689. A Murderous Affair: The Habsburgs’ Greatest Scandal (Part 1)

What was Vienna like in the 1880s? Why was Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria seen as the outcast of the prestigious Habsburg dynasty? And, how would meeting 17 year-old Baroness Mary Vetsera on his 30th birthday change both of their lives, and the trajectory of Europe, forever? Join Dominic and Tom as they unravel the mysterious tale that is the Mayerling Incident. *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 _______ Lloyds. 250 years on and still backing the nation's aspirations. _______ 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

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  Count Hoyos and the Prince of Coburg ordered Loszek to break down the door. Out of breath, half crying, Loszek whispered that he had to inform their serene lordships that a lady, the Baroness Mary Vetsera, was staying in his Imperial Highness's room. Coburg and Hoyos recoiled. They retreated to the billiard room. Loszek kept knocking and calling. A kitchen maid began to whimper. Within a minute, the two emerged and repeated their order. Break down the door. Some servant had already brought a wood chopping axe.

• 3:45Speaker 00

  Loszek raised it to smash the lock. The lock resisted. Loszek hacked away at the white painted door panels. The axe crashed. The panels splintered. Ravens fluttered up from the snow outside. The dogs barked and howled to the echoing blows. Loszek hacked out a gash. The gash became a hole. Framed in jagged wood, smoky with blurred candles, dark with

• 4:20Speaker 00

  the drawn blinds, the room inside was visible. Only then did Loszek drop his axe. The silence which followed changed the empire. So that is the climactic scene from Frederick Norton's great book, A Nervous Splendor, which is a portrait of fundacyekla Vienna at the end of the 1880s. And it is a tremendously Gothic account of the most notorious murder-suicide in European history, a scandal so fantastically

• 4:59Speaker 00

  lurid that it makes the travails of our own beloved royal family, well, like nothing very much at all in comparison. And the context couldn't be more colourful. We're just outside Vienna, the year is 1888. Vienna, of course, at this period, the city of Mahler, of Klimt, the young Freud, busy developing his theories of psychoanalysis, his notions about the sexual etiology of neurosis and the question of sex and neurosis will not be irrelevant to this story. And Vienna is the capital of an empire that is struggling to cope with forces that

• 5:39Speaker 00

  in the 20th century will have an absolutely explosive effect. Nationalism, antisemitism, a host of other modern pathologies. But the scene I just described, Dominic, I mean, it does read like something out of a kind of 19th century Gothic thriller, doesn't it? Like something out of Edgar Allan Poe.

• 5:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely it does. So, hi everybody. The scene is a remote hunting lodge in the woods outside Vienna. And the two principal characters, so I'm going to give the game away right away. Our killer is the 30-year-old heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, his Crown Prince Rudolf, an idealistic, haggard man. He's off his face on morphine and champagne. He is riddled with gonorrhea and he's the kind of man who keeps a skull as a paperweight.

• 6:27Speaker 00

  I mean, he's another of the many people in history who look like our producer Callum. There's astonishing number of them. But maybe the interesting thing about this, we did our series on Jack the Ripper and we poo-pooed the notion that a crown prince could be a killer in that series. But here, there's not much doubt, is there?

• 6:45Speaker 01

  There's no doubt whatsoever. So there's Crown Prince Rudolf, and then there is his accomplice and victim. And this is his teenage mistress, Baroness Mary Vetsera, who is a fashionista. She's a party girl. She's a social climber. And she has become infatuated with him to the point of self-destruction. And it's a brilliant, brilliant story. I mean, all through the decades, writers and artists have been drawn to it. There are manga, comics, there are plays, there are operas, there's ballet, Kenneth MacMillan's great ballet from the 1970s, a real favourite at the Royal Ballet in London.

• 7:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, because it was staged this spring at Covent Garden.

• 7:21Speaker 01

  Yes. So it's a fantastic story. And we'll get straight into it. And we'll begin with the time and place, which is a great favourite of the rest of history, the Austro-Hungarian Empire. So worlds of gigantic cakes, even more gigantic moustaches, insanely dapper uniforms, waltzes, nationalism simmering beneath the surface, the subconscious sexual psychosis.

• 7:47Speaker 00

  Exactly. We are here for all of it.

• 7:49Speaker 01

  Now, to remind listeners, particularly people who didn't hear our series about the build-up to the First World War and the Austro-Hungarian Empire last featured, it's in Central Europe, it's this mosaic of languages and ethnicities. Half of it is ruled from Vienna, half of it from Budapest. There are 13 million German speakers, 10 million Hungarians, 5 billion Czechs, there are Poles, Italians, Slovenes, Jews, you name it. And what binds them is their unity to the Habsburg dynasty. So it's a 13th century dynasty, the Habsburgs. Rudolph, of course, is a Habsburg. In his book that you mentioned, brilliant book, A Nervous Splendor, Frederick Morton calls them manipulative, industrious, strangely

• 8:26Speaker 01

  modest, inexorable, decent, stodgy, staunch. Drabness was their secret. Drabness and patience. And the man who embodies this.

• 8:39Speaker 01

  Is Rudolph's father, and that is Emperor Franz Joseph the First, a great, great favourite of the show. So because basically he lived forever.

• 8:49Speaker 00

  He's Elizabeth the Second, isn't he, of 90th century history?

• 8:52Speaker 01

  He completely is. And we'll get, because he's the father of the killer, we'll spend a bit of time with him because he's such an important figure in this story. So at this point, although he died in 1916, but at this point, 1888, he is not yet 60. And he was born in 1830 in Schoenbrunn Palace, the Austrian kind of Versailles outside Vienna. And he was really the ultimate Habsburg. He's, if you take the sort of Habsburg spirit, was that decent, stodgy, staunch drab. He's peak Habsburg and distilled it in human form. You have this guy. So he's very, you know, he's very pious, pious Catholic. He's completely committed to the imperial ideal. He grew up as a little boy with a passion for uniforms and parades

• 9:35Speaker 01

  and toy soldiers. And that runs all the way through his life. And in the history books, he generally, historians tend to kind of laugh at him because historians don't like people like this. He's a sensitive man, Franz Joseph, but he's, perhaps because he's sensitive, he's very stubborn and he's a stickler for order.

• 9:53Speaker 00

  Protocol, right? Everything has to be governed by protocol.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  People used to joke that when he made love to his wife, he would always be wearing full regimental uniform.

• 10:01Speaker 00

  I mean, the ladies love a uniform.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  They do. And the uniform means a lot to him. There are loads and loads of stories of him losing his temper when people come to court in the, in the, in the wrong uniform. There's famously a story that there was a junior officer, you know, just a young bloke at a kind of ball or at a, you know, at some function, had the wrong number of decorative buttons on his sleeve. And Franz Joseph said, well, how dare you? How dare you turn up with the wrong number of buttons? And various other people explained to the emperor that tailors had stopped making these decorative buttons because they were pointless. And Franz Joseph was absolutely crushed. And he said, it's quite wrong. It's monstrous.

• 10:40Speaker 00

  Because this is, this is a signal that nothing is stable and all may pass.

• 10:45Speaker 01

  Exactly. So as a, just a, a thought about our protagonist, Grand Prince Rudolf. So he's growing up with a father who is intensely conservative, who's emotionally very taciturn, who is obsessed with duty and order, and not a man who will show strong feeling to his son, which I think is a factor in, in explaining how Grand Prince Rudolf gets to where he gets to.

• 11:08Speaker 00

  Faint echo of Prince Philip and Prince Charles?

• 11:12Speaker 01

  Possibly, yeah. I think there is a slight element of that actually in this story.

• 11:15Speaker 00

  Prince Philip was always kind of forcing Prince Charles into Spartan activities that he didn't really enjoy.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  I think Franz Joseph would have approved of Gordonston as a school, don't you?

• 11:26Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 11:27Speaker 01

  So Franz Joseph became emperor when he was 18 years old. So it's the chaos of the 1848 revolutions. His uncle, Emperor Ferdinand, who was epileptic, abdicated. And in this moment of great tension and great flux for the Austro, the Austrian Empire, Franz Joseph was parachuted in as emperor. And he stands, from that moment onwards, he stands for stability, discipline, tradition, and so on. He makes himself the fixed point, which is why your parallel with Elizabeth the Second, I think, is very well observed. I think they're both monarchs who in an age of change decide to play the part. They decide to become the embodiment of continuity. Now, an emperor needs an empress. And this brings us to Rudolph's mother.

• 12:10Speaker 00

  Oh, yes.

• 12:12Speaker 01

  So surely the most romantic, certainly the most romantic, maniacal figure in Central European history, Elizabeth of Bavaria. Now, people in the English speaking world may not gauge just how popular she was in Central Europe. She was the focus of an absolutely intense cult, personality cult. Basically, if you think about Princess Diana in the 1980s and 90s, she's that on steroids. Her nickname was Cece. And she was a sex symbol. She was a fashion leader. She was an influencer. She was the personification of glamour. She was romantic heroine. She was a sportswoman. For lots of people, she was basically a saint

• 12:54Speaker 01

  and a martyr. And her story really is bonkers. So she was born in 1837 into a sort of minor branch of the Bavarian royal family. And her father was called Duke Maximilian, and he was an absolute madman. He was obsessed with circuses. And he, he didn't give her a proper education because unusually, he hoped that his daughter would grow up to join the circus.

• 13:19Speaker 00

  Run away from a palace and join a circus.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. So she's only sort of half educated. She's a bit of an autodidact.

• 13:26Speaker 00

  Well, do you know, Dominic, I've always found that a very appealing aspect of her because she, you know, she had this enormously long hair.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, down to her ankles.

• 13:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, down to her ankles. And, and it was so heavy that she would complain that its weight gave her headaches. And so it took her maids kind of two or three hours every morning to, to comb it and to brush it out and to adorn it and whatever. And while she's doing it, she sits there learning difficult languages. So she learnt Hungarian. She became hugely popular with Hungarians, as we will find out. And then she learnt ancient Greek. And I had to learn ancient Greek. And I unfortunately didn't have as long, didn't have long hair and I didn't have a tendance to, to comb it. But I, nevertheless, while I was at my blutions, I would try and, and emulate Cece by learning some regular Greek.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  When you're combing your hair?

• 14:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  Okay. Well, that's impressive.

• 14:15Speaker 00

  So she's a role model still to this day, is what I'm saying.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  She and Franz Joseph have an incredibly romantic origin story as a couple. So when she was 15, she went with her mother and her older sister, Helen, Nene, she was called, to the spa town of Bad Ischl.

• 14:31Speaker 00

  Great to have a spa town.

• 14:32Speaker 01

  It is great. And the reason they were going there was they're going to meet Franz Joseph because the two mothers had agreed basically that Franz Joseph would marry Helen. Franz Joseph was then 23. And his mother, Sophie, she was called, had picked out Helen as a sort of German speaking Catholic, you know, ideal regal bride, imperial bride. When they met for tea, Helen was very shy and serious and she was poor at small talk, as was Franz Joseph.

• 15:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, wouldn't it? I mean, he's shy and serious, isn't he?

• 15:03Speaker 01

  Exactly. But he was looking for something more. He didn't want another shy and serious person. He wanted a circus performer.

• 15:08Speaker 00

  He did. Cece was there and she was only 15. And she was basically there for, you know, she was along for a jaunt. So she was in great form, joking, you know, good humoured. Shaking her very long hair.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  Exactly. She's a very elegant looking, sort of innocent teenage girl. And after this, they'd had tea. Franz Joseph's brother said to their mother, he said, Mama, Francie likes Cece very much, better than Nene. You will see, he will choose her instead of the elder one. And their mother said, no, no, no, he'll do as is told. I mean, he may be the emperor, but he'll do as I tell him. Anyway, Franz Joseph went to see his mother that evening and said, it's Cece or nobody. I'm in love.

• 15:45Speaker 00

  I mean, how awful for Helen.

• 15:47Speaker 01

  Right, gutting for Helen. Although the, the upside for Helen is she didn't have to marry Franz Joseph. So, you know, swings and roundabouts. Anyway, the next day, they had a big ball and Franz Joseph danced with Cece to the exclusion almost of everybody else. And when servants gave him loads of flowers to give to all his dance partners for the day, he gave them all to Cece. And people said, oh, well, there's no fighting this. So the next day, which was his birthday, the two mothers said, they got together and they said, fine. You know, Franz Joseph can marry Cece after all. So a very romantic story. They went for a midnight carriage ride and he wrapped Cece up in his military cloak and he whispered in her ear, I can hardly say how happy I am to be marrying

• 16:30Speaker 01

  you. And he, to Franz Joseph, you know, she is a dream. She's his fairy tale princess. And a year later, she arrives in Vienna for the wedding. And there are huge crowds, there's merch, there's an amazing scene. So the Countess of Westmoreland was, was there to see it happen, to see her arrive. And she described how the boat docked, the emperor ran onto the bridge and embraced her openly. And she said, I can't tell you the effect of the simple natural act. Not only thousands of spectators on the banks burst into prolonged cheers, but many eyes besides mine were wet. She's a thousand times better than her portraits. None of them give an idea of her freshness, her air of candour and gentleness and intelligence.

• 17:13Speaker 01

  So this sounds great, right? This sounds fantastic. But the reality is a little bit different. You know, it's a fairy tale. We're not unfamiliar with this, of course, in modern British history, a fairy tale royal wedding that doesn't turn out quite as happily as you would think. So in his great book on the Habsburgs, Andrew Weecroft, British historian, says, behind the fairy tale image, the reality was a gauche and rather difficult girl, flattered yet terrified by his overwhelming passion. And this is absolutely right. Cece said herself, you know, why me? I'm so young. I'm so unimportant. I'll try to keep him happy, but will it be enough? She is absolutely crippled by self consciousness. She doesn't get on with Franz Joseph's mother.

• 17:57Speaker 00

  No, the mother's awful, isn't she? And when, and when she has children, they're always taking the children away and not letting her have anything to do with them.

• 18:04Speaker 01

  Exactly, constantly squabbling, you know, the worst kind of mother-in-law, basically. But in C C, I think partly because she's been brought up to be in the circus. She never quite grows up, so she's always a little bit of a sort of spoiled child. She's very moody, she is brooding, she is stubborn. These are qualities that she will pass on to her son, Rudolph.

• 18:26Speaker 00

  I mean, it helps presumably that she's incredibly beautiful and glamorous. Because if you're moody and beautiful and glamorous, then it comes to seem part of the package, rather than just being annoying.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  Of course, exactly right, exactly. So they have two girls almost straight away, Sophie and Gisela. But Sophie died of scarlet fever when she was two. And I think this was probably for C C, who was only 20 at the time. A shattering moment from which she probably never really recovered, to be quite honest. Anyway, a year later, 1858, 21st August, 1858, she has a son. And this, of course, is giving Franz Joseph what he wants, a male heir. And this is our protagonist, our killer, Crown Prince Rudolf. And he was named after Rudolph the first, who was the first Habsburg to be king of the Romans, basically, Holy Roman Emperor.

• 19:17Speaker 01

  And that name tells a story, because at this point in time, the 1850s, 1860s, the Habsburgs, all the rage is what's called historicism. So they are looking back constantly to try to find some historical legitimacy for their embattled dynasty and their state. And Rudolph is the focus for enormous expectation right from day one. So they had a big gala at the Court Theatre in Vienna to celebrate his birth. And they had an actress, I thought this would appeal to you, Tom, an actress playing the part of Cleo, the muse of history, who has a golden tablet on stage and she writes his name and the date of his birth on the tablet. And then she says to the audience, but the rest of the tablet I leave empty.

• 19:59Speaker 01

  There must be room for his deeds and I divine greatness, which I shall record here yet.

• 20:05Speaker 00

  It's like something from a Greek myth or a fairy tale, isn't it? Because of course, his deeds will indeed be written down in the annals of history, but not quite as his parents would hope.

• 20:15Speaker 01

  No, exactly. So like his father, Rudolph is brought up, effectively he's trained to be a soldier because the army is the supreme Habsburg institution.

• 20:25Speaker 00

  I mean, Tom, you say he's raised up. The day after his birth, he is appointed the Colonel of an infantry regiment and given the order of the Golden Fleece, which regular listeners may remember Edward Habsburg, who was a member of the Habsburg, I think the only Habsburg we've had on the show and who did a whole episode about that space. And he promised me that I would join the order of the Golden Fleece. A promise he hasn't yet delivered. And also, young Rudolph, he got his first military uniform when he was two.

• 20:54Speaker 01

  That does not surprise me. So when he was six, he was handed over to a general to tutor him. And this bloke was an absolutely monstrous kind of military taskmaster. So he would wake the six-year-old Rudolph up by shooting a pistol over his head, like right by his ear.

• 21:10Speaker 00

  I mean, this is very Prince Philip, isn't it, with Prince Charles?

• 21:13Speaker 01

  Basically waterboard him, like to prepare him for the, for the rigors of leadership. And he'd also make him, this is a mad detail, he would make him sleep at night in the zoo.

• 21:25Speaker 00

  What, in a cage? With lions?

• 21:28Speaker 01

  I don't know. I don't know. I just saw this detail and I wrote it down in the notes.

• 21:34Speaker 01

  I, I'd love to have time to research this proper, more, in more detail, the zoo, the sleeping in the zoo.

• 21:40Speaker 00

  In the monkey house.

• 21:42Speaker 01

  Exactly, in the, in the reptile enclosure or something. Anyway, Rudolph was completely traumatized by this. And basically, after two years of this, Accortia mentioned to his mother that this was happening. And she complained.

• 21:55Speaker 00

  Where he's sleeping with snakes.

• 21:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, she complained and the general was fired. But it obviously, I mean, take, you don't have to be a great psychoanalyst, you don't have to be a psychoanalyst.

• 22:06Speaker 01

  This would probably really screw you up. Anyway, so it also tells you something about C C's parenting. The fact that it's taken two years to notice that her son is sleeping in the lion enclosure. So she's not a terribly interested parent. I think that's reasonable to say. She's in fact so self-absorbed with her hair and her sort of brooding and whatnot, that she doesn't really have time for her children. And when Rudolph was two, she said to Franz Joseph, she said, I need to go to Madeira for my health, I need to go immediately. And Franz Joseph said, oh my God, you know, the doctors will have, I'll get the doctors to have a look at you. The doctors reported there was absolutely nothing wrong with her. And she said, no, no, I'm terribly ill, I absolutely must go to Madeira.

• 22:47Speaker 01

  Why, we don't know, they might have had a row, or I think quite possibly she's suffering extreme postnatal depression. But anyway, off she went to Madeira, spent the whole winter there, then she came back to Vienna for a little bit. And then she said to Franz Joseph, I need to leave again, I need to go to Corfu now. And then she went to Corfu.

• 23:05Speaker 00

  And she loves Corfu, doesn't she?

• 23:07Speaker 01

  And she, oh, she absolutely adored Corfu.

• 23:09Speaker 00

  She builds the Achilleon.

• 23:10Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly.

• 23:11Speaker 00

  Which we've talked about.

• 23:12Speaker 01

  And Franz Joseph went to visit her in Corfu and said, you know, how are you getting on, are you feeling better? She said, not really, I'll probably stay here for a while.

• 23:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, for a few weeks, maybe months, maybe years.

• 23:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. And this is basically the story of the next few decades. She's traveling constantly.

• 23:29Speaker 00

  She goes to England a lot, doesn't she? Goes fox hunting.

• 23:32Speaker 01

  In Northamptonshire bizarrely, she goes, she likes going to Northamptonshire. She also likes hanging out in Ireland and again, going hunting and sort of hanging out with the Anglo-Irish aristocracy. And then occasionally she'll go to Monte Carlo to play the tables in the casino.

• 23:45Speaker 00

  I mean, I think if I was a beautiful 19th century empress, that is what I would do.

• 23:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. You would go to, you'd go to Monte Carlo and Corfu.

• 23:54Speaker 00

  I'd play the tables, I'd go fox hunting in England, I'd hang out in Corfu, I'd be moody.

• 23:59Speaker 01

  Do you know what, actually, the parallels are uncanny, you know, like you.

• 24:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:03Speaker 01

  As with you, her clothing, her weight, her appearance is discussed in the gossip columns of the world.

• 24:11Speaker 00

  Well, she's very, she's very tall, isn't she? Unusually tall and madly thin. So she, her waist is 16 inches. So the corsets are vise-like. And she, she never weighs more than 110 pounds, ever. And if she, if she does, then she goes on these kind of massive, well, she would basically refuse to eat. And she goes to a gym. So she's one of the earliest women in European history regularly to go to a gym. And she has an absolute horror of fat women. And she raises her children to regard them with, with dread and terror. And she get, when she, one, one occasion, she takes her young daughter to, to London to meet Queen Victoria.

• 24:56Speaker 00

  And the poor girl has never seen a fat woman before, so she's Queen Victoria. She wets, she wets herself out of terror.

• 25:04Speaker 01

  Biographers had this great battle about whether or not she was anorexic or bulimic or something.

• 25:08Speaker 00

  Oh, I think she was. Because occasionally she'd go off and eat cake.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  They would describe her eating enormous meals and then somehow miraculously being incredibly thin.

• 25:16Speaker 00

  And she would never eat meat, would she? She would, she'd have beef steaks kind of squeezed and the blood would drip out and then she'd have it with watery soup.

• 25:24Speaker 01

  She probably suffers very badly from some form of mental health issues such as depression. And that would explain why she often seems so listless, so kind of blank, so also so self-destructively reckless when she's hunting. People would say, you know, she's an incredible huntswoman, but one day she's going to fall off and break her neck and, and all of this.

• 25:42Speaker 00

  And the corsetry, the whole corsetry thing. I mean, it, it's kind of, it's so extreme as to be almost fetishistic.

• 25:48Speaker 01

  Exactly. She's punishing herself effectively. Now, while she's gone, Franz Joseph, he has affairs with these sort of very boring, discreet, middle-class women who can be relied upon to keep quiet. And his most celebrated relationship is with an actress at the Court Theatre called Katerina Schrat. And that was basically set up for him by his wife. He'd long admired this actress and C C said, well, as a present to you, I'll get her portrait painted and maybe you'd like to meet her. And she introduces them and they have this very close relationship. So Katerina Schrat would, she was basically as confident and she was very jolly and she was a good listener. She would make him cakes, she would cook goulash for him and she would tell him all

• 26:32Speaker 01

  the backstage gossip. And C C was very happy with this and she encouraged it and she would sort of, sometimes the three of them would hang out together.

• 26:40Speaker 00

  Did they go on? C C and Katerina?

• 26:43Speaker 01

  I think it's because C C had arranged it because she knew this actress was no conceivable threat to her.

• 26:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, C C's not a goulash cooker, I imagine.

• 26:52Speaker 01

  No, she's not going to make you cakes and tell you great banter about, you know, actors. And of course, if she'd joined the circus, as was intended, it would have been a very different story. But the person that Franz Joseph loves is always clearly C C. He's got her portrait in his study with her hair down to her ankles. He's always sending her presents in Corfu, he writes her sweet letters all the time. He always calls her my dear, dear angel. He signs himself, your little man. Or he called, he literally calls himself your mannequin, because she's much taller than he is. And I think there's something quite sad about his story. So he's this kind of lonely emperor, devoted to his people. He gets up at five o'clock every morning from his iron bedstead to do his paperwork.

• 27:35Speaker 01

  He has his lunch on his own of boiled beef, always the same lunch. Then he goes out to meet his people. He always says exactly the same thing. I mean, even Queen Elizabeth II didn't do this. He always says, it was at the end of every event. It was very nice. I enjoyed it. And then he goes home and then he writes letters to his runaway wife. So that's his story. Now, there is one respect in which C C really helps him out. Because basically, in the first 20 years of his reign, everything has gone wrong for him and for Austria. They were beaten by the French and Piedmont, the Italians, Solferino in 1859. That lost Lombardy, northern Italy for Austria, paved the way for Italian unification.

• 28:18Speaker 01

  And he basically had to grant a kind of constitution and a parliament at home to make up for this. And then, seven years later, he loses another war to Bismarck's Prussia. Basically, it takes seven weeks. It's a catastrophic defeat for the Austrians at the Battle of Kurniggritz. And after this, the Austrians are driven out of the German-speaking world, which is now free to unite under Prussian leadership to become Germany. And that is a devastating moment for Austria and for Franz Joseph. Basically, he's been emperor for 20 years. Everything he's touched has turned to ashes. He's lost Italy. He's lost Germany. You know, Austria's been basically forced back into the Balkans.

• 29:01Speaker 01

  And as a reaction to this latest defeat, it looks like his empire might fall apart. Because the Hungarians, who are, you know, basically half the empire and have rebelled already in 1848, they're now questioning the legitimacy of the entire enterprise. They're not paying their taxes. There's a huge political crisis. It looks as though the whole thing's going to fall apart. Everybody in Vienna hates the Hungarians and says they're terrible people, except one. And you've already mentioned this, Tom. And that's C C. She's been busy learning Hungarian while having her hair done. She has. So she had gone to Budapest a few years earlier and she absolutely loved it. And she had this sort of fantasy of Hungary, a land of gypsy fiddlers, dancing bears. Yeah.

• 29:45Speaker 01

  You know, sort of Count with massive moustaches, all of this. She loves all this. Ruritania, basically. It's a Ruritanian quality. Completely. She's incredibly popular in Budapest. And she says to Franz Joseph, look, I can play a role as an intermediary with the Hungarians. And she introduces him to these nationalist leaders, Count Andrász and Ferenc Deák, who are the big Hungarian sort of bigwigs. She passes letters between them. She encourages her husband to be, you know, flexible and to, you know, look for solutions and stuff. And the result of this is what's called the Compromise of 1867, which is a huge moment in Central European history. Because what it does is it divides the Austrian Empire into two. There's a Hungarian half that will be ruled from Budapest.

• 30:29Speaker 01

  And that includes Transylvania and includes inland Croatia. And then there's an Austrian half ruled from Vienna that includes what's now the Czech Republic. So Bohemia, Moravia includes Galicia in Poland and Ukraine includes Slovenia and so on and so forth. And in Vienna, Franz Joseph rules as emperor of Austria. And in Budapest, he rules as king of Hungary. And to mark the occasion in Budapest, he and C C had given a coronation, a new coronation. She's the first Hungarian queen to be crowned with the Holy Crown of St Stephen, to be given the sceptre and the orb. And the Hungarians absolutely love her. They give her a palace.

• 31:13Speaker 01

  She, whenever she goes, she wears Hungarian national dress. As you said, she speaks Hungarian, all of this. So it looks like everything's gone well, but with the Habsburgs in this period, there's always some sort of amusing calamity just around the corner. The next calamity, well, it's not exactly amusing, is it? But it's eccentric. It's an eccentric calamity. And we've done this on the show, haven't we, with Edward Shawcross? This was the, um, the story of Maximilian Habsburg, who'd gone off to become emperor of Mexico. It's all gone terribly wrong for him. He's Franz Joseph's brother. And he ends up being cornered in Queretaro in Mexico and shot by a firing squad. And Franz Joseph's reaction is so Franz Joseph. He's told, your brother's been shot by a firing squad.

• 31:56Speaker 01

  And he says, what a shame. He was an excellent huntsman and we will miss him at our next shoot. However, and I quote, "We may still look forward to good sport", which I think is an admirably sanguine way to mark your brother's demise. As an Englishman, you're an admirer of a stiff upper lip. So one has to respect that. Exactly. So the net result of all this, we're now into the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary. The upside is it keeps the empire going. The downside is it basically institutionalizes constant squabbling between the Austrian and Hungarian halves of the empire about tariffs, budgets and the army and things like this. And it also kind of institutionalizes an instability at the heart of the empire.

• 32:39Speaker 01

  The Hungarians have had special treatment now. There are lots of other groups, Slovaks, Romanians, Croats and stuff, who are now being ruled from Budapest with an iron fist by the Hungarians. And they don't like this at all. They're resentful. They'd rather have the Austrians. The Austrians are a bit softer on their minorities than the Hungarians are. Because the Hungarians are a bit more insecure, I think. So it's a great tragedy in some ways for the Austro-Hungarians. For the advent of proper parliamentary politics coincides with effectively the invention of national identities. So there's a great book on the Habsburgs by Martin Reedy. And he has this whole thing about how this is the age when people are drawing up censuses,

• 33:18Speaker 01

  they're drawing national maps, ethnographic museums are inventing kind of unbroken histories. Towns are putting up statues of national heroes. Basically, they're inventing fixed national identities where previously they were fluid. And in areas where the people are overlapping, you get different kind of linguistic groups who will set up competing, and I quote, choirs, fire brigades, athletics clubs, savings banks, veterans associations, schools and so on and so forth. So they're basically, you might never have thought, am I a Hungarian? Am I Romanian or whatever? But now people are forcing you to choose. And those identities are becoming kind of locked in.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  And these sort of different groups are, once they're formed, they're fighting for power and influence within this new system. Now, the bloke who is brilliant at manipulating all this is the Austrian prime minister. He's called Count Edouard Taffer. He's of Irish descent, interestingly. The Irish landowners, they'd moved to Moravia in the Czech Republic. And they'd settled there, done very well. And he had been Franz Joseph's childhood friend. And he creates a coalition, this guy Taffer, of sort of Catholic clericals, German landowners, Czech nationalists, Polish nationalists. It's called the Iron Ring, his coalition. And he was very, very sort of suave and self-knowing.

• 34:44Speaker 01

  He said of his own strategy, he said, "My policy is muddling through. I'd like to keep all the nationalities of the monarchy in a state of balanced and well-modulated discontent." Disappointed you didn't give that in an Irish accent.

• 34:58Speaker 01

  That's, that's bonus content. That's for club members, the Irish accents. Now, as a, one of the things that he has to do as part of this is to keep the Czechs happy. So he basically allows junior civil servants in Bohemia and Moravia to use Czech as, rather than German. And that creates a backlash from some of the German speakers. And the German speakers say, what? You're allowing the Czechs to use Czech? What, what are you giving away? You know, our supremacy within the empire to these kind of jumped up Slavs. And the, some of the German speakers say, look, Germany is brilliant. Germany's just been created under Bismarck. It's very modern, it's very dynamic, very militaristic. What are we hanging around for?

• 35:41Speaker 01

  We're like these people stuffing themselves with cake and talking to Slavs. Austria-Hungary is clearly destined for the scrapheap. We, our future lies in a, in a greater Germany. And so in the 1880s, which is the decade leading up to the Miling incident, you have the growth of this very noisy, aggressive Pan-German movement that is bitterly opposed to what they sees as the sort of woke multiculturalism of the Habsburgs and would much prefer union with Berlin. And their spokesman is a guy called Georg von Schönerer, who is the leader of this tiny sort of German nationalist party. And he is a pioneer of extremist antisemitic nationalism. We kind of know where this is going to lead.

• 36:26Speaker 01

  We do indeed. Because Schönerer, he wants to change the calendar dating all years from the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest. Yeah. The defeat of Augustus's three legions. Exactly so. Because he says that was the last point, basically, when Germany, the German-speaking world was free from the taint of kind of bourgeois Jewish capitalism. And we need to get back to that. And he doesn't like Christian festivals, does he? Because they're Jewish. Exactly. Get rid of Christmas from a place that was something called Yule Fest. And the Austrians greet each other by saying Grusgott. He says, get rid of that. Why don't we say Heil? Yeah, why not? Could really catch on. So you can see, right, where all this is leading.

• 37:07Speaker 01

  Because of course, in a couple of decades, a certain Adolf Hitler will be hanging around in Vienna and imbibing a lot of this. Anyway, back to Miling. That's the context. So let's now concentrate, let's get, narrow the focus to Vienna in August, 1888. On the 18th of August, Franz Joseph is due to celebrate his birthday. It actually pours with rain, so it's postponed for a couple of days. And that means that it coincides with what's scheduled for the 20th, which is this guy Georg von Schönerer, the Pan-German extreme nationalist, is due to report to the Landesgerichtsstraße Prison, because he's been sentenced to three months in jail for leading an attack on a Jewish-owned newspaper.

• 37:51Speaker 01

  And the very next day, the 21st, our protagonist, our killer, Crown Prince Rudolph, is due to mark his own birthday. It's his 30th birthday. And although none of them know it, it is also going to be his last. Because something is very, very seriously wrong with Crown Prince Rudolph. Are we going to find out what is wrong after the break? Definitely. Don't miss it then.

• 38:21Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by National Geographic. Tom, we're familiar, aren't we, with what happened in Pompeii when Vesuvius exploded?

• 38:30Speaker 00

  We absolutely are. So AD 79, Vesuvius blows its top. Debris rains down on Pompeii. It ends with a pyroclastic flow, which essentially entombs the city, entombs everyone left living there. And it lay there, waiting to be brought to light centuries and centuries later.

• 38:52Speaker 01

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• 39:07Speaker 00

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• 39:16Speaker 01

  Watch Pompeii: Out of Time with Tom Hiddleston, Thursday at 8pm on National Geographic.

• 39:28Speaker 00

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• 40:07Speaker 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.

• 40:19Speaker 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 realises, or rather, everybody else realises, 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?

• 40:50Speaker 00

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• 41:04Speaker 01

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• 41:15Speaker 00

  Hello, everyone, and welcome back to The Rest is History and to the story of one of the great royal scandals of Central European history. And indeed, I would go so far as to say European history, full stop. And it is the late summer of 1888. We're at the heart of the Austro-Hungarian imperial capital Vienna, a city of almost one and a half million people. And Dominic, there is a case for saying that this is the heartbeat of what will become modern civilisation, isn't it?

• 41:45Speaker 01

  Totally. So we already mentioned, you know, Mahler, Klimt and so on. We'll come back to them in a second. Vienna has been completely transformed in the previous 30 years. So just to give people who haven't been to Vienna a sense of our stage set, if you like. And actually, that's quite a good phrase to use of Vienna. Franz Joseph builders in the last 30 years have ripped down the old city fortifications, and they've made way, the centrepiece of their sort of city planning project is probably at the time the most famous boulevard in the world, which is the Ringstrasse. You'd go there today, it's still this kind of breathtaking spectacle. These magnificent buildings, the Opera House, the Court Theatre, the Parliament, the City Hall, Museum of Natural History, the Art Museum, enormous buildings around this kind of circular,

• 42:29Speaker 01

  I mean, you might call it a ring road if you're being dismissive. And their design tells you something about the Habsburg project in the 19th century. Because the very first buildings on the ring were designed, they were historicists. So each building was sort of designed in a different historical style to reflect its function. So the City Hall would be one star, the Parliament another. And basically, they were saying, well, the Habsburgs are the heirs to all historical styles. But then by the 1880s, when they're finishing off the Ringstrasse, Franz Joseph's architects have settled on just one star, which was Neo-Baroque. And the reason they settled on this, which is quite sort of wedding cakey.

• 43:08Speaker 00

  Kind of florid paintings, isn't it, and all of that?

• 43:11Speaker 01

  Exactly. And the reason they did that is because at the time, in Bismarck's Germany, classic, neoclassical was all the rage, which is kind of slightly colder and more austere. And the Viennese wanted to say, well, we're not like the Germans with their cold classicism. We're more fun, we're more, you know, a little bit more flowery.

• 43:31Speaker 00

  But I mean, that's not entirely a sensible policy, is it? Because if you've got a serious architecture and you've got a kind of wedding cake architecture, which one is, you know, going to have the most potent empire?

• 43:43Speaker 01

  Well, I suppose so. I suppose so. Although I quite like that, that Habsburg style.

• 43:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, I like it, but it doesn't make me think these are going to be the, you know, the master race.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  It makes me think there'll be excellent composers.

• 43:56Speaker 00

  Great composers, great cake, interesting theories about sexuality, totally. But an ability to conquer much of Eastern Europe, I think probably not.

• 44:04Speaker 01

  Probably not, yeah. They roll it out all across the empire. So if you go now, even today, to Trieste, to Lviv, to Krakow, to Prague, wherever, you can see this sort of Habsburg architecture is very recognisable. Now, I called it a stage set, and this sense that it's a sort of Baroque stage set is probably a bit misleading because, as you said, you know, this is the city of psychoanalysis. It's the city of the future in lots of ways. So that summer of 1888, there were the first long-distance telephone calls in Central Europe. They're from Vienna to the suburb of Baden, so it's just outside Vienna, so it's not that long distance. And you're limited to 10 minutes, but people are very excited by this.

• 44:41Speaker 00

  I would like more cake!

• 44:42Speaker 01

  Well, actually, what it is, the greetings that people gave, the sort of, you know, Frau, you know, Herr Doktor, whatever, whatever, took so long. They took so long that you basically only gave you like two minutes at the end of the call. Anyway, if you went to the Prater amusement park, so if you've seen the film The Third Man, the kind of Ferris wheel and Orson Welles. If you go to the Prater amusement park, people would go there and they would buy themselves electric shocks. There was like an electric shock machine. And there were safety regulations to stop people electrousing themselves. But swells from that, the sort of aristocratic bits of Vienna would basically bribe the people running the machine to give them bigger and bigger shocks.

• 45:26Speaker 01

  And they would just have, they would be carted off all the time to hospital ambulances because they'd electrocute themselves.

• 45:31Speaker 00

  Right, so aristocratic self-harm, bit of a theme.

• 45:34Speaker 01

  It's a theme. Now, we mentioned this book by Frederick Morton, A Nervous Splendor. And he sort of, you know, zeroes in on a few characters. So you've got Gustav Klimt, who is painting the new court theatre. He's painting a ceiling panel called the Chariot of Thespis. You have Mahler, who's about to move from Vienna to Budapest to run the opera in Budapest. You have Freud, who then is in his 3030s, is a nerve doctor. But he's just beginning work on the theories of the sort of subconscious. And it's interesting that two of these names, so Mahler and Freud, are Jewish. And actually, there's lots of Jewish influence in Fandesechek Vienna.

• 46:14Speaker 01

  So there's Wittgenstein, there's Schoenberg, there is Arthur Schnitzler, the great writer and so on. And that reflects a bigger story because the Jewish population of Vienna in the last 20 years has risen from 40,000 to well over 100,000, about 120,000. Often, these are people who've come from Galicia, kind of Poland, Ukraine, on the newly-built railways. And they now have legal equality, which they've only had since 1867. And they flood into their professions. So about 60% of Vienna's doctors are Jewish. About half of the lawyers, they're very prominent in art and in publishing and whatnot. And this, of course, means that they are very convenient and easy scapegoats

• 46:57Speaker 01

  for people like Georg von Schoenerer, who can point to them and say, this is why the empire is going wrong. Because we've allowed all these people to come to the capital and to play important parts in the cultural, intellectual life of the capital. Now, there's one man that becomes associated with this Jewish presence. And he's a man who hates Schoenerer and who hates the Pan-German movement and has a lot of Jewish friends. And this is our protagonist. This is Crown Prince Rudolf. So this is the man who was born to be Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary, King of Bohemia, Dalmatius, Transylvania, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all of this.

• 47:35Speaker 00

  So basically, his military education has made him kind of woke.

• 47:40Speaker 01

  A little bit, yeah, a little bit. So we were talking before the break about he's slept in the zoo and been woken by pistol shots. And as time goes on, when he enters his teens, it's obvious that he's very much his mother's son, Cece's son. So he is like her. He is restless, he's brooding, he's very introverted. We actually have some of his teenage jottings when he was about 15.

• 48:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, shall I read them?

• 48:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, why don't you read them in your, in your best Austrian accent?

• 48:08Speaker 00

  The kingdom still stands, a mighty ruin, continuing from one day to the next, but doomed finally to fall. For centuries it has endured, and so long as the people allowed themselves to be led blindly, it was good. But now, its task is at an end. All men are free. And so next storm will sweep away this ruin.

• 48:31Speaker 01

  So he's not very optimistic about his own inheritance. And you might say, well, he's a sort of typical, you know, typical teenager, a bit miserable, a bit, a bit downcast and depressive and whatnot. But I think there's more to this than your usual teenage woes. So they've got another quotation, Tom, I think.

• 48:50Speaker 00

  Thoughts of every kind race endlessly through my head, all is confusion. My brain seizes all day. Now soon has one thought gone and another takes its place. Each one compels me, each one says something different, now gay and cheerful. Now I'm even black with rage.

• 49:10Speaker 02

  I fight them and struggle with them. And out of it all, the truth at last will come.

• 49:15Speaker 01

  He's not a bundle of laughs. I think it's true to say. So when he was 21, his father arranged a marriage for him. And he arranged a marriage to Princess Stephanie.

• 49:27Speaker 00

  She's a jolly fun-loving, fun-loving bride.

• 49:30Speaker 01

  She's not a funster. She's a good person, I think, Stephanie. She's quite decent, good natured.

• 49:34Speaker 00

  I mean, considering her father.

• 49:36Speaker 01

  Her father is one of the worst people we've ever had on the show. Her father is King Leopold of Belgium.

• 49:41Speaker 00

  Athen Congo.

• 49:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. So she's got the worst father in the world. And she's been condemned to marry Crown Prince Rudolf. And actually, the story of their wedding and, you know, the wedding night is awful. She arrives in Vienna when she's 16 years old. But they have to postpone the marriage because it is discovered that her periods have not yet started. So she is then sent back home for a few months to Belgium, which is humiliating.

• 50:09Speaker 00

  That's not remotely embarrassing for a 16 year old.

• 50:11Speaker 01

  Right, but it gets worse. She's sent back home. Basically, you can come back once you've started menstruating. She comes back to Vienna, they get married. And then later in life, she wrote a memoir of their wedding night. And I'll read it. It's, it's as follows. What a night, what torment, what horror. I had not the ghost of a notion of what lay before me, but had been led to the altar as an ignorant child. My illusions, my youthful dreams were shattered. I thought I should die of my disillusionment.

• 50:40Speaker 00

  Is this a kind of John Ruskin reaction? I mean, what's going on there?

• 50:45Speaker 01

  We don't know. I think what torments, what horror suggests she has not enjoyed it. Well, I mean, she's obviously not enjoyed herself. And I think, I don't think it's that Rudolph has disappointed her by just turning to the wall and going to sleep. I mean, you wouldn't write what torment, would you?

• 51:02Speaker 00

  No, but is he, is he kind of getting up to sinister sex games?

• 51:07Speaker 01

  I just don't know. I mean, Tom, clearly you're thinking about this. You're, I don't want to accuse you of overthinking this extremely gory scene.

• 51:13Speaker 00

  Well, but it matters, doesn't it? Because, because if Rudolph is in the habit of, I mean, as we will see, he's very, very sexually driven.

• 51:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:22Speaker 00

  And he's also very haunted by fantasies of violence and death. I think it's legitimate to say, well, what was he perpetrating on his wedding night?

• 51:30Speaker 01

  I don't know. On your wedding night with like a 16 year old? I mean, it's poor from him, isn't it? Anyway, they actually did have a daughter called Elizabeth Marie. We don't have time to talk about her particularly, but she had an incredible life. So their daughter became a socialist in the 1920s, socialist activist and was called the Red Arch Duchess.

• 51:49Speaker 00

  God, so even woker than her father.

• 51:51Speaker 01

  Even woker. The Nazis sent her to Dachau. And she lived an extreme age and died in 1963. Same year as John F. Kennedy.

• 52:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, the year of Beatlemania.

• 52:02Speaker 01

  She lived long enough to watch TV footage of the, of people screaming at the London Palladium or something. Of the, of the Beatles, incredible. Anyway, the marriage was not a success. Rudolph was very dissolute. He's, he's a good looking man, I think. You compared him with Callum, our producer, so Callum will be pleased by that. Queen Victoria was a big fan of his. She gave him the garter when he came to England and used to tickle him, which is slightly weird. And messes with your sense of Queen Victoria, I suppose.

• 52:32Speaker 00

  Well, you say that because Queen Victoria's son, so the future Edward the Seventh, Bertie, the Prince of Wales. I mean, he is a notorious lethario and he's incredibly impressed. So he said of Rudolph, for a young man of his age, it is surprising how much he knows about sexual matters. There is nothing I could teach him. And that's when Rudolph was 19.

• 52:54Speaker 01

  Would you want Edward the Seventh to be your instructor? I mean.

• 52:58Speaker 00

  Well, Rudolph likes it, likes the future Edward the Seventh.

• 53:01Speaker 01

  They love each other. Well, this will be coming up in, in the rest of this episode, exactly. So.

• 53:05Speaker 00

  He's a kind of jolly father figure, isn't he? So contrast to his, his father and also to another member of the, the German speaking royalty, he will be coming to in due course.

• 53:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I can't wait for him to appear on the show. So Rudolph's favorite mistress was a woman called Mitzi Kaspar, who came from Graz. It was said that she had worked as a prostitute in Madame Wolf's Vienna brothel. I don't know how true this is. She becomes very close to Rudolph. She becomes his great confidant. But she's only one of many lovers. And it's generally accepted, I think, that by the late 1880s, Rudolph probably had severe gonorrhea. And that he passed this on to Stephanie, his wife, which meant that she could not have more children. And the, basically the fact that they've both got the sexually transmitted disease doesn't greatly add to the harmony of the household.

• 53:56Speaker 00

  No.

• 53:57Speaker 01

  And by the late 1880s, there's a lot of rumor in Vienna that Rudolph is looking to have the marriage annulled in some way. I don't think, I personally, I don't think they were going to do that because I think that would have been a very difficult thing for a family like the Habsburgs to accept.

• 54:10Speaker 00

  Can I just ask what Rudolph's religious faith is? I mean, if he's going to go on and commit suicide and murder.

• 54:17Speaker 00

  That's not very Catholic behaviour.

• 54:18Speaker 01

  I think it is skin deep at best. I would guess. I don't think it's his bag at all. He never seems to talk about God, particularly in his letters and in his sort of jottings, which we'll come to. So before the break, we got to his birthday, which is the 21st of August, 1888. And he celebrated that, that's when he turns 30. At his castle, which is called Laxenburg in the Vienna woods. And Stephanie was there, his wife and their daughter Elizabeth, who was only, I think she was four or so. His parents didn't go, they just sent telegrams and that tells you, you know, about their very sort of chilly formal relationship. And Rudolph, I mean, this is where Callum, our producer, may reject the comparison. Rudolph had just shaved his beard, Callum still has his beard.

• 55:00Speaker 00

  Exactly, that's the point. That's the lesson that Callum has to learn. And also he has to learn not to get gonorrhea, which I think is a valuable lesson for any young producer.

• 55:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. Rudolph was very haggard. He seems constantly exhausted, which is actually a symptom of gonorrhea. He has this cough that he can't get rid of and he's necking morphine to deal with the cough. And he feels in private, in public, he gives nothing away, but in private, Rudolph clearly feels completely, he feels useless. He feels there's no point to his life. Actually, he has very strong political views. He would love to see Austria become more modern. He was very interested in electricity. We mentioned the electric shocks in the Prater Park. He still believes very much in the empire and the Habsburg ideal. He's very keen on the army. He wrote to his friend, who was a liberal newspaper editor called Modus Sephs.

• 55:48Speaker 01

  And he said, the army is the single central thread, which in this chaos still stands for the empire. He thought that the empire needed radical change. So he writes anonymously, saying that we should change into a kind of United States of Europe, a kind of federation. He is always writing to this guy, Sephs, his friend and saying, you know, that we're suffering from a sickness. We should have a purge and a cleaner, better Europe will emerge from this. Interestingly, I mean, this sounds like very kind of, you know, radical, late 19th century, early 20th century rhetoric. But one big contrast, as I've already said, he's very keen on the Jews of the empire. Cause he's got a lot of very close Jewish friends. And actually this newspaper editor, Sephs, is Jewish.

• 56:32Speaker 01

  And that makes Rudolph a hate figure for Scherner and the Pan Germans. They say he's a puppet of Jewish capitalism and all this.

• 56:41Speaker 00

  So aside from the whole killing his mistress and shooting himself angle, he might actually have made quite a good fist of being an emperor. And the fate of Middle Europe might have been slightly, well, we'll discuss this, I guess.

• 56:53Speaker 01

  I think if you're brooding all the time in a very slightly weird insults, I mean, it's the opposite of an insult actually. But he's a man who would spend a lot of time on, on, on YouTube, watching dark web material.

• 57:07Speaker 00

  Yes, but because he's not an emperor, because he's not an emperor. But if he was an emperor, perhaps he would have, I don't know, I'm clutching at the reins here.

• 57:14Speaker 01

  I'll tell you what would have completely recast the map of Europe if he'd been an emperor. He was not a fan of Austria's chief ally, the Germans. He's not a fan of the Germans.

• 57:24Speaker 00

  He prefers France, doesn't he? And he also prefers Britain. He likes its constitutional monarchy.

• 57:31Speaker 01

  He does. And he likes visiting Britain. And of course he likes Queen Victoria and likes the future Edward the Seventh. But there's one man in Europe whom he despises more than any other. Who might this man be? A man who lives rent free in Rudolph's head. A man who has just succeeded to the throne of Germany. It is perhaps the ultimate friend of the rest is history.

• 57:56Speaker 01

  The bounder, bracket, general oaf Kaiser Wilhelm II. So they're cousins and they're almost exactly the same age. I think Rudolf is five months older than Wilhelm and Rudolf absolutely despises Wilhelm. He hates him. And when Wilhelm became Emperor of Germany, Rudolf was appalled and he wrote to his friend, Maurice Seppes, he said, "By the grace of God, he is dumb of the Kaiser, but he considers himself the greatest genius. I imagine that in a few years he will bring a hoenzollern Germany to the pass it deserves." And he is not wrong. So Crown Prince Rudolf has all these ideas in his head, but he can't tell them when

• 58:41Speaker 01

  he has to bottle them up because his father doesn't give him anything to do. In fact, the only thing his father lets him do, I mean, I quite admire this, I like this, and I'd actually love to get hold of this. His big passion project is a massive encyclopedia of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. So when I say massive, it took 16 years to compile it. It was 24 volumes. It had 400 contributors and it was, it was 12,000 pages long. And it basically goes through every part of the empire. It's history, it's geography, it's architecture, it's flora and fauna, all of this. The nickname for it, because he was the sponsor, it was called the Crown Prince Work, the Crown Prince Werk. And he does this, so he is doing his encyclopedia and he also writes anonymous articles for

• 59:27Speaker 01

  liberal newspapers and he will send them in via servants, you know, and they will always be printed by his friends in the sort of, in the liberal press. And they're usually either arguing for reform of the empire or slacking off the Germans. So when he turns 30, he feels very miserable. He thinks my life's been wasted and he writes to his mate Maurice Seppes. Do you want to read it? And you don't forget, he's not a teenager at this point, so it's not a broken voice.

• 59:50Speaker 00

  "The age of 30 marks the dividing point in life and events that isn't very pleasant. Much time has passed, spent more or less usefully, but devoid of real action and success. We live in a slow, rotten time. Who knows how long this will continue? Every passing year makes me older, less keen, less fit."

• 1:00:21Speaker 01

  So unlike his mother, he's not keeping up with the gym. He's not, I think he's, to use the expression that surely his friend, the Prince of Wales would have used, he feels very seedy. And he spends a lot of his time retreating. He's got a new bolt hole, a hunting lodge in the Vienna woods called Mjälling. And he will go there with his aristocratic mates. They go shooting in the daytime and then the evening they drink champagne laced with cognac and morphine, in his case, and they sort of set the world to rights and abuse the Kaiser.

• 1:00:51Speaker 00

  I wonder what champagne and laced with cognac and morphine would be like.

• 1:00:55Speaker 01

  I think that's tremendous, actually.

• 1:00:56Speaker 00

  That's sound quite fun, doesn't it?

• 1:00:58Speaker 01

  And the next Rest is History scheduling meeting.

• 1:01:00Speaker 00

  We could have that.

• 1:01:01Speaker 01

  We should order champagne laced with cognac.

• 1:01:03Speaker 00

  We could find a hunting lodge, get in a bit of hunting, get out the morphine and the cognac.

• 1:01:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can't see this, Tom, but Alia is in, was recording with me and she's absolutely crying with laughter at the thought of this hunting lodge and the champagne and cognac. You can take the girl out of Germany, but you can't take Germany out the girl. So this is the moment, just after his 30th birthday, when Crown Prince Rudolf meets the woman who will, I was about to say change his life. This will change both their lives in quite a dramatic way. And this is Mary Vetsera. So who is she? So the Vetseras are a recently ennobled family, they're kind of parvenus. Her father was a diplomat who was ennobled by Franz Joseph. Her mother came from a Greek financial family from Constantinople called the Baltatsis. And the Baltatsis are relentless social climbers.

• 1:01:49Speaker 01

  So her uncles are always sort of hanging around at the race course in sort of excessively shiny silk top hats or something. And they're always trying to get invitations to court via Katerina Schratz, Franz Joseph's kind of muse. And Franz Joseph actually said to her, "Stay away from those Baltatsi brothers. They are, their reputation is not entirely correct." So she was born Marie, but she called herself Mary because unusually in world history, it was seen as cool to have an English style name. So that's very nice. And her mother was very ambitious for her and she went to a convent school for nobleman's daughters. Her father had died in 1887. So when she was, that was the year she turned 16.

• 1:02:31Speaker 01

  Now, at this point, when her father died, she already had quite a racy reputation. I have to say, if you, if you Google her, I don't want to sound ungallant, but she doesn't leap out of the photograph as a great beauty. However, she's a great party girl. So she's a girl who will, if you have a party in Vienna, she will come dressed as a sexy chambermaid, kind of French maid, that kind of thing. Exactly. And she's a massive social climber, like her mother was. So the Duke of Briganza set his cap at her, but she said, "Not interested, not good enough." And the reason is she has set her sights on Crown Prince Rudolf.

• 1:03:12Speaker 01

  Now, her family has fallen because her mother had tried to seduce Rudolf, I think to no effect 10 years earlier. But now Mary wants to have a go and she is absolutely infatuated with him. So she told her maid, "He is mine. He may not even know I exist, but he is mine. I feel it in my heart." So it's a very sort of teenage infatuation. Anyway, in the summer of 1888, she went off to England and she comes back from England. She's 17 years old and she is absolutely determined, "I'm going to meet Rudolf and I'm going to have my way with him." She goes to all the fashionable race meetings. She's very stylish. The Viennese papers say she's one of the sort of best dressed girls of the season.

• 1:03:55Speaker 01

  She wrote to her governess, "I cannot live without having seen or spoken to him." And as luck would have it, she's about, you know, she's about to see him. Because one afternoon, she's in the tea pavilion at the races when Rudolf walks in with the future Edward VII, the Prince of Wales, we've already described, tried to give him instructions in sexual matters, but found there was nothing that Rudolf didn't know. Now Edward, Bertie, as he was called slightly confusingly, recognized her from England and he sort of stopped to say hello and he introduced Rudolf. Hello, my dear. Yeah, very much. Looking very pretty, if I may say so. A fine filly. Exactly. And he introduced Rudolf, "Have you met my good friend, the Crown Prince?" But Rudolf just bowed and he didn't say anything to her. He obviously wasn't that taken with her.

• 1:04:40Speaker 01

  Or is he playing hard to get? Well, we don't know. A few days later, their paths crossed again at the Court Theatre. But Rudolf didn't, again, didn't really interact with her at all. And the reason for that is he's got these royal guests. So first of all, he's had the Prince of Wales and they had a brilliant time. They went to the races, as we've just heard. They go to the Hotel Sacha and have Sacha Torte and they laughing and having a great time, having champagne, surely with cognac and morphine, with actually Rudolf's great, another Jewish friend of his, his banker, Baron Moritz Hirsch. So this, I think, reflects very well, both on Crown Prince Rudolf and on the Prince of Wales, in this very feverish political environment, they're publicly associating with well-known kind of Jewish figures.

• 1:05:25Speaker 01

  And Rudolf said to Stephanie, his wife, "Oh, this is brilliant. He's indefatigable. Nothing seems to tire the old boy." So they were having a great time. But Rudolf knows that as soon as the Prince of Wales goes, things will take a turn for the worse because the worst person in the world in his mind is about to arrive in Vienna and that is the Kaiser. And of course, the timing is really bad because there's been all this hullabaloo about Schörner and the Pan-Germans. And Rudolf and his, indeed his father and the court and general are worried that when the Kaiser arrives in Vienna, all the Pan-Germans will come out on the streets, there'll be demonstrations, shouting how brilliant the Kaiser is. And that's not good.

• 1:06:07Speaker 01

  And Rudolf actually said to Stephanie, his wife, the splendid line, "Left to me, I would invite Wilhelm only to get rid of him in some elegant hunting accident." Which would have been an amusing way to get rid of the Kaiser. Anyway, the Kaiser arrived in Vienna on the 3rd of October and I'm very, very sorry to report that he let himself, Germany and the podcast down immediately.

• 1:06:32Speaker 01

  They brought the Court Opera Orchestra to the palace, to the Hofburg, to play selections from Wagner in his honour. And the Kaiser disgraced himself by a quote. He talked and laughed noisily during the performance. So, bad behaviour from him. For the next few days, he does nothing but tell the Austrians. You know, he's just such a terrible guest. He's constantly saying to the Austrians, this is wrong. You should do this. You're not doing this properly. He's terrible at that. He says, you're too lax with your newspapers. You're too soft on the Slavs. He says at one point, if you were ever to give the Slavs more political rights and move towards a more federal structure, we'd probably have to drop you as an ally. You know, he's, he's got a sort of Donald Trump approach to diplomacy.

• 1:07:17Speaker 01

  And then he goes to a palace reception and he really disgraces himself by attacking the Austrian army. He says, you've ordered the wrong ammunition for your Mannlicher repeater rifles. You made a schoolboy error. What kind, who's the inspector general of your army? What a muppet he must be.

• 1:07:32Speaker 00

  And who is it, Dominic?

• 1:07:34Speaker 01

  It's Crown Prince Rudolf.

• 1:07:35Speaker 00

  Oh, no.

• 1:07:36Speaker 01

  Standing right next to him.

• 1:07:37Speaker 00

  Is he amused by this?

• 1:07:38Speaker 01

  No, he bowed, clicked his heels and left, as did his mother. So, the Russian ambassador who was there said it was absolutely excruciating, but obviously par for the course with the Kaiser. Now, it's about this point in time where perhaps unsurprisingly, people start to notice a marked change in Rudolph's demeanour. So, his wife Stephanie wrote later, I could not fail to notice an alarming change in him. It was not only that he was more restless and distraught than ever before. In addition, he had become prone to outbursts of fierce anger on the most trifling occasions. He was often quite unrecognisable. And it's this time as well that Rudolph writes a letter to his friend Maurice Sepp, the newspaper editor.

• 1:08:20Speaker 01

  And he says, you know, I'm very, he's very apocalyptic in his letters. He says, I'd like to see a war, actually. I think we need a war with Russia. War must come soon, a great time when we should be happy because after its glorious end, we could build the foundations of a great and beautiful Austria. So, the storm clouds in his mind are blacker than ever. And then, here's a key moment in the story. Mid-October, another of his cousins, Countess Mary Larisch, comes to see him. And she is the same age as Rudolph. She's 30. She's a relative of his mother. She's a sort of social butterfly, Viennese social butterfly. She has appointed herself Mary Vetsera's mentor.

• 1:09:04Speaker 00

  What does that mean? Basically, her board? Or?

• 1:09:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, a little bit like the, who's the Madame de Mertoi, is it? In Dangerous Liaisons? The sort of Glenn Close figure who grooms younger women?

• 1:09:18Speaker 00

  Lady Melbourne.

• 1:09:19Speaker 01

  Exactly right. So, Mary Vetsera has told Countess Larisch that she fancies Crown Prince Rudolf. And the countess has said, I'll fix it for you. I'll sort this out. So, the countess says to Rudolph, my young friend Mary met you at the races. She didn't get a chance to express the loyalty and admiration she feels for you, and she'd love to have another meeting with you. And Rudolph said, oh, didn't, haven't I seen her in the fashion pages? And Countess Larisch said, oh, yes. She's a most interesting and captivating person. There'll be a new court theatre opening on the Ringstrasse in a couple of days with electric lighting, very exciting. She'll be there. You should look out for her.

• 1:10:01Speaker 01

  So, on the 14th of October, Rudolph goes to the court theatre opening. And Mary's there in the, in the Vetsera family box with her mother and her sister. She's very elegantly turned out. She's got diamonds in her hair. And they don't speak, but Rudolph can see her watching him through her opera glasses. And then a couple of days later, he sends his elderly valet, who's called Neehammer, with a message for Countess Larisch. And the day after that, Countess Larisch picks up Mary Vetsera from her family house and she takes her for a coach ride to the Prater Park. And it's a cold autumn day, so the park is empty. But when they get there, there's one other coach waiting silently under a chestnut tree. They park next to this other coach.

• 1:10:44Speaker 01

  Mary gets out of the coach, into the second coach, and it rolls off into the mist. And inside the second coach is Crown Prince Rudolf. And for the next hour or two, they drive around this park. Rudolph's drawn the curtains and Rudolph's coachman drops her off back with Countess Larisch. And then a few days later, on the 5th of November, the decisive encounter. Countess Larisch says to Mary's mother, I'd like to take Mary shopping. I'd like her advice because she's such a fashionista. And they go out to the shops, but in fact, they are picked up straight away by Rudolph's coachman. And he takes them to a back entrance of the palace, the Hofburg. And there, Mary is led upstairs to Rudolph's apartment.

• 1:11:26Speaker 01

  And we'll let Mary tell the story herself from a letter to her old governess. She said, I looked around me. On his desk was a revolver and a skull. I picked up the skull and looked at it from all sides. Suddenly Rudolph came in and took it from me. And when I said that I wasn't afraid, he smiled.

• 1:11:45Speaker 00

  My goodness. Cliffhangers, we've got them. So, next time, the mystery of Maeling races towards its spectacular, bloody and empire-shaking conclusion. And members of the Rest is History Club, of course, can hear that right now at therestishistory.com. And just to say, fabulous news, Dominic. We are running a summer sale. So, if you're not a member of the Rest is History Club, for a limited time, you can get an extra 20% off. I mean, that's insane value, isn't it?

• 1:12:21Speaker 01

  That's giving it away. It's madness. I think it's too much.

• 1:12:25Speaker 00

  20% off an annual membership using the code SUMMER26. And that's only valid until August 31st. So, absolutely not something to leave hanging.

• 1:12:34Speaker 01

  I urge people not to do this because I don't want them to have that deal. It's too good a deal.

• 1:12:39Speaker 00

  20% Dominic, 20%.

• 1:12:41Speaker 01

  Too much.

• 1:12:41Speaker 00

  Are we doing this for nothing?

• 1:12:42Speaker 01

  Madness. My counsel will be raging.

• 1:12:44Speaker 00

  Just incredible value there.

• 1:12:46Speaker 01

  There's even better news, isn't there? Is there not, is there not live show news?

• 1:12:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, there is. I'd forgotten about that. If you think the, the Maeling incident is an amazing story, then we have an even better one coming up. And this is the ultimate Victorian adventure, the Abyssinian Expedition of 1868.

• 1:13:04Speaker 01

  Incredible.

• 1:13:05Speaker 00

  By some measures, a tragic story and by some measures, a richly comical story.

• 1:13:09Speaker 01

  We know a comical story.

• 1:13:11Speaker 00

  And we'll be trying to blend the two aspects of that. And we will be doing that live at the South Bank Centre in London on Friday, the 4th of September. And tickets, of course, at therestishistory.com. But for now, thank you, Dominic. Thank you, everyone. And we will be back next time with the Crown Prince Rudolph, Mary Vetsera, and the shocking climax of the Maeling incident.

• 1:13:37Speaker 01

  I'll be your saint. Bye-bye.

• 1:13:44Speaker 03

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