The Rest Is History - 689. A Murderous Affair: The Habsburg's Great Scandal (Part 1)

Episode Date: July 19, 2026

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: ⁠[e-mail]⁠ _______ 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

This episode is brought to you by the Lloyd's 5K House Deposit, and this is something that was last seen in 1996. Yeah, so the 1990s looks now like a lost golden age of prosperity and positivity, doesn't it? Think of the sort of the advent of the Blair administration in 1997, all the enthusiasm and excitement that surrounded that, the economic growth at the time, the technological developments, the sort of sense of an endless golden summer where everybody is listening to Blair and Oasis and looking forward to to buying their first houses. And that, of course, takes us to mortgages. Now, the good news is that in a nod to the 1990s, Lloyds are offering 5K deposit mortgages to first-time buyers. So search 5K first-time buyer. 1996 average first-time buyer deposits are based on ONS data. Subject to status, your home may be repossessed if you don't keep up repayments and conditions apply.

The Hulu original series Furious is coming to Disney Plus. Starring Emmy Rossum, Furious follows FBI agent Alice Black on the hunt for a mysterious and calculating serial killer. Both walk their own paths toward justice and as their lives start to intertwine, the line between right and wrong begins to blur. Don't miss the three-episode premiere of the Hulu original series Furious on July 27th, only on Hulu on Disney Plus. Kat Hoyos and the Prince of Coburg ordered Loschek to break down the door. Out of breath, half crying, Losjeck whispered that he had to inform their serene lordships that a lady, the Baroness Mary Vetsera, was staying in his imperial highness.

room. Coburg and Hoyos recoiled. They retreated to the billiard room. Loszsche 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.

Loszschec raised it to smash the lock. The lock resisted. Loschek 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. Loschek hacked out a gash. The gash became a hole.

Framed in jagged wood, smoky with blurred candles. dark with the drawn blinds. The room inside was visible. Only then did Losscheck 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 Fandesieckler, 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 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 Marla. 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 in the 20th century will have an absolutely explosive effect. Nationalism, anti-Semitism, 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.

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. A killer is the 30-year-old heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, he's Crown Prince Rudolph, 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. I mean, he's another of the many people in history who look like our producer Callum. He does have an astonishing number of them. But maybe the interesting thing about this, we did our series on Jack the Ripper,

and we poo-poohed the notion that a crown prince could be a killer in that series, but here there's not much doubt. is there? There's no doubt whatsoever. So there's Crown Prince Rudolph. And then there is his accomplice and victim. And this is his teenage mistress, Baroness Mary Vetsara, 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 McMillan's great ballet from the 1970s, a real favourite at the Royal Ballet in London. Yeah, because it was staged this spring at Covent Garden. 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 is history, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, so worlds of gigantic cakes, even more gigantic moustaches, insanely dapper uniforms, waltzes, nationalism, you know, know, simmering beneath the surface, the subconscious sexual psychosis. Exactly. We are here for all of it.

Now, to remind listeners, particularly people who didn't hear our series about the build-up to the First World War when 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 million Czechs. There are polls, Italians, Slovenes, Jews, you name it. it. And what binds them is their unity to the Hapsburg dynasty. So it's the 13th century dynasty of the Hapsburg. Rudolf, of course, is a Hapsburg. In his book that you mentioned

is brilliant book, a nervous splendor, Frederick Morton calls them manipulative, industrious, strangely modest, inexorable, decent, stodgy, staunch. Drabness was their secret, drabness and patience. And the man who embodies this is Rudolph's father. And that is Emperor Franz Joseph I, a great favourite of the show. So because basically he lived forever, is Elizabeth II, isn't he, of 19th century history? He completely is. And 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 Schoenbrun Palace, the Austrian kind of Versailles, outside Vienna. And he was really the ultimate Habsburg. He says, 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 and toy soldiers. And that runs all the way through his life. And in the history, 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. Protocol, right? Everything has to be governed by protocol. People used to joke that when he made love to his wife, he would always be wearing full regimental uniform. I mean, the ladies love a uniform. 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 wrong form. Most 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, some function had the wrong number of decorative buttons on his sleeve. And Franz Joseph said, 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. Because this is a signal that nothing is stable and all may pass. Exactly. So just a thought about our protagonist, Crown Prince Rudolph, 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 explaining how Grant Prince Rudolph gets to where he gets to. A faint echo of Prince Philip and Prince Charles? Possibly, yeah. I think there is a slight element of that, actually, in this story. Prince Philip was always kind of forcing Prince Charles into Spartan activities that he didn't really enjoy. I think Franz Joseph would have approved of Gordonston as a school thing.

Yes. 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 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 you're parallel with Elizabeth II, 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. Oh, yes. So surely the most romantic, certainly the most romantic monarchical 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 is that on steroids. Her nickname was Sisi and she was a sex symbol. She was a fashion leader. She was an influencer. She was the personification of glamour. She was a romantic heroine.

She was a sportswoman. For a lot of people, she was basically a saint 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 didn't give her a proper education because unusually he hoped that his daughter would grow up to join the circus. Run away from a palace and join a circus.

Exactly. So she's only sort of half educated. She's a bit of an autodidact. Well, do you know, Dominique? I've always found that a very appealing aspect of her because she, you know, she had this enormously long hair. Yeah, down to her ankles. Yeah, down to her ankles. 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 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 learned Hungarian. She became hugely popular with Hungarians, as we will find out. And then she learned ancient Greek. And I had to learn ancient Greek. And I unfortunately didn't have as long, didn't have a long hair and I didn't have attendance to comb it. But nevertheless, well, as at my ablutions, I would try and emulate CeC by learning some regular Greek firms.

Well, you're combing your hair. Yeah. Okay. Well, that's impressive. So she's a role model still to this day, is what I'm saying. 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, Elene. Nene, she was called, to the spa town of Bad Ischel.

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

was poor small talk, as was Franz Joseph. Yeah, wouldn't it? I mean, he's shy and serious, isn't he? Exactly. But he was looking for something more. He didn't want another shy and serious person. He wanted a circus performer. He did.

Cici was there and she was only 15. She was basically there for, you know, she was along for a jaunt. So she was on great form, joking, you know, good humoured, shaking her very long hair. 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 mum,

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 then mother said, no, no, no, he'll do as he's 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. I mean, how awful for Helene. Right, gutting for Helene. Although the upside for Ellen 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 to 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 Jose 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 you. And to Franz Joseph, 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 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. in, 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 freshness, her air of candor and gentleness and intelligence. 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, 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 Hapsbergs, Andrew Weakroft, British historian, says, behind the fairy tale image, the reality was a gauche and rather difficult girl, flattered yet terrified by his overwhelming passion. This is absolutely right. Cici 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. No, the mother's awful, isn't she? And when she has children, they're always taking the children away and not letting her have anything to do with them.

Exactly. Constantly squabbling. You know, the worst kind of mother-in-law, basically. But in Cece, 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. 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. 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 Cece, who was only 20 at the time. the time, a shattering moment from which she probably never really recovered, to be quite honest. Anyway, a year later, 1858, 21st to 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 Rudolph. And he was named after Rudolph I, who was the first Habsburg to be king of the Romans, basically Holy Roman emperor. And that name tells a story, because at this point in

time, the 1850s, 1860s, the Hapsburgs, 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 in 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. There must be room for his deeds and I divine greatness, which I shall record here yet. 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. No, exactly. So like his father, Rudolf is brought up. Effectively, he's trained to be a soldier because the army is the Supreme Hapsburg institution.

I mean, Dominic, 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 Hapsburg, who is a member of the Hapsburg, I think the only Hapsburg we've had

on the show, and who did a whole episode about the Hatsbytes. And he promised me that I would join the Order of the Golden Fleece, I promise he hasn't yet delivered. And also young Rudolph, he got his first military uniform when he was two. 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. I mean, this is very Prince Philip, isn't it, with Prince Charles? 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?

What, in a cage? With lions? I don't know. I don't know. I just saw this detail and I wrote it down in the notion. I'd love to have time

to research this proper, in more detail, the zoo, you know, the sleeping in the zoo. In the monkey house. Exactly. In the reptile enclosure or something.

Anyway, Anyway, Rudolph was completely traumatized by this. And basically, after two years of this, a courtier mentioned to his mother that this was happening. And she complained. He's sleeping with snakes. Yeah. She complained. And the general was fired.

But it obviously, I mean, you don't have to be a great psychoanalyst. You don't have to be sick. We don't have to be Freud. Yeah. This would probably really screw you up. Anyway, so it also tells you something about Cici'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 parents.

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 France Joseph said, oh my God, you know, the doctors will have, I'll get the doctors to have a look at you.

The doctor's reporter there was absolutely nothing wrong with her. And she said, no, no, I'm terribly ill. I absolutely must go to Madeira. 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, and 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. And she loves Corfu, doesn't she? Oh, she absolutely adored Corfu. She builds the Achilleon. Yes, exactly, which we've talked about. And Franz Joseph went to visit her in Corfu and said, you know, how? you're getting on, you're feeling better. She said, not really. I'll probably stay here for a while. Yeah, for a few weeks, maybe months, maybe years. Yeah. And this is basically the story of the next

few decades. She's traveling constantly. She's goes to England a lot, doesn't she? Goes to fox hunting. In Northamptonshire, bizarrely. 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 into Monte Carlo to play the tables in the casino. I mean, I think if I was a beautiful 19th century emperors, that is what I would do. Yeah, right. You would go to Montecarlo and Corfu. I'd play the tables. I'd go Foxington, England. I'd hang out in Corfu. I'd be moody. Do you know what? Actually, the parallels are uncanny. You know, like you, as with you, her clothing, her weight, her appearance is discussed in the gossip columns of the world.

Well, she's very, she's very tall, isn't she? Unusually tall. And madly. thin. So her waist is 16 inches. So the corsets are vice-like. And she never weighs more than 110 pounds ever. And if she does, then she goes on these kind of massive, well, she basically refused 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 dread and terror. And one occasion she takes a young daughter to London to meet Queen Victoria. And the poor girl has never seen a fat woman before.

So she's Queen Victoria. She wets herself out of terror. Biographers have this great battle about whether or not she was anorexic or bulimic or something. Oh, I think she was. Because occasionally she'd go off and eat cake. They would describe her eating enormous meals and then somehow miraculously, being incredibly thin. And she would never eat meat, would she? She'd have beef steaks kind of squeezed and the blood would drip out and then she'd have it with watery soup. 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 hunts woman, but one day she's going to fall off and break her neck and all of this. And the corsetry, the whole corsetry thing. I mean, it, it It's kind of, it's so extreme as to be almost fetishistic. 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 theater called Katerina Schrat. And that was basically set up for him by his wife. He'd long admired this actress. And Cici 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 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 the backstage gossip. And Cici was very happy with this. She encouraged it, and she would sort of, sometimes the three of them would hang out together. Did they get on?

Cici and Katrina? I think it's because Cici had arranged it because she, She knew this actress could was no conceivable threat to her. Yeah. I mean, Cici's not a ghoulish cooker, I imagine. No. She's not going to make your cakes and tell you great banter about, you know, actors. And, of course, if she'd joined a circus, as was intended, it would have been a very different story.

But the person that Franz Joseph loves is always clearly Cici. He's got her portrait and his study with her hair down to her ankles. He's always sending her presence 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 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 5 o'clock every morning from his iron bedstead to do his paperwork. 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, 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 Cece 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, 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. There's a catastrophic defeat for the Austrians at the Battle of Koenigrits. 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 has been basically forced back into the Balkans. 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 Sisi. 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, bear. Yeah.

You know, sort of, count of massive moustaches, all of this. She loves all this. Rouratania, basically. It's a Rouratian 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 Andrasse and Ference Deiak, who are the big Hungarian sort of bigwigs. She passes letters between them. She encourages a 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, and that includes Transylvania, it includes inland Croatia. And then there's an Austrian half ruled from Vienna that includes what's now the Czech Republic,

so Bohemia, Arabia, 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 Cece are 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 scepter and the orb. And the Hungarians absolutely love her. They give her a palace. whenever she goes, she wears Hungarian national dress. As she 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 way on 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 story of Maximilian Habsberg, who had 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 Kedatero 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 firing squad. 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 a marer 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 institutionalises constant squabbling

between the Austrian and Hungarian halves of the empire about tariffs and budgets and the army and things like this. And it also kind of institutionalises an instability at the heart of the empire. 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 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 hapses. by Martin Rady. And he has this whole thing about how this is the age when people are drawing up censuses, 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.

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 Edward Taffa. He's of Irish descent, interestingly. 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, Tarfa, 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. 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 he didn't give that in an Irish accent. That's bonus content. That's for club members, the Irish accent. Now, one of the things that he has to do as part of this to keep the Czechs happy. So he basically allows junior civil servants in Bohemian Moravia to use Czech rather than German.

And that creates a backlash from some of the German speakers. And the German speakers say, what you're allowing the checks to use Czech? What are you giving away? You know, our supremacy within the empire to these kind of jumped up Slavs. And 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 forward, like these people stuffing themselves with cake and talking to Slavs? Austria-Hunger is clearly destined for the scrap heap. Our future lies in a greater Germany. And so, in the 1880s, which is the decade leaning up to the miling incident, you have the growth of this very noisy, aggressive, pan-German movement that is bitterly opposed to what it 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 Schernerer, who is the leader of this tiny sort of German nationalist party, and he is a pioneer of extremist, anti-Semitic nationalism. We kind of know where this is going to lead. We do indeed, because Schernerer, he wants to change the calendar, dating all years from the battlefields, of the Tutterburg Forest.

Yeah. The defeat of Augustus is the 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 Bordshire 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 pace. It was something called Yulfest. And the Austrians greet each other by saying Gruzstadt. 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 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 paused 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 Schernerer, the pan-German extreme nationalist, is due to report to the Landis Gerichstraza prison because he's been sentenced to three months in jail for leading an attack on a Jewish-owned newspaper.

And the very next day, the 21st, our protagonist, our killer, Crown Prince Rudolf, 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 This episode is brought to you By National Geographic Tom we're familiar Aren't we with what happened in Pompeii

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You should have ordered from Wayfair. With Wayfair, there's no what if. Just style you love and quality you can trust. Visit Wayfair.ca. Wayfair, every style, every home. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the rest of 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. were 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 civilization, isn't it? Totally. So we already mentioned, you know, Marla, Klimt and so, and 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's 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. It's probably at the time the most famous boulevard in the world, which is the Ringstrasse. It go there today. It's still a 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, I mean, you might call it a ring room. road if you were 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 design. 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 style, 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 Ringstras. Franz Joseph's architects have settled on just one style which was neo-baroque and the reason they settled on this which is quite sort of wedding cakey kind of florid paintings isn't it and all of that? 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 or not like the Germans

with their cold classicism we're more fun we're more you know a little bit more flowery. 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? Well, I suppose so. I suppose so. Although I quite like that, that Habsburg style. Yeah, I like it. But it doesn't make me think these are going to be the, you know, the master race. It makes me think there'll be excellent composers. Great composers, great cake, interesting theories about

sexuality, totally. but an ability to conquer much of Eastern Europe, I think probably not. Probably not, yeah. They roll it out all across the empire. So if you go now, even today, to Trieste, to Leviv, to Krakoff, to Prague, wherever, you can see this sort of Habsburg architecture. It's very recognizable. Now, I called it a stage set, and this sense that it's a sort of Baroque stage set,

it's 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, 1888, there were the first long-discipline, 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. I would like more cake. Well, actually, what it is, the greetings that people gave, the sort of, you know, frail, you know, hair doctor, 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 Prata amusement parks, if you've seen the film The Third Man, the kind of Ferris wheel and Orson Wells, if you go to the Prata amusement part, 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 electricity using themselves, but swells from the sort of aristocratic bits of Vienna would basically bribe the people running the machine to give them bigger and bigger shocks. And they would just have, they were being carted off all the time to hospital ambulances because they'd electrically to themselves. Right.

So aristocratic self-harm, a bit of a theme. 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 Marla, who's about to move from Vienna to Budapest, to run the opera in Budapest. You have Freud,

who then is in his 30-30s, 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 Marla and Freud, are Jewish. And actually, there's lots of Jewish influence in Fandesiect, Vienna. It says Wittgenstein, the 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're very convenient and easy scapegoats for people like Georg von Schoen, 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 Schernerer 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. So basically his military education has made him kind of woke. A little bit, yeah, a little bit.

So we were talking before the break about he 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.

Yeah, should I read them? Yeah, why don't you read them in your best Austrian accent? 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. So he's not very optimistic about his own inheritance. And you might say, well, he's a sort of typical teenager,

a bit miserable, 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. Thoughts of every kind right endlessly through my head. All is confusion. My brain sees all day. No sooner has one thought gone and another takes its place. Each one compels me.

Each one says something different, now gay and cheerful. Now Ivan Black with rage. I fight them and struggle with them. And out of it all the truth at last will come. 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.

She's jolly, fun-loving, fun-loving bride. She's not a funster. She's a good person, I think, Stephanie. She's quite decent and good nature. I mean, considering her father. Her father is one of the worst people we've ever had on the show. Her father is King Leopold of Belgium. As in Congo.

Yeah. So she's got the worst father in the world, and she's been condemned to marry Crown Prince Rudolph. 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 their 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.

That's not remotely embarrassing for a 16-year-old. 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 as follows. What a night. What torments. 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. Is this a kind of John Ruskin reaction? I mean, what's going on there? 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? No, but is he kind of getting up to sinister sex games? I just don't know. I mean, Tom, clearly, you're thinking about this. I don't want to accuse you of overthinking this extremely gory scene. Well, but it matters, doesn't it? Because if Rudolph is in the habit of, I mean, as we will see, he's very, very sexually driven. Yeah.

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

God, so even woken her than her father. Even woken. The narcissist sent her to Dachau, and she lived in an extreme age. And died in 1963. Same year as John F. Kennedy. Yeah, the year of Beatlemania. She lived long enough to watch TV footage of people screaming at the London Palladium or something, of the Beatles. Incredible.

Anyway, the marriage was not a success. Rudolph was very dissolute. He's a good-looking man, I think. You compared him with Callum and producers, 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. Well, you say that because Queen Victoria's son, so the future Edward the 7th, Bertie, the Prince of Wales,

I mean, he is a notorious Lothario and he's incredibly impressed. So he said of Rudolf, 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. Would you want Edward the Seventh to be your instructor? I mean, well, Rudolph likes it, likes the future Ed for the seventh. They love each other. Well, this will be coming up in the rest of this episode, exactly so.

He's a kind of jolly father figure, isn't he? So a contrast to his father. And also to another member of the German-speaking royalty, he will be coming to in due course. Yeah, I can't wait for him to appear on the show. So Rudolf's favorite mistress was a woman called Mitzi Kaspar, who came from Gratz. it was said that she had worked as a prostitute in Madame Wolff's Vienna brothel. I don't know how true this is. She becomes very close to Rudolph.

She becomes his great confident. 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 basically the fact that they've both got the sexually transatlorea, It's a disease doesn't greatly add to the harmony of the household.

No. 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 he, 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. Can I just ask what Rudolph's religious faith is? I mean, if he's going to go on and commit suicide and murder, that's not very Catholic behavior. I think it is skin deep at best, I would guess. I don't think it's his bag at all. He never seemed to talk about God,

particularly in his letters and in his sort of jottings, which will come to. So before the break, we got to his birthday, which was the 21st of August 1888. And he celebrated that. That's when he turns 30. And his castle, which is called Laksenburg in the Vienna woods. And Stephanie was there, his wife,

and their daughter, Elizabeth, who was only, I think, she was four or so. But his parents didn't go. They just sent telegrams, and that tells you about their very sort of chilly, formal relationship. And Rudolph, I mean, this is where Callum, our producer, may object to the comparison. Rudolph had just shaved his beard.

Callum still has his beard. 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. 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 Morris Sepps. 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,

Seps his friend and saying, you know, 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, of 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 because he's got a lot of very close Jewish friends.

And actually this newspaper editor, Sepps, is Jewish. And that makes Rudolph a hate figure for Schernerer and the Pan Germans. They say he's a puppet of Jewish capitalism and all this. 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 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 YouTube watching dark web material 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 his drawers here I'll tell you what would have completely recast the map of Europe if he'd been emperor. He was not a fan of Austria's chief ally. The Germans. He's not a fan of the Germans.

He prefers France, doesn't he? And he also prefers Britain. He likes its constitutional monarchy. He does. And he likes visiting Britain. And of course, he likes Green Victoria. He likes the future Edward 7th. 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. The Bounder, bracket, General Oaf, Kaiser Wilhelm II. So they're cousins, and they're almost exactly the same age. I think Rudolph is five months older than Wilhelm. And Rudolph absolutely despises Vilhelm.

Well, he hates him. And when Wilhelm became emperor of Germany, Rudolf was appalled, and he wrote to his friend Morris Sepps. 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 Hoenzollin, Zollin, Germany to the past. It deserves. And it is not wrong.

So Crown Prince Rudolf has all these ideas in his head, but he can't tell him when 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 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 the things. the nickname for it because he was the sponsor. It was called the Crown Prince work, the Crown Prince Wech. And he does this. So he's doing his encyclopedia. And he also writes anonymous articles for 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, they're asking 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, Morris Sepps. Do you want to read it? Don't forget he's not a teenager at this point, so it's not a broken voice. The age of 30 marks a dividing point in life, and the one 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 so unlike his mother he's not keeping up with the gym he's not here

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 to he's got a new bolthole a hunting lodge in the Vienna woods called myeling

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. I wonder what champagne and laced with cognac and morphine would be like. I think it sounds tremendous, actually. That sounds quite fun, doesn't it? And the next rest is history scheduling meeting.

We could have one. We should order champagne laced with coniac. You could find a hunting lodge. Get in a bit of hunting. Get out the morphine and the cognac. Yeah. You can't see this, Tom. But Alia is in recording with me.

She is absolutely crying with laughter and thoughts of this hunting lodge and the champagne and cornet. You can take the girl out of Germany but you can't take Germany out of the girl. So this is the moment just after his 30th birthday when Crown Prince Rudolf meets the woman

who, I was about to say, change his life. Yes. This will change both their lives in quite a dramatic way. And this is Mary Vetsera. So who is she? So the Vetserras 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 general. Greek financial family from Constantinople called the Baltazis. And the Baltazes are relentless social climbers. 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 Schrat Franz Joseph's kind of muse. And Franz Joseph actually said to her, stay away from those Baltazzi brothers. Their reputation is not entirely correct. So she was born Marie,

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, 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. Now, at this point when her father died,

she already had quite a racy reputation. I have to say, 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 dress as a sexy chamber maid Kind of French maid That kind of thing Exactly And she's a massive social climate Like her mother was So the Duke of Braganza 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 Rudolph. Now her family has formed because her mother had tried to seduce Rudolph,

I think to no effect, 10 years earlier. But now Mary wants to have a go and she is absolutely infatuated with them. 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 Rudolph 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. She wrote to her governess, I cannot live without having seen or spoken to him. And as luck would have it, she's about to see him. Because one afternoon, she's in the tea pavilion at the races,

when Rudolph walks in with the future Edward the 7th, the Prince of Wales we've already described, tried to give him instruction in sexual matters, but found there was nothing that Rudolph didn't know. Now Edward Bertie, as he was called, slightly confusingly, recognised her from England, and he sort of stopped to say hello and he introduced Rudolph. Hello, my dear. Yeah, very much. Looking very pretty, if I may say so.

It's a fine Philly. Exactly. And he introduced Rudolph. Have you met my good friend, the Crown Prince? but Rudolph just bowed and he didn't say anything to her. He obviously wasn't that taken with her. 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 Rudolph, 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 Sacher and have Sachertaughta and they're 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 Rudolph and on the Prince of Wales. In this very feverish political environment, they're publicly associating with well-known kind of Jewish figures. And Rudolph 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 worst, 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 hollabaloo about Schernerer and the Pan Germans. And Rudolph and indeed his father and the court in general are worried that when the Kaiser arrives in Vienna,

all the Pan Germans will come out on the streets. though him demonstrations shouting how brilliant the Kaiser is, and that's not good. And Rudolph 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. We should 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. they brought the court opera orchestra to the palace to the Hofberg to place 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. He's got a sort of Donald Trump approach to diplomacy. And then he goes to a palace reception. He really disgraces himself by attacking the Austrian army. He says, you've ordered the wrong ammunition for your man-licker repeater rifles. You made a schoolboy era. Who's the inspector general of your army? What a muppy he must be. And who is it, Dornick? And there's a crown prince Rudolph. Oh, no.

Standing right next to him. Is he amused by this? No, he bowed, clicked his heels and left, as did his mother. So the Russian ambassador who was there said it was absolutely excruciated, but obviously par for the course with the Kaiser. Now, it's about this point in time, but perhaps unsurprisingly, people start to notice a marked change in Rudolf's demeanor. 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 unrecognizable. And it's this time as well that Rudolf writes a letter to his friend Morris Sepp's, the newspaper editor. And he says, you know, 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.

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 Marie Larish comes to see him. She's 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 Vetsara's mentor.

What does that mean? Basically her board or? Yeah, a little bit like the who's the Madame de Mertoy, is it, in Dangerous Liaisons? The sort of Glenn Close figure who grooms younger women. Lady Melbourne.

Exactly right. So Mary Vetsera has told Countess Larrish that she fancies Karen 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, haven't I seen her in the fashion pages? And Countess Larry said, oh yes, she's a most interesting and captivating person. There'll be a new court theatre opening on the Ringstrasse from a couple of days. with electric lighting, very exciting. She'll be there. You should look out for her. So on the 14th of October, Rudolph goes to the court theatre opening. And Mary's there 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 Niehammer, with a message for Countess Larish. And the day after that, Countess Larrish picks up Mary Vetsera from her family house and she takes her for a coach ride to the Prata 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 this other coach. 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 Rudolph.

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 Larrish and then a few days later on the 5th of November the decisive encounter Countess Larrish says to Mary's mother

I'd like to take Mary's shopping I'd like her advice because she's such a fashionista if 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 to the palace the Hofberg and there Mary is led upstairs to Rudolph's apartment

and will 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

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

That's giving it away. It's madness. I think it's too much. 20% off an annual membership using the code summer 26. And that's only valid until August 31st. So absolutely not something to leave hanging. I urge people not to do this because I don't want them to have that deal. It's too good a deal. 20%, Dominic. Too much. Are we doing this for nothing? Yeah, madness. My accountant will be raging. Just incredible value there. There's even better news, isn't there? Is there not live show news? Yeah, there is. I've forgotten about that.

If you think the mailing 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. Incredible. By some measures a tragic story and by some measures a richly comical story. We'll have a comical story. And we'll be trying to blend the two aspects of that. And we'll be doing that live at the South Bank Centre in London on Friday, the 4th of September, and tickets, of course, at The Rest is History.

com. But for now, thank you, Dominic. Thank you, everyone. And we will be back next time with the Crown Prince, Rudolf, Mary Vetsera, and the shocking climax of the mailing incident. I'll see you're saying. Bye-bye.