Among those which are identified is a collection of five medals and decorations which belonged at one time to Empress Zita of Austria-Hungry, whose husband Charles was the last crowned head of the famous house of Habsburg. These decorations are:

Jewelled Star of the Order of the Lion and Sun of Persia,

Badge of the order of Francis Joseph,

Badge of the order of the Iron Crown,

Cross of the Austrian Red Cross,

Star of the Bulgarian Red Cross, Ist Class.

How these medals landed here is not quite clear but one can hazard a guess; and the story that emerges constitutes one of the more pathetic footnotes to the twentieth century.

Zita is not one of the great names of European history. Her husband ruled for less than two years, and when he fell at the end of the World War I, three other emperors, and more than 20 minor German princes also lost their crowns. In that general twilight of the old ruling elite of Europe, the 31-year-old Emperor Charles and his 26-year-old consort had few claims to sympathy, beyond their immediate family and court circles.

Zita was born princess of Bourbon-Parma, daughter of the last ruling duke of that petty Italian state which disappeared when the kingdom of Italy was born. The Parmesan Bourbons happen to be a branch of the Spanish Bourbons, who in turn are a cadet branch of the former French royal house. After his expulsion from Italy, Duke Robert retired to his old estates in Bourbonnais (in central France), from which the family derives its name.

Bourbonnais is a delightful bucolic country, closely cultivated, with large farmhouses and gently rolling hills. I remember how on a day’s hike with friends out of Vichy, where I was reading French, we once came across a large estate with a manorial mansion at the end of a long shady drive. The gates were closed, so we moved on. Later in the evening while studying the guidebook, I discovered that the chateau we had passed was the seat of the former dukes of Bourbon-Parma where the aged Empress Zita of Austria was a frequent and honoured guest. Zita was the seventeenth of the 24 children, so in 1988 she undoubtedly had a host of nephews and nieces, and even, maybe, a few brothers still alive and kicking.

However in 1988 Zita was, relatively speaking, unknown outside the exclusive circles of the Almanach de Gotha. Her husband had mounted the throne of Austria-Hungary in 1916, in the middle of World War I. His predecessor, Francis Joseph, had reigned for 68 years and, over time, had come to be as closely identified with his empire as Queen Victoria had been with her’s. There was a tragic aura about him; his brother had been killed in Mexico, his only son had committed suicide, and his wife and heir-presumptive had both been assassinated. His reign had been witness to the humbling of Austria and its expulsion from both Italy and Germany, but he bore it all with stoic impassivity. The Viennese however loved him, and it was impossible for Charles to fill the vacuum that he left behind. Further, the strain of the war was threatening to tear apart the crazy checkerboard of antagonistic nationalities that made up the Danubian monarchy.

Zita, too, lived under the long shadow of her predecessor, Empress Elizabeth, or ‘Sisi’, one of the great beauties of her age. After her assassination she had become something of a cult figure. Zita is also described as ‘beautiful’ but judging from her photographs, one is constrained to conclude that she was beautiful only in the sense that all princesses — unless unambiguously ugly — are presumed to be so. She hit the headlines only after her death in 1989, and then, for sometime, the media was full of nostalgic, pro-monarchist obituaries on Europe’s ‘Last Empress’.

Charles became the heir after the assassination of his uncle Francis Ferdinand at Sarajevo in June 1914. He had married Zita in 1911, and but for that fatal assassination (it was the cause of World War I) the young couple would probably have led a private and comfortable life. Charles was a pacifist, and soon after his coronation he made peace overtures through his wife’s French relatives. Long before Berlin could see it, Charles had foreseen defeat for the Central Powers, but in the upper-class Viennese society his was a lone Cassandra voice. Charles and Zita were, in fact, labelled ‘royal renegades’.

But Charles failed to negotiate peace. Austria-Hungary was doomed to fall together with its senior partner, Germany. On November 11, 1918, the day the war ended, Charles was forced to quit the Austrian throne. Revolution had already broken out in Germany and the Kaiser had fled to Holland. Charles, however, still hoped to reign as king in Hungary, but the new Hungarian Parliament also demanded his immediate abdication. Charles and Zita became exiles.

Hungary, however, remained nominally a kingdom and a ‘regency’ was established under Admiral Horthy. Encouraged by this anomalous position, Charles made two abortive attempts in 1921 to regain power in Hungary. On the second occasion he actually walked up to Horthy’s room, unarmed, without even a revolver, but the dictator, who was nothing if not a realist, refused to relinquish power to his sovereign. It is said that the support of an army brigade was available to the king but, idealist that he was, he refused to avail himself of it. He was determined not to shed Hungarian blood. His biographer, Brook-Shepherd, thinks that even a handful of armed men might have forced the Regent to yield, but the peace-loving king refused to take the risk.

Horthy had him deported to Switzerland. Eventually he chose Madeira as his residence in exile, a place of which Zita and he had fond memories as they had visited it during their honeymoon. The couple were in dire financial straits and the family lived under extremely poor conditions. Unlike modern rulers who invariably provide for such contingencies, Charles had no numbered accounts in Switzerland to draw upon. On April 1, 1922, at the age of 34, he died of pneumonia after a short illness. From that day Zita always wore black.

Zita was left with eight children to raise. Not wanting to move in with relatives, she first shifted to a fishing village in Spain. Then she moved with her children to Belgium where she purchased a small farm. With the outbreak of World War II she had to move again, and eventually she came to the USA.

In 1961, the Archduke Otto, her eldest son and heir to the Hubsburg legacy relinquished his royal and imperial pretensions and was allowed to return to Austria. He lives today in Bavaria, which he represents in the European Parliament. His eldest son, Charles, lives in Austria, and, like his father, is also a member of the European Parliament. He works quietly to change the Austrian laws of 1919 which debar the Hubsburgs from holding any political office and has often been mentioned as a future Chancellor of the Austrian republic.

When Zita died on March 14, 1989, at the age of 96, unlike her poor husband, she received a state funeral. She lies today in the Capuchin Crypt, Vienna, along with the remains of 145 other deceased Habsburgs. Charles however still rests in Madeira, though his heart is in the nearby church of the Augustinians, next to Zita’s. It was a Habsburg custom to take out the heart and preserve it separately. Just as all the imperial Habsburgs lie in the crypt of the Church of the Capuchins, their pickled hearts are kept in urns in the convent of the Augustinians.

The details of the maharaja’s acquisition of the medals are not available, and Spink’s archives for those years are missing, so the exact date of purchase cannot be pinned down. But the collection was put together in the late 1920s, and it reached Patiala in 1928. So most probably the empress sold these medals, along with other valuables, during her difficult days in Madeira or Spain.