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

0:00This 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 of the time, the technological developments, the sort of sense of an endless golden summer where everybody's listening to Blur and Oasis and looking forward to buying their first houses. And that, of course, takes us to mortgages. Now, the good. 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. This is a paid advertisement for BetterHelp. History is full of barriers. Some are built in stone. Others are formed by custom and silence.

1:17Rules people absorb without always noticing. Stigma can work like that. Most of us would tell a friend or loved one to get support. We would call it sensible. But when it's us, that same step can feel strangely difficult. BetterHelp's 2026 State of Stigma report surveyed 2,000 Americans and revealed that 85% of Americans believe that getting support is wise. Yet 74% say society discourages people from doing so. BetterHelp therapists are fully qualified in the US. Don't let stigma stand in the way of support. Start therapy with BetterHelp. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com slash restishistory. That's betterhelp.com slash rest is history. That's better. H.E.L.P. dot com slash rest is history. This episode is brought to you by Snapdragon. Take the leash off your laptop with the processor that gives you long battery life. Work on the go. Jump between back-to-back calls, stay locked in from brewing morning coffee to burning the midnight oil. Get maximum performance even when unplugged. Finally,

2:34the freedom to move across the room or across the world is here. Snapdragon, that's how. Go to snapdragon.com slash laptops. Snapdragon branded products are products of Qualcomm Technologies Inc. and or its subsidiaries. Count Hoyos and the Prince of Coburg ordered Loschek to break down the door. Out of breath, half crying, Loschek whispered that he had to inform their serene lordships that a lady, the Baroness Mary Wetzera, was staying in his Imperial Highness's room. Coburg and Hoyos recoiled. They retreated to the billiard room. Loschek 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. Loschek raised it to smash the lock. The lock resisted.

3:52Loschek 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 Loscheck 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 loschek 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 Fantasiecla 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

5:07very 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 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. 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. He's Crown Prince Rudolf, an idealistic, haggard man. He's off his face on morphine and champagne. is riddled with gonorrhea and he is the kind

6:26of 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 there's an 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 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 vetzer 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 favorite at the raw ballet in london yeah because it was staged this spring at covent garden yes 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 favorite of the rest is history. The Austro-Hungarian Empire. So worlds of gigantic cakes, even more gigantic mustaches, insanely dapper uniforms, waltzes, nationalism, you know, simmering beneath the surface, the subconscious

7:46sexual 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 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 Viennaienna half of it from budapest there are 13 million german speakers 10 million hungarians five million czechs there are poles italians slovenes jews you name it and what binds them is their unity to the hapsburg dynasty so it's the 13th century dynasty of the hapsburgs rudolf of course is a hapsburg in his book that you mentioned is brilliant book and 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 the first um a great great favorite of the show so because basically he lived forever is elizabeth the second isn't he of uh 19th century history 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

9:08was born in 1830 in schoenbrunn palace the austrian kind of versailles outside vienna and he was really the ultimate hapsburg he's if you take the sort of hapsburg spirit was that decent stodgy staunch drab he's peak hapsburg 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 um 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, 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 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 in the um in the wrong uniform 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?

10:25How 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 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 explaining how prince rudolph gets to where he gets to faint um 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 um forcing prince charles into spartan activities that he didn't really enjoy i think franz jose Joseph would have approved of Gordonston as a school theme. 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

11:42and 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 your 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 Rudolf'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's 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

12:58bonkers. 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 run away from a palace and join a circus. Exactly. Exactly. So she's only sort of half educated. She's a bit of an autodidact. Well, do you know, Dominic, I've always found that a very appealing aspect of her. Because, 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 long hair and I didn't have attendance to comb it. But nevertheless, while I was at my ablutions, I would try and emulate Cece by learning some regular Greek.

14:14Really? While you were 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, Hélène, Nené, she was called, to the spa town of Bad Ischl. 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 Hélène. Franz Joseph was then 23. And his mother, Sophie, she was called, had picked out Hélène as a sort of German-speaking, Catholic, ideal, regal bride, imperial bride. When they met for tea, Hélène was very shy and serious, and she was poor at 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. 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. Exactly. She's a very elegant-looking, sort of innocent teenage girl. And after this, they'd had tea. Franz Josef's brother said to their mother, he said, Mama, Francie likes Sisi very much.

15:33Better 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 he's told. I mean, he may be the emperor, but he'll do as I tell him. Anyway, Franz Josef went to see his mother that evening and said, it's Sisi or nobody. in love i mean how awful for helene right gutting for helene although the the upside for helene 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 cc 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 Sisi. 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 Josef can marry Sisi after all. So a very romantic story. They went for a midnight carriage ride and he wrapped Sisi up in his military cloak and he whispered in her ear, I can hardly say how happy I am to be marrying you. And he, to Franz Josef, 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

16:52the 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 portrait 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 Wheatcroft, 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. 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 Josef'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 squabbling you know the worst kind of

18:08mother-in-law basically but in cc 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 a spoiled child she's very moody she is brooding she is stubborn these are qualities that she will pass on to her son, Rudolf. 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, a shattering moment from which she probably never really recovered, to be quite honest. Anyway, a year later, 1858, 21st of 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 Rudolf 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,

19:23the 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 Rudolf 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 um 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 um rudolph is brought up effectively he's trained to be a soldier because the army is the supreme hapsburg institution i mean don't 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

20:41the only hapsburg we've had on the show and who did a whole episode about the Habsburgs. 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. 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 notes i'd love to have time to research this proper more in more detail the zoo no the sleeping in the zoo in the monkey house exactly in the in the reptile enclosure or something 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

21:57snakes yeah she complained and the general was fired but it obviously i mean you take you don't have to be a great psychoanalyst you have to be sick you don't have to be a great psychoanalyst yeah this would probably really screw you up anyway so it also tells you something about cc'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 apps. He 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 France 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

23:13and um franz joseph went to visit her in corfu and said you know how are you 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 goes to England a lot, doesn't she? Goes 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 to Monte Carlo to play the tables in the casino. I mean, I think if I was a beautiful 19th century empress, that is what I would do. Yeah, right. You would go to Monte Carlo in Corfu. I'd play the tables. I'd go to Foxhound in England. I'd hang out in Corfu. I'd be moody. Do you know what? Actually, the parallels are uncanny. You know, like you. Yeah. As with you, her clothing, her weight, her appearance is discussed in the gossip columns of the world. Well, 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 if she does then she goes on these kind of massive well she basically refused to eat

24:33and 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 a young daughter to 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. 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 huntswoman, 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's kind of it's so extreme as to be almost fetishistic exactly

25:50she's punishing herself effectively now while she's gone franz joseph he uh 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 Cece 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 Cece 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, Cece and Katerina? I think it's because Cece had arranged it because she knew this actress was no conceivable threat to her. Yeah, I mean, Cece's not a goulash cooker, I imagine. No, she's not going to make you cakes and tell you great banter about, you know, actors. I mean, 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 Sisi.

27:06He'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 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. 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 Sisi 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.

28:26And 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 Königgrätz. 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 Josef. 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 cc 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 you know

29:47sort of uh counter massive mustaches all of this she loves itania basically it's a quality completely she's incredibly popular in budapest and she says to france joseph look i can play a role as an intermediary with the hungarians. And she introduces him to these nationalist leaders, Count Andrássy and Ferenc Dayak, who are the big Hungarian sort of bigwigs. She passes letters between them, she encourages her husband to be, you know, flexible and to 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 and includes uh 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 and 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 Sisi are given a coronation a new coronation she's the first Hungarian queen to be crowned with the holy

31:06crown of saint stephen to be given the scepter and the orb and the hungarians absolutely love her they give her a palace um 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 hapsburgs 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 story of Maximilian Habsburg, who had gone off to become emperor of Mexico. It's all gone terribly wrong for him. He's Franz Josef's brother. And he ends up being cornered in Queretaro in Mexico and shot by a firing squad. And Franz Josef's reaction is so Franz Josef. He's told, your brother's been shot by a 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 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

32:26keeps 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 the hungarians have had special treatment now there 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. 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 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

33:41who will set up competing, 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 Tarfer he's of Irish descent interestingly the Irish landowners they'd moved to um 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 Catholic clericals, German landowners, Czech nationalists, Polish nationalists, and 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

34:57accent that's that's bonus content that's for club members, the Irish accents. Now, 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 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 Czechs 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 has just been created under Bismarck. It's very modern. It's very dynamic, very militaristic. What are we hanging around for? We're like these people stuffing themselves with cake and talking to slavs austria-hungary is clearly destined for the scrap heap which our future lies in a greater germany and so in the 1880s which is the decade leading up to the meiling incident you have the growth of this very noisy aggressive pan-German movement that is bitterly opposed to what they see as the sort of woke multiculturalism of the Habsburgs and would much prefer union with Berlin.

36:13And 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, anti-Semitic nationalism. We kind of know where this is going to lead. 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' 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. Get rid of Christmas from a place with something called Yule Fest. And the Austrians greet each other by saying Grueskot. He says, get rid of that. Why don't we say Heil? Yeah, why not? Could really catch on. So you can see, right 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.

37:31It actually paused with the 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 Schörnerer, the pan-German extreme nationalist, is due to report to the Landesgerichtstrasse 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 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 when vesuvius exploded 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.

38:54Now in Pompeii, Out of Time with Tom Hiddleston, Hiddleston will guide you between past and present. He will uncover the real stories of the people who lived through one of history's most notorious disasters. It is a cinematic masterpiece from the makers of Loki and it brings the ancient world vividly to life. Watch Pompeii out of time with Tom Hiddleston, Thursday at 8pm on National Geographic. This episode is brought to you by Autotrader. Now, if car shopping feels like a massive faff, buying your car online at Autotrader makes it way easier, really. So you can shop loads and loads of cars online. You can compare prices. You can check the financing and trade-in options. And of course, you can do it from wherever you are. You start online, go to the dealer for your test drive, and finish wherever works for you. Your information, your data stays with you, so there is no starting over. Plus, you are working with local dealers and there are real people there to help. So buy your car online on AutoTrader. Really.

40:15This episode is brought to you by the Gates Foundation. We have touched on the fall of the Roman Empire a few times on this show, haven't we? But what our listeners may not know is that among the causes that historians talk about, it's not just barbarian invasions. There's also talk of a disease which people call Roman fever, which I believe we know now as malaria. For thousands of years, humanity was defenseless against it. But thankfully, we live in a time of incredible ingenuity and American scientists and partners around the world are fighting back with support from the Gates Foundation. Yes, so they're creating a new generation of bed nets that kill up to 90% of mosquitoes. That leads to a 50% drop in malaria, saving lives and protecting vulnerable communities. The Gates Foundation, partners of human potential. Search gatesfoundation.org slash mosquito to learn more. This episode is brought to you by Zip Recruiter. Tom, you can always tell, can't you, when somebody is really passionate about something. And actually, we have a brilliant example in our own podcast team. Because a couple of years ago, we hired a new producer called Elia Akude. And it was the best decision

41:33we ever made. And if you want a similar passion in your team, then you need ZipRecruiter. And you can try it free at ZipRecruiter.com slash history. ZipRecruiter's newest feature and powerful matching technology shows the most interested, qualified people first. So find candidates who really want those jobs in your company on ZipRecruiter. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. Try it for free at ziprecruiter.com slash history that's ziprecruiter.com slash history meet your match on zip recruiter hello everyone and welcome back to the rest is history 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

42:49modern civilization, isn't it? 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 Josef's builders in the last 30 years have ripped down the old city fortifications and they've made way the centerpiece of their sort of city planning project. It's probably at the time the most famous boulevard in the world, which is the Ringstrasse. You go there today, it's still this kind of breathtaking spectacle these magnificent buildings the opera house the court theater 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 road if you're being dismissive and their design tells you something about the hapsburg 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 style the parliament another and basically they they were they were saying well the hapsburgs are the heirs to all historical styles but then by the 1880s when they they're finishing off the Ringstrasse,

44:06Franz 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, neoclassical was all the rage which is kind of slightly colder and more austere and the viennese wanted to say well not like the germans with their cold classicism we're more fun we're more you know a little bit more flowery but um 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 is 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 levive to krakow to prague wherever you can see this sort of hapsburg architecture it's very recognizable now i called it a stage set and

45:23this 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 1888 there were the first long distance telephone calls in 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 at the the greetings that people gave the sort of you know um frowl 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 uh if you went to the prater amusement parks if you've seen the film the third man the um the kind of ferris wheel and orson wells 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 electrocuting themselves but swells from 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 were being carted off all the time to hospital ambulances because they'd electrocuted themselves. Right, so aristocratic self-harm, bit of a theme.

46:39It'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 theater 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 uh in budapest you have freud who then is in his 30s, 30s, he's 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 Fantasiekt Vienna. 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, Poland, Ukraine on the newly built railways. And they now have legal equality, which they've only had since 1867. And they flood into the 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,

47:58of course, means that they're very convenient and easy scapegoats for people like Georg von Schoenera, 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 Schönerer 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, Dalmatia, 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 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 in your best austrian accent the kingdom still stands a mighty ruin continuing

49:17from 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 the 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 yeah typical teenager a miserable, a bit downcast and depressive and whatnot. But I think there's more to this than your usual teenage woes. So we've got another quotation, Tom, I think. Thoughts of every kind race endlessly through my head. All is confusion. My brain sees all day. No sooner has one thought gone than another takes its place. Each one compels me. Each one says something different. Now gay and cheerful. Now even 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 uh he arranged a marriage to princess stephanie she's jolly fun

50:33loving fun loving bride she's not a funster she's a good person i think stephanie she's quite decent good natured 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 Rudolf. And actually, the story of their wedding, and 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. 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?

51:49I 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 perpetrating on his wedding night? I don't know. On your wedding night with like a 16-year-old? I mean, it's poor for 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 arch duchess god so even woker than her father even woker the nazis sent her to dachau and she lived an extreme age and died in 1963. Same year as John F. Kennedy.

53:06Yeah, the year of Beatlemania. She lived long enough to watch TV footage of people screaming at the London Palladium or something. At 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. 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 VII, Bertie, the prince of wales i mean he is a notorious lothario 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 would you want edward the seventh to be your instructor i mean well rudolph likes it likes the future Edward VII. 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 who we'll be coming to in due course.

54:22Yeah, I can't wait for him to appear on the show. So Rudolf's favorite mistress was a woman called mitzi caspar who came from gratz 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 um but she's only one of many lovers and it's generally accepted i, that by the late 1880s, Rudolf 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 transmitted disease doesn't greatly add to the harmony of the household. And by the late 1880s, there's a lot of rumour in Vienna that Rudolf 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 Rudolf's religious faith is? I mean, if he's going to go on and commit suicide and murder, that's not very Catholic behaviour. I think it is skin deep at best i i would guess i don't think it's as bad at all he never seems to talk about god particularly in his letters and in his sort of jottings which will come to you 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

55:42castle 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 but 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 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, Rudolf 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 and 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.

56:59He 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, 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 because he's got a lot of very close Jewish friends. And actually, this newspaper editor, Sepps, is Jewish. And that makes Rudolf a hate figure for Schönerer 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 incel... I mean, it's the opposite of an incel, actually. But he's a man who would spend a lot of time on YouTube watching dark web material. Yes, but because he's not an emperor. Because he's not an emperor.

58:15But if he was an emperor, perhaps he would have, I don't know, I'm clutching at straws 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 VII. 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 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 he hates him and when Wilhelm became emperor of Germany, Rudolf was appalled, and he wrote to his friend, Maurice Sepps. He said, By the grace of God, he is dumb,

59:32of the Kaiser. But he considers himself the greatest genius. I imagine that in a few years, he will bring Hohenzollern 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 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 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 back and he does this so he is 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 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

1:00:49and he writes to his mate morris seps 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 the age of 30 marks the dividing point in life and of answered 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. I think 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 Meierling. 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? At the next Rest Is History scheduling meeting. We could have could have we should order champagne laced with cognac you

1:02:08could find a hunting lodge get in a bit of hunting get out the morphine and the cognac yeah you can't see this john but alia is uh in recording with me and she's absolutely crying with laughter and thoughts 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 rudolph meets the woman who i was about to say changes life yes i mean 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 parvenues her father was a diplomat who was ennobled by Franz Joseph. Her mother came from a Greek financial family from Constantinople called the Baltazis. And the Baltazis 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, but she called herself Mary because unusually in world history it was seen as cool to have an English style name. So that's

1:03:24very nice. And her mother was very ambitious for her. And she went to a convent school for noblemen'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 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 Braganza set his capita, chambermaid 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 capita 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 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.

1:04:41Anyway, 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 you know 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 seventh the prince of wales we've already described tried to give him instructions sexual matters but found there was nothing that rudolph didn't know now Now Edward, Bertie, as he was called slightly confusingly, recognised 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. Or was he hard to get well we don't know a few days later their paths crossed again at the court theater um but rudolph didn't again didn't really uh 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

1:06:00of 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 sacher torta and they laughing and having a great time having champagne surely with cognac and morphine with actually rudolph'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 Prince of Wales in this very feverish political environment they're publicly associating with well-known kind of Jewish figures 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 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 hullabaloo about schirner and the pan germans and rudolph and his and his father and the court in general are worried that when the kaiser arrives in vienna pan-Germans will come out on the streets. They'll have demonstrations shouting how brilliant the Kaiser is. And that's not good. And Rudolf actually said to Stephanie, his wife, the splendid line left to me.

1:07:17I would invite Wilhelm only to get rid of him in some elegant hunting accident. 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 they brought the uh court opera orchestra to the palace to the hofburg, 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 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 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 liquor repeater rifles. You made a schoolboy error.

1:08:34Who's the inspector general of your army? What a muppet he must be. And who is it, Dominic? It's Crown Prince Rudolf. 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 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 Rudolf's demeanour. So his wife, Stephanie, wrote later, I could not fail to notice an alarming change in rudolph'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 rudolph writes a letter to his friend morris seps the newspaper editor 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.

1:09:51Mid-October, another of his cousins, Countess Marie Larish, comes to see him. She's the same age as Rudolf. 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. What does that mean? Basically her board? Yeah, a little bit like the Madame de Mertoy, is it, in Dangerous Liaisons? The sort of Glenn Close figure who grooms younger women? Lady Melbourne. Exactly right. glenn close figure who um grooms younger women lady melbourne exactly right so mary vetsera has told countess larish that she fancies crown prince rudolph 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 like the fashion pages and uh countess larry said oh yes she's a most interesting and captivating person there'll be a new court theater opening on the ringstrasse in 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,

1:11:08Rudolph 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 Nihammer, with a message for Countess Larish. And the day after that, Countess Larish 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. 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. Rudolf's drawn the curtains, and Rudolf's coachman drops her off back with Countess Larish. And then a few days later, on the 5th of November, the decisive encounter. Countess Larish says to Mary's mother, I'd like to take Mary shopping. I'd like her advice because she's such a fashionista. If they go out to the shops, but in fact they're picked up straight away by Rudolf's coachman and

1:12:23he takes them to a back entrance to the palace, the Hofburg. And there, Mary is led upstairs to Rudolf's apartment. 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, Rudolf 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 rest of history club of course can hear that right now at the rest of history.com and just to say fabulous news dominic we are running a summer sale so if you're not a member of the rest of history club uh 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

1:13:38leave 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 20% Dominic, 20%. Too much. Are we doing this for nothing? 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 love a comical story. And we'll be trying to blend the two aspects of that. And we will be doing that live at the Southbank 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, Rudolf, Mary Vetsera, and the shocking climax of the mailing incident. Auf Wiedersehen. Bye-bye. Ralph says everything you need to get back to it. Keep busy routines running smoothly with proven quality at affordable prices

1:14:55from our exclusive brands. Creamy Kroger brand protein yogurt makes a satisfying breakfast, while sweet Simple Truth organic baked energy bars keep midday bites exciting. And classic Kroger brand crustless sandwiches Thank you.