laststandonzombieisland

The Habsburgs by the 1860s had at least five assorted life guard units in their Household Division, with probably the most elite of them– on regular watch anyway– being the Imperial-Royal Trabant Lifeguards (k.k. Trabantenleibgarde).

Composed of long-serving Army officers and career NCOs, the half-company-sized Trabantenleibgarde was responsible for mounting the interior guard at the imperial residences of Hofburg and Schönbrunn in Austria. A larger force of picked enlisted men, the Leibgarde Infanterie Kompanie, handled day-to-day exterior guard work. The castles and residences in Hungary were guarded by dedicated Hungarian units.

When the last Habsburg emperor, Charles (Kaiser Karl I of Austria/King Károly IV of Hungary), left Schönbrunn Palace for the final time in the quiet pre-dawn hours of 12 November 1918, he personally dismissed the men of the Trabantenleibgarde without relief, their watch concluded.

However, Charles forgot to change the non-commissioned officer on duty in the Hall of Mirrors. Legend has it that the guard remained at his post until overcome by fatigue and drowsiness; he fell asleep on he shiny floor. He was found the next morning lying next to his white-crested helmet.

Emperor Karl I of Austria-Hungary inspecting troops of the Polish Auxiliary Corps in Bukovina, 10 December 1917. The officer on horseback is probably Lieutenant Colonel Michał Żymierski (IWM)

While Charles beat feet to Schloss Eckartsau, east of Vienna, and issued a proclamation that was ultimately taken as an abdication-in-waiting with the hope that his people would recall him, the old Empire was shattered to pieces in the wake of the country’s Great War defeat and ruin.

Leaving Austria for good in March 1919 for Switzerland and finally Portugal, where he died in exile in 1922, the Austrian Parliament pulled the plug on the monarchy in April 1919 and barred Charles and his male descendants from ever returning unless they formally renounced their rights to the throne.

Well, it seems like Charles and his wife Zita got the last laugh as a literal treasure trove of jewels, including the famous 137-carat Florentine Diamond, thought lost to history and unseen since 1918, just surfaced in the hands of male Habsburg descendants.

Long feared broken up, it turned out that Zita carried the cardboard box full of jewels away and locked the trove in a Canadian safe deposit box in the 1940s, where they remain today.

The family secret was kept on the condition that at least 100 years had passed since the last Austrian Kaiser’s death before it would be revealed.

The family wants to put the jewels on display in a Canadian institution, but the Austrian government is already making noise about getting the items, some of which have been in the personal collection of the Habsburgs since the 1700s, back.

You have to give it to Charles, Zita, and their offspring, though. The jewels could have easily been passed on in private sales at any point since 1919, but have been kept intact and safe. Worse, they could have abandoned them to history. Keep in mind that since they left Austria, the country descended into a spiral of Nazi and later Allied occupation that lasted 23 years, bracketed by cycles of oddball socialist governments. Had the jewels been left at Schönbrunn, they very well may have vanished.

Remember that the 12th-century Holy Crown of Hungary, also known as the Crown of Saint Stephen, which last rested on Charles’s head in 1916, was recovered in the remote mountain hamlet of Egglesberg, Austria, by the U.S. 86th Infantry Division in April 1945 and kept in Fort Knox until 1978, when it was handed over to the Hungarian government.

At least the secret was kept, clad in pasteboard, and the last post has finally been relieved.