690. A Murderous Affair: Death at Mayerling (Part 2)

What really happened at the Habsburgian hunting lodge, Mayerling? Did Crown Prince Rudolf and his mistress, Baroness Mary Vetsera, really commit a romantic murder suicide, or did the heir cold-heartedly murder the 17 year old girl? And, why did the Austrian royal family try to erase all traces of this tragic incident? Join Dominic and Tom as they solve the mysterious tale of the Mayerling Incident. _______ Lloyds. 250 years on and still backing the nation's aspirations. *The Rest Is History LIVE: The Ultimate Victorian Adventure* The maddest expedition in history and it’s NEVER been heard before on the show: join Tom Holland & Dominic Sandbrook LIVE at the Southbank as they tell the bonkers story of Queen Victoria ordering one of history’s most daring assignments ever. ⁠⁠Tickets available for Friday 4th September⁠⁠, the Saturday show is SOLD OUT. Join The Rest Is History Club: Unlock the full experience of the show – with exclusive bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to every series and live show tickets, a members-only newsletter, discounted books from the show, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at the⁠⁠restishistory.com⁠ To read our new newsletter, sign up at: ⁠therestishistory.com/newsletters⁠ Advertise with us: ⁠[email protected] _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Video Editors: Jack Meek, Harry Swan + Adam Thornton Social Producer: Harry Balden Producers: Tabby Syrett & Aaliyah Akude Senior Producer: Callum Hill Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 3:00Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:21Speaker 00

  Please come in.

• 3:23Speaker 02

  Marie, I shit me in.

• 3:27Speaker 02

  We talked a while about Vienna. Then he said to me,

• 3:31Speaker 00

  Pardon me, but I would like to talk to the Countess privately for a few minutes.

• 3:36Speaker 02

  And then he went with Marie to another room.

• 3:41Speaker 02

  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.

• 4:10Speaker 00

  So that is an amazing scene, like something, and we said it before, from a 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 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 Rudolf.

• 4:53Speaker 00

  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 Mayerling 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.

• 5:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is an amazing, amazing tale. And today we'll be telling the story of that secret affair between Rudolph and Mary. We will get deep into what exactly happened at Mayerling, 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 Rudolf, the sinister man in the Gothic melodrama that you described so chillingly, I have to say, in your introductory reading.

• 6:13Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  So Crown Prince Rudolf is 30 years old. He is, to remind people, he is the son of Emperor Franz Joseph and his very glamorous melancholy wife, Cici.

• 6:23Speaker 00

  Very thin, very long hair.

• 6:25Speaker 01

  And Rudolph, who takes after his mother, I think it's reasonable to summarize, he is a very troubled, unhappy, 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 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 Vetsera. She's precocious, she's a social butterfly, she's a social climber.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  She's ambitious, but she's also incredibly romantic in a very 17-year-old teenage girl way.

• 7:16Speaker 00

  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?

• 7:22Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 7:23Speaker 00

  A bit of both, probably.

• 7:24Speaker 01

  Was there really a black bird, you know?

• 7:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, it's improbable, but.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  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 intermediary and put the two of them together.

• 7:42Speaker 00

  The board.

• 7:44Speaker 01

  She is the board, yeah. You could say she's the procurer, as it were.

• 7:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:48Speaker 01

  So the events that you described, Monday, the 5th of November, 1888, we ended the last episode with this scene. Countess Larisch 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, Joseph Bratfish.

• 8:15Speaker 00

  Bratfish?

• 8:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a great name.

• 8:18Speaker 00

  That is worthy of an American.

• 8:20Speaker 01

  Totally, yeah.

• 8:22Speaker 00

  And Dominic, this whole thing about women being taken 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 mentioned it in the context of Cici.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely there is. I mean, it's very much a Diana in the 1990s vibe to this, I think.

• 8:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:43Speaker 01

  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.

• 8:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  So from there, she was taken to the Hofberg, 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 Kaspar.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  And Mary herself, actually, this is not her first rodeo. So she, for an aristocratic girl of seventeen, 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.

• 9:31Speaker 00

  Oh, my goodness. Not General Gordon.

• 9:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:36Speaker 00

  That would be improbable.

• 9:37Speaker 01

  Wow, that's a twist. General Gordon, who is still alive in this fashion of history.

• 9:43Speaker 00

  Okay, fine.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  Well, anyway. Anyway, she's had loads of admirers, not just Crown Prince Rudolf. 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 Frister. 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 once went, me and Crown Prince Rudolf, to the ghetto cemetery. You know, the old town cemetery in Prague? Very evocative, moving.

• 10:24Speaker 00

  With the grave of the rabbi who created the Golem.

• 10:26Speaker 01

  The Golem, exactly.

• 10:28Speaker 00

  The kind of prototype for Frankenstein.

• 10:30Speaker 01

  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 aide, and particularly by the cantor's raven-haired daughter. And she became obsessed with Crown Prince Rudolf, 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

• 11:10Speaker 01

  just caught pneumonia and died. And Rudolph went secretly to her grave and left roses by her tombstone.

• 11:19Speaker 00

  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 pneumonia, I imagine it was consumption.

• 11:29Speaker 01

  Well, I think Victor von Frich has a very lively imagination.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  Because Victor von Frich, Rudolph's aide, said, "The Crown Prince clearly believed that this Mary Vetsera was the reincarnation of this Jewish girl from Prague."

• 11:43Speaker 00

  Oh, God, there is reincarnation.

• 11:45Speaker 01

  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?

• 11:58Speaker 00

  But I suppose the question is whether Rudolph might have thought that.

• 12:01Speaker 01

  He might have done.

• 12:02Speaker 00

  He might have done, because he has that kind of sensibility, doesn't he?

• 12:05Speaker 01

  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.

• 12:19Speaker 00

  God. I mean, they would so be into black eye shadow now, if they live now, wouldn't they?

• 12:23Speaker 01

  They completely would. They're total Goths, aren't they? Or emo or whatever.

• 12:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:27Speaker 01

  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. And it was inscribed with the letters ILVBIDT. "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

• 13:09Speaker 01

  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 hates his wife. He will abandon me and we will go into the shadows." All of this.

• 13:35Speaker 00

  And especially in Fantasy at Klavat Vienna.

• 13:37Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 13:38Speaker 00

  That kind of mood of lush morbidity.

• 13:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, completely. On the other hand, there are hints that Rudolph, you know, sees this as something more than just a sort of love law joke or something. So on All Souls' Day, on the 2nd of November, he met his mother's lady-in-waiting, Countess Festertich, 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.

• 14:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:25Speaker 01

  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 Larisch 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 lubricants that is Richard Wagner.

• 14:47Speaker 00

  He's very romantic. I mean, literally, you know, the song is death.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  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?

• 14:59Speaker 00

  Well, I entirely approve of. 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.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly.

• 15:09Speaker 00

  Who had laughed and chatted all the way through Wagner in the previous episode.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. And also, the Kaiser's not a man who's ever going to top himself, right? The Kaiser is a better investment.

• 15:20Speaker 00

  I think so. Yes, I think so.

• 15:22Speaker 01

  He's also not riddled with gonorrhea.

• 15:24Speaker 00

  Well, quite.

• 15:25Speaker 01

  So, anyway, the Court Opera is doing this big new production of The Ring Cycle, starting with Das Rheingold. And the Vetseras 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."

• 15:43Speaker 00

  You'd have been like, "What? No interest in Wagner? Unbelievable. I'm out."

• 15:46Speaker 01

  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.

• 15:59Speaker 00

  I can't believe he's called Bratfish.

• 16:01Speaker 01

  And he would drive her to Schunbrunn 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.

• 16:12Speaker 00

  So it's brilliant, isn't it, that Wagner's operas are so long?

• 16:15Speaker 01

  Amazing. But there's still no sort of physical side to this relationship, it seems. Frederick Morton, in his book An Erwerb Spender, says, "The reason is that Rudolph is postponing this because Rudolph believed that climax meant end, meaning death."

• 16:29Speaker 00

  It's sad, isn't he, that Freud never got the chance to psychoanalyze him?

• 16:33Speaker 01

  I know.

• 16:34Speaker 00

  He just feels an ideal patient.

• 16:36Speaker 01

  Completely, with his mother, his distant father, all of this.

• 16:40Speaker 00

  The yearning for death. I mean, it's, yeah.

• 16:43Speaker 01

  Anyway, we get to Christmas. So the imperial family, for once, are actually reunited at the palace. Cici's birthday is on Christmas Eve, so Rudolph's mother's birthday. And that, in Austria, is when the Christkind brings your presents, the Christchild. She's just got back from Koffu, which she loves. You've seen her palace in Koffu, have you not?

• 17:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, the Kileon.

• 17:04Speaker 01

  And she's come back from Koffu with an anchor tattooed on her shoulder.

• 17:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:09Speaker 01

  Which is punchy.

• 17:10Speaker 00

  I always thought this was unusual behaviour. But a whole host of members of royal families throughout the late 19th century were doing it.

• 17:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:17Speaker 00

  So it had obviously become a kind of royal craze.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  It was, exactly. George V and his brother went off to Japan, I think, who got dragons tattooed on their arms or something. Incredible. Anyway, they gathered in Cici'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 favourite German writer, and a packet of 11 original Heine letters that he'd sent to a relative in Paris.

• 17:47Speaker 00

  That is thoughtful, Dominic, because there's nothing more thoughtful than giving someone a letter written by someone they particularly admire.

• 17:55Speaker 01

  Can you think of an example of this, Tom?

• 17:59Speaker 00

  Anyone who does that, I think, is beneath the shell of cynical cruelty or whatever it is.

• 18:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:04Speaker 00

  A cherubic lovable.

• 18:06Speaker 01

  Is there anything you want to share with the listeners?

• 18:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, because you bought me a letter written by Nelson.

• 18:11Speaker 01

  There you go. Thank you.

• 18:13Speaker 00

  One of my most treasured possessions.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  That comparison with Crown Prince Rudolf that has dogged me all my life. Yet more ammunition to the people who say, is he the reincarnation of Crown Prince Rudolf? Because the parallels are uncanny.

• 18:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, they are.

• 18:28Speaker 01

  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.

• 18:36Speaker 00

  I mean, you write history books that are like encyclopedias.

• 18:39Speaker 01

  Correct. Yeah, thank you. I was fishing for that. And there are the presents all around. So Franz Joseph and Cici have got presents for Rudolph and Stephanie's 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.

• 18:56Speaker 00

  Can I just ask, he's got a lovely present for his mother.

• 19:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:01Speaker 00

  Has he got anything for his father?

• 19:02Speaker 01

  No mention, no mention of that. It's not his father's birthday, though, to be fair.

• 19:06Speaker 00

  That's true.

• 19:07Speaker 01

  Also, what did you give the man who owns Central Europe?

• 19:11Speaker 00

  A uniform.

• 19:12Speaker 01

  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 pitch. 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 Maurice Sepes, 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.

• 19:53Speaker 00

  Do you know who this unexpectedly reminds me of is Harold Wilson in 1974?

• 19:59Speaker 01

  Really?

• 19:59Speaker 00

  Releasing mad, mad stories to the press.

• 20:02Speaker 01

  Yes, I can see that, actually.

• 20:03Speaker 00

  Clearly made up.

• 20:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. 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?

• 20:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, I suppose.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  He'd be an unpopular customer. He wouldn't be a great tipper.

• 20:18Speaker 01

  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. I postpone 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, you're not feeling good. That's a shame.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  Oh, 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 Abatsia, 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.

• 21:44Speaker 00

  It's not very Gothic, is it?

• 21:45Speaker 01

  No, it's not very Gothic. It's very dull as far as he's concerned. And 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 Vetsera. 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.

• 22:31Speaker 01

  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 jewellery shop in Vienna. And she ordered a gold cigarette case inscribed with the, 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.

• 23:16Speaker 01

  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 Rudolph 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.

• 23:40Speaker 00

  I thought that there were.

• 23:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:42Speaker 00

  Inversions 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?

• 23:50Speaker 01

  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 Austrian, German language versions of this. Maybe more familiar with it. But in, for example, Frederick Morten'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.

• 24:18Speaker 00

  Yeah. And then going to the police.

• 24:19Speaker 01

  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.

• 24:50Speaker 00

  She's a massive Goth though, isn't she? I mean, you said.

• 24:52Speaker 01

  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 Dandys 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 a 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.

• 25:37Speaker 01

  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, very deserted, no one there. And they fixed a date at this meeting. They said, let's go to the Miling Hunting Lodge on Monday.

• 26:20Speaker 01

  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's shop on the Maria Hilferstraße, where they'd been stuffing his eagles for him.

• 26:59Speaker 00

  God. I mean, the whole empty fairgrounds.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:04Speaker 00

  Stuff the taxidermist.

• 27:06Speaker 01

  It's brilliant. It's got it all. I was thinking about this. I think this would be a brilliant Alfred Hitchcock film.

• 27:13Speaker 00

  David Lynch would enjoy it as well.

• 27:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, there are lots of directors who would do really, really good, different versions of this.

• 27:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:20Speaker 01

  Christopher Nolan would cast Killian Murphy, surely as Crown Prince Rudolf, a young Killian Murphy.

• 27:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, and Michael Caine is his father.

• 27:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was about to say Tom Hardy. Tom Hardy is the coachman, surely.

• 27:34Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 27:35Speaker 01

  Tom Hardy is Bratfish. Surely everyone wants to see that.

• 27:39Speaker 00

  That would be the spin-off series.

• 27:40Speaker 01

  Bratfish. Yeah, he's solving crimes with Sigmund Freud.

• 27:44Speaker 00

  He's solving crimes with Freud.

• 27:48Speaker 01

  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 Tadej Adukovic. And he is a pole, I think, given his name. And he's painting Rudolph on horseback, showing him as an infantry general. And then he goes to the palace for dinner.

• 28:08Speaker 00

  Does the painting, the portrait of Rudolph, start to weep tears?

• 28:11Speaker 01

  Surely. Yeah, definitely.

• 28:13Speaker 00

  Of blood.

• 28:14Speaker 01

  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 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 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, taxi, derbis shop, portraits.

• 28:56Speaker 01

  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 Larisch'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 parter, 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.

• 29:36Speaker 00

  Oh God. I wonder who he is himself.

• 29:40Speaker 01

  Imagine the almost hated enemy having to dress up in uniforms and go to.

• 29:45Speaker 00

  Solution.

• 29:45Speaker 01

  It's like a nightmare, right? Or a Greek punishment. It's like Sisyphus had it easy.

• 29:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:52Speaker 01

  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.

• 30:10Speaker 00

  Is their relationship now common knowledge? Does Stephanie know, do we think?

• 30:14Speaker 01

  I don't know. We just don't know. So there was a moment, suppose it is 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 suspected at the time.

• 30:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it sounds retrospective.

• 30:40Speaker 01

  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.

• 31:10Speaker 00

  I mean, it really could be heavy.

• 31:11Speaker 01

  It could indeed.

• 31:12Speaker 00

  I guess, I imagine there were a lot of medals.

• 31:14Speaker 01

  Surely, and epaulettes.

• 31:16Speaker 00

  Yeah. Weighing his shoulders down.

• 31:18Speaker 01

  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.

• 31:29Speaker 00

  Our favourite drink, our favourite tipple.

• 31:31Speaker 01

  A favourite drink, exactly. We'll be drinking that at the Rest is History Christmas party. And 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 at 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.

• 32:10Speaker 00

  We talked about this yesterday, about whether he would have viewed suicide as a sin, but clearly not.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  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 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, 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 eleven, he's on his way and Rudolph has left the palace.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  Now meanwhile, Mary Vetsera and Countess Larisch have already left the Vetsera family mansion, which is on the Seliziana 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, 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 Rultus Stadl, which is closed for the winter.

• 33:38Speaker 00

  Again, a very Gothic scene, this abandoned inn. People are always being murdered in Red Barns, aren't they?

• 33:43Speaker 01

  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 Rudolf.

• 33:55Speaker 00

  It's such a great film.

• 33:57Speaker 01

  It is.

• 33:58Speaker 00

  Isn't it? It'd be amazing.

• 34:00Speaker 01

  Of course, he's coming through 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.

• 34:17Speaker 00

  So they've shaken off the police now?

• 34:18Speaker 01

  Now he's shaken off the police. So he and Mary and Bratfish drive on together towards his hunting lodge at Mihling, which is about 20 miles southeast of Vienna. And they arrive round about sunset. So that's about five o'clock.

• 34:33Speaker 00

  Of course they do.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 34:36Speaker 00

  As the ravens flock around, flock around the gatehouse.

• 34:42Speaker 01

  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 Larisch, 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 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.

• 35:26Speaker 01

  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 Rudolf. And the commissioner said, well, come on. I mean, if she's 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 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.

• 36:12Speaker 01

  These things happen. What are you worried about?

• 36:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, what's the worst that could happen?

• 36:17Speaker 01

  What's the worst that could happen? Well, we will find out the answer to that question after the break.

• 36:28Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Mint Mobile. Right now, all of Mint's plans are $15 per month, even unlimited. So go to mintmobile.com/history.

• 36:41Speaker 01

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• 37:07Speaker 00

  This episode is supported by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Now, history's biggest leaps started as hard questions that people didn't want asked.

• 37:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a classic example of that at the end of the 15th century. And the hard question in particular was, what is out there beyond the Atlantic Ocean to the west? And as you will know, the man who found the answer to that question was the explorer Christopher Columbus. And he realizes, or rather, everybody else realizes, that there is a vast continent out there and it is, of course, the Americas. So Anthropic knows the importance of questions and it's why Anthropic is founded on one hard question above all. How can we ensure that the AI revolution really goes well for ordinary people?

• 37:50Speaker 00

  So they asked over 100,000 people and what came back wasn't just fear, there was hope as well. People wanted to know, will cancer ever be cured? Can kids have a better future? It turns out that there is hope in hard questions.

• 38:04Speaker 01

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• 38:45Speaker 00

  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 Mjolnir Hunting Lodge, some 20 odd miles outside Vienna where two friends of Crown Prince Rudolf, 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?

• 39:18Speaker 01

  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 in the billiard room, Crown Prince Rudolf is waiting.

• 39:40Speaker 00

  So alive and well.

• 39:41Speaker 01

  He's alive and well and he seems in good form.

• 39:44Speaker 00

  Or is he well?

• 39:45Speaker 01

  Well, he's not well. He's got gonorrhea and he's off his space 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 pact. But apart from that, he looks like he's in brilliant form.

• 39:58Speaker 00

  And has he got the kind of little snuffle?

• 40:00Speaker 01

  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 Coburg 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 Loschek, he says, "Can you send a telegram to my wife, please?" Crown Prince says, "Stephanie." Telegram reads, "Please tell Papa that I ask his pardon for not appearing at dinner,

• 40:45Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 41:29Speaker 01

  And Rudolph is clearly in quite good form. He's coming out with some great banter. He says, "It's much easier to deal with gondogs than with Hungarian politicians." And Hoyos thinks this is absolutely hilarious. 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.

• 41:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is. Don't think his mother would approve.

• 42:00Speaker 01

  No.

• 42:00Speaker 00

  Cece loves Hungarian.

• 42:01Speaker 01

  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 metres 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 Vetsera. 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 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

• 42:42Speaker 01

  brings champagne from the cellar and he calls for Bratfish, the coachman. He's still hanging around. Aaliyah 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.

• 42:56Speaker 00

  I think we've established it's a ludicrous name.

• 42:58Speaker 01

  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, Mary and Rudolph.

• 43:10Speaker 00

  That sounds incredibly annoying.

• 43:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 43:14Speaker 00

  Can't you make him shut up?

• 43:15Speaker 01

  Some bloke called Mr. Grilled Fish turns up and whistles at you.

• 43:20Speaker 00

  It's the last thing you want.

• 43:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:21Speaker 00

  Especially on your last night. Spoiler.

• 43:24Speaker 01

  How does you want to spend your last hours on?

• 43:28Speaker 00

  I wonder if they shot themselves.

• 43:29Speaker 01

  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 Loschek, 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.

• 44:11Speaker 01

  Now, Loschek at this point, he gets dressed, you know, he's had 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. Loschek 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. And he knocks on the back door. Again, no reply. Loschek is becoming quite anxious now because Rudolph is a famously light sleeper. And the dogs started barking. So it's a slightly chaotic

• 44:56Speaker 01

  scene. The hunting dogs are all barking because of the knocking. Loschek 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 who'd 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 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

• 45:36Speaker 01

  with the Crown Prince." And then this is the point when Hoyos and Coburg 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 Loschek 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,

• 46:17Speaker 01

  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 Rudolf. 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

• 47:01Speaker 01

  has happened at Crown Prince Rudolf'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 Cece's chamberlain, who is called Baron Nopscha. And they say, "Well, we will tell the Empress and then she can tell the Emperor." So Cece, Elizabeth,

• 47:42Speaker 01

  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.

• 47:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, for two or three hours, learning Greek, all of that.

• 47:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. Then she would have a herbal tea and she would do some exercises in her private gym. Then she, 10 o'clock, had started a Greek lesson with Monsieur Rousofalos 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 Nopscha and Count Hoyos want to see you urgently." And Elizabeth was furious, "You don't interfere with my Greek lessons." But then Baron Nopscha 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.

• 48:32Speaker 00

  Well, he always gets up early, doesn't he? Because he's got an empire to run.

• 48:35Speaker 01

  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 four twenty. 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 eleven o'clock, he went, 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 pre-arranged

• 49:17Speaker 01

  meeting with his confidant, Katerina Schrat, the actress. Katerina Schrat was going to do a drama recital for his wife. And this was, this is brilliant for him because he'll see his two favourite people at once. And, you know, their little mainage, at what they, he loves all that. But he gets there and he finds Baron Knopfstra blocking the door to his wife's apartment. Baron Knopfstra'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.

• 49:58Speaker 01

  And soon after that, all the operas, the theatres, the cabarets, the music halls are told to cancel their evening programmes with their explanation. And by mid afternoon, there's a crowd outside the Hofberg, people know something has happened. There are people talking about Crown 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 are, 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?

• 50:43Speaker 00

  Throttled by the Kaiser.

• 50:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. He's died of apoplexy after the Kaiser's been rude about an Austrian army belt or something of that kind, surely.

• 50:54Speaker 00

  Be the obvious explanation, wouldn't it?

• 50:56Speaker 01

  But not, 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.

• 51:09Speaker 00

  I mean, I can't imagine in a, because it's still a very devoutly Catholic.

• 51:13Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 51:14Speaker 00

  City and country.

• 51:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:16Speaker 00

  I mean, the impact must be devastating.

• 51:18Speaker 01

  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.

• 51:32Speaker 00

  Prince William, yeah.

• 51:34Speaker 01

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

• 51:42Speaker 00

  I think it's much worse than that because suicide is no longer framed as, as, as a sin.

• 51:49Speaker 01

  No, it's true. Yeah.

• 51:50Speaker 00

  You know, it's treated with sympathy and, 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, it's important to their legitimacy that they are Catholic.

• 52:04Speaker 01

  Completely. They're the guardians of Catholicism.

• 52:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:07Speaker 01

  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 worked late that night. And he rang by ten 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.

• 52:51Speaker 01

  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 Hermann Widerhofer, who had been to Maling to, and it was the first person who basically went into the room to inspect the bodies. And Professor Widerhofer 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.

• 53:32Speaker 00

  To ask for breakfast?

• 53:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:33Speaker 00

  So what do you think was going on there?

• 53:35Speaker 01

  Don't know. Did he ever plan to eat the breakfast, change his mind? Impossible to say. Strange.

• 53:42Speaker 00

  I mean, everything about this is strange. Let's not deny that.

• 53:45Speaker 01

  No, but there's, um, this, the worst of it, I think for Franz Joseph is the, is what Widerhofer then says. The Crown Prince has left a number of letters. So he's left a letter to his mother, Cece. 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 Heiligenkreuz, 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.

• 54:30Speaker 00

  And a shrewd analysis.

• 54:32Speaker 01

  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 Loschek, 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 is unknown, has never been released. And for his father, the emperor, there was no letter at all, nothing.

• 55:05Speaker 00

  Oh dear.

• 55:06Speaker 01

  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, for a father, that would be.

• 55:20Speaker 00

  Of course, of course. Devastating.

• 55:23Speaker 01

  That would be almost the worst blow of all, I think.

• 55:27Speaker 00

  Such kind of posthumous cruelty as well, isn't it?

• 55:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. So eventually he composes himself and he says, where is my son? And Dr. Widerhofer said, well, we've brought the body back to the palace as you ordered. We've dressed him in a uniform, we have 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 fifteen 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, 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.

• 56:11Speaker 01

  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. Cece 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.

• 56:53Speaker 01

  And she found that the city police had cordoned off her townhouse, her mansion, because of the crowds outside. She was in a terrible state, she wanted to go into the house. And eventually the Austrian Prime Minister, Count Tarfe, turned up. He was very, I think we described him in the last episode, he's very suave, kind of top hat, cigar. And he sort of said, my dear, 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 have done. I could not resist love. In agreement with him, I wish to be buried by his side at the Alland Churchyard.

• 57:36Speaker 01

  It's actually a slightly different place from the Heiligenkreuz 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.

• 57:58Speaker 01

  The emperor, however, gets in touch with Heiligenkreuz's abbey and his staff 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 Mayerling. They identified her body. A doctor washed the blood off her body and they dressed it in coat and hat, in that 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.

• 58:43Speaker 01

  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.

• 58:53Speaker 00

  Because there are all kinds of stories where Sherlock Holmes turns up.

• 58:56Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 58:56Speaker 00

  And solves the case, aren't there? I don't think he'd have been fooled by that.

• 59:00Speaker 01

  No, he wouldn't. I mean, this is so Sherlock Holmes, isn't it? It's sort of scandal in Bohemia.

• 59:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:05Speaker 01

  You know, all of that. So the carriage rolled through the night to Heiligenkreuz's 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.

• 59:50Speaker 01

  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."

• 59:57Speaker 00

  So that is a contrast with Diana in the 90s.

• 1:00:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:02Speaker 00

  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?

• 1:00:13Speaker 01

  Well, 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 Austria-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 Rudolf? 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

• 1:00:58Speaker 01

  then, is he? Or even a murderer? He was, poor fellow, what a terrible shame. He can be buried on the Kapitschen Krypt 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.

• 1:01:22Speaker 00

  I think, though, it's very unusual for a case that is this high profile. So the Papal Nuncio in Vienna.

• 1:01:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:30Speaker 00

  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 murderer and a suicide.

• 1:01:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right.

• 1:01:41Speaker 00

  So he's not happy about it at all.

• 1:01:42Speaker 01

  And the Papal Nuncio actually then went to the hunting lodge and asked a load of questions, kept kind of looking into it.

• 1:01:48Speaker 00

  So he could team up with Bratfish.

• 1:01:50Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:01:51Speaker 00

  Set up an agency if the Papal Nuncioing doesn't work out.

• 1:01:54Speaker 01

  Brilliant. So anyway, Rudolph lies in state for three days, various places in the Hofberg, and finally in the Hofberg Chapel, the Hofberg Capella. 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, the 5th of February, in the Kapitschen Church and the Kapitschen Krypt, which you can visit. I mean, you can see Crown Prince Rudolf's tomb. I went to see it last, last summer. Of course, this is not the last, you know, very high profile funeral that's going to be in Vienna.

• 1:02:38Speaker 01

  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."

• 1:03:06Speaker 00

  Even to you.

• 1:03:07Speaker 01

  Even to you. Few'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 worst.

• 1:03:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:03:18Speaker 01

  So the funeral was another incredibly sort of Viennese occasion. The ritual would be that the chamberlain would knock on the door of the Kapitschen Krypt, 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 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

• 1:04:03Speaker 01

  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 war us.

• 1:04:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:04:18Speaker 01

  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 at the day, was a guy called Edouard 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, I mean, you mentioned Diana a few times.

• 1:04:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:04:53Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:05:03Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, you, you said that Diana's world wasn't Gothic, it was Hello magazine and everything.

• 1:05:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:09Speaker 00

  And so it seemed expressive of a kind of age of celebrity that was running out of control.

• 1:05:16Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:05:16Speaker 00

  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 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?

• 1:05:42Speaker 01

  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 Fandiskliek Vienna, the sense of neurosis, the sense of introspection of, of cultural anxiety, also cultural excitement, of course. This seems reflective of that world.

• 1:06:20Speaker 00

  And also of the, the German-speaking world more generally, because Wagner is, I mean, you know, the Liebestod, the idea of, of love and death.

• 1:06:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:30Speaker 00

  And, and two lovers who are united in death.

• 1:06:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. Tristan and Isolde. Yeah, exactly.

• 1:06:36Speaker 00

  I mean, it's, it's probably the most celebrated work of music that has been produced in the late 19th century.

• 1:06:44Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:06:45Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:06:52Speaker 01

  Completely. And precisely because it's overwhelming, that's where you get the conspiracy theories. 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,

• 1:07:36Speaker 01

  and they wanted to punish him for it.

• 1:07:38Speaker 00

  What about Stephanie?

• 1:07:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, there are theories that Crown Prince Stephanie did it because she was jealous, of course. The Freemasons, the Jesuits, the Jews, Bismarck did it.

• 1:07:49Speaker 00

  Not the Kaiser?

• 1:07:50Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:08:18Speaker 00

  Well, I guess that's expressive of what is clearly a deep sense of tension between father and son.

• 1:08:24Speaker 01

  But also between the two halves of the empire.

• 1:08:26Speaker 00

  Yeah. And he's, you know, the emperor is obsessing about this even on the day of his, his son's suicide.

• 1:08:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:08:32Speaker 00

  Isn't there a theory that was proposed by Emperor Zeta, who was the last empress, that it was the French, and that it had been organised by Clemenceau, which I think is generally not regarded as plausible?

• 1:08:46Speaker 01

  Why did Clemenceau do it? Remind me why Clemenceau wanted to kill Crown Prince Rudolf?

• 1:08:50Speaker 00

  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 seventies or something.

• 1:09:00Speaker 01

  She did, yeah.

• 1:09:00Speaker 00

  Maybe even the eighties. And she was, she was, kept repeating this.

• 1:09:03Speaker 01

  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 C C and they love Crown Prince Rudolf. So if you go to the Cappuccino 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 Rudolf'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.

• 1:09:39Speaker 00

  It's kind of Kurt Cobain of Austria-Hungary.

• 1:09:42Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:09:56Speaker 00

  It's the Titanic.

• 1:09:57Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:10:14Speaker 00

  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 sowing themselves into their, their uniforms and their clothing. So, you know, Franz Ferdinand, when he gets shot, it takes time for them to realise that the blood is welling out. We're going to hear something similar about C C in due course, I think. That there is, that monarchy is a kind of trap for those who find themselves enclosed within it.

• 1:10:49Speaker 01

  Very 21st century theme, right? And people often say that's about the House of Windsor, don't they?

• 1:10:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, but, but the difference with the House of Windsor is that they can kind of make radio programmes 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.

• 1:11:11Speaker 01

  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. There would not, I mean, it's hard to imagine a 14th century prince.

• 1:11:23Speaker 00

  No, but, and it's changing nowhere more than in Vienna.

• 1:11:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:11:28Speaker 00

  Vienna is the, you know, this is where all these ideas of repression and neurosis and psychosis and everything are being defined at this very moment.

• 1:11:40Speaker 01

  Maybe a particular kind of introspection, and a sense of yourself, or I don't know.

• 1:11:46Speaker 00

  He's vibelording, I believe is the phrase.

• 1:11:48Speaker 01

  It's vibelording, is that the phrase? Gen Z joins us on the podcast. Brilliant. So 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 Miling, 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.

• 1:12:26Speaker 00

  He needs all the prayers he can get.

• 1:12:28Speaker 01

  He does. So 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, in 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.

• 1:12:58Speaker 00

  So do we get his dysentery returned to the show?

• 1:13:01Speaker 01

  Dysentery returned to the show and carried off Carl Ludwig, and the heir became his son, Rudolph's protege, Franz Ferdinand. So a great fan of the Restless 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 C C 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,

• 1:13:42Speaker 01

  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 her these very sweet letters. The end of one letter, he signs off, 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.

• 1:14:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:14:22Speaker 01

  And when finally they worked out what happened, they realised 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 travelled to Geneva to kill a royal, because it was a favourite royal hangout. And he said afterwards, he didn't care which one he killed, as long as he killed one. And C C was the person that he killed. And when the news got back to Vienna, Franz Joseph, 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.

• 1:15:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:15:07Speaker 01

  So this for him was the crowning blow. He still had his actress, Katerina Schrat, though their relationship had actually cooled by this point. He's very lonely. He writes to Katerina Schrat 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,

• 1:15:49Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:16:11Speaker 00

  His red boxes.

• 1:16:13Speaker 01

  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 manoeuvres in 1914. And Tom, we all know how that story was to end.

• 1:16:44Speaker 00

  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 Nopsha, Cici's Chamberlain. And his nephew is also Franz Baron Nopsha, 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 Nopsha, Nopsha Junior, absolutely Titanic figure in the history of the study of dinosaurs.

• 1:17:24Speaker 00

  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 Miling 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 at therestishistory.com.

• 1:17:56Speaker 01

  That sounds amazing.

• 1:17:57Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:18:23Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:18:34Speaker 00

  It's very Flashman, isn't it?

• 1:18:35Speaker 01

  There's a Flashman book about it, Flashman on the March.

• 1:18:38Speaker 00

  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 is 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.

• 1:19:22Speaker 00

  So that is the Miling Incident. Next week, we begin a six-part series on another royal, but this is a royal who lives through a ripe old age and does heroic things all her reign, and it is Elizabeth I. And we will be looking at the road that takes Elizabeth I to the fateful decision to execute Mary Queen of Scots and thereby inspire the launching of the Spanish Armada against her.

• 1:19:54Speaker 01

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

• 1:19:55Speaker 00

  Francis Drake is in it.

• 1:19:57Speaker 01

  Sir Philip Sidney.

• 1:19:58Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:20:07Speaker 01

  Brilliant.

• 1:20:08Speaker 00

  So if you love a Tudor, you're going to love this series. We will see you then. Bye-bye.

• 1:20:12Speaker 01

  Auf Wiedersehen.

• 1:20:25Speaker 04

  We are getting a statement from Number Ten. On that flight, with 350 passengers onboard.

• 1:20:34Speaker 05

  The Great Game: Strategic Struggle Between Britain and Russia.

• 1:20:41Speaker 06

  We assess Prime Minister...

• 1:20:45Speaker 06

  With high confidence, it was Russian.

• 1:20:48Speaker 01

  Holding the Russians accountable is World War III.

• 1:20:50Speaker 07

  They took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people.

• 1:20:53Speaker 05

  Man in the Kremlin is playing, Alex. Got to ask yourself: Do you want to play, or not? You're the Prime Minister. You've done... Nothing!

• 1:21:06Speaker 00

  We would need to understand the policy context.

• 1:21:08Speaker 05

  All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today. And disseminated into an operation order, or FRAGO.

• 1:21:17Speaker 08

  A FRAGO that says to... Kill the President of Russia.

• 1:21:22Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:21:24Speaker 08

  New from Goalhanger. Who is going to be able to pull this off?

• 1:21:28Speaker 09

  You're my soldier, are you? Sergeant Tom McDuff, Duffy!

• 1:21:32Speaker 08

  An audio drama journey like no other.

• 1:21:34Speaker 09

  Men like Duffy, they are our most valuable weapons.

• 1:21:38Speaker 08

  Devized as a technically rigorous geopolitical action thriller.

• 1:21:42Speaker 09

  We have two types friendly.

• 1:21:43Speaker 08

  Where Britain plays its strongest hand... He's the best. Against its strongest foe. Don't do it, Duffy! Bear Hunt. Available now, wherever you get your podcasts.