1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Schwarzenberg, Karl Philipp, Prince zu
SCHWARZENBERG, KARL PHILIPP, Prince zu (1771-1820),
Austrian field marshal, was born on the 15th of April 1771
at Vienna.[1]
He entered the imperial cavalry in 1788, fought
in 1789 under Lacy and Loudon against the Turks, distinguished
himself by his bravery, and became major in 1792. In the
French campaign of 1793 he served in the advanced guard of the
army commanded by Prince Josias of Coburg, and at Cateau
Cambresis in 1794 his impetuous charge at the head of his
regiment, vigorously supported by tweleve British squadrons,
broke a whole corps of the French, killed and wounded 3000 men,
and brought off 32 of the enemy's guns. He was immediately
decorated with the cross of the Maria Theresa order. After
taking part in the battles of Amberg and Würzburg in 1796 he
was raised to the rank of major-general, and in 1799 he was
promoted lieutenant field marshal. At the defeat of Hohenlinden
in 1800 his promptitude and courage saved the right wing of the
Austrian army from destruction, and he was afterwards entrusted
by the archduke Charles with the command of the rearguard.
In the war of 1805 he held command of a division under Mack,
and when Ulm was surrounded by Napoleon in October he was
one of the brave band of cavalry, under the archduke Ferdinand,
which cut its way through the hostile lines. In the same year
he was made a commander of the order of Maria Theresa and in
1809 he received the Golden Fleece. When in 1808, in view of a
new war with France, Austria decided to send a special envoy to
Russia, Schwarzenberg, who was persona grata at the court of
St Petersburg, was selected. He returned, however, in time
to take part in the battle of Wagram, and was soon afterwards
promoted general of cavalry. After the peace of Vienna he was
sent to Paris to negotiate the marriage between Napoleon and
the archduchess Maria Louisa. The prince gave a ball in honour
of the bride on the 1st of July 1810, which ended in the tragic
death of many of the guests, including his own sister-in-law, in
a fire. Napoleon held Schwarzenberg in great esteem, and it
was at his request that the prince took command of the Austrian
auxiliary corps in the Russian campaign of 1812. The part
the Austrians was well understood to be politically rather than
morally hostile, and Schwarzenberg gained some minor successes
by skilful manœuvres without a great battle; afterwards, under
instructions from Napoleon, he remained for some months
inactive at Pultusk. In 1813, when Austria, after many hesitations,
took the side of the allies against Napoleon, Schwarzenberg,
recently promoted to be field marshal, was appointed
commander-in-chief of the allied Grand Army of Bohemia. As such
he was the senior of the allied generals who conducted the
campaign of 1813-1814 to the final victory before Paris and the
overthrow of Napoleon. It is the fashion to accuse Schwarzenberg
of timidity and over-caution, and his operations can easily
be made to appear in that colour when contrasted with those of
his principal subordinate, the fiery Blücher, but critics often
forget that Schwarzenberg was an Austrian general first of all,
that his army was practically the whole force that Austria could
put into the field in Central Europe, and was therefore not lightly
to be risked, and that the motives of his pusillanimity should be
sought in the political archives of Vienna rather than in the
text-books of strategical theory. In any case his victory, however
achieved, was as complete as Austria desired, and his rewards
were many, the grand crosses of the Maria Theresa and of many
foreign orders, an estate, the position of president of the
Hofkriegsrath, and, as a specially remarkable honour, the right to
bear the arms of Austria as an escutcheon of pretence. But
shortly afterwards, having lost his sister Caroline, to whom he
was deeply attached, he fell ill. A stroke of paralysis disabled
him in 1817, and in 1820, when revisiting Leipzig, the scene of the
Völkerschlacht that he had directed seven years before, he was
attacked by a second stroke. He died there on the 15th of
October.
His eldest son, Friedrich, Prince zu Schwarzenberg (1800-1870), had an adventurous career as a soldier, and described his wanderings and campaigns in several interesting works, of which the best known is his Wanderungen eines Lanzknechtes (1844-1845). He took part as an Austrian officer in the campaigns of Galicia 1846, Italy 1848 and Hungary 1848, and as an amateur in the French conquest of Algeria, the Carlist wars in Spain and the Swiss civil war of the Sonderbund. He became a major-general in the Austrian army in 1849, and died after many years of well-filled leisure in 1870. The second son, Karl Philipp (d. 1858), was a Feldzeugmeister; the third, Edmund Leopold Friedrich (1803-1873), a field marshal in the Austrian army. Of Schwarzenberg's nephews, Felix, the statesman, is separately noticed, and Friedrich Johann Josef Coelestin (1809-1885) was a cardinal and a prominent figure in papal and Austrian history.
See Prokesch-Osten, Denkwürdigkeiten aus dem Leben des Feldmarschall's Fürsten Schwarzenberg (Vienna, 1823); Berger, Das Fürstenhaus Schwarzenberg (Vienna, 1866), and a memoir by the same hand in Streffleur's Öst. Militärzeitschrift, 1863.
- ↑ The family of Schwarzenberg, of which many members are known to history, was derived from Erkinger von Seinsheim (b. 1362), a distinguished soldier under the emperor Sigismund, who bought the lordship of Schwarzenberg in Franconia in 1420. Count Adolf von Schwarzenberg (1547-1600) was a renowned general of the empire, whose sword, along with that of his descendant Prince Karl Philipp, is preserved in the arsenal of Vienna. He fought in the wars of religion, but was chiefly distinguished in the wars on the Eastern frontier against the Turks. He was killed in a mutiny of the soldiers at Papa in Hungary in 1600. Georg Ludwig, Count von Schwarzenberg (1586-1646), was an Austrian statesman in the Thirty Years' War. Johann, Freiherr von Schwarzenberg und Hohenlandsberg (1463-1528), was a celebrated jurist and a friend of Luther.