Maria Josepha von Bayern

Josépha of Bavaria, also known as Maria Josepha Antonia Walburga Felicitas Regula, was born on 30 March 1739 in Munich and died on 28 May 1767 in Vienna. She belonged to the House of Wittelsbach and was the daughter of the Bavarian elector and later emperor Charles Albert and Archduchess Maria Amalia of Austria. Through her marriage, she became Queen of the Romans and Empress of the Holy Roman Empire. Josépha was the seventh and youngest child of her parents. Of their seven children, only four reached adulthood. Her family included her brother Maximilian III Joseph, Elector of Bavaria, and her sisters Maria Antonia, who later became Electress of Saxony, and Maria Anna, who became Margravine of Baden-Baden. Through her mother, Josépha was closely connected to the Austrian imperial family. Her maternal grandparents were Emperor Joseph I and Wilhelmine Amalia of Brunswick-Lüneburg; on her father’s side, she descended from Elector Maximilian II Emanuel of Bavaria and Therese Kunigunde Sobieska, a daughter of the Polish king John III Sobieski. Maria Amalia was also a cousin of Josépha’s future mother-in-law, Maria Theresa, making Josépha and her future husband, Joseph II, distantly related. Josépha’s marriage to Joseph of Habsburg-Lorraine was arranged primarily for political reasons. Having experienced the consequences of a war of succession herself, Maria Theresa wanted to create a marriage for her heir that would provide political security and, ideally, male descendants. Joseph, however, was still mourning his first wife, Isabella of Parma, and initially did not wish to marry again. He had even considered a match with Isabella’s sister, Maria Luisa, but she was already betrothed to the future Spanish king Charles IV and had no interest in Joseph. Joseph met Josépha in 1764, while traveling to Frankfurt am Main to be elected King of the Romans. His first assessment of her appearance was highly disparaging. Nevertheless, the influential statesman Wenzel Anton von Kaunitz-Rietberg advocated a marriage to a Bavarian princess because he expected it to secure an alliance between Austria and Bavaria. On 13 January 1765, Josépha and Joseph were married by proxy. After her arrival in Vienna, the marriage was formally celebrated on 25 January at Schönbrunn Palace. The union proved unhappy. Even Josépha’s opponents at the Viennese court regarded her as friendly, helpful, sociable, and charitable. At the same time, she was considered poorly educated and limited in her intellectual abilities. Joseph acknowledged her good qualities and described her as blameless, but complained that they had no inner bond and that he could not love her. He promised to respect her at least as a friend and to treat her with the greatest possible consideration. In practice, however, he increasingly treated her with coldness and distance. Josépha herself loved her husband deeply and suffered greatly from his rejection. She was shy and insecure, and often became frightened in his presence. Joseph largely lived apart from her and described his married life in letters as almost that of an unmarried man. The marriage remained childless. Nevertheless, the court repeatedly suspected that Josépha might be pregnant because she suffered from various health problems. The tensions within the household were so obvious that even the chief superintendent of the imperial household resigned, claiming that she could no longer endure witnessing the state of the marriage. Josépha apparently worsened her situation by speaking to her servants about her suffering. The only member of the imperial family who initially supported Josépha was her father-in-law, Francis Stephen. After his death on 18 August 1765, she lost this important source of support. Francis Stephen was succeeded by Joseph as Emperor Francis I, and Josépha thereby became Empress of the Holy Roman Empire. Her mother-in-law, Maria Theresa, nevertheless remained the most influential figure at court and in the empire. After only two years of marriage, Josépha contracted smallpox, the same disease that had already killed Joseph’s first wife. She died on 28 May 1767 at the age of 28. Joseph did not visit her during her illness, while Maria Theresa went to see her and contracted the disease herself, though she survived it. After Josépha’s death, Joseph initially declared that he regretted his earlier coldness. He later told his sister Maria Antonia that his wife had been worthy of respect in many ways. Josépha was buried in the Capuchin Crypt in Vienna, but Joseph did not attend her funeral. Her death had further consequences. In October 1767, Archduchess Maria Josepha, who had prayed at her sister-in-law’s sarcophagus before her planned marriage to Ferdinand IV of Naples, also contracted smallpox and died from it. Josépha continued to play a role in her husband’s politics even after her death. When Joseph II claimed large parts of Bavaria in 1778 and 1779, he cited, among other reasons, his marriage to a Bavarian princess. The dispute led to the War of the Bavarian Succession, in which the Habsburgs ultimately gained only the Innviertel. As early as 1748, Josépha had been appointed a Noble Lady of the Imperial and Royal Order of the Starry Cross by Maria Theresa.