DEREK BEALES Clergy at the Austrian Court in the Eighteenth Century
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
DEREK BEALES Clergy at the Austrian Court in the Eighteenth Century in MICHAEL SCHAICH (ed.), Monarchy and Religion: The Transformation of Royal Culture in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) pp. 79–104 ISBN: 978 0 19 921472 3 The following PDF is published under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND licence. Anyone may freely read, download, distribute, and make the work available to the public in printed or electronic form provided that appropriate credit is given. However, no commercial use is allowed and the work may not be altered or transformed, or serve as the basis for a derivative work. The publication rights for this volume have formally reverted from Oxford University Press to the German Historical Institute London. All reasonable effort has been made to contact any further copyright holders in this volume. Any objections to this material being published online under open access should be addressed to the German Historical Institute London. DOI: 3 Clergy at the Austrian Court in the Eighteenth Century DEREK BEALES So far as I can tell, no one has ever written on this exact subject. Indeed, I have wondered at times whether it is a subject at all. It is certainly elusive. There exists, for example, a manuscript 'Essay on the Austrian Monarchy and its Present Condition' of 1790, evidently written for the Neapolitan rulers who visited Vienna in that year. 1 It runs to more than four hundred pages and was clearly compiled by someone very close to the Austrian court who had been plied with information by the Staatskanzler, Prince Wenzel Anton von Kaunitz. A coy reference to the Neapolitan ambassador to Vienna, Count Gallo, suggests that he was the author. The document naturally includes a longish chapter on the court, but not a word is said in it about clergy in general, or about any individual clergyman operating within the Austrian Monarchy. To take another case: for Maria Theresa's (1740-80) court, historians have an exceptionally good source, eight volumes of the diaries of a highly placed courtier who eventually became the equivalent of the lord great chamberlain, the Obersthofmeister, Prince Khevenhiiller-Metsch. 2 He often mentions the papal nuncio, the Archbishop of Vienna, other cardinals, and the royal confessors, and refers to the occasional bishop. But lesser clergy make no showing in his account at all, 1 I know of two copies: one in the Austrian Centre of the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis (Z943.6 fEs 73), the other in the Acton MSS collection of the University Library, Cambridge (MSS 46g5). I am very grateful to Dr Michael Hochedlinger for his advice about this document, for generous help in finding material on the court in the Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv, Vienna (henceforth cited as HHSA), and for having read and commented on an earlier version of this essay. I am grateful, too, to Dr Mark Hengerer for his comments. 2 Rudolf von Khevenhiiller-Metsch and Hanns Schlitter (eds.), Aus der Zeit Maria Theresias: Togebuch des Fiirsten Johann Josef Khevenhiiller-Metsch, kaiserlichen Obersthqftneisters, 17,µr1776, 8 vols. (Vienna, 19071 2,. 80 DEREK BEALES either as individuals or in groups. If one turns to Eduard Vehse's old, inadequate, but still not superseded account of the court of Vienna, 3 one finds that he, too, has very little to say about clergy actually at court. Jeroen Duindam's Vienna and Versailles: The Courts of Europe's Dynastic Rivals, 1550-1780 does not address the issue, though it does give a useful account of the religious func- tions associated with the court.4 There is one exception, admit- tedly, to this rather remarkable dearth of material, namely a handful of works which consider the court chapel, the Hofkapelle but even these usually concentrate on the musicians employed rather than on the clergy.5 Having looked for material on the subject for the purposes of this essay, I now recognize that it is a viable topic. Though few documents illuminate it directly, many are relevant to it. But it is one which would require lengthy research to treat exhaustively. The court's organization was both complex and subtle: responsi- bilities overlapped, and many posts were honorific, part-time, or held with others inside or outside the court. The extensive docu- mentation it produced is difficult to use and fails to tell us much of what we should like to know. 6 In this essay I shall offer a preliminary survey which I hope that, in time, others will elabo- rate and modify. The Court Defined Apart from the lack of previous writing on the subject and the absence of information about it in obvious sources, anyone trying 3 Eduard Vehse, Gesclucht,e des iistreichischen Hefs und Adels und der iistreichischen Dipwmatie, II vols. (Hamburg, 1851-:3), esp. vii-ix. 4 Jeroen Duindam, Vienna and Versailles: The Courts ef Europe's 0nasti.c Rivals, 1550--1780 (Cambridge, 2003). 5 The fullest is Coelestin Wolfsgruber, Die k.u.k. Hojburgkapelle und du geistliche Hofkapelle {Vienna, 1905), quoting many royal and Church documents, largely undigested. Ivan van Zolger, Der Hefstaat des Hauses Osterreich (Vienna, 1917), 79-98, has an informative and more analytical section. Ludwig Kochel, Die kaiserliche Hef-Musik.kapelle in Wien von 154:,1867 (Vienna, 1867; repr. Hildesheim, 1976) is a very useful list of the musicians with a helpful introduction. Daniel Heartz, Haydn, Mozart and the Viennese School, 1740--1780 (London, 1995), 3---g, is instructive. 6 For the latter part of the century there are two semi-official series of annual 'court calendars', the Hef- und Staats-&hematismus and the Hef- und Ehren-Kalender, substantially but not wholly overlapping. Vast documentation is available in the Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv in Vienna under many different rubrics, e.g., Altere Zeremonialakten, Hofakten des Ministeriums des Innem, ObersthofineisteramL Clergy at the Austrian Court 81 to describe the Austrian court has to face the basic difficulty that historians of all courts face, that of defining a court. At the risk of repeating what other historians have already said, I feel it is necessary to try to provide a definition, or series of definitions, that applies to the rather special case of the court of Vienna. 'Court' has several overlapping meanings. First, in diplomatic parlance, it is to a court that ambassadors are accredited. As in some other instances, the court is here a symbol or afiction as much as a place or a set of people or an institution. But in the diplo- matic context 'the court of Vienna', 'the Austrian court'-and, also for most of the eighteenth century, 'the imperial court'-are also often mere synonyms for the ruler of the Monarchy, or the makers of the Monarchy's policy. Secondly, a court is a place, but not a fixed place or a unique place. It may be the acknowledged headquarters of a monarch, generally but not always in the capital city of his or her lands, where he or she is regularly to be found and 'holds court'. But the ruler may also sometimes hold court in other places. After the removal of the Turkish threat in 1683, Vienna was firmly established as the capital of the Monarchy, but its rulers often held court at their summer palaces of the Favorita, Schonbrunn, and Laxenburg in Austria, or at Pressburg (Pozsony, Bratislava), until 1784 the capital of Hungary, and sometimes elsewhere. In principle, there can be, and in the view of many contemporaries there ought to have been, a court held wherever the monarch happened to be. There may also be several courts operating simultaneously within one state. In the Monarchy three suc- cessive dowager empresses, widows of Leopold I (1658-1705), Joseph I (1705-11), and Charles VI (1711-40), had their own households and held courts; and so did the royal governors of Hungary, the Netherlands, and Milan. 7 The notion of 'holding court', though bound up with particu- lar places, introduces in effect a third meaning, an activity: the monarch makes himself or herself visible to, and approachable by, at least certain subjects and, while also conducting some 7 The diary ofKhevenhiiller-Metsch (seen. 2 above) provides ample evidence on most of these points. On the Brussels coun see the catalogue of the Europalia exhibition, Charles-Alexandre de lmrai.ne, 2 vols. (Brussels, 1987). Walter Koschatzky and Selma Krasa (eds.), Herzog Albert von Sachsen-Tesclum (Vienna, 1982) has material on both Hungary and Belgium. 82 DEREK BEALES business, gives them entertainment and thereby supplies the main or a major focus for upper-class social life and culture. The scope of the court's influence will be greatest where it is regularly held and where there are substantial facilities and a large perma- nent staff, as in Vienna. Fourthly, the court is a set of people, that is, the monarch's mainly aristocratic entourage and at least some of his employees, especially those who serve him or her, their spouses and their families in ceremonial and private capacities, running palaces and organizing pleasures and entertainments. In the middle of Maria Theresa's reign at least 1,500 persons figured in the lists of the various departments of the court. By 1780 the figure was roughly 2,000.8 The court as a meeting place and a set of people was of special significance in that here, and almost only here in the eighteenth century, women-the wives and daughters of male courtiers-played a prominent and essential part. Fifthly, the court is also a unit ofjurisdiction: in Austria for most of the eighteenth century the Obersthofmarschall exercised jurisdic- tion over those who resided in parts of the royal palaces, those actually present when the ruler held court, and those employed by the court.