Dana. I wish you all the best for your continuing work.
36:48 Dana Schwartz? Noble Blood is a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manke. Noble Blood is hosted by me, Dana Schwartz, with additional writing and research by Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zwick, Courtney Sender, Amy Height, and Julia Maloney. The show is edited and produced by Jesse Funk with supervising producer, Reema Ilkayali, and executive producers Aaron Manke, Trevor Young, and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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38:10 Speaker 10 What's that? My fresh detector. Uh, your what? There it is. What is it detecting? Fresh produce, fresh meat. Okay, what happens if it detects something really fresh?
38:24 Speaker 10 Apparently, we celebrate.
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Previous Olympic Glory for a Princess Next A Terrible Waste Page updated October 31, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated