A Prince Among Stones (29 page)

I have to say that Mick has a refreshingly honest and realistic view of the limitations of what he writes. After Andy Warhol had produced his set of prints featuring Mick, I suggested to Mick that a further option, which would be cheaper, would be to produce a calligraphic book using his lyrics, printed on wonderful paper, with illustrations. Mick said, ‘No, no, no, my lyrics couldn’t take it.’ I was very impressed with his saying that.

The classical music that moves me has to be appropriate for the environment. Keith gave a birthday party during one of the European tours. He mentioned to me that he had brought along the CD of Richard Strauss’s ‘Four Last Songs’, as he had recently seen it performed. ‘I thought we might play it,’ he said, so I advised him, ‘It simply won’t work with this audience.’ He saw my point.

When our house in California was being built, the man in charge was Armenian: he stayed there with his pregnant wife and told me that she was only interested in classical music, listened to it very frequently and felt that it was good for the embryo. Josephine now has an upright piano in the house which she plays every day we are there. For a time a small bird used to come and dance to Mozart, but to no other music. We all respond to music in our individual ways.
Chacun à son goût
indeed.

Appendix: The ancestry of Rupert zu Loewenstein-Wertheim-Freudenberg by Guy Sainty

The Loewenstein-Wertheim family is the senior branch of one of Europe’s oldest reigning families. It not only produced ruling Dukes, then Electors and Kings of Bavaria, but two Holy Roman Emperors, the first King of independent Greece, Electors of the Palatinate, Kings of Sweden, Hungary, Norway and Denmark and two ‘anti-Kings’ of Bohemia, who challenged the Habsburg kings in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

They also inherited the Duchies of Julich and Berg which straddle what is now the German-Dutch border, the Counties of Holland, Hainault and Zeeland in what is now a large part of the Netherlands and Belgium as well as other smaller German states. The family produced a notable branch of the British royal family, of which Prince Rupert of the Rhine, Duke of Cumberland, is the best-known member, and a branch of the Spanish royal family (in the twentieth century). The Loewensteins themselves were minor sovereigns as rulers of the ‘immediate’ County of Wertheim and other smaller territories held as fiefs of the Empire.

Bavaria, the Palatinate and the County of Wertheim were all states of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, founded on Christmas Day 800 when Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne
Imperator Romanorum
. In 1512, this was formally titled the
Imperium Romanum Sacrum Nationis Germanicæ
(translated in German as the
Heiliges Römisches Reich Deutscher Nation
), or Holy Roman Empire, which is how this strange construct has been known to history and which was famously dismissed by Voltaire as being neither Holy, nor Roman nor an Empire.

In 1362 the right to elect the Emperor was defined and limited to seven ruling princes, three ecclesiastical – the Archbishops of Mainz, Trier and Cologne – and four lay: the King of Bohemia (who although an elector was otherwise excluded from the affairs of the Empire), the Count Palatine of the Rhine (Wittelsbach), the Duke of Saxony (Wettin) and the Margrave of Brandenburg (Hohenzollern). These were later augmented by the elevation of Bavaria and the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg (as Hannover) to Electorates.

The Dukes, Margraves, Landgraves, Princes, and Imperial Counts, Barons and Knights, as well as the ecclesiasts who held ‘immediate’ territories, all enjoyed membership in the Imperial Diet, a kind of supra-national Parliament for the German states. This included the sovereigns of the larger territories such as Saxony, Bavaria and Brandenburg as well as the rulers of quite modest territories, or representatives of groups of statelets along with the Archbishops, Bishops, Abbots and Abbesses who ruled the ecclesiastical states. Considerable prestige became attached to possession of even a relatively modest immediate territory, some having only a few hundred inhabitants, and it was a measure of the standing of the Loewensteins that they remained immediate sovereigns until the Empire’s dissolution in 1806.

The Loewenstein family descends from Berthold, Margrave in Bavaria, who died in 980 and whose probable grandson, Otto, acquired the castle and county of Scheyern, exchanged for that of Wittlesbach, a small township north of Munich, by the latter’s son Otto II, in 1119. In 1214 the family also acquired the enormously wealthy County Palatine of the Rhine in 1214 and the duchy of Bavaria was ceded to a junior line. When the senior, Palatine, line became extinct in 1777 Bavaria and the Palatinate with the family’s others possessions were combined into one state. In 1805, after an agreement with the French by which certain of the family’s possessions along the left bank of the Rhine were ceded to Napoleon, Bavaria became a kingdom, remaining such until 1918 when the family finally ceased to reign.

The origins of the Loewenstein (in German, Löwenstein) branch go back to the marriage of Elector Palatine Friedrich I, who had become Elector on the death of his elder brother Ludwig IV, mortally wounded in battle in 1449 at the age of twenty-five. As he lay dying Ludwig commanded his brother Friedrich to support his young son Philip as his youth necessitated a regency. Since a regency may have required imperial permission, Friedrich instead assumed the title of Elector under the terms of an ‘Arrogation’ in which he undertook not to marry and, although the Emperor tried to intervene, Friedrich proved an adept ruler whose victory over the imperial allies at the Battle of Seckenheim in 1462 secured his own rule and possession of the Palatinate for his nephew, whom he had formally adopted in 1451.

Friedrich, however, wanted to marry his long-term mistress, Klara Tott (otherwise known as Klara Dettin), who had already given birth to their two sons a decade earlier; she was a former maid of honour at the Munich court and the daughter of an Augsburg burgher but not considered of suitably elevated rank to be the bride of a sovereign ruler. Philip, by then aged twenty-one, wanted to protect his own inheritance but nonetheless agreed that the earlier ‘Arrogation’ should be varied to permit his uncle’s marriage, while excluding Friedrich’s descendants from succeeding as ruler.

Friedrich married sometime before October 1471 with his nephew’s consent and, on 24 January 1472, renounced his succession rights to the Palatinate for himself, his wife and their descendants. Friedrich and Klara’s marriage served to legitimise them under canon law, since neither was under any legal impediment to marry once Philip had given his consent; furthermore, their two sons had already been legitimatised by bulls issued by both the Pope and the Bishop of Speyer before 14 October 1470.

The future Elector Philip must have recognised that he ultimately owed his throne to his uncle Friedrich, and it would have been ungracious for him to have withheld consent, particularly since Friedrich had not only defended his existing inheritance but had managed to enlarge it. Klara’s elder son Friedrich, who died aged thirteen in 1474, and Louis (1463–1524), were accorded several properties and substantial sums but Friedrich died on 12 December 1475 before the grant of further estates could be effected.

Philip initially only allowed Ludwig, Friedrich’s surviving son, the lordship of Scharffeneck (in 1476) and the County of Loewenstein (in 1488) but then, in 1490, granted his cousin the lordships of Abstatt and castle Wildeck and in 1494 asked the Emperor, Maximilian I, to raise Ludwig to the rank of Count of the Empire as Count of Loewenstein. Of Ludwig’s five sons, only the youngest, Friedrich (1502–41), left descendants, of whom the elder, Wolfgang (1527–71), left an only son, Wolfgang II (1555–96), who received the lordship of Scharffeneck and was known as the Count of Loewenstein-Scharffeneck; this branch became extinct in 1633 when the property reverted to the junior Loewenstein line.

Friedrich’s younger son, Ludwig III (1530–1611), who had embraced the reformed Protestant faith, made a brilliant marriage in 1566 to Countess Anne of Stolberg; she inherited the lordship of Rochefort (a fief held jointly by the Prince-Bishop of Liège and the Duchy of Luxembourg), in what is now Belgium (in 1574) and was ultimately the heiress of the county of Wertheim, an immediate imperial fief, of which Ludwig became ruler by right of his wife in 1598.

Of Ludwig and Anne’s four surviving sons, only the eldest, Christoph Ludwig (1568–1618), and Johann Dietrich (1585–1644) left descendants. Christoph Ludwig married Elisabeth von Manderscheid, heiress of Virneburg, and from 1621 his son took the title of Count of Loewenstein-Wertheim-Virneburg, while Johann Dietrich’s heirs took the title of Count of Loewenstein-Wertheim-Rochefort. During the Thirty Years War, the Rochefort branch supported the Emperor and returned to the Catholic faith of their ancestors. The change of faith brought some advantage to the junior line and insured their elevation to the rank of Prince of the Holy Roman Empire in 1711, while the senior, Virneburg, line remained merely Counts. In 1559, with the extinction of the senior Palatinate line, the Loewensteins became the senior male line of the house of Wittelsbach. It was later argued that in the event of the extinction of the male line of both the Bavarian and Palatinate reigning house that these thrones should then pass to the Loewensteins.

In 1803 a series of French victories led to the Treaty of Lunéville under which Virneburg and Rochefort were both ceded to France (although the family was compensated elsewhere). The family still retained their immediate County of Wertheim and so were formally included among the former sovereign houses of the Holy Roman Empire when it was finally dissolved in 1806. The King of Bavaria elevated the living males of the senior, Virneburg, branch to the rank of Prince (
Fürst
) on 19 November 1812, with the name Virneburg substituted by that of the newly acquired territory of Freudenberg. This title was then accorded by the King of Württemberg in a grant of 25 February 1813, and confirmed by the sovereigns of each of the other principal states in which the family held immediate territories (the Grand Duchy of Frankfurt in December 1812, the Grand Duchy of Hesse on 17 December 1812, the Grand Duchy of Würzburg on 24 January 1813 and the Grand Duchy of Baden on 3 April 1813).

The Congress of Vienna of 1815 decided that those former sovereign families which had owed direct allegiance to the Emperor should be accorded a special status, allowing them a form of equality with those families which after 1815 had retained their thrones. The German Confederation decided that those of princely rank would be accorded the style
Durchlaucht
(Most Serene Highness) and those of countly rank
Erlaucht
(Most Illustrious Highness) and both branches of the Loewenstein-Wertheim family were included in the former category. These ‘mediatised’ families were also authorised to establish or maintain their family ‘house laws’ which accorded the head of each family the right to authorise or refuse to accept as ‘dynastic’ the marriages of members of their families. However, in order for these house laws to have full legal validity they had to be registered in the parliaments of the states in which they held their rank and titles. Although the Freudenberg branch drew up strict laws requiring that members marry into countly families, they were never registered and so could not be legally enforced.
1

The marriage of Johann Karl Ludwig, Count of Loewenstein-Wertheim-Freudenberg (1740–1816), in 1764 to Princess Dorothea Maria of Hesse-Philippsthal-Barchfeld, a branch of the family of the Grand Dukes and Electors of Hesse, may have influenced his elevation to the rank of Prince by the Bavarian King, especially since Johann’s wife’s mother was a Princess of Anhalt (of which family the Russian Empress Catherine the Great had been a member). Johann’s younger brother Friedrich, who died in 1799, made the first ‘unequal’ marriage in the family and his two children instead took their mother’s name and were given a modest financial settlement.
2
Johann had twelve children but only two sons married and had descendants; the two wives of the elder, Georg, 2nd Prince of Loewenstein-Wertheim-Freudenberg (1775–1855) were both members of former sovereign houses, but Johann’s younger son, Wilhelm (1783–1847), married a lady of more modest standing, albeit of old Prussian nobility, Dorothea von Kahlden, whose family provided numerous Prussian generals and senior officers. Georg’s only surviving son Adolf (1805–61), married morganatically in 1831, to Catherine Schlundt (1807–77), who the Grand Duke of Baden created Baroness of Adlerhorst. Their elder son died young, leaving just one daughter, and eventually Adolf’s father allowed Catherine to be accorded the rank of Erbfürstin von Loewenstein-Wertheim-Freudenberg, thus also extending princely rank to their daughter.

Adolf, who succeeded in 1855, died in 1861 aged just fifty-six, to be succeeded by his cousin Wilhelm (1817–87). Wilhelm’s much younger brother, Leopold (1827–93), then serving as an officer in a Bavarian cavalry regiment and who like his uncle Adolf would convert to the Catholic faith, had fallen in love with Amalia Wollrabe (1836–1909). Adolf was still head of the house and willingly gave his consent to the marriage, which took place in the Evangelical Lutheran church of St Peter, in Hamburg, on 4 August 1861. Amalia, while not born to a noble family, was a member of a family of Hamburg patricians – Hamburg did not have a nobility, although the patriciate was similar to that of the early Renaissance Italian city-states.

Unfortunately Adolf died a few days after Leopold’s marriage before his consent had been formalised, so the decision now reverted to Leopold’s older brother Wilhelm, who was keen to restore his family’s status after the embarrassment of his predecessor’s wife’s elevation as
Fürstin
. Wilhelm also wanted to retain the family’s historic allegiance to the Protestant faith that both Adolf and Leopold had now abandoned. The advantage for the family of excluding descendants of such marriages was that they would no longer have any claim on the family ‘fideicommis’, or hereditary trusts, which were restricted to the descendants of ‘equal’ marriages. Leopold was initially able to get the support of the Bavarian King, Maximilian II, who was conscious that the two Loewenstein-Wertheim families were the senior legitimate branch of his own royal house. There remained some mystery about Amalia’s true parentage and it has been proposed that she was really the daughter of Maximilian’s father, the deposed King Ludwig I, renowned for his love of beautiful women and extramarital relationships.