Empress Maria Theresa

Of famous queens, the one most lacking in this allure is perhaps Queen Victoria. Though she came to the throne as a teen-age girl, her image is indelibly matronly and, well, Victorian. The very triumph of Britain in her reign perhaps robbed her of the chance for gallantry; no Armada approached Victorian England, so she had no occasion to deliver a counterpart to ElizabethÆs Tillbury speech.

But another great European queen of the previous century, the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, has failed even more to capture the imagination, at least in the English-speaking world. Unlike her contemporary, Catherine of Russia, or her daughter, Marie Antoinette, even her name is likely to be unknown to the general public. Those who have heard of her are likely to have little more image of her than as a matronly woman (whi

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even a nascent one, and it would in the end dissolve entirely after defeat in the First World War. When Maria Theresa was born, in 1717, that denouement lay 201 years in the future, but the Hapsburg Empire's lack of foundation and thus its lack of inherent stability was already evident to the farsighted. Among them was Frederick II of Prussia. In his explanation of his motives for attacking the Austrian province of Silesia upon Maria Theresa's accession, he first stated his claims, but then got to his real argument: Add to the previous considerations troops ever ready to act, my well-filled treasury and the vivacity of my character: these were the reasons I made war on Maria Theresa, Queen of Bohemia-Hungary (McGill, 1972, p. 34). A more forthrightly cynical explanation of motives for making war would be hard to imagine. There were other considerations that Frederick did not mention, though they were surely on his mind. First, the inherent shakiness of the Hapsburg Empire, for all the reasons noted above. Second, the great likelihood, as he must have estimated it, that the woman he was attacking would be hopelessly outclassed. III. The Accession Crisis Maria Theresa's her father, the Emperor Charles VI, had devoted much of
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Approximate Word count = 1934
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)