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- [00:00]
A
This episode is brought to you by the Lloyds 5k house deposit and this is something that was last seen in 1996.
- [00:11]
B
Yeah, so the 1990s looks now like a lost golden age of prosperity and positivity, doesn't it? Think of the sort of the advent of the Blair administration in 1997, all the enthusiasm and excitement that surrounded that, the economic growth at the time, the technological developments, the sort of sense of a an endless golden summer where everybody's listening to Blair and Oasis and looking forward to buying their first houses. And that of course takes us to mortgages. Now the good news is that in a nod to the 1990s, Lloyds are offering 5k deposit mortgages to first time buyers. So search 5k first time buyer 1996
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A
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C
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B
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A
To learn more, check out Accenture.com Spotify. An old servant was waiting for us by a small iron door. He led us through a number of dark stairs and rooms until he asked us to enter a certain door. As I crossed the threshold, a black bird, some kind of raven, flew at my head. A voice called from the next room,
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B
Please come in, Marie.
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A
I shut me in. We talked a while about Vienna. Then he said to me, pardon me, but I would like to talk to the Countess privately for a few minutes. Then he went with Marie to another room. I looked around me. On his desk was a revolver and a skull. I picked up the skull, took it between my hands and looked at it from all sides. Suddenly Rudolph came in and took it from me with deep apprehension. But when I said that I wasn't afraid, he smiled. So that is an amazing scene, like something. We said it before from a kind of Gothic melodrama, Edgar and Poe or something like that. But in fact that is a letter that was written by the 17 year old Baroness Mary Vetsera to her old governess in the autumn of 1888. In fact, it's like something out of Dracula, isn't it? A letter written to a governess by a 17 year old girl who has invited herself into the room of an exceedingly sinister man. And she is describing there a secret meeting with the heir to the throne of the Austro Hungarian Empire, Crown Prince Rudolph. And this had happened a few days earlier on the 5th of November. And Dominic, if listeners, which I hope they will have done, have heard our first episode, then they will know where this is heading. And it is nowhere good for Baroness Mary because she is heading to a hunting lodge at Mailing in the Vienna woods. And what happens there is going to be one of the greatest scandals in the entire history, not just of Austria, Hungarian, but of European royalty. It is going to be a murder suicide pact that will shake the Habsburg dynasty to its very foundations. So Dominic, it's an amazing story.
- [05:32]
B
It is an amazing, amazing tale. And today we'll be telling the story of that secret affair between Rudolf and Mary. We will get deep into what exactly happened and Myelin, and we'll talk about the implications for the Habsburg dynasty and for the Austro Hungarian Empire. But just to remind ourselves exactly when and where we are. We're in Vienna in 1888. The world of Klimt and Freud and Mahler and these titanic cultural figures. Also the world of Crown Prince Rudolph, the sinister man in the Gothic melodrama that you described so chillingly, I have to say in your introductory reading.
- [06:09]
A
Thank you.
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B
So Crown Prince Rudolph is 30 years old. He is to remind people he is the son of Emperor Franz Josef and his very glamorous, kind of melancholy wife
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A
Sisi, very thin Very long hair.
- [06:21]
B
And Rudolph, who takes after his mother, I think it's reasonable to surmise he is a very troubled, unhappy, kind of morbid young man. He's almost certainly suffering from incurable gonorrhoea. He's probably off his face on morphine and he is suffocated by the kind of expectations of his role as crown prince. And also I think he is being eaten away by a sense of uselessness and futility as he waits for. For his father to die and to vacate the throne. And into Rudolph's orbit, as we described last time, has come the teenage Baroness, Mary Betsera. She's precocious, she's a social butterfly, she's a social climber, she's ambitious. But she's also incredibly romantic in a very 17 year old sort of teenage girl way.
- [07:12]
A
Well, you could see, couldn't you, from that extract that she wrote. Is it actually like a Gothic melodrama or is she putting that spin on it?
- [07:18]
B
Of course.
- [07:19]
A
Bit of both, probably.
- [07:20]
B
Was there really a blackbird, you know?
- [07:23]
A
Yeah. I mean, it seems improbable, but.
- [07:25]
B
And she had gone to that meeting with her older friend, Countess Marie Larisch, who is Rudolph's cousin. And basically the Countess Larisch has acted as the sort of intermediary and put the two of them together.
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A
The board.
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B
She is the board. Yes, you could say she's the procurer, as it were.
- [07:43]
A
Yeah.
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B
So the events that you described, Monday the 5th of November 1888, we ended the last episode with this scene. Countess Lass Parish has offered to take Mary shopping with her mother's permission. They went to the Graben, the great shopping street in Vienna. They went to a society photographer to have Mary's picture taken. But then they went to the back entrance to the Grand Hotel, to a carriage which was waiting for them, driven by Rudolph's coachman, Josef Bratfish.
- [08:11]
A
Bratfish, yeah. Yeah.
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B
It's a great name that is worthy of an American. Totally. It is, yeah.
- [08:18]
A
And Dominic, this whole thing about women being taken to the, you know, to hotels, the back rooms of hotels and things, and being driven off in carriages. Faint echo of Diana about this, isn't there? We've kind of mentioned it in the context of Cece.
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B
Yeah, definitely. There is. I mean, this, this. It's very much a kind of Diana in the 1990s vibe to this, I think.
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A
Yeah.
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B
The Diana story doesn't quite have that Gothic element to it though, does it? It's rather more hello magazine. This is much more hello magazine meets Bram Stoker as you said.
- [08:47]
A
Yeah.
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B
So from there she was taken to the Hofburg, the imperial palace, to Rudolph's private apartments. And then we get the scene with the raven and the skull and so begins their relationship, their affair. Now this is not unusual for Rudolf. Rudolph has had a lot of affairs and all the time he's still seeing his chief, his regular mistress, who is the former courtesan Mitzi Kaspar. And Mary herself, actually, this is not her first rodeo. So she, for an aristocratic girl of 17, is probably quite experienced. She'd been on a trip to Egypt a year earlier and it was generally thought that she'd been carrying on with a British brigadier.
- [09:27]
A
Oh my goodness, not General Gordon.
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B
Yeah, that would be improbable. Wow, that's a twist. General Gordon, who is still alive in this version of history.
- [09:39]
A
Okay, fine.
- [09:40]
B
Well, anyway, anyway, she's had loads of admirers, not just Crown Prince Rudolph. So what makes this particular liaison so special? Well, you described how Mary Vetsera's account owes something to Gothic melodrama, but it pales by comparison with this, which is from Rudolph's military aide, Victor von Frischer. And he tells this absolutely extraordinary story. He said later, you know, when we were young men, we were stationed in Prague when we were younger, and we went, me and Karen, Prince Rudolf to the ghetto cemetery, you know, the Old Town cemetery in Prague. Very evocative, moving with the grave of
- [10:20]
A
the rabbi who created the Golem.
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B
The Golem, exactly.
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A
The kind of prototype for Frankenstein.
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B
So this really kind of haunting, spooky kind of landscape. And they went there and the cantor was singing prayers during a funeral. And Rudolph was very taken by this, according to his aid and particularly by the cantor's raven haired daughter. And she became obsessed with Crown Prince Rudolph too. So obsessed that her father had to send her to a provincial town to get her away from him. But she came back to Prague. She stood every night under his castle window through the winter. Rudolf eventually found out that she was standing underneath his window, but when he sent people to look for her, they reported that she had just caught pneumonia and died. And Rudolph went secretly to her grave and left roses by her tombstone.
- [11:15]
A
So do you think there's a possibility that that raven was the reincarnation of this girl who died of. And I imagine it wasn't. You may imagine it was consumption.
- [11:25]
B
Well, I think Victor von Fritsch has a very lively imagination because Victor von Fritsch, Rudolph's aide, said the Crown Prince clearly believed that this Mary Ofitzer was the reincarnation of this Jewish girl from Prague.
- [11:39]
A
Oh, God. There is reincarnation.
- [11:41]
B
And this is why he was so obsessed with her. This is his interpretation. Whether listeners believe this, I'll leave to them. I mean, I don't think she probably. I don't think she was the reincarnation of this girl, but who knows?
- [11:54]
A
But I suppose the question is whether Rudolph might have thought that.
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B
He might have done.
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A
He might have done, because he has that kind of sensibility, doesn't he?
- [12:01]
B
He absolutely does. And the way their relationship is carried out is all like. They're sort of cosplaying in a Gothic melodrama. So they would always meet kind of at dusk in the shadows, or they'd meet in his very gloomy kind of palace apartment with the skull on the table.
- [12:14]
A
God, I mean, they would so be into black eyeshadow now, if they live now, wouldn't they?
- [12:19]
B
They completely would. They're total Goths, aren't they, or emo or whatever? Yeah, so they would be. They're going on these sort of ride, carriage rides in the dusk through the abandoned, deserted Prater park, and all of this. After a few days, Rudolf gave her an iron wedding ring. It was inscribed with the letters I L V B I D T in liebe werheint bis in der Todd. Through love united unto death. And she wore it on a kind of chain under her bodice. And she is clearly, absolutely infatuated with him in a very recognisable kind of teenage way. So she wrote to her old governess, if I could give my life to make him happy, I would gladly do it because I do not value my own life. And in one of these letters, she says to her governess, we've discussed what would happen if people found out about us. We have made a pact covering such an eventuality. After a few happy hours at a place nobody knows, we will enter death forever. Now, at one level, this is not unusual. This is the kind of slightly madly overwrought thing that teenage girls who are going out with married older men write. He. He hates his wife, he will abandon me and we will go into the shadows.
- [13:30]
A
All of this, and especially in fantasy Vienna, exactly. That kind of mood of lush morbidity.
- [13:37]
B
Yeah, completely. On the other hand, there are hints that Rudolf sees this as something more than just a sort of lovelord joke or something. So on All Souls Day, on the 2nd of November, he met his mother's lady in waiting, Countess Festrtich, in a palace corridor. And he said, are you off to the cemetery, Countess? And she said, yes, your imperial highness, to pray for my dead when I'm gone. Will you pray for me? Will you include me among your dead? And she said, your imperial highness is smiling. It is a joke. A smile doesn't always mean a joke, your imperial Highness. I'm much older than you. I pray God I shall never have a chance to do what you ask. I mean, he's clearly a man who's just walking around the palace talking to people unnecessarily about death and about his own death.
- [14:21]
A
Yeah.
- [14:21]
B
Anyway, the weeks pass in early December. I mean, don't forget, they haven't been going out very long. They've been going about four weeks in early December. Countess Larish has to go back to her husband's estate in Bohemia, and they need a new way of hooking up Rudolph and Mary. And the way they find is through the unlikely romantic lubricant that is Richard Wagner.
- [14:42]
A
He's very romantic. I mean, literally, you know, the song is Death.
- [14:47]
B
I suppose. Yeah. But I mean, if you said to somebody, why don't we use Wagner as an excuse to go on dates? I mean, that's a very particular vibe, is it? Not when I entirely.
- [14:56]
A
Approval. I mean, the thing is, if she doesn't like Wagner, then perhaps she'd be better off going. Off. Going out with the Kaiser.
- [15:03]
B
Yes, exactly.
- [15:05]
A
Who had laughed and chatted all the way through for Wagner in the previous episode.
- [15:10]
C
Yeah.
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B
And also, the Kaiser's not. Not a man who's ever going to top himself. Right. The Kaiser is a better investment.
- [15:16]
A
I think so. Yes. I think so.
- [15:18]
B
He's also not riddled with gonorrhea. Well, quite so. Anyway, the Court Opera is doing this big new production of the Ring Cycle, starting with Das Rheingold and the Vetz Errors have a box at the opera. But Mary says to her mother, I hate Wagner. This would have been a red flag for you, Tom, if you and Mary had matched on hinge. You'd have been like, what? No interest in Wagner? Unbelievable. I'm out. So she tells her mother, I'm not going to Wagner. She keeps coming up with excuses not to go. And then when her mother and sister went off to the opera, she would slip out of the house. Bratfish the coachman would be waiting at the corner.
- [15:55]
A
Can't believe he's called Bratfish.
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B
And he would drive her to Schonbrunn palace, the Austrian Versailles, and she and Rudolph would kind of walk in the darkness of the park, and then she'd always be back in time for her mother. And sister's return at 10 o'. Clock.
- [16:08]
A
So it's brilliant, isn't it, that Wagner's
- [16:10]
B
operas are so long, amazing. But there's still no sort of physical side to this relationship, it seems. Frederick Morton, in his book A Nervous Spender, says the reason is that Rudolf is postponing this because Rudolf believed that climax meant end, meaning death.
- [16:25]
A
It's sad, isn't he, that Freud never got the chance to psychoanalyze him.
- [16:29]
B
I know.
- [16:29]
A
He just feels an ideal patient completely
- [16:32]
B
with his mother, his distant father, all
- [16:35]
A
of this, the yearning for death. I mean, it's. Yeah.
- [16:38]
B
Anyway, we get to Christmas, so the Imperial family, for once, are actually reunited at the palace. Sisi's birthday is on Christmas Eve to Rudolph's mother's birthday. And that in Austria, is when the Christ kind brings your presence. The Christ child. She's just got back from Corfu, which she loves. You've seen her palace in Corfu, have you not?
- [16:59]
A
Yeah, the Kilaion.
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B
And she's come back from Corfu with an anchor tattooed on her shoulder.
- [17:04]
A
Yeah.
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B
Which is punchy.
- [17:06]
A
I always thought this was unusual behavior, but a whole host of members of royal families throughout the late 19th century were doing it.
- [17:13]
B
Yeah.
- [17:13]
A
So it had obviously become a kind of royal craze.
- [17:15]
B
It was exactly. George V and his brother went off to Japan, I think, and got dragons tattooed on their arms or something. Incredible. Anyway, they gathered in Sisi's apartment that night, and Rudolph very thoughtfully had laid the table with presents. He got her a book of letters by Heine, who was her favorite German writer, and a packet of 11 original Heine letters that he had sent to a relative in Paris.
- [17:43]
A
That is thoughtful, Dominic, because there's nothing more thoughtful than giving someone a letter written by someone they particularly admire.
- [17:51]
B
Can you think of an example of this, Tom?
- [17:54]
A
Anyone who does that, I think, is beneath the show of cynical cruelty or whatever it is a cherubic, lovable.
- [18:02]
B
Is there anything you want to share with the listeners?
- [18:04]
A
Yeah, because you bought me a letter written by Nelson.
- [18:07]
B
There you go. Thank you.
- [18:08]
A
One of my most treasured possessions.
- [18:10]
B
That comparison with Crown Prince Rudolph, that has dogged me all my life. Yet more ammunition to the people who say, is he the reincarnation of Crown Prince Rudolph? Because the parallels are uncanny. Yeah, they are. I would work on an encyclopedia if my father ordered me to. And he's been working on his Austro Hungarian Encyclopedia, so he's got copies of that wrapped up.
- [18:32]
A
I mean, you write history books that are like encyclopedias, correct?
- [18:35]
B
Yeah. Thank you. I was fishing for that. And there were presents all around. So Franz Josef and Cece have got presents for Rudolph and Stefan, his daughter Elizabeth. I mean, it's often forgotten in this story that he has a daughter. I think she's about 5 or 6, and they've got her kind of toy garden furniture made in Corfu.
- [18:52]
A
Can I just ask, he's got a lovely present for his mother. Has he got anything for his father?
- [18:58]
B
No mention. No mention of that. It's not his father's birthday, though, to be fair.
- [19:02]
A
That's true.
- [19:03]
B
Also, what do you give the man who owns Central Europe?
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A
A uniform.
- [19:08]
B
Yeah. You give him Venice back or something. That's what he'd like. Yeah. So this sounds lovely, but Rudolph spends the festive season brooding darkly. His hatred of the Kaiser has now reached absolute fever. Basically, since the Kaiser went back to Berlin, Berlin newspapers have just been mercilessly mocking the Austrian army. And this has driven Rudolph mad. And Rudolph has written to his mate Morris Seps, the kind of newspaper editor, and he says, I can give you information about that. When we went hunting in Styria with Kaiser Wilhelm, a prostitute stole Wilhelm's cufflinks.
- [19:49]
A
Do you know who this unexpectedly reminds me of is? Harold Wilson in 1974, releasing Mad, Mad stories to the press.
- [19:58]
B
Yes, I can see that clearly.
- [20:00]
A
Made up.
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C
Yeah.
- [20:01]
B
Well, do you think this is made up or do you think a prostitute. I think the Kaiser is precisely the kind of man who might have his cufflinks stolen by a lady of the night. No. Yeah, I suppose he'd be an unpopular customer. He wouldn't be a great tipper. And in revenge, his escorts would steal items of his personal apparel, hoping to blackmail him later. Anyway, Rudolph sends this in this letter and says, I want you to hold on to this. If the Berlin press continues slagging me off, you can. You can print it. And then a couple of days later, he writes again to this editor and he says, I feel the storm clouds are gathering over Austria. In international politics, there is a temporary quiet. The dangers threatening us from Serbia. Wow. That's a little preview. What's coming are postponed for the moment. But this uncanny stillness gives me the impression of calm before the storm. It can't go on like this. That's my consolation. And this editor writes back and says, you're not feeling good. That's a shame. I think you're brilliant. The future is yours. You never tire, unlike so many other people. And it's because our crown prince never tires that we still believe in a great Glorious free and prosperous Austria. So basically sucking up to Rudolph to try to modify him. The very end of the year, Rudolph and Stephanie, his wife, they go to a place called, now called Opatia, but at the time called Abbasia, which was on the Adriatic, it's on the Croatian coast. It was the can or the Saint Tropez of the Austro Hungarian Empire. So palm trees, hotels, sort of tea lounges, all of this. Rudolph doesn't like it. He finds it very boring. He comes back early to Vienna.
- [21:40]
A
It's not very Gothic, is it?
- [21:41]
B
No, it's not very Gothic. It's very dull as far as he's concerned. And he also, he finds his wife very dull. He comes back to Vienna, he finds, as usual, there have been meetings of the army command without him, which he very annoyed by. They didn't invite him because they thought he was on holiday then. They're into the carnival season now because the Austrian court is still mourning the death of Kaiser's father. The previous summer court sort of regulations forbid them from going to balls. So what that means is they have to just give a series of dinners for visiting dignitaries, royalty, aristocracy and so on. Rudolf again finds this very boring, but the one consolation is that he can resume his affair with Mary Vetserra. And the key date here is the 13th of January. And we know this from Mary's letter the next day to her old governess. She said, I must make a confession. I was with him yesterday evening from 7 till 9. We both lost our heads. Now we belong to each other, body and soul. On Saturday I hope to get away from a ball and then I will rush back to him. So we belong to each other, body and soul. We lost our heads. We all know what happened between 7 and 9 that evening. And that same day she went to the most expensive jewelry shop in Vienna and she ordered a gold cigarette case inscribed with the date of their tryst the night before the 13th of January. And she wants to give it to the crown prince to remember the occasion. And my guess is that it was probably around now that he floated seriously the idea that he had mentioned a few weeks earlier, which she'd mentioned to her governess, the idea that one day they will be discovered, that we will go to a happy place that nobody knows and then we will enter death together. And this is not the first time that Rudolf has mentioned this to a woman, because we know that he had mentioned it to his regular mistress, Mitzi Kaspar, before Christmas and she had laughed at him and thought it was a joke.
- [23:36]
A
I Thought there were inversions. I've read of this. She goes to the police and tells them and the police refused to listen to her because she's just a prostitute. Is that not true?
- [23:46]
B
Yeah. I don't know how true that is. So I've seen that online and I've seen that repeated in kind of general histories, but I'm not convinced how true that. I mean, it may be true. Maybe listeners who, particularly Austrian listeners who might have read German language versions of this may be more familiar with it. But in, for example, Frederic Morton's book, which is kind of day by day, there's no mention of this, just mentions her laughing at him. There's a slight disconnect, actually, between laughing at somebody because you think they're joking.
- [24:14]
A
Yeah. And then going to the police.
- [24:15]
B
And then going to the police. Is it a better story if they go to the police? She goes to the police. Maybe it is a better story. What we do know for certain is that Mary didn't laugh. Mary is not a joker in that way. And she takes her relationship with the Crown Prince incredibly seriously. She sees it in these very overwrought terms. But of course, this is again, what we don't know. We don't know what they said to each other. We cannot know how much she was coerced. You know, he's 30, he's the crown Prince.
- [24:46]
A
She's a massive goth though, isn't she?
- [24:48]
B
I mean, you said she's a massive goth, of course, but how much she enters into this pack, you know, voluntarily, difficult to say. Anyway, Rudolph's friends and acquaintances suspect absolutely nothing that month. He seems calm, he seems untroubled, he seems polite. He goes repeatedly to operettas or to the opera. On the 23rd of January, for example, he goes to see a comedy called the Dandies of Vienna. And he's cheered by the audience. He's working on his encyclopedia. He writes an article, one of his many anonymous articles from monarchist periodical, in which he basically says people should stop going on about Germany and how brilliant Germany is. People should put their faith in Austria, ancient, united and undivided. And of course, being a Habsburg, he does a lot of hunting. So he's not quite in his cousin Franz Ferdinand's league. So Franz Ferdinand, his kind of younger cousin and protege and sort of a world class butcher of birds. But Rudolph still, you know, he sees an eagle, he likes to shoot it. So he shot three eagles on the 20th, three more on the 21st, and five deer on the 23rd of January. On the 24th of January. So Thursday the 24th, he now has less than a week to live. By the way, Bratfish drove him to meet Mary by the Prater park again. It was very cold, deserted, no one there. And they fixed a date at this meeting. They said, let's go to the Mireling hunting lodge on Monday. Because he said, I'm going there anyway with some friends to do some more hunting. And that evening, the evening of Thursday the 24th, he went to the Court opera and he sat beside his father in the Imperial box. They were spotted deep in a very serious conversation. But nobody knows or will ever know what was said. On Friday the 25th, he has five days to live. He goes hunting again on the banks of the danube. He shot 26 ducks. Seems like a lot, actually. Then he went back to town. He went to Hodex taxidermist shop on the Marriage Hilfstrasse where they'd been stuffing his eagles for him.
- [26:54]
A
God, I mean, the whole empty fairgrounds.
- [27:00]
B
Yeah.
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A
Stuff the taxidermists.
- [27:02]
B
It's brilliant. It's got it all. I was thinking about this. I think this would be a brilliant Alfred Hitchcock film.
- [27:09]
A
David lynch would enjoy it as well.
- [27:11]
B
Yeah. There are lots of directors who would do really, really good. Different versions of this. Yeah. Christopher Nolan would cast Cillian Murphy, surely, as Crown Prince Rudolph. A young Cillian Murphy.
- [27:22]
A
Yeah. Michael Caine is his father.
- [27:25]
B
Yeah. I was about to say Tom Hardy. Tom Hardy is the coachman, surely?
- [27:29]
A
Yes.
- [27:30]
B
Tom Hardy is Bratfish. Surely. Everyone wants to see that.
- [27:34]
A
That would be the spin off series.
- [27:36]
B
Bratfish. Yeah. He's solving crimes.
- [27:40]
A
He's solving crimes with Freud.
- [27:43]
B
Fantastic. All right, so he's gone to the taxidermist shop, then he goes to a painter's studio. I've put the painter in just so I can say his name. His name is Tadeus Ajukovic and he is a Pole, I think, forgiven his name. And he's painting Rudolph on horseback, showing him as an infantry general. And then he goes to the palace for dinner.
- [28:04]
A
Does the painting, the portrait of Rudolph start to weep?
- [28:06]
B
Tears, surely? Yeah, definitely.
- [28:09]
A
Of blood.
- [28:10]
B
So Saturday the 26th, he has four days to live the same routine. And as if to punish him, the fates are mocking him because that evening there's a court dinner to celebrate, of all things, Kaiser Wilhelm II's birthday. So Rudolf has to dress up in his uniform as an honorary colonel of the 2nd Brandenburg Ulan Regiment. And this must be a terrible thing for him because he regards the Kaiser as the worst man in history. A Dreadful bounder. But he has to sort of smile and make small talk about how brilliant the Kaiser is. The next day, Sunday the 27th, there are now three days to go. Same routine hunting, taxidermist, shop portrait. And then he rushes back to the Hofburg and he changes into civilian clothes and Bratfish drives him to the back entrance, the tradesman's entrance of the Grand Hotel. And there he goes upstairs, up the back stairs to Countess Larish's suite. So she's come back from Bohemia, she's the go between once again with Mary. Then he goes back into the coach. They go off to the Prater, the deserted park. Mary is waiting there in a coach of her own. Again, a hurried meeting with Mary to finalise the plans for tomorrow. And then back to the palace, another quick change into another German uniform because he has to go to another reception for the Kaiser's birthday. So imagine the almost hated enemy having to dress up in uniforms and go to saluting. It's like a nightmare, right? Or a Greek punishment. It's like Sisyphus had it easy.
- [29:47]
A
Yeah.
- [29:48]
B
So he has to go to a reception, the German Embassy, for the Kaiser's birthday. Now, at this reception is his father and also his wife, Crown Princess Stephanie, who's looking very elegant, and his lover, Mary Vetsera. So they're all there.
- [30:06]
A
Is their relationship now common knowledge? Does Stephanie know, do we think?
- [30:10]
B
I don't know. We just don't know. So there is a moment, supposedly. It's a moment, I think this is made up, actually, where Stephanie and Mary came face to face. And there was apparently a little pause before Mary curtsied, just to. She waited just too long, like a little gesture of disrespect to Rudolph's wife. Well, that's what people said afterwards, but I suspect at the time.
- [30:34]
A
Yes, it sounds retrospective.
- [30:36]
B
It's retrospective, yeah, exactly. Now, Rudolf is very pale and quiet at this reception, partly because he hates the Kaiser, but also maybe for other reasons. At one point, he's making small talk with a sculptor called Victor Tilgner, and later claimed, again, this may be retrospective, that at one point Rudolf gave a kind of shiver or shudder and said to him, this whole uniform is distasteful to me, unbearably heavy. And that. That was the only hint of something. But of course, that could be just a banal thing. It could be he hates German uniforms.
- [31:06]
A
I mean, it really could be heavy.
- [31:07]
B
It could indeed.
- [31:08]
A
I get. I imagine there were a lot of
- [31:09]
B
medals, surely, and epaulettes.
- [31:12]
A
Yeah.
- [31:12]
B
Weighing his shoulders down, he doesn't stay long at this reception, though. By midnight he's gone and he doesn't go back to the palace. He goes to the apartment of his mistress, Mitzi Kaspar, and they drink champagne laced with cognac.
- [31:25]
A
Our favourite drink. Our favourite tipple.
- [31:27]
B
A favourite drink. Exactly. We'll be drinking that at the Rest is History Christmas party. And Rudolf says to Mitzi, tomorrow morning I'm leaving to go hunting forever. And Mitzi kind of laughs at him. She doesn't go to the police. She laughs and she thinks to herself, this is the kind of mad thing that Rudolf says all the time, because he's a bit of a goth. He's always saying morbid things like this. 3 o' clock in the morning he leaves her apartment to go back to the Imperial palace, the Hofburg. And there's an odd little gesture as he leaves. He makes the sign of the cross on her forehead. Even though he doesn't believe in God, he's told her he doesn't believe in God.
- [32:06]
A
We talked about this yesterday, about whether he would have viewed suicide as a sin, but clearly not.
- [32:12]
B
So he goes back to the Imperial Palace. He has a couple of hours sleep and he's up by 7 o' clock in the morning. He goes through his paperwork. He has meetings with officials at 11 o' clock outside his office. The clock of St. Michael's which is the chapel next door, sounds the hour and Rudolph calls in his adjutants and he says, cancel my appointments, please for the rest of the morning. I'm going shooting now. I'll be back tomorrow, 5 o'. Clock. I'm going to have dinner with the Emperor as agreed. And on his way out of the palace, he stops briefly at his wife's apartment. He says goodbye to Stephanie and to their daughter Elizabeth, and he repeats this message, I'll be back tomorrow for dinner. So by half 11 he's on his way and Rudolph has left the palace now. Meanwhile, Mary Vetsera and Countess Larisch have already left the Vetsera family mansion, which is on the Silesiana Gasse in Vienna. They told Mary's mother they were going shopping, which they've said so many times, at 10:30. But once they got into the cab, they changed the address. They went to the Hofburg palace back entrance again. Once again, Rudolf's coachman, Mr. Bratfish, played by Tom Hardy, is waiting and he takes them out of the city. So the carriage rolls out of the city and they go into the Vienna woods and they stop beside an inn called the Red Barn, the Rother Stadel, which is closed for the winter. Again, a very gothic scene, this abandoned inn.
- [33:37]
A
People are always being murdered in red barns, aren't they?
- [33:39]
B
Yeah, right, good spot. So they wait for 20 minutes in the cold by this inn and then they see a man in a fur collared coat coming through the woods towards them.
- [33:49]
C
Them.
- [33:49]
B
And this is Crown Prince Rudolph.
- [33:51]
A
It's such a great film.
- [33:53]
B
It is, isn't it?
- [33:55]
A
Be amazing.
- [33:56]
B
Of course, he's coming through the, the mist or whatever. He comes through the trees and he gets into their carriage, his own carriage that brought him out of the city is now going back to the city, being tailed as always by the police. So the police always followed him.
- [34:13]
A
So they've shaken off the police now,
- [34:14]
B
now he's shaken off the police. So he and Mary and Bratfish drive on together towards his hunting lodge at Mireling, which is about 20 miles southeast of Vienna. And they arrive round about sunset, so that's about five o'.
- [34:29]
A
Clock.
- [34:29]
B
Of course they do, of course, as
- [34:32]
A
the ravens flock, flock around the gatehouse.
- [34:37]
B
It's a really cold, dark evening. The servants have lit the fires in the hunting lodge. Here they will be alone, well alone except for all the servants, until the next day. But back in the city, Countess Larish, who has engineered all this, has this flash of revelation and we absolutely don't know why. Is it something that Mary said before she left? Is it something that Rudolph said in the last few days that has been, you know, preying on her mind or who knows? But at lunchtime, once she'd seen Mary off, she went back to the Vet Sarah mansion and she asked to see Mary's mother and she said, I've lost your daughter. I don't know where she is, I'm worried about her. And that afternoon, one of Mary's uncles, Alexander Baltazzi, went to see the Police Commissioner of Vienna and he said, we've lost Mary, we've lost the 17 year old Baroness. Can you help us find her? And eventually he said to the Police commissioner, look, we think she's gone off with Crown Prince Rudolph. And the Commissioner said, well, come on, I mean, it's just gone off with Crown Prince Rudolph. We're hardly going to like launch a massive police investigation. For one thing, we are constitutionally barred from investigating the Imperial family. But for another, what are you so stressed about? The Crown Prince has loads of affairs. Clearly Mary Vetserra is one of his mistresses. She's 17 years old, she knows what she's doing. You know, she's quite racy. She's mature beyond her years. These things happen. What are you worried about?
- [36:11]
A
Yeah, what's the worst that could happen?
- [36:13]
B
What's the worst that could happen? Well, we will find out the answer to that question after the break. So good.
- [36:22]
C
So good. So good.
- [36:24]
B
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- [36:49]
A
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- [37:36]
C
of $45 for three months, $90 for six months or $180 for 12 month plan required $15 per month equivalent taxes and fees. Extra initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes. Me slow when network is busy. C Terms.
- [37:49]
A
Hello everyone and welcome back to the Rest Is History. Where it is the early morning of Tuesday on the 29th of January, 1889 and we are in the Meiling Hunting Lodge some 20 odd miles outside Vienna where two friends of Crown Prince Rudolph, Count Joseph Hoyos and Prince Philip of Coburg have arrived for a day's sport. They're going to go out and murder birds. And Dominic, what happens as they approach the hunting lodge?
- [38:23]
B
Well, a very sort of gothic or fairy tale scene. They approach the house and it's completely still and silent and they see that the curtains on the bedroom windows of Rudolph's ground floor apartment are closed. But the servants are up. The servants admit them and and in the billiard room Crown Prince Rudolph is waiting.
- [38:45]
A
So alive and well.
- [38:46]
B
He's alive and well and he seems in good form.
- [38:48]
A
Or is he? Well?
- [38:49]
B
Well, he's not well, he's got gonorrhea and he's off his face on morphine and champagne, but apart from that. And he looks really haggard and gaunt and like. Looks like a man who's conceived as a murder suicide pact. But apart from that, he looks like he's in brilliant form and he's got the kind of little snuffle, possibly. Yes, he's got a bit of a cold, he says. He's got a silk scarf tied very tightly around his neck. He says, I've got a cold and I probably won't come hunting with you after all. So you go ahead, I'll sit it out. They have a cup of coffee and then Hoyos and Koba go out to do some hunting and they return at lunchtime and Rudolph is waiting for them and he's still in good form. The Prince of Coburg is going back to Vienna straight away, the afternoon. And Rudolf says, well, because of this cold, I'm not going to head back when I thought dinner with my father, so please, you know, pass on my message. And he also says to his valet who's called Losczec, he says, can you send a telegram to my wife, please, Crown Princess Stephanie. Telegram reads, please tell Papa that I ask his pardon for not appearing at dinner, but because of a heavy cold, I wish to avoid the journey this afternoon. So the Prince of Coburg goes off, the telegram is sent. Count Hoyos goes shooting on his own. So that's. I think that's a slightly joyless thing to do, frankly. Anyway, he goes hunting on his own. He goes and shoots loads of birds. And then he comes back to spend the evening with Rudolph, to have dinner with Rudolph. And they have, it's very rest is history Christmas party, actually. They have pate de foie gras, they have venison, they have roast beef, red wine. And then they. They have a sort of leisurely smoke and they talk about the latest army legislation which has been held up in the parliament in Budapest because of wrangling with the Hungarians. And Rudolph is clearly in quite good form. He's coming up with some great banter. He says it's much easier to deal with gundogs than with Hungarian politicians. And Hoyas thinks this is absolutely hilarious and says afterwards he turned on me the whole beguiling force of his personality. So actually, I mean, the mad thing is that Rudolph hates the Kaiser because this is the kind of banter the Kaiser would very much enjoy. Yeah, it is.
- [41:03]
A
Don't think his mother would approve. No, see, she Loves Hungarian.
- [41:06]
B
Exactly. Anyway, at nine o' clock, Hoyos says, right, I'm turning in now. Hoyos is going to spend the night in guest quarters in a converted farm cottage, which is about 500 meters from the main house. And as soon as Hoyos has gone down the path, the door of Rudolph's bedroom opens and out comes Mary Vetzera. And she has been hiding in Rudolph's bedroom all this time. And because she's been hiding in the bedroom and they've been afraid to send in food to her because Hoyas would notice, so she's starving. So Losczek, the valet, brings her cold venison and he lights a fire in the billiard room. He brings champagne from the cellar and he calls for Bratfish, the coachman. He's still hanging around. Alia in the chat, points out that Bratfish means grilled fish. So I think that's a terrible surname. Franklin, he's called Grilled Fish, that's his name.
- [42:01]
A
I think we've established it's a ludicrous name.
- [42:04]
B
So Bratfish sits on the stool in the corner of the billiard room and he sings and whistles songs of old Vienna while they're eating their dinner. Marian and Rudolph. That sounds incredibly annoying, right?
- [42:19]
A
Can't you make him shut up?
- [42:20]
B
Some bloke called Mr. Grilled Fish Turns up and whistles at you.
- [42:24]
A
It's the last thing you want. Yeah, especially on your last night. Spoiler.
- [42:29]
B
How did you want to spend your last hours?
- [42:32]
A
No wonder they shot themselves, right?
- [42:35]
B
So they sit up very late. Lozczyk, the manservant, he turns in at 2 o', clock, but he doesn't sleep for very long because at half past six he's woken by footsteps. He looks up and this would really freak you out. He looks up and standing over him is the sepulchral figure of Crown Prince Rudolph in a dressing gown and a silk scarf, looking very pale. So Rudolf, standing over lost check, says, I want you to call me for breakfast in an hour. And he also says, tell Bratfish to have the horses ready. And then he walks back to his bedroom. A bizarre detail, this whistling, one of Bratfish's tunes. So he walks back and he closes the door, the door behind him now, lost check. At this point he gets dressed, he's been about three hours sleep or something, gets dressed and he goes to tell the kitchen staff, get up, come on, sort yourselves out, start getting breakfast ready. And at 7:30, as instructed, he knocks on the Crown Prince's door. And this is the scene with which we opened the first episode, this tremendous scene. Lost Sheik knocks. And he knocks again. He keeps knocking. He calls your Imperial Highness. He runs upstairs. And then there's a spiral staircase at the back that goes down to a back door of Rudolph's apartment. He knocks on the back door again. No reply. Lozzek is becoming quite anxious now because Rudolf is a famously light sleeper and the dogs started barking. So it's a slightly chaotic scene. The hunting dogs are all barking because of the knocking. Lozek has gotten to a massive panic. He comes back to the front door. He gets a log from the fire and starts hammering on the door. With this log, Bratfish, the coachman, joins him. Count Hoyos has come up from his cottage to find out what's going on. And then, as if that's not enough, the Prince of Coburg had gone back to Vienna. He now turns up as well, because he's come back to do some more hunting. They're all completely shocked and confounded by the scene, and they say to Loshzek, okay, break down the door. And this is the point. He's now sobbing with worry. And this is the point when he says to them, I have something to tell you. Baroness Mary Vetserra has been staying with the Crown Prince. And then this is the point when Hoyos and Koba go into the billiard room and they have this sort of little conference, and eventually they come out and they basically say, well, even so, fine, okay, we're men of the world. Break down the door. And Loshtek hacks at the door. He hacks at the panels, as you described in that reading that you did for the first episode. The hole becomes this kind of gash, and he's able to look through. And he drops the axe in horror. Inside, it's total darkness. He can see the air is very heavy with smoke, but he can see two people lying on or near. It's really not clear from the descriptions, the bed. One of them is Mary. She's stretched out on the bed. Her hands are clasping a rose, and there's blood on the sheets around her head. And the other is Crown Prince Rudolph. He is kind of slumped against or leaning on a bedside table in front of a mirror, and there is blood trickling from his mouth. And it is absolutely obvious that they are both dead. And for a moment, the men outside are paralyzed with horror and nobody dares to go in. And eventually Hoyos says, okay, Bratfish, I need you to drive me to Baden Station, which is the nearest railway Station. They get to Baden station and he has to go into the station master and say, something terrible has happened at Crown Prince Rudolph's hunting lodge. I must get to Vienna instantly. And the station master agrees to stop the express train from Trieste. And Hoyos climbs on board. So at 9:50 he is in Vienna and within about 25 minutes he has reached the Hofburg, the Imperial palace. And here he completely loses his nerve. He doesn't know how he can possibly break this news to the Emperor. So he goes to find Sisi's chamberlain, who is called Baron Nopscha. And they say, well, we will tell the Empress and then she can tell the Emperor. So Sisi, Elizabeth, she got up early that morning. She got up at 6:30, as she always did. Her days always began with this long bath and then a massage. Then her hair, famously long. There was a special maid to comb her hair.
- [46:59]
A
Yeah, for two or three hours, learning Greek, all of that.
- [47:01]
B
Yeah. And then she would have her herbal tea and she would do some exercises in her private gym. Then she, at 10 o' clock had started a Greek lesson with Monsieur Russophalos and they were reading the Iliad together. And at 10:45 there was a knock on the door and the lady in waiting said, baron Nopscher and Count Hoyas want to see you urgently. And Elizabeth was furious. You don't interfere with my Greek lessons. But then Baron Nopscher came in. She saw the look on his face and she realised something was terribly wrong. Now her husband, Franz Josef, had been up even longer.
- [47:36]
A
Well, he always gets up early, doesn't he, because he's got an empire to run, right?
- [47:40]
B
He got up at 4 o' clock in the morning from his iron military bed and he'd been washed by his footman. He'd had breakfast at 4:20 and then he got straight into his paperwork and had his first meetings at 5 o'
- [47:53]
A
clock in the morning.
- [47:53]
B
And a lot of this had been about the Budapest Parliament and the Army Bill. As Frederick Morton said that morning, Franz Josef did what his ancestors had done before him. He ruled and overruled with utter confidence, with axiomatic competence and without the slightest inspiration. Just before 11 o' clock, he set off to go to see his wife in her apartment. Franz Josef was looking forward to this because he knew that his wife actually had a pre arranged meeting with his confidant, Katharina Schratt. The actress, Katerina Schratt was going to do a drama recital for his wife. And this is brilliant for him because he'll See his two favorite people at once and you know, their little menage atoi.
- [48:37]
A
They.
- [48:37]
B
He loves all that. But he gets there and he finds Baron Nopscha blocking the door to his wife's apartment. Baron Nopstra faces streaked with tears. And through the door Franz Josef can hear his wife sobbing and sobbing. So in the next few hours, the news that something terrible has happened races round the city. Crown Prince Rudolph's wife Stephanie is having a singing lesson and that's interrupted. And she is told. And soon after that, all the operas, the theaters, the cabarets, the music halls are told to cancel their evening programs with no explanation. And by mid afternoon, there's a crowd outside the Hofburg. People know something has happened. There are people talking about Grand Prince Rudolph, but no one knows exactly what it is. And it's actually not until the following morning that the news is confirmed. It's broken by the Wiener Tagblatt. Our Crown Prince is dead says this huge headline. It's reproduced. There's an image of it in Frederick Morton's book, A Nervous Splendid Murder. But what there aren't. There are no details of how he died. So the assumption that most people make is he has had a stroke or a heart attack, you know, a freak accident or something. Who knows?
- [49:48]
A
Throttled by the Kaiser.
- [49:49]
B
Yeah, exactly. He's died of apoplexy after the Kaiser's been rude about a Austrian army belt or something of that kind.
- [49:58]
A
Surely be the obvious explanation, wouldn't it?
- [50:00]
B
But not as the following evening, the Wiener Tagblatt prints the headline, the most horrible truth. And it says Crown Prince Rudolph was killed by a gunshot and he fired the pistol himself.
- [50:13]
A
I mean, I can't imagine in a. Because it's still a very devoutly Catholic.
- [50:18]
B
Of course.
- [50:18]
A
City and country.
- [50:20]
B
Yeah.
- [50:20]
A
I mean, the impact must be devastating.
- [50:23]
B
Exactly. I mean this is. We said it's the Royal scandal to end all raw scandals. I mean, let's try to imagine. I mean, it's not even Prince Harry. It would be implausibly your fellow Aston Villa supporter, Prince William.
- [50:37]
A
Prince William, yeah.
- [50:39]
B
Carrying on with a 17 year old and having a murder suicide pact at a hunting lodge in Staines.
- [50:47]
A
I think it's much worse than that because suicide is no longer framed as, as, As a sin.
- [50:54]
B
No, it's true.
- [50:55]
A
Yeah. You know, it's treated with sympathy and, and kind of understanding now, but back then it was a sin. I mean, it endangers your mortal soul. And the Habsburgs, it's important to their legitimacy that they are Catholic completely.
- [51:09]
B
They're the Guardians of Catholicism?
- [51:11]
A
Yeah.
- [51:12]
B
You know, they are the absolute. His Apostolic Majesty, Franz Joseph, you know, so important for them as kings of Hungary and as emperors of Austria. Absolutely. So let's actually focus on the Imperial family for a second. By the way, one small detail, actually, which I forgot to mention. Mary Vetserra's name has never been mentioned in any of those newspaper reports at all. And we'll come back to her role in the story in a second. So Franz Josef spent the first afternoon trying to console his wife along with Katerina Schratt. And then being Franz Josef, he went back to work and he worked late that night and he rang by 10 o' clock that night on the day he heard the news about his son. He was still ringing the Hungarian Prime Minister to talk about the army bill. The next day he got up at 4 o' clock as usual to start work. But at dawn he had a visitor, the Imperial doctor, Professor Hermann Wiederhofer, who had been to Meiling and was the first person who basically went into the room to inspect the bodies. And Professor Wiederhofer says, I have some pretty bad news. It is clear that the crown Prince died by his own hand, a gunshot wound to the head. But what is worse, there is no doubt that he killed Mary of Cetzera with the same gun two hours earlier. So actually, this is so interesting. He had killed Mary Vetserra before he appeared at the manservant's bedside to say, get my breakfast ready.
- [52:36]
A
To ask for breakfast.
- [52:38]
B
Yeah.
- [52:38]
A
So what do you think was going on there?
- [52:40]
B
Don't know. Did he ever plan to eat the breakfast, change his mind? Impossible to say. Strange.
- [52:47]
A
I mean, everything about this is strange. Let's not deny that.
- [52:50]
B
No, but there's this. The worst of it, I think, for Franz Joseph is the. Is what Friederhofer then says the crown Prince has left a number of letters. So he's left a letter to his mother, Sisi. This is the only letter that was written at the scene of the crime. The other letters were written beforehand. He wrote to his mother, I have no right to go on living. I have killed. And he asks that he and Mary are buried together at the nearby abbey of Heiligenhaus Croit's Holy Cross. He wrote a letter to his sister Valerie beforehand. He said, I advise you. You know, I'm going now. I advise you, when our father dies, leave Austria. For what will happen then in Austria is unforeseeable. This is again his kind of existential, apocalyptic dread about the geopolitical outlook for his country.
- [53:35]
A
And a shrewd analysis.
- [53:37]
B
Yeah, I guess so. He wrote a letter to Stephanie, his wife. Dear Stephanie, you are now rid of my presence and annoyance. Be happy in your own way. Take care of the poor little one. She is all that is left of me. He wrote a letter to Losczek, his valet. Thank you for all the years of service. He also wrote letters to his friend, Baron Moritz Hirsch, and to his mistress, Mitzi Kaspar. But the contents of those letters, as unknown, has never been released. And for his father, the Emperor, there was no letter at all. Nothing.
- [54:09]
A
Oh, dear.
- [54:10]
B
And that is the moment when the. The doctor says that to Franz Joseph. That's the moment when Franz Joseph loses his composure and he breaks down in tears and he collapses and falls to the ground. And you can absolutely understand why, for a. For a father, that would be, of course.
- [54:25]
A
Of course, devastating.
- [54:27]
B
That would be almost the worst blow of all, I think.
- [54:32]
A
Such kind of posthumous cruelty as well, isn't it?
- [54:34]
B
Yeah. So eventually, he composes himself and he says, where is my son? And Dr. Wiederhofer said, well, we've brought the body back to the palace as you ordered. We've dressed him in a uniform, we bandaged his head, and we put him in bed. And Franz Joseph went to his son's bedroom, and he stood by his son's body for 15 minutes in silence, Kind of vigil for a brother officer, as per the army regulations. Always the way with him. And then he said to his aides, we have two priorities now. Number one, my son must have a Catholic burial. The Habsburgs have Catholic burials, Catholic funerals. Even though he is both a murderer and a suicide. And then secondly, he said, all mention of this girl must be suppressed. Her presence at the scene, her body, even her name must be deleted from the public record. Now, what made this difficult is that the Habsburgs themselves have told the Vetserra family what happened to Mary. Sisi herself broke the news to Mary's mother. Now, at the time, the imperial staff said to Mary's mother, Baroness Helene Vetserra, they said, you have to get out of Vienna. You know, the press will be hounding you. There'll be crowds baying for your blood. People will blame your daughter for this, and you have to get out. And she got on a train to Italy. But then she changed her mind halfway, and she came back to the city, and she found that the city police had cordoned off her townhouse, her mansion, because there were crowds outside. She was in a terrible state. She wanted to go into the house. And eventually the Austrian prime Minister, Count Tarver turned up. He was very, I think we described him in the last episode. He's a very suave kind of top hat, cigar. And he sort of said, my dear lady, a terrible business. This is for you. I really do think you should get out of the city and you should keep a very low profile. It's now clear, by the way, that this was a genuine suicide pact because Mary's mother is now given a letter by Mary, forgive me for what I have done. I could not resist love. In agreement with him, I wish to be buried by his side of the Alland churchyard. It's actually a slightly different place from the Heidenkreuz Abbey, but there you go. I'm happier in death than I was in life. I mean, imagine what that must be like for a mother to read from her daughter. Of course, there is a big issue here for the families. Now, if. If Mary and Rudolph are suicides, they cannot be buried in consecrated ground. The emperor, however, gets in touch with Heiligenkreuz Abbey and his staff do anyway, and they say, basically, we want you to find room for Mary Vetsera's body. No questions asked. You must find her a plot. And that same day, Thursday 31st January, two of her uncles, the Baltatszi brothers, went to Mayerling. They identified her body. A doctor washed the blood off her body and they dressed it in coat and hat, in a sort of veil, a boa, shoes, you remember, she's very fashionable. And then an absolute bizarre scene. Mary's uncles propped her up and walked her out of the hunting lodge as if she was alive and put her in the carriage and sat either side of her. So if anybody's seen the film Weekend At Bernie's, that's what this is. And they even stuck a broomstick up the back of her dress so that it would keep her upright.
- [57:58]
A
Because there are all kinds of stories where Sherlock Holmes turns up.
- [58:00]
B
Yes.
- [58:01]
A
And solves the case, aren't there? I don't think he'd have been fooled by that.
- [58:04]
B
No, he wouldn't. I mean, this is so Sherlock Holmes, isn't it? It's sort of scandal in Bohemia.
- [58:09]
A
Yeah.
- [58:10]
B
You know, all of that. So the carriage rolled through the night to Heiligenkreuz Abbey, which is about three miles away. There are loads of police waiting. And early the next morning, when the rain stopped a little bit, they buried Mary. And then the police sent a coded telegram to Vienna just with the words, all finished. And that was the end in every way, of Mary Vetsera. There was one mention of her in an illustrated paper published in Graz which said, quite erroneously, Mary Vetserra died in Venice and has been buried in Bohemia. But otherwise, to quote Frederick Morton, her name never appeared again in any book, magazine or newspaper published in Austria, Hungary. No printed mention, mention was ever made of her death or even her life. It was as though nobody remembered that she had walked the earth.
- [59:02]
A
So that is a contrast with Diana in the 90s. Yeah, because nobody was going to leave the details of that alone. And in fact, they came up with all kinds of linked conspiracies to explain it. But I'm wondering, what about the foreign press?
- [59:18]
B
We'll come on to that in just a sec. But you're absolutely right, of course, the foreign press does print it. And a problem for the Austro Hungarian monarchy is there's an extremely large country to their north that prints everything in German so people can read it. And it's very easy for people to travel between Germany and Austria Hungary with German newspapers. So they're fooling nobody. I mean people, everybody knows about it, you know, they don't fool anybody. Meanwhile, what about Crown Prince Rudolph? Well, they held an autopsy the same day, the 31st. And the autopsy concluded that on studying Rudolph's brain, it was clear he was suffering from abnormal mental conditions and was in a state of mental confusion. And the Catholic Church said, oh, well, in that case, you know, he's not really a suicide then, is he? Or even a murderer. He was, poor fellow. What a terrible shame. He can be buried on the Capuchin crypt in Vienna alongside his ancestors. And this apparently was quite common Vienna. You know, coroners or whatever were well known for fudging reports on suicides to allow people to be buried according to the rights of the Church.
- [60:27]
A
I think, though it's very unusual for a case that is this high profile. So the Papal Nuncio in Vienna. Yeah, because he's absolutely. And he says it's probably the first time that a Papal Nuncio had ever been obliged to attend the funeral of a. A murderer and a suicide.
- [60:44]
B
Yeah, that's right.
- [60:45]
A
So he's not happy about it at all.
- [60:47]
B
And the Papal Nuncio actually then went to the hunting lodge and asked a load of questions, kept kind of looking into it.
- [60:53]
A
So he could team up with Bratfish.
- [60:54]
B
Exactly.
- [60:56]
A
Set up an agency if the Papal nunc earing doesn't work out.
- [60:59]
B
Brilliant. So anyway, Rudolph lies in state for three days. Various places in the Hofburg and finally in the. The Hofburg Chapel, the Hofburg Cappella. And there was a huge public crush, all thousands upon thousands of people, especially women dressed in black. So many that people were injured or fainted in the, in the crowd. Ambulances had to be called and it ended with thousands of people being turned away. And then the funeral took place on Tuesday 5th February, in the Capuchin Church and the Capuchin Crypt, which you can visit. I mean, you can see Crown Prince Rudolph's tomb. I went to see it last, last summer. Of course, this is not the last, you know, very high profile funeral is going to be in Vienna and not for the last time. Franz Josef specifically asks foreign dignitaries not to come. And in a preview of what will happen in 1914, the worst person, the last person that you would ever want at a somber family occasion, the Kaiser says, no, no, I'm coming anyway. And Franz Joseph has to send him a special message. You may judge how deeply crushed my family is if we have to address this request. Even to you, even to you, Even to you. If you'd suffered a terrible tragedy and then Kaiser Wilhelm II announced that he was going to turn up, I mean, that would be the worst.
- [62:22]
A
Yeah.
- [62:23]
B
So the funeral was another incredibly sort of Viennese occasion. The ritual would be that the chamberlain would knock on the door of the Capuchin crypt and the voice would say, who is it? And he'd say, his most Serene Imperial and Royal Highness, the Archduke Crown Prince Rudolph of Habsburg. And the voice would say, we know him not. And they'd repeat this. And then eventually when the voice said, who is there? The chamberlain would say, your brother Rudolph, a poor sinner. And then at last, they would open the door and let him in. And then right at the end, very memorable moment when they carry the body down to the crypt. Franz Joseph, the Emperor. That's the one moment in public, one of the only moments in his entire life, probably the only moment when he lost control of his public dignity and he burst out crying and he broke down and he was kissing the casket and sobbing. The one moment when you see the man, you know, the grieving father, behind the facade of the sort of the imperial walrus. So if we widen the picture out a bit, at one level, it's only a royal scandal. But the great sort of Austrian music critic, the most forbidding critic in Vienna at the day, was a guy called Eduard Hanslick. And he wrote afterwards, he said, I've lived through the saddest catastrophes in Vienna. I've lived through revolutions, the loss of land Murderous devastation by flood and fire. But nothing of all this is comparable to the horror of January 30th. The disconsolate, desperate turbulence which ripped through the entire population is indescribable. And we know from. I mean, you mentioned Diana a few times.
- [63:58]
A
Yeah.
- [63:58]
B
How these sort of personal tragedies can often cut through with the great mass of the population in a way that geopolitical things don't.
- [64:08]
A
Yeah. I mean, you said that Diana's world wasn't gothic, it was hello magazine and everything.
- [64:13]
B
Yeah.
- [64:14]
A
And so it seemed expressive of a kind of age of celebrity that was running out of control. But presumably in the Viennese context, there is, there are all kinds of cultural swirls that find echoes in this case. And also there is the sense that the crown prince is gone, the emperor doesn't have another direction male heir. And it must have symbolized for people at the time in the empire an anxiety that indeed the storm clouds are gathering. Don't you think?
- [64:47]
B
Yes, I think exactly both those things. I think first of all, it's a huge shock for the dynasty because as you say, he doesn't have another son. So they're going to have to search elsewhere in the family tree for an heir. Of course, the man that they find turns out to be a great friend of the rest is history, but a slightly ill fated figure in his own right. Although the bird population of Central Europe might not agree. And I think you're dead right. The cultural atmosphere of Van der Selecke, Vienna, the sense of neurosis, the sense of introspection, of cultural anxiety, also cultural excitement. Of course, this seems reflective of that
- [65:24]
A
world and also the German speaking world more generally, because I think Wagner is, I mean, he, you know, the Liebestod, the idea of. Of love and death. Yeah, and. And two lovers who are united in death.
- [65:38]
B
Yeah. Tristan is older. Yeah, exactly.
- [65:41]
A
I mean, it's. It's probably the most celebrated work of music that has been produced in the late 19th century. And, and we, you know, we've seen how, how much a part it is of the kind of cultural furniture of people of this age. It must just be overwhelming.
- [65:57]
B
Completely. And precisely because it's so overwhelming. That's why you get the conspiracy theorists. So we talked about this with the Kennedy assassination with lots of things. What appears to be a freak event. If it's seen by the public as cataclysmic and of seismic importance, people will often refuse to accept. They don't like chance, luck, you know, personal quirks in history. Great events must have Great causes. And so people look for conspiracy theories that are related to the political anxieties of the day. So people say. I mean, first of all, there are the sort of more humdrum conspiracy theories. Mary murdered Rudolph or her relatives murdered Rudolph, perhaps because they found out he'd given her gonorrhea and they wanted to punish him for it.
- [66:43]
A
What about Stephanie?
- [66:44]
B
Yeah, there are theories that Crown Princess Stephanie did it because you were jealous. Of course. The Freemasons, the Jesuits, the Jews, Bismarck did it.
- [66:54]
A
Not the Kaiser.
- [66:55]
B
The Kaiser. No, there are theories that the Kaiser did it, but the most common, the most. And this obviously reflects the political atmosphere of the day that. I mean, this is such a weird theory. He either killed himself or was murdered because he was about to be exposed as having plotted to seize the throne of Hungary from his father and break away from his father and set up a secessionist Hungarian kingdom.
- [67:23]
A
Well, I guess that's expressive of. Of what is clearly a deep sense of tension between father and son, but
- [67:29]
B
also between the two halves of the empire.
- [67:31]
A
Yeah, And. And he's, you know, the emperor is obsessing about this even on the day of his. His son's suicide. Right. Isn't there a theory that was proposed by Empress Zeta, who was the last empress, that it was the French, and that has been organized by Clemenceau, which I think is generally not regarded as plausible.
- [67:51]
B
Why did Clemenceau do it? Remind me why Clemenceau wanted to kill Crown Prince Rudolph.
- [67:55]
A
I. Well, he wasn't even. I think he wasn't even in parliament at this time. I think she. She made it up, but she lived to a kind of ripe old age. I think she kind of died in the 70s or something.
- [68:04]
B
She did, yeah.
- [68:05]
A
Maybe even the 80s. And she was. She was. Kept repeating this.
- [68:08]
B
I have to admit I showed Herculean self control by not falling down. Lots of rabbit holes online, because there's so much stuff online about this by people, because people love Sisi and they love Crown Prince Rudolph. So if you go to the Capuchin Crypt, they have tombs of all the Habsburgs. And some of these are like massive figures. I don't know, Maria Theresa or something. But Crown Prince Rudolph's tomb has more flowers, has a lot of flowers powers, you know, given that he never wielded power. And actually in the grand scheme of things, you could argue was not a terribly consequential person. But there's clearly something about his story that speaks to people. Even Today in the 21st century, it's
- [68:44]
A
kind of Kurt Cobain of Austro Hungary.
- [68:47]
B
I mean, to talk about the political meaning of it. Anyone. Any historian writing about the Austro Hungarian Empire or the Habsburgs, you know, gives this a lot of welly, understandably. And they see it as symptomatic of this wider loss of confidence of the imperial project.
- [69:00]
A
It's the Titanic.
- [69:02]
B
Yeah. But as with the Titanic, I think a lot of this is massively overblown. So we know why Mary and Rudolph killed themselves. I mean, he's morbid, he's got gonorrhea. Today he would be diagnosed as having mental health issues of a very serious kind.
- [69:19]
A
That does speak of something that is genuine, which is the. The way in which to be born into the Habsburg dynasty is to feel trapped, is to feel a prisoner. We have all these counts of both men and women almost sewing themselves into their. Their uniforms and their clothing. So, you know, Franz Ferdinand, when he gets shot, it takes time for them to realize that the blood is welling out. We're going to hear something similar about Sisi in due course. I think that there is that monarchy is a kind of trap for those who find themselves in. Enclosed within it.
- [69:53]
B
Very 21st century theme.
- [69:55]
A
Right.
- [69:56]
B
And people often say that's about the House of Windsor, don't they?
- [69:58]
A
Yeah, but. But the difference with the House of Windsor is that they can kind of make radio programs about it and kind of have features in newspapers talking about bad mental health, whereas Rudolph couldn't. And the idea of. Of any of these people really having a kind of interior, emotional life is verboten.
- [70:15]
B
Yeah. Interesting that nobody had done this before him, though. No. What does that tell you? Something changed in the second half of the 19th century that made this possible. That would. I mean, it's hard to imagine a 14th century prince.
- [70:28]
A
No, but. And it's changing nowhere more than in Vienna.
- [70:32]
B
Yeah, exactly.
- [70:33]
A
Vienna is the. You know, this is where all these ideas of, of repression and neurosis and psychosis and everything are being defined at this very moment.
- [70:45]
B
Maybe a particular kind of introspection and a sense of yourself or. I don't know.
- [70:50]
A
He's vibe lording. I believe it's the phrase.
- [70:53]
B
It's vibe lauding. Is that the phrase? Gen Z joins us on the podcast. Brilliant. So what happened next? Franz Josef. I mean, this is very Freudian. And Frederick Morton makes this point in his book. He wants to erase every trace, every memory of this incident. And the way he does it is by literally erasing the place. So the hunting lodge at Mireling, every trace of it is expunged. From the earth, it's completely pulled down and it is replaced with a Carmelite convent, which stands to this day. And the nuns of the convent are enjoined to offer daily prayers for the salvation of the late Crown Prince.
- [71:31]
A
He needs all the prayers he can get.
- [71:32]
B
He does. So the most likely heir to Franz Josef now is his younger brother, Karl Ludwig, who is in his late 50s. But Carl Ludwig's not in brilliant health. And in the late 1890s and 1896, he went on a sort of pilgrimage to Palestine, then part of the Ottoman Empire, and he decided to drink some water from the River Jordan. He basically drank dirty water polluted with sewage.
- [72:02]
A
So do we get is dysentery returned to the show?
- [72:06]
B
Dysentery returned to the show and carried off Carl Ludwig, and the heir became his son Rudolf's protege, Franz Ferdinand. So a great friend of the rest is history. But we know what became of him. And actually this brings us to the wider issue of tragedy in the Habsburgs. So you've already alluded to this. In the decade after Rudolf's death, his mother, Sisi, cut an ever more ever lonelier and more melancholy figure. So she basically, she's dressed always in black, in mourning for her son. She drifts around the Mediterranean, she's thinner than ever. She looks very sad, you know, solitary. And in autumn of 1898, she was staying at Lake Geneva. And Franz Josef, her husband, was still writing to her all the time from Vienna. And he would write her these very sweet letters. The end of one letter, he signs off, he says, sort of farewell, my most beautiful, my best and sweetest angel. But the sad thing is she never got to read this particular letter, because while it was en Route on 10th September, 1898, she was boarding the steamer to Montreux on Lake Geneva, which just had one lady in waiting with her. And she was standing amid the crush of people when suddenly she collapsed. And no one could work out why she collapsed at first. As you said, she's very tightly sewn into her corset. And when finally they worked out what happened, they realized that she had been stabbed through the heart with a sharpened stiletto, a kind of improvised stiletto by an Italian anarchist called Luigi Lucani. And he had traveled to Geneva to kill a royal, because it was a favorite royal hangout. And he said afterwards he didn't care which one he killed as long as he killed one. And Sisi was the person that he killed. And when the news got back to Vienna, Franz Josef, apparently, when he heard the News. He sobbed uncontrollably. And then he said to one of his aides, so I am to be spared nothing in this world. Nobody knows the love we had for each other. Which is a sort of bitterly ironic thing for him to say.
- [74:11]
A
Yeah.
- [74:12]
B
So this for him was the crowning blow. He still had his actress, Katerina Schratt, though their relationship had actually cooled by this point. He's very lonely. He writes to Katarina Schratt at one point. I feel endlessly sad in my hopeless loneliness. His son has killed himself. His wife has been murdered. He's effectively on his own. And he lives for another 18 years after his wife's death. He seems incredibly old at this point. He actually looks older than he is. So he turned 70 in 1900, but at this point he looked about 150. And people talked about him as a relic at this point. They would call him the Last Knight or the Old Gentleman or something. And he remains enormously popular. Franz Joseph, a great rallying point for his empire. And his suffering actually worked quite well as a political asset because the papers would call him the man of Sorrows. Sort of a man who has lost everything. Wife, son, you know, all the light has gone from his life and yet still he dedicates himself every day, gets up at 4 o' clock in the morning, his red boxes to his. Yeah, to the peoples of his empire. But I suppose another way of looking at it is precisely because he is such a relic. He seems like the embodiment of an antiquated institutional conservatism, an empire that seems utterly beleaguered by the modern world and an empire that feels itself to be so embattled. And of course, that's the context in which his heir, who he doesn't get on with at all now, Franz Ferdinand goes off to Bosnia to see some army maneuvers in 1914. And, Tom, we all know how that story was to end.
- [75:49]
A
We do. Well, thank you, Dominic. A gothic chiller, an amazing story. And we have a bonus out this week on the nephew of one of the characters in this series, and that is Baron Nopscher, CC's Chamberlain. And his nephew is also Franz Baron Knopshire, and he is one of the most remarkable figures in the entire history of paleontology. I see Dominic's face light up at the mention of that word. So. So Nopcha Jr. Absolutely Titanic figure in the history of the study of dinosaurs. But he also, he hung out with bandits in Albania, became a spy in the First World War, is in the Guinness Book of records as the first man to have hijacked a plane. And his end has some striking and actually I wonder if they're entirely coincidental echoes of the Myling incident. So if you're already a member of the Rest is History club, you already have had that. If you're not, then you can sign up@therealStishistory.com that sounds amazing. And the good news doesn't stop there because Dominic, we're also doing a live show, aren't we, about the ultimate Victorian adventure which is the Abyssinian expedition of 1868 all kicked off when the Abyssinian emperor wrote a letter to Queen Victoria and she neglected to reply and he got in a massive strop and chaos ensued and actually I think that ends with him with the Abyssinian emperor killing himself. So bit of a theme developing there.
- [77:28]
B
Yeah, it's absolutely amazing story. It's one of the most lurid, implausible and entertaining of all 19th century imperial adventures. So I'm really looking forward to the show.
- [77:39]
A
It's very Flashman, isn't it?
- [77:40]
B
There's a Flashman book about it, Flashman on the March.
- [77:42]
A
Yeah, it's the ideal Flashman story if you like Flashman and even if you don't, it's still brilliant. Anyway, that is at the south bank in London on Friday 4th September and you can get tickets once again at the restishistory.com I think you should just bookmark the resthistory.com and buy everything it's got to offer. And Dominic, I have even more exciting news because we are running a summer sale and so for a limited time if you want to sign up to the rest of History Club, listen about the dinosaurs and a host of of other supplementary benefits, then you will get an extra 20% off an annual membership using the code Summer26. And this is only valid until the 31st of August. So hurry, hurry, hurry while stocks last. So that is the Myeling incident. Next week we begin a six part series on another royal. But this is a royal whole lives to a ripe old age and does heroic things all her reign. And it is Elizabeth the First. And we will be looking at the road that takes Elizabeth the First to the fateful decision to execute Mary Queen of Scots and thereby inspire the launching of the Spanish Armada against her.
- [78:58]
B
Francis Drake's in it, isn't he?
- [79:00]
A
Francis Drake is in it.
- [79:01]
B
Sir Philip Sidney.
- [79:02]
A
Sir Philip Sidney's in it. Edward Campion the the Jesuit is in it. Lord Cecil is in it. It's just non stop Elizabethan action.
- [79:12]
B
Brilliant.
- [79:13]
A
So if you love a Tudor, you're going to love this series. We will see you then. Bye bye.
- [79:17]
B
Ale have absolutely sensational, spectacular, stupendous news about a forthcoming Rest Is History live show.
- [79:38]
A
We do Dominic now. Sometimes there are complaints that people in Britain don't know enough about the British Empire that they don't study it in sufficient depth. So we are stepping in to make up for that and we are. We're going to be telling the story of the ultimate Victorian imperial adventure. And that, Dominic, is the Abbas Abyssinian expedition of 1868.
- [80:01]
B
And it's.
- [80:01]
A
Well, I don't say it's brilliant, but it's mad, isn't it?
- [80:04]
B
It is mad. To give people a bit of context, it's an amazing story. The Emperor of Abyssinia, Tewodros ii, he was ignored by Queen Victoria, who didn't answer his letters, so he took some British hostages and then the British sent an expedition to Abyssinia to attack his capital at Magdala, his kind of mountain citadel. It's an amazing, amazing story. Story. A bonkers story. And precisely the kind of thing that we enjoy on the Rest Is History.
- [80:29]
A
Yes. And that I think the entire country could profit from hearing about. So that is what we're going to be doing. It is, I think, a very Flashman kind of a story.
- [80:38]
B
Totally.
- [80:39]
A
So anyone who enjoys Flashman will enjoy this. And we are going to be doing it at the Southbank Centre in London on the 4th of September. We do have a few tickets for that. We're also doing it on the 5th of September and not to base, but that one is already sold out. So if you want to come, book your tickets for the 4th of September and you can get them@therealstishistory.com I'm Mary Beard.
- [81:03]
B
And I'm Josephine Quinn. At the Rest Is Fest this September, we're putting on a show that can only be described as an iconoclastic romp through the ancient world. We're talking about leaders behaving badly, emperors putting their horses in charge. Charge. Cities built by asylum seekers and empires getting their comeuppance. There will be some proper myth busting, but we'll also be asking why these myths matter even when we know they're wrong. So if you love your ancient history and you're free on September 6th, get your ticket now and join us at London's South Bank Centre. Tickets are on sale now. Just visit southbankcenter.co.uk that's southbankcentre.co.uk.