Thanks: that makes sense, since the emperor's mother and only sister were also deceased. His demented sister-in-law Charlotte (who had briefly been empress of Mexico as the consort of his ill-fated brother, Emperor Maximilian) was living in confinement.

Both surviving daughters had married and had their own national and dynastic obligations elsewhere (although Marie Valerie married a fellow Habsburg: I'm not sure if she stayed in Austria afterward, since her husband was a member of the Italian branch).

As for the status of his widowed daughter-in-law, Crown Princess Stephanie ... well, that's another question. Her daughter, Archduchess Elisabeth, would probably have been in the same position as that of his daughters: somebody who had only a temporary place in the Austrian imperial court, since princesses have traditionally been expected to leave home and marry foreign royals.

Which was what his daughter Gisela had done, in 1873, and which leads me to raise the question of just who exactly was the acting first lady of Bavaria, between the death in 1889 of Queen Marie and the accession of the self-proclaimed King Ludwig III in 1913.

Prince Luitpold (uncle of the mad kings) had assumed the regency in 1886; but he had been widowed in 1864 and never remarried. His only daughter, Princess Therese, stayed home and never married at all (it's interesting to note the number of unmarried Bavarian princesses like herself: look at Clara and Pilar, as other examples).

But all three of his sons had married equally born foreign princesses: as it was, the second was the one who married a daughter of the Austrian emperor. So in a sense, Prince Leopold might be thought of as having made the *highest* match of them all (his older brother had married an Habsburg archduchess of Austria-Este, while his younger brother married a princess of Liechtenstein).

Did perhaps Archduchess Gisela of Austria have the highest rank in the Wittelsbach royal court? The reason for my asking is that Bavaria greatly respected the birth rank of a foreign princess who married into her royal family. By contrast, a woman who became a member of the British royal family by marriage derived her rank exclusively from her husband, not her own birth. As long as a marriage was dynastic (meaning legal in accordance with the 1772 Royal Marriages Act), the wife of the monarch's eldest son always outranked the wife of the second son, etc.

This irked the Duchess of Edinburgh, born in 1853 as HIH Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna of Russia, daughter of the future Czar Alexander II. As she by 1874 (the year of her marriage to Queen Victoria's second son) had been an emperor's daughter for nearly two decades, she felt entitled to a higher rank in the royal court of her adopted homeland than that of the Princess of Wales, who was *only* a king's daughter. In fact, King Christian IX didn't even come to the throne of Denmark until 1863, the year of his eldest daughter's marriage.

To add to the indignity of the situation, the duchess had to style herself Royal first, Imperial second, in the UK: when in Rome, do as Romans do was a motto she had a hard time in following.

Fortunately, Gisela was allowed to continue styling herself as "Her Imperial and Royal Highness", after marrying into the Bavarian royal family. But I'm still in the cloud as to her exact rank at court -- whether she outranked her unmarried sister-in-law, or Archduchess Maria Theresia of Austria-Este (a member of a cadet branch of the Habsburgs, born to a royal but not imperial rank: her father was never a reigning monarch, and her uncle lost his throne, the duchy of Modena, in 1860)