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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 please come in Marie ushered 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. He picked up the skull, took it between my hands, and looked at it from all sides. Suddenly, Rodolf 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, and we said it before, from a kind of gothic melodrama, Edgar Allan 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 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 You

for Baroness Mary, because she is heading to a hunting lodge at Marling in the Vienna woods. And what happens there is going to be one of the greatest scandals in the entire history, not just of Austro-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.

Yeah, 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 at Meiling, 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 in your introductory reading thank you so crown prince rudolph is 30 years old he is to remind people he's the son of emperor franz joseph and his very glamorous kind of melancholy wife cc very thin very long hair 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 gonorrhea 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 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 betzera 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 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 of course bit of both probably was there really a black bird you know yeah i mean it's it's improbable

but and she had gone to that meeting with her older friend countess marie larish who is rudolph's cousin and and basically the countess larish has acted as the sort of intermediary and put the two of them together the board she is the board yeah she could you could say she's the procurer as it were yeah so the events that you described monday the 5th of november 1888 we ended the last episode with this scene countess larish has offered to take mary shopping with her mother's permission they went to the grab and 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 uh which was waiting for them driven by rudolph's coachman joseph bratfish bratfish yeah

it's a great name that is worthy of an american totally it is yeah and dominic this whole thing about women being taken to the um 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 cc yeah definitely there is i mean this this it's very much a kind of diana in the 1990s vibe to this i think yeah the diana story doesn't quite have that gothic element to it there does it it's rather more hello magazine this is much more hello magazine meets bram stoker as you said yeah so um 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 rudolph 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 caspar 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 oh my goodness not general gordon yeah that would be improbable wow that's a twist general gordon who is still alive in this version of history okay fine 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 uh account owes something to gothic melodrama but it pales by comparison with this which is from rudolph's military aide victor von frischer Yeah.

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 Crown Prince Rudolf, to the ghetto cemetery. You know, the old town cemetery in Prague, very evocative, moving. With the grave of the rabbi who created the golem. The golem, exactly. The kind of prototype for Frankenstein. 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 rudolph 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 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 Emona, I imagine it was consumption. Well, I think Viktor von Fritsch has a very lively imagination. Because Viktor von Fritsch, Rudolf's aide, said the crown prince clearly believed that this Mary Vetsera was the reincarnation of this Jewish girl from Prague. Oh God, there is reincarnation. 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 but i suppose the question is whether rudolph might have thought that he might have done he might have done because he's he has that kind of sensibility doesn't he 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 god i mean they would so be into black eyeshadow in that if they live now wouldn't they 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 rudolph gave her an iron wedding ring um it was inscribed with the letters i l v b i d t in Liebe vereint bis in der Tod, 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 recognizable 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 right he hates his wife he will abandon me and we will go into the shadows all of this and especially in fantasy eclair vienna exactly that kind of mood of lush morbidity yeah completely on the other hand there are hints that rudolph you know sees this as something more than just a sort of um love lord joke or something so on all souls day on the 2nd of november he met his mother's lady in waiting countess festatic in a palace corridor and he said are you 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 yeah 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 um lubricant that is richard wagner he's very romantic i mean literally you know the song is death 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 approve of i mean the thing is if she doesn't like wagner then perhaps she'd better off going off going out with um the kaiser yes exactly who had laughed and uh chatted all the way through for barkner in the previous episode yeah and also the kaiser's not not a man who's ever going to top himself right the kaiser is a better investment i think so yes i think so he's also not riddled with gonorrhea well quite so anyway the court opera is doing this big new uh production of the ring cycle starting with Das Rheingold. And the Wetzirahs 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? I'm 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. I can't believe he's called Bratfish. And he would drive her to Schönbrunn Palace, the Austrian Versailles, and she and Rudolf

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. So it's brilliant, isn't it, that Wagner's operas are so long? Amazing. But there's still no sort of physical side to this relationship, it seems. Frederick Morton in his book, Inerva Spenders, says the reason is that Rudolf is postponing this because Rudolf believed that climax meant end, meaning death. It's sad, isn't he, that Freud never got the chance to psychoanalyse him. I know. He just feels an ideal patient. Completely, with his mother, his distant father, all of this. The yearning for death. I mean, it's, yeah. Anyway, we get to Christmas. So the imperial family for once are actually reunited at the palace. Sisi's birthday is on Christmas Eve. It's Rudolf's mother's birthday. And that, in Austria, is when the Christkind brings your presents, the Christ child. She's just got back from Corfu, which she loves. You've seen her palace in Corfu, have you not? Yeah, the Kileon. And she's come back from Corfu with an anchor tattooed on her shoulder. Yeah. Which is punchy. I always thought this was unusual behavior, but a whole host of members of royal families throughout the late 19th century were doing it. Yeah. So it had obviously become a kind of royal craze. 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 Rudolf 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'd sent to a relative in Paris. That is thoughtful, Dominic, because there's nothing more thoughtful than giving someone a letter written by someone they particularly admire. Can you think of an example of this, Tom? anyone who does that I think is beneath the show of cynical cruelty or whatever it is a cherubic lovable is there anything you want to share with the listeners yeah because you bought me a letter written by Nelson there you go thank you one of my most treasured possessions 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. I mean, you write history books that are like encyclopedias. Correct. Yeah, thank you. I was fishing for that. And there are presents all around. So Franz Joseph and Cece have got presents for Rudolf and Stef and his daughter, Elizabeth. I mean, it's often forgotten in this story that he has a daughter. I think she's about five or six. And they've got her kind of toy garden furniture made in Corfu. Can I just ask, he's got a lovely present for his mother. Yeah. Has he got anything for his father? No mention. No mention of that. It's not his father's birthday, though, to be fair.

That's true. Also, what do you give the man who owns Central Europe? A uniform. Yeah. You give him Venice back or something. That's what he'd like. Yeah. So this sounds lovely, but Rudolf 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 rudolf mad and rudolf has written to his mate morris sepps 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 do you know who this unexpectedly reminds me of is um harold wilson in 1974 releasing mad mad stories to the press yes i can see that clearly made up yeah well do you think this is made up

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 uh 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 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 i 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 know you're not you're not feeling good that's a shame um 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 Abazia, which was on the Adriatic. It's on the Croatian coast. It was the Cannes or the Saint-Tropez of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. So palm trees, hotels, sort of tea lounges, all of this. Rudolf doesn't like it. He finds it very boring. He comes back early to Vienna. It's not very Gothic, is it? 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's 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 are 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 rudolph again finds this very boring but the one consolation is that he can resume his affair with mary that Sarah. 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 seven till nine. 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 seven and nine 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 the date of their trist 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 mentioned to her governess the idea that one day they will be discovered that we will go to a happy place uh that nobody knows and then we will enter death together and this is not the first time that rudolph has mentioned this to a woman because we know that he had mentioned it to his regular mistress mitzi caspar before christmas and she had laughed at him and thought it was a joke i thought that there were yeah in versions i've

read of this she goes to the police and tells them and the police refuse to listen to her because

she's just a prostitute is that not true 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 uh particularly austrian listeners who might have read austrian german language versions of this may be more familiar with it but in for example frederick 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 yeah and then going to the police 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 she's a massive goth though isn't she i mean you said she's a massive goth of course but how much she enters into this pact 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 dandis 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 Rudolf 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 very you know deserted no one there and they fixed a date at this meeting they said let's go to the myling 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 uh hodek's uh taxidermist shop on the maria hilferstrasse where they'd been stuffing his eagles for him god i mean the whole empty fairgrounds yeah stuff the taxidermist it's brilliant it's got it all i was thinking about this i think this would be a brilliant alfred hitchcock film david lynch would enjoy it as well yeah there are lots of directors who would do really really good different versions of this yeah christopher nolan would cast killian murphy surely as crown prince rudolph a young killian murphy yeah michael kane is his father yeah i was about to say tom hardy tom hardy is the coachman surely yes tom hardy is bradfish surely everyone wants to see that that would be the spin-off series bradfish yeah he's solving crimes with he's solving crimes with freud 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 tadeusz adjukowicz um and he is a pole i think for giving his name and he's painting

rudolph on horseback showing him as an infantry general and then he goes to the palace for dinner does the painting the portrait of rudolph start to weep tears surely yeah definitely of blood 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 kaiserville on the second's birthday so rudolph has to dress up in his uniform as an honorary colonel of the second 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 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 taxi derby shop portrait and then he rushes back to the hofburg 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 finalize 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 oh god no wonder he shoots himself imagine your most hated enemy having to dress up in uniforms and go to solution it's like a nightmare right or a greek punishment it's like sisyphus had it easy yeah so he has to go to a reception uh the german embassy for the kaiser's birthday now at this reception is his father and also uh his wife crown princess stephanie she's looking very elegant and here. lover mary vet sarah so they're all there is their relationship now common knowledge does stephanie know do we think i don't know we just don't know so there is a moment suppose it is a moment i think this is made up actually uh 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 yes it sounds retrospective it's retrospective yeah exactly now rudolph 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 rudolph 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 i mean it really could be heavy he could indeed i get i imagine there were a lot of medals surely and epaulettes yeah 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 caspar and they drink champagne laced with cognac our favorite drink our favorite tipple a favorite drink exactly we'll be drinking that at the rest of history christmas party and uh rudolph 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 said she thinks to herself this is the kind of mad thing that rudolph says all the time because he's a bit of a goth he's always saying morbid things like this three o'clock in the morning he leaves her apartment to go back to the imperial palace the hofburg and there's an old 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 we talked about this yesterday about whether he would have viewed suicide as a sin but clearly not so he goes back to the imperial palace he has a couple of hours sleep and he's up by seven 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 Rudolf 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, five 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 larish have already left the vetsera family mansion which is on the salesiana gasa 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 rudolph'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 ruter stadl which is closed for the winter again a very gothic scene this abandoned inn people always being murdered in red barns aren't they 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 and this is crown prince rudolph it's such a great film

it is isn't it be amazing of course he's coming through the the mist or whatever he comes through the trees and uh 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 so they've shaken off the police now now he's shaken off the police so he and mary and bratfish drive on together towards his hunting lodge at meiling which is about 20 miles southeast of and they arrive round about sunset so that's about five o'clock of course they do of course it's the ravens flock around the gatehouse 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 when she'd seen mary off she went back to the vetsera 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 you know baroness uh can you help us find her and eventually he said to the police commission look we think she's gone off with crown prince rudolph and the commissioner said well come on i mean if she's gone off the crown prince rudolph we're hardly gonna 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 Vetsera is one of his mistresses. She's 17 years old. She knows what she's doing. You know, she's quite racy. She's matured beyond her years. These things happen. What are you worried about? Yeah, what's the worst that could happen? What's the worst that could happen? Well, we will find out the answer to that question after the break.

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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're in the Meierling Hunting Lodge, some 20-odd miles outside Vienna, where two friends of Grand Prince Rudolf, Count Josef 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?

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 Rudolf's ground floor apartment are closed. But the servants are up. The servants admit them. And in the billiard room, Crown Prince Rudolf is waiting. So alive and well. He's alive and well. And he seems in good form. Or is he well? Well, he's not well. he's got gonorrhea and he's like 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 a murder-suicide packed 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 lads after all so you go ahead i'll sit it out they have a cup of coffee and then hoyos and coberg 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 rudolph 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 lost check 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 all 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 um it's very restless 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 gun dogs than with hungarian politicians and Right. Hoyos 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 Rudolf hates the Kaiser because this is the kind of banter the Kaiser would very much enjoy. Yeah, it is. I don't think his mother would approve. No. Since he loves Hungarian. 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 Rudolf's bedroom opens and out comes Mary Vetsera. And she has been hiding in Rudolf'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 Hoyos would notice. so she's starving so loschek 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 frankly he's called grilled fish that's his name i think we've established it's a ludicrous name 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 marion and rudolph that sounds

incredibly annoying you're right how do you make him shut up some bloke called mr grilled fish turns up and whistles it's the last thing you want yeah especially on your last night Spoiler. How did you want a special last hour? No wonder they shot themselves.

Right. So they sit up very late. Loschek, the manservant, he turns in at two 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 Rudolf in a dressing gown and a silk scarf looking very pale. so rudolph 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 behind him now lost check at this point he gets dressed he's you know he's about 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 check 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 their reply lost check is becoming quite anxious now because rudolph is a famously light sleeper and the dogs started barking so

a slightly chaotic scene the hunting dogs are all barking because of the knocking and loszek has gone into 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 loschek okay break down the door and this is the point he's he's now sobbing with worry and this is the point when he says to them i have something to tell you baroness mary vetsera has been staying with the crown prince and then this is the point when hoyas and cobra 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 losite 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 Nopstra 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 yeah for two or three hours learning Greek

all of that yeah and then she would have a 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 Rousophelos, 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 Knopster and Count Hoyos want to see you urgently. And Elizabeth was furious. You don't interfere with my Greek lessons. But then Baron Knopster came in. She saw the look on his face, and she realized something was terribly wrong. Now, her husband, Franz Joseph, had been up even longer. Well, he always gets up early, doesn't he? Because he's got an empire to run. Right. He got up at four 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 five o'clock in the morning. And a lot of this had been about the Budapest Parliament and the army bill. As Frederick Morton said, that morning, Franz Joseph 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 Joseph was looking forward to this because he knew that his wife actually had a prearranged meeting with his confidant, Katharina Schrat, the actress. Katharina Schrat 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 ménage, he loves all that. But he gets there and he finds Baron Knopster blocking the door to his wife's apartment. Baron Knopster's face is streaked with tears. And through the door, Franz Joseph can hear his wife sobbing and sobbing. So in the next few hours, the news that something terrible has happened races around the city. Crown Prince Rudolf'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 within their explanation and by mid-afternoon there's a crowd outside the hofburg people know something has happened there are people talking about grand prince rudolf 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 splendor 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 throttled by the kaiser yeah exactly he's died of apoplexy after the Kaiser has been rude about an Austrian army belt or something of that kind, surely. A bit of the obvious explanation, wouldn't it? But it's the following evening, the Wiener Tagblatt prints the headline, The Most Horrible Truth. And it says, Crown Prince Rudolf was killed by a gunshot and he fired the pistol himself.

I mean, I can't imagine, because it's still a very devoutly Catholic city and country. Yeah. I mean, the impact must be devastating.

Exactly. I mean, this is, we said it's the royal scandal to end all royal 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.

Prince William, yeah.

Carrying on with a 17-year-old and having a murder-suicide pact at a hunting lodge in Staines.

I think it's much worse than that, because suicide is no longer framed as a sin. No, it's true. Yeah. You know, it's treated with sympathy 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. They're the guardians of Catholicism. Yeah. You know, they are the absolute, his apostolic majesty, Franz Joseph. You know, it's 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 Vetsera'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 Joseph spent the first afternoon trying to console his wife, along with Katerina Schrat. and then being franz joseph he went back to work and he uh 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 four o'clock as usual to start work but at dawn he had a visitor the imperial doctor professor herman wiederhofer who had been to myling to and he was the first person who basically went into the room to inspect bodies and professor wiederhofer says i have you know 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 vetsera with the same gun two hours earlier so actually this is so interesting he had killed mary vetsera before he appeared at the manservant's bedside to say get my breakfast ready to ask for breakfast yeah so what do you think was going on there don't know did he ever plan to eat the breakfast change his mind impossible to say strange i mean everything about this is strange let's not deny that no but there's um this the worst of it i think for franz joseph is the is what fidehofer then says the crown prince has left a number of letters so he's left a letter to his mother cc 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 Heiligenkreutz, 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 and a shrewd analysis 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 lost check 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 caspar but the

Thank you.

contents of those letters is unknown has never been released and for his father the emperor there was no letter at all nothing oh dear 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 Of course, of course. Devastating. That would be almost the worst blow of all, I think. Such kind of posthumous cruelty as well, isn't it? Yeah. So eventually he composes himself and he says, Where is my son? And Dr. Wiedehofer said, Well, we've brought the body back to the palace as you ordered. We've dressed him in uniform. We've bandaged his head and we've put him in bed. And French Joseph went to his son's bedroom and he stood by his son's body for 15 minutes in silence on a vigil for a brother officer. as per the army regulations, always the way with him. And then he said to his aides, well, 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 Vetsera 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 Ellen Vetsera they said you have to get out of Vienna you know the press will be hounding you there'll be crowds begging 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 the crowds outside she was in a terrible state she wanted to go into the house and eventually the austrian prime minister count taffer turned up he was very i think we described in the last episode he's very suave kind of top hat cigar and he sort of said My dear lady, what 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've done. I could not resist love. In agreement with him, I wish to be buried by his side at the Alland churchyard. It's actually a slightly different place from the Heilig & Croix 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 Mary and Rudolf are suicides, they cannot be buried in consecrated ground. The emperor, however, gets in touch with Heilig and Kreutz 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, the 31st of January, two of her uncles, the Baltazzi brothers, went to Myerling. 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 know, remember, she's very fashionable. And then an absolutely 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. Because there are all kinds of stories where Sherlock Holmes turns up and solves the case, aren't there? I don't think he'd have been fooled by that. No, he wouldn't. i mean this is so sherlock holmes isn't it it's sort of scandal in bohemia yeah you know all of that so the carriage rolled through the night to heiligen kreutz abbey which is about three miles away there are loads of police waiting and only 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 vetsera 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 was ever made of her death or even her life. It was as though nobody remembered that she had walked the earth 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 well come

on to that 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, everybody knows about it. They don't fool anybody. Meanwhile, what about Crown Prince Rudolf? Well, they held an autopsy the same day, the 31st. And the autopsy concluded that on studying Rudolf'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, he's not really a suicide, is he? Or even a murderer. He was a 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 coroners or whatever were well known for fudging reports on suicides to allow people to be buried

according to the rights of the church i think though it's very unusual for a case that is this high profile so that the the papal nuncio in vienna yeah 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

murderer and a suicide yeah that's right so he's not happy about it at all and the papal nuncio actually then went to the hunting lodge and asked load of questions kept kind of looking into it so

he could team up with bratfish exactly set up an agency if the papal nunceering doesn't work out

brilliant so um anyway rudolph lies in state for three days various places in the hofburg and finally in 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 thousands of people being turned away and then the funeral took place on tuesday the 5th of february in the capuchin church in the capuchin crypt which you can visit i mean you can see crown prince rudolph's um tomb i went to see it last last summer of course this is not the last you know very high profile funeral there's going to be in vienna and not for the last time franz joseph specifically asks foreign dignitaries not to come and in a preview of what will happen in 1914 the worst person the last person 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 that would be the the worst yeah 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 rudolf 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 carried 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 um the imperial walrus yeah so if we widen the picture out a bit at one level it's only a royal scandal but the the great sort of austrian music critic the most forbidding critic in vienna of the day was a guy called edward 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 devastations by flood and fire but nothing of all this is comparable to the horror of january the 30th the disconsolate desperate turbulence which ripped through the entire population is indescribable and we know from when you mentioned

diana a few times yeah 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 yeah i mean you said that um diana's world wasn't gothic it was hello magazine and everything yeah 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 has gone um the emperor doesn't have another direct 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

yes i think exactly both those things i think first of all it's a huge shock for the dynasty because 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 um 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 fantasy like the vienna the sense of neurosis the sense of introspection of of cultural anxiety also cultural excitement of course um this seems reflective of that world and also the

german-speaking world more generally because wagner is i mean he you know the liebestad the idea of of love and death yeah and and two lovers who are united in death yeah tristan is older yeah exactly 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 completely and precisely

because it's so overwhelming that's where 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 uh 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 harm drum conspiracy theories mary murdered rudolph uh or her relatives murdered rudolph perhaps because they found out he'd given her gonorrhea and they wanted to punish him for it what about stephanie yeah there are theories that Grand Princess Stephanie did it because she was jealous, of course. The Freemasons, the Jesuits, the Jews, Bismarck did it. Not the Kaiser. The Kaiser. No, there are theories that the Kaiser did it. But the most common, 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. Well, I guess that's expressive of what is

clearly a deep sense of tension between father and son. But also between the two halves of the empire. Yeah. 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 um a theory that was proposed by empress zita 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 why did clemenceau do it remind me why clemenceau wanted to kill grand prince rudolph i think well he wasn't even i think her um 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 she did yeah maybe even the 80s and she was she was kept

repeating this 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 cc and they love crown prince rudolph so if you go to the capuchin crypt they have tombs of all the hapsburgs 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 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 kind of kurt cobain of austro-hungary 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 welling, understandably. And they see it as symptomatic of this wider loss of confidence of the imperial.

project it's the titanic yeah but as with the titanic i think a lot of this is massively overblown so we know why mary and rudolph killed themselves we i mean he's morbid he's got gonorrhea today he would be diagnosed as having mental health issues of a very serious kind that does

speak of something that is genuine which is the um the way in which to be born into the dynasty is to feel trapped it's 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 cc in due course i think um that there is that monarchy is a kind of trap for those who find themselves enclosed within it very 21st century theme right and people often say that's about the house of windsor don't they 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 yeah interesting

that nobody had done this before him though no no what does that tell you something changed in the second half of the 19th century that made this possible that would not i mean it's hard to

imagine a 14th century prince no but and it's changing nowhere more than in vienna yeah exactly vienna is the you know this is where all these ideas of repression and um neurosis and psychosis and everything are being defined at this very moment maybe a particular kind of introspection

um and a sense of yourself or i don't know he's vibe lording i believe it's the phrase it's vibe lording is that the phrase yeah gen z joins us on the podcast brilliant so um what happened next franz joseph 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 myling 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 he needs all the prayers you can get he does so um the most likely heir to franz joseph now is his younger brother carl 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 um decided to drink some water from the river jordan he basically drank dirty water polluted with sewage so do we get his dysentery returned to the show distantly returned to the show and carried off carl ludwig and the heir became his son rudolph's uh protégé franz ferdinand so a great friend of the rest of 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 rudolph's death his mother cc 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 joseph her husband was still writing to her all the time from vienna and he would write 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 the 10th of September 1898 she was boarding the steamer to Montreux on Lake Geneva which just had one lady 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 you know sewn into her corset yeah 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. So this for him was the crowning blow. He still had his actress, Katerina Schrapp, though their relationship had actually cooled by this point. He's very lonely. He writes to Katerina Schrapp 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. It 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 four o'clock in the morning, his red boxes 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.

we do well thank you dominic um a gothic chiller an amazing story um and we have a bonus out this week on the nephew of one of the characters in this series and that is a baron nopsha um cc's chamberlain and his nephew is also franz baron nopsha um 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 Nopcha Jr., absolutely titanic figure in the history of the study of dinosaurs. But he also hung out with bandits in Albania, became a spy in the First World War, is in the 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 um 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 at the rest is history.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 a bit of a theme

developing there yeah it's absolutely amazing story it's one of the most um lurid implausible and entertaining of all 19th century imperial adventures so I'm really looking forward to the show it's very Flashman isn't it there's a Flashman book about it Flashman on the March

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 the 4th of September and you can get tickets once again at therestishistory.com I think you should just bookmark therestishistory.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 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 myling incident next week we begin a six-part series on another royal but this is a royal who uh 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 first to the fateful decision to execute Mary Queen of Scots and thereby inspire the launching of the Spanish Armada against her.

Francis Drake's in it, isn't he?

Francis Drake is in it Sir Philip Sidney Sir Philip Sidney's in it Edward Campion the Jesuit is in it Lord Cecil is in it it's just non-stop Elizabethan action brilliant so if you love a Tudor you're going to love this series we will see you then bye-bye Auf Wiedersehen

hello everybody we have absolutely sensational spectacular stupendous news about a forthcoming

rest is history live show 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 abyssinian expedition of 1868 and it's well i don't say it's brilliant but it's mad isn't it it is mad to give people a bit of context

it's an amazing story the emperor of abyssinia to wadros 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 a bonkers story and precisely the kind of thing that we enjoy on the rest is history 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 totally so anyone who enjoys flashman will enjoy this and we are going to be doing it at the south bank center 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 at the rest is history.com i'm mary beard 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, 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 6. Get your ticket now and join us at London's South Bank Centre. Tickets are on sale now.

Just visit southbankcentre.co.uk. That's southbankcentre.co.uk.