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William was dismissed from his office as stadtholder (February 23), and his rule was succeeded by the Batavian Republic (1795–1806). In November 1802 he went to his dynastic Nassau possessions in Germany.

his father Leopold I

With his death, that pre-eminence of the House was challenged

So, even if the last Habsburg's death had no sinister implications, it was potentially a catastrophe for the dynasty. Charles had no male heir, and his daughters could not succeed him to the Imperial throne. The laws of the Empire permitted only a male to sit on the throne of Charlemagne

Among the Habsburgs, gender was less important than blood

among the Habsburgs, as opposed, to say, the Valois or the Bourbons, the reality of female power and authority was accepted. Thus Charles' daughters could succeed to his titles and lands but they could not become Holy Roman Emperor

Since Frederick III had been crowned Holy Roman Emperor in Rome in 1452, the Imperial title had become almost synonymous with the Habsburgs. They had been elected since 1438 in an unbroken succession to the most dignified and honourable office in Christian Europe. Sometimes there had been other challengers and, on occasion, it had seemed likely that the title would pass to another claimant. But the Habsburgs had always succeeded in persuading sufficient electors to favour their candidate

it obscured the real power that a Holy Roman Emperor could exercise

While the power and effectiveness of the Reich was undoubtedly waning, especially after the peace settlement at Westphalia in 1648, it was, paradoxically, becoming a more effective instrument of Habsburg power

its sanctions still carried weight

The Emperor Leopold I, in 1687 and 1705, had moved away from the notion of the equal claim towards establishing the precedence of the senior line, with males inheriting first and then females.

deprived the daughters of Joseph I, and established that the new primogeniture would begin with his own children. When Charles presented this edict he was initiating a constitutional revolution

It is worthwhile noting that Charles' concerns were for the future. In 1715, despite ten years of marriage, he had no heir

the lands ruled by the Habsburgs should never be divided, and he was mindful of the wrangles over the Spanish inheritance of his cousin Carlos II, which ultimately deprived him (he believed) of the throne of Spain

However, there was a strong body of legal opinion that suggested that so powerful were these claims ‘of blood' that no prior agreement could abrogate them, and certainly nothing could prevent their rights being transmitted to the future children of a female Habsburg

The Pragmatic Sanction assumed that males would come before females in order of inheritance, but if there were no male heirs, then a female could inherit all the powers and rights due to the head of the house of Habsburg

it was accepted that a female Habsburg could wear the Crown of St Stephen. Constitutional lawyers would insist that, technically speaking, Maria Theresa should become ‘King of Hungary’, although she was always referred to as Queen of Hungary

The sudden death of Charles produced a crisis for the Habsburgs, firstly in the political domain, but secondly, in the area of dynastic ideology

set apart from ordinary humanity, the chosen vessels of God's will

The Habsburgs had made so much of their long ancestry, of the male descent through the generations, since the time of the first Rudolf

To describe Charles VI as the ‘last of the Habsburgs’ plays to a widely-held legend of the enfeeblement of the Habsburg line

it marked their ancient heritage

his descendent Carlos II of Spain

This grotesque appearance lay behind the assumption that the Habsburgs had died out in the male line for genetic reasons, as a consequence of their deliberate policy of marrying within the family which they had followed since the middle of the sixteenth century

In fact the failure of the Habsburg line had much more to do with epidemic disease and poor standards of infant care in the Habsburg palaces than with any genetic taint

The lack of a male heir may have had a hereditary element, because there were many more female than male births in the House of Habsburg, but the disappearance of the male line was more an accident than a sign of waning procreative powers.

or this reason he never accepted that it was his elder daughter Maria Theresa who would succeed him, and had done nothing to introduce her to the complexities of government

The rules and taboos which constrained other ruling houses were transmuted by the Habsburgs' notion of their own unique collective identity

The Habsburgs, from the founder of the family's fortune, Emperor Rudolf I in the thirteenth century, had sedulously constructed a myth of their origins which set them apart from ordinary humanity

And most Habsburg rulers year by year, right up until the death of the Emperor Franz Joseph in 1916, played a solemn part in the annual Corpus Christi procession through the streets of Vienna

It was for this reason that the Darks of Habsburg identity, like the jutting jaw, were a mark of honour not a disfigurement

It had been the grimly practical Wallenstein and not the Virgin Mary who had rescued the Habsburg cause in the 1630s. In the 1740s Maria Theresa saved her inheritance with a steely will and an unswerving determination to succeed

Her response, conditioned both by her character and the exigencies of the circumstances, was very different from her fussy and pedantic father, obsessed with the lost throne of Spain

A young woman inherited the crowns and possessions of her father, but also an empty treasury and an army commanded by dotards. The process by which she stiffened the resolve of her generals, won the nobility and gentry of Hungary to her cause, and organised the resistance to the Prussian, Bavarian and French armies has itself achieved the quality of myth

Maria Theresa was as involved with the identity of the house of Habsburgs as he had been. She followed her father in his obsessive concern for the safe keeping of the bones of their ancestors

Maria Theresa's son Joseph II has been nicknamed ‘The Revolutionary Emperor' by one of his biographers

The transformation which she inspired and then enforced on her territories was less dramatic (and less publicised) than Joseph’s: it was also a lot more successful and longer lasting. The crisis of Maria Theresa's first years and the subsequent revival of Habsburg power is most often looked upon in external terms, both political and economic

She moved away from the reliance on the Imperial title as a principle source of Habsburg legitimacy

However, even then, she refused to be crowned as Empress, preferring the titles she held in her own right to the crowns of Hungary and Bohemia

Mother of the Country

who ruled briefly as Leopold II, knew better than either of them how to play the twin chords of coercion and free expression

But the Habsburgs, from Maria Theresa onwards, turned their backs on the tradition of grandeur and portrayed themselves as the first servants of the nation

he believed as ardently as any of his predecessors in the unique role and mission of his clan

Historians have come to regard Maria Theresa as one of the most significant and innovative of the long line of Habsburg rulers

The potential catastrophe of the 1740s was that the Habsburg lands, like Poland a generation later, might have been dismembered or at best much reduced in scale and power

He spent the rest of his life in exile in the Netherlands, where he died at age 82.

Wilhelm’s childhood was shaped by two events, one medical and one political. His birth had been traumatic; in the course of a complicated delivery, the doctor permanently damaged Wilhelm’s left arm. In addition to its smaller size, the arm was useless for such ordinary tasks as cutting certain foods with a knife at mealtime.

In 1881, Wilhelm married Princess Augusta Victoria (1858-1921) of Schleswig-Holstein. The couple would go on to have seven children

Wilhelm damaged his political position in a number of ways. He meddled in German foreign policy on the basis of his emotions, resulting in incoherence and inconsistency in German relations with other nations. He also made a number of public blunders, the worst of which was The Daily Telegraph affair of 1908. Wilhelm gave an interview to the London-based newspaper in which he offended the British by saying such things as: “You English are mad, mad, mad as March hares.”

The kaiser supported the plans of Alfred von Tirpitz (1849-1930), his chief admiral, who maintained that Germany could gain diplomatic power over Britain by stationing a fleet of warships in the North Sea. By 1914, however, the naval buildup had caused severe financial problems for Wilhelm’s government.

Wilhelm’s behavior during the crisis that led to war in August 1914 is still controversial. There is little doubt that he had been broken psychologically by the criticism that followed the Eulenburg-Harden and Daily Telegraph scandals; he suffered an episode of depression in 1908. In addition, the kaiser was out of touch with the realities of international politics in 1914; he thought that his blood relationships to other European monarchs were sufficient to manage the crisis that followed the June 1914 assassination of the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand (1863-1914) in Sarajevo, Bosnia. Although Wilhelm signed the order for German mobilization following pressure from his generals–Germany declared war against Russia and France during the first week of August 1914– he is reported to have said, “You will regret this, gentlemen.”

In late 1918, popular unrest in Germany (which had suffered greatly during the war) combined with a naval mutiny convinced civilian political leaders that the kaiser had to abdicate to preserve order. In fact, Wilhelm’s abdication was announced on November 9, 1918, before he had actually consented to it. He agreed to leave when the leaders of the army told him he had lost their support as well. On November 10, the former emperor took a train across the border into the Netherlands, which had remained neutral throughout the war. He eventually bought a manor house in the town of Doorn, and remained there for the remainder of his life.

After two decades in exile, he died in the Netherlands on June 4, 1941, at the age of 82.

In foreign affairs, Christian allied with the Protestant German rulers against the Habsburg Holy Roman emperor Charles V, who wanted to place the daughters of Christian II on the Scandinavian thrones.

Bismarck was less circumspect in his conduct of the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71). Seeing the opportunity to unify Germany’s loose confederations against an outside enemy, Bismarck stirred political tensions between France and Prussia, famously editing a telegram from William I to make both countries feel insulted by the other. The French declared war, but the Prussians and their German allies won handily. Prussia levied an indemnity, annexed the French border provinces of Alsace and Lorraine and crowned William emperor of a unified Germany (the Second Reich) in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles—a tremendous insult to the French.

In the 1880s Bismarck set aside his conservative impulses to counter the socialists by creating Europe’s first modern welfare state, establishing national healthcare (1883), accident insurance (1884) and old age pensions (1889). Bismarck also hosted the 1885 Berlin Conference that ended the “Scramble for Africa,” dividing the continent between the European powers and establishing German colonies in Cameroon, Togoland and East and Southwest Africa.

William I died in 1888 and was succeeded by his son Frederick III and then his grandson William II, both of whom Bismarck found difficult to control. In 1890 the new king forced Bismarck out. William II was left in control of a flourishing unified state but was ill-equipped to maintain Bismarck’s carefully manipulated balance of international rivalries. Respected and honored by the time of his death eight years later, Bismarck quickly became a quasi-mythic figure invoked by political leaders calling for strong German leadership—or for war.