The emperor who died on the hill

In November 1921 a steamer brought to Funchal a man who, three years earlier, had ruled fifty million people. Charles I — the last Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary, the final monarch of the six-century Habsburg line — had twice tried and failed to take back his Hungarian throne. The Allied powers decided he must be put somewhere remote, surrounded by sea, from which no third attempt could be launched. They chose Madeira.

He arrived with his wife, the Empress Zita, who was pregnant with their eighth child, and with very little money. For their first months the family lodged at the Villa Vittoria, a house beside the brand-new Reid's Palace hotel on the Funchal cliffs — so that, for a strange interval, a deposed emperor and a luxury hotel shared a garden wall.

The house on the hill

The seafront proved costly, and in February 1922 a Madeiran banking family lent the couple a modest summer villa high above the city: the Quinta do Monte, in the cool, green, often cloud-wrapped hills of Monte. It was beautiful and it was damp. On 9 March, walking down into town, the emperor caught a chill. The chill became bronchitis; the bronchitis became pneumonia.

There were no antibiotics. Over three weeks he weakened, suffered two heart attacks, and on 1 April 1922 died of respiratory failure. He was thirty-four. The Empress Zita was at his bedside, and so was their nine-year-old eldest son, Otto — who would carry the memory of that room for the rest of a long life.

He came to Madeira with no throne, no money, and a borrowed house. He is the only emperor the island ever kept. The register

A divided rest

Charles was buried where he died, in the hilltop church of Nossa Senhora do Monte — Our Lady of the Mount — whose white towers look out over Funchal and the Atlantic. His body has never left. His heart, however, was later taken to Muri Abbey in Switzerland and placed beside that of Empress Zita: a last emperor whose remains are split between a subtropical island and a Swiss monastery.

In 2004, Pope John Paul II declared him “Blessed Karl of Austria.” A man who died in obscure exile became, eighty-two years later, an object of veneration — and his tomb at Monte became a place of pilgrimage. His descendants still gather here each year on 1 April, the day he died.