Ah Maria, That’s How to Raise an Army

In order to save Austria, Queen Maria Theressa had to humble herself to the Hungarian. She gladly thumbed her nose at her own nobles. Then peace came.

Peace. For the first eight years of her reign all had been war. Things had not gone particularly well in that department. Overall though, things hadn’t gone particularly badly either. Only a small bit of Silesia remained in Austria’s hands. As bitter a pill as this was to swallow, she had the consolation of knowing that she had beaten the French, Bavarians and Saxons. She had kept the mighty Frederick of Prussia out of Vienna.

Indeed, while Frederick was being lauded as “The Great”, he himself knew how close he had come to suffering a very nasty set-back at the hands of the Austrians. In his view Maria was no fool. She had already replaced her husband as head of the army. It was only a matter of time before she got truly competent men to lead her armies. And then what? Nothing good for Prussia, Frederick was sure of that.

But for the time being, peace was at hand. And with it, a new set of problems. First and foremost, she needed a full time, standing army. As big as she could afford. The French would be back, as would Frederick. But armies are very expensive., so she needed a dependable revenue stream.

The nobles had money. They had lots, if not most, of it. The problem was, they didn’t have to part with it if they didn’t want to. And more often than not, they didn’t want to. She did what seemed to be second nature for her. She plucked some guy out of obscurity and told him to take charge. Count Wilhelm Haugwitz was his name.

The task he was given was formidable. In essence, he had to persuade the grandees to fork it over by the bushel basket load while at the same time surrendering to the crown certain powers they considered to be theirs and theirs alone. What could be easier?

Haugwitz was, according to one historian, “Just about as unprepossessing a person as it is possible to imagine.” The son of a Protestant general, he had a nervous tic that caused him to blink constantly. He entered the Silesian civil service at age twenty-five. He converted to Catholicism and settled in to nurse his career along. Things probably would have gone just as he wished had not Frederick invaded Silesia.

At age forty-one, he found himself back in Vienna, unemployed and “poor with no prospects” This time it was Maria’s husband who first got wind of him. As a former administrator, he had also come to the notice of Count Tarouca. They liked what they saw and introduced him to the Queen. She liked what she saw and sent him to administer the small bit of Silesia that remained in Austrian hands.

While this may not seem like much, it was actually a vitally important test. The problems there were not unlike Maria’s problems with the rest of the empire. What land that wasn’t in the hands of the grandees was in the hands of the church. Neither of these entities paid taxes, and they weren’t about to start now.

It was especially ticklish because Maria wasn’t planning a revolution. She had no problem with the status quo..up to a point. She did need a cohesive, centralized government because government by grandee whim was no government at all.

And standing armies need a steady revenue stream. They need to make long range plans and know the money is there to pay for them. A difficult thing to achieve when money was usually not forthcoming until after war was declared.

Count Haugwitz returned to his bit of Silesia and went to work. He watched closely what Frederick was doing in the rest of Silesia. What was taking place there was the centralizing of nearly all government functions. But first and foremost was the army. Taking his que from Frederick, Haugwitz came up with… The Haugwitz plan! This called for a standing army of 108,000 men with a budget of 14 million gulden. This out of a total budget of 30 some odd million gulden. This would be paid for, in effect, by subscription.

A ten year agreement between the government and the land owners Everyone paid an equal share based on estimates of amount of land owned, total immovable property owned, etc. It would be a cash payment only. No barter. The government would be in charge of buying supplies and paying the soldiers.

Not surprisingly, this was most unpopular. For the grandees, it was way over the top. To their way of thinking, they already contributed to their share by maintaining private regiments. This was a logical argument, for that time anyway, and it had merit. The thing was, those soldiers were loyal to the grandee who paid them. They followed their own sets of orders, had their own weapons, which might or might not be compatible with their neighbors weapons.

And, last but not least. If His Lordship went over to the enemy to keep his lands from being overrun, his soldiers didn’t fight. It was no way to run a national army. Besides, if there were taxes to be collected, the nobles would collect them, not pay them.

The estates closest to Prussia were among the first to agree to the new arrangements, not surprisingly. And, rather than pursue a blanket agreement that would cover all estates, Haugwitz negotiated with each estate, one by one.

Not all agreed to the ten year subscription. Some signed on for a year or two, some for five, some, like the Hungarians, didn’t sign on at all. Nevertheless, it was more or less done as Maria wished. Essentially, the army was being created from whole cloth.

Every estate had it’s regiment, which in some cases was a regiment in name only. All had their own drills and uniforms. Even terms of command changed from one regiment to another. This could not be allowed to continue. The army also needed officers who understood that they served the crown and would obtain their positions because of their training and not because they were Count So and So’s feeble-witted nephew.

To this end Maria personally established the soon to be famous Military Academy in the fortress town of Wiener Newstadt. At the same time, she opened an academy of military engineering and the Theresianum, in the Favorita Palace, for the training of future civil servants.

And did all this activity pay off? Well…in the opening of the Seven Years War, Frederick observed, with no little exasperation, “These are no longer the same old Austrians.”

— Mr. Al