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

22:00Dominic Sandbrook:I need to go immediately. And Francis said, oh my God, you know, the doctors will have, I'll get the doctors to have a look at you. The doctors reported there was absolutely nothing wrong with her. And she said, no, no, I'm terribly ill. I absolutely must go to Madeira. Why? We don't know. They might've 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 achille on yes exactly which we've talked about and um france joseph went to visit her in corfu and said you know how are you getting on are you feeling better she said not really i'll probably stay here for a while 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 goes she likes going to northamptonshire she also likes hanging out in ireland and again going hunting and sort of hanging out with the anglo-irish aristocracy and then occasionally she'll go into monte carlo to play the tables in the casino i mean i think

23:11Tom Holland:if i was a beautiful 19th century emperors that is what i would do yeah right you would go to the

23:18Dominic Sandbrook:You'd go to Monte Carlo and Corfu.

23:19Tom Holland:I'd play the tables. I'd go Foxhound in England.

23:21Dominic Sandbrook: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.

23:35Tom Holland: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 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 and she goes to a gym so she's one of the earliest women in european history regularly to go to a gym and she has an absolute horror of fat women and she raises her children to regard them with with dread and terror and she get when she one 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.

24:29Dominic Sandbrook:Biographers had 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

24:43Tom Holland:would she'd have beefsteaks kind of squeezed and the blood would drip out and then she'd have it

24:48Dominic Sandbrook: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 and all of this and the

25:08Tom Holland:The whole corsetry thing. I mean, it's so extreme as to be almost fetishistic.

25:14Dominic Sandbrook:Exactly. She's punishing herself, effectively. Now, while she's gone, Franz Joseph, he has affairs with these sort of very boring, discreet, middle-class women who can be relied upon to keep quiet. And his most celebrated relationship is with an actress at the Court Theatre called Katerina Schrat. And that was basically set up for him by his wife. he'd long admired this actress and cc said well it's 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 schratt would um 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 cc was very happy with this and she encouraged it and she would sort of sometimes the three of them would hang out together did they go on cc and uh katerina i think it's because cc had arranged it because she knew this actress was no conceivable threat to her yeah i mean cc'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 and of course if she joined the circus as was intended it would have been a very different story but the person that franz joseph loves is always clearly cc he's got her portrait in 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 uh your little man or he called he literally calls himself your mannequin because she's much taller than he is and i think there's something quite sad about his story so he's this kind of lonely emperor devoted to his people he gets up at five o 'clock every morning from his iron bedstead to do his paperwork 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.

27:24Dominic Sandbrook: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. 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 Königgritz.

28:01Dominic Sandbrook: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. The, 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.

28:41Dominic Sandbrook: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 bears. Yeah. You know, sort of counts of massive moustaches, all of this. She loves all this. Ruritania, basically.

29:16Dominic Sandbrook:It's the Ruritania 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 andrasi and ference 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 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 and includes inland croatia and then there's an austrian half ruled from vienna that includes what's now the czech republic so bohemia moravia includes galicia in poland and ukraine includes slovenia and so on and so forth and in vienna franz joseph rules as emperor of austria and in budapest he rules as king of hungary and to mark the occasion in budapest he and cc are given a coronation a new coronation she's the first hungarian queen to be crowned with the holy crown 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.

30:40Dominic Sandbrook:As you said, she speaks Hungarian, all of this. So it looks like everything's gone well, but with the Habsburgs in this period, there's always some sort of amusing calamity just around the corner. The next calamity, well, it's not exactly amusing, is it? But it's eccentric. It's an eccentric calamity. And we've done this on the show, haven't we, with Edward Shawcross. This was the story of Maximilian Habsburg, who'd gone off to become emperor of Mexico. It's all gone terribly wrong for him. He's Franz Jose's brother. And he ends up being cornered in Queretaro in Mexico and shot by a firing squad.

31:16Dominic Sandbrook:And Franz Jose's reaction is so Franz Jose. 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.

31:39Tom Holland:As an Englishman, you're an admirer of a stiff upper lip. So one has to respect that. Exactly.

31:44Dominic Sandbrook:So the net result of all this, we're now into the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary. The upside is it keeps the empire going. The downside is it basically institutionalizes constant squabbling between the Austrian and Hungarian halves of the empire about tariffs and 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 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.

32:17Dominic Sandbrook: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 that 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.

32:55Dominic Sandbrook: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 tarfa 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 um 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 you didn't give that in an Irish accent that's that's bonus content that's for club members the Irish accent now as 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 as rather than German and that creates a backlash from some of the German speakers and the German speakers say what you're allowing the Czechs to use Czech what are you giving away you know our supremacy within the empire to these kind of jumped up Slavs and the some of the German speakers say look Germany is brilliant Germany's just been created under Bismarck it's very modern it's very dynamic very militaristic what are we hanging around for we're like these people stuffing themselves with cake and talking to Slavs Austria-Hungary is clearly destined for the scrap heap we our future lies in in a greater Germany.

35:16Dominic Sandbrook: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. And their spokesman is a guy called Georg von Schoenere, 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 Schöner, he wants to change the calendar, dating all years from the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest.

35:59Dominic Sandbrook: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 bourgeois Jewish capitalism. And we need to get back to that. And he doesn't like Christian festivals, does he? Because they're Jewish. Exactly. Get rid of Christmas and replace it with something called Yulefest. And the Austrians greet each other by saying, Gruß Gott. 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.

36:39Dominic Sandbrook:Anyway, back to Meiling. That's the context. So let's now concentrate. Let's get narrow the focus to Vienna in August, 1888. On the 18th of August, Franz Joseph is due to celebrate his birthday. It actually pours with rain, so it's postponed for a couple of days. And that means that it coincides with what's scheduled for the 20th, which is this guy Georg von Schoenere, 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.

37:25Dominic Sandbrook: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.

37:38Tom Holland:I'll begin to find out what is wrong after the break. Definitely. Don't miss it then.

37:46Dominic Sandbrook:This episode is brought to you by National Geographic. Tom, we're familiar, aren't we, with what happened in Pompeii when Vesuvius exploded?

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40:13Tom Holland:hello everyone and welcome back to the rest is history um and to the story of one of the great royal scandals of central european history and indeed i would go so far as say european history full stop and it is the late summer of 1888 we're at the heart of the austro-hungarian imperial capital vienna a city of almost one and a half million people and dominic there is a case for saying that this is the heartbeat of what will become modern civilization isn't it totally so

40:44Dominic Sandbrook:we already mentioned you know marla 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 a 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 centerpiece of their sort of city planning project is 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.

41:16Dominic Sandbrook: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 road if you're being dismissive. And their design tells you something about the Habsburg Project in the 19th century. because the very first buildings on the ring were designed they were historicists so each building was sort of designed in a different historical style to reflect its function so the city hall would be one style the parliament another and basically they were they were saying well the hapsburgs are the heirs to all historical styles but then by the 1880s when they're finishing off the ringstrasse franz joseph's architects has 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 classis 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

42:32Tom Holland: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 hapsburg 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.

43:03Dominic Sandbrook:Probably not. Yeah. They roll it out all across the empire. So if you go now, even today, to Trieste, to Lviv, to Krakow, to Prague, wherever, you can see this sort of Habsburg architecture. It's very recognisable. Now, I called it a stage set. And this sense that it's a sort of Baroque stage set is probably a bit misleading because, as you said, you know, this is the city of psychoanalysis. It's the city of the future in lots of ways. So that summer, 1888, there were the first long-distance telephone phone 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 frau 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 electric using themselves but swells from that the sort of aristocratic bits of vienna would would basically bribe the people running the machine to give them bigger and bigger shocks and they were just 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 it's a theme now if 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 in Budapest.

44:54Dominic Sandbrook:You have Freud, who then is in his 30s, he's a nerve doctor, but he's just beginning work on the theories of the subconscious. And it's interesting that two of these names, so Mahler and Freud, are Jewish. Actually, there's lots of Jewish influence in van der Sieck to Vienna. There's Wittgenstein, the schoenberg there is arthur schnitzler the the great um writer and so on and that reflects a bigger story because the pop 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 the professions so about 60 percent of vienna's doctors are jewish about half of the lawyers they're very prominent in art and in publishing and whatnot and this of course means that they are very convenient and easy scapegoats for people like georg von schoennerer 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.

46:10Dominic Sandbrook:Now, there's one man that becomes associated with this Jewish presence, and he's a man who hates Schönera 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.

46:34Tom Holland:So basically, his military education has made him kind of woke. A little bit, yeah, a little bit.

46:41Dominic Sandbrook: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, Sisi'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, shall I read them? Yeah, why don't you read them in your best Austrian accent?

47:07Tom Holland: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 the next storm will sweep away this ruin.

47:29Dominic Sandbrook: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 bit miserable a bit um a bit downcast and depressive and whatnot but i think there's more to this than your usual teenage woes so then we've got another quotation tom i think thoughts of every kind write endlessly

47:51Tom Holland: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

48:13Dominic Sandbrook:come he's not a bundle of laughs i think it's uh true to say so when he was 21 his father arranged a marriage for him and uh he arranged a marriage to princess stephanie which is jolly fun-loving fun-loving bride she's not a funster she's a good person i think stephanie she's quite decent 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 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 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 um a kind of john ruskin

49:42Tom Holland:reaction i mean what's going on there we don't know i think what torments what horror suggests

49:49Dominic Sandbrook:she has not enjoyed it well i mean she's obviously not enjoyed herself um 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

49:59Tom Holland:you wouldn't write what torment would you no but is he is he kind of getting up to sinister sex games

50:05Dominic Sandbrook:i just don't know i mean tom clearly you're thinking about this you're i don't want to accuse you of overthinking this extremely gory scene well but it matters doesn't it because

50:13Tom Holland: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

50:30Dominic Sandbrook: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 arch duchess god so even woke her than her father even woke her the nazis sent her to dachau and she lived an extreme age and died in 1963 same year as john f kennedy yeah the year of beetlemania she lived long enough to watch tv footage of the of people screaming at the london palladium or something of the other beetles incredible anyway the marriage was not a success rudolph was very dissolute he's he's a good looking man i think you compared him with callum and producers so callum will be pleased by that um 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

51:29Tom Holland:queen victoria i suppose well you say that because um 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 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 VII to be your instructor? I mean... Well, Rudolph likes the future Edward VII.

51:59Dominic Sandbrook:They love each other. Well, this will be coming up in the rest of this episode.

52:04Tom Holland: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 will be coming to in due course.

52:15Dominic Sandbrook: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 Graz. It was said that she had worked as a prostitute in Madame Wolf's Vienna brothel. I don't know how true this is. she becomes very close to rudolph she becomes his great confidant but she's only one of many lovers and it's generally accepted i think that by the late 1880s rudolph probably had severe gonorrhea and that he passed this on to stephanie his wife which meant that she could not have more children and the basically the fact they've both got the sexually transmitted 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 Rudolf is looking to have the marriage annulled in some way.

53:02Dominic Sandbrook: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.

53:09Tom Holland: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 behavior.

53:17Dominic Sandbrook:I think it is skin deep at best, I would guess. I don't think it's his bag at all. He never seems to talk about God, particularly in his letters and in his sort of jottings, which we'll come to. so before the break we got to his birthday which was the 21st of august 1888 and he celebrated that that's when he turns 30 at his castle which is called laxenburg in the vienna woods and stephanie was there his wife and their daughter elizabeth who was only i think she was four or so 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.

53:56Dominic Sandbrook:Rudolf had just shaved his beard. Callum still has his beard.

53:59Tom Holland: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.

54:06Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah. Rudolf 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 in the Prater Park. He still believes very much in the empire and the Habsburg ideal.

54:40Dominic Sandbrook: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 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.

55:20Dominic Sandbrook: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 Schoenere and the Pan-Germans.

55:37Tom Holland: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.

55:52Dominic Sandbrook: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.

56:06Tom Holland: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.

56:13Dominic Sandbrook: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.

56:23Tom Holland:He prefers France, doesn't he? And he also prefers Britain. He likes its constitutional monarchy.

56:30Dominic Sandbrook: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 Rudolf'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 Rudolf is five months older than Wilhelm. And Rudolf absolutely despises Wilhelm. He hates him. And when Wilhelm became Emperor of Germany, Rudolf was appalled and he wrote to his friend Morris Sepps.

57:22Dominic Sandbrook: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 Hohenzollern Germany to the past it deserves. And he is not wrong. So Crown Prince Rudolf has all these ideas in his head, but he can't tell anyone. 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.

57:58Dominic Sandbrook: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 this. The nickname for it, because he was the sponsor, it was called the Crown Prince Work, the Crown Prince Work. 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 either arguing for reform of the empire or slacking off the germans so when he turns 30 he feels very miserable he thinks my life's been wasted and he writes to his mate morris sepps do you want to read it and you're don't forget he's not a teenager at this

58:47Tom Holland:point so it's not a broken voice the age of 30 marks a dividing point in life and 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

59:23Dominic Sandbrook:he's not here i think he's to use the expression that uh 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 myling 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

59:50Tom Holland:champagne and laced with cognac and morphine would be like i think it sounds tremendous actually that That sounds quite fun, doesn't it?

59:57Dominic Sandbrook:And the next Rest is History scheduling meeting.

59:59Tom Holland:We could have one.

1:00:00Dominic Sandbrook:We should order champagne-laced cognac.

1:00:02Tom Holland:You could find a hunting lodge. Get in a bit of hunting.

1:00:05Dominic Sandbrook:Get out the morphine and the cognac. Yeah. You can't see this, Tom, but Alia is recording with me. She's absolutely crying with laughter at the thought of this hunting lodge and the champagne and cognac. You can take the girl out of Germany, but you can't take Germany out of the girl. So this is the moment, just after his 30th birthday, when Crown Prince Rudolf meets the woman who will, I was about to say, change his life. this will change both their lives in quite a dramatic way and this is mary vetsera so who is she so the vetseras are a recently ennobled family they're kind of parvenues her father was a diplomat who was ennobled by franz joseph her mother came from a greek financial family from constantinople called the baltatzis and the baltatzis 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 schratz franz joseph's kind of muse and franz joseph actually said to her stay away from those baltazzi brothers they are their reputation is not entirely correct so uh she was born marie but she called herself mary because unusually in world history it was seen as cool to have an english style name so that's very nice um and her mother was very ambitious for her and she went to a convent school for nobleman's daughters her father had died in 1887 so when she was that was the year she turned 16 now at this point when her father died she already had quite a racy reputation i have to say if you if you google her i don't want to sound ungallant but she doesn't leap out of the photograph as a great beauty however she's a great party girl so she's a girl who will if you have a party in vienna she will come dressed as a sexy chambermaid kind of french maid that kind of 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 rudolf 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 anyway in the summer of 1888 she went off to england and she comes back from England.

1:02:40Dominic Sandbrook: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 VII, the Prince of Wales, we've already described. Tried to give him instructions on sexual matters, but found there was nothing that Rudolf didn't know.

1:03:16Dominic Sandbrook: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 is he playing 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 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 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.

1:04:12Dominic Sandbrook:So this, I think, reflects very well, both on Crown Prince Rudolph and on the Prince of Wales, that 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 hullabaloo about schoenner and the pan germans and rudolf and his 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 they'll him 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 I would invite Wilhelm only to get rid of him in some elegant hunting accident which would have been an amusing way to get rid of the Kaiser anyway the Kaiser arrived in Vienna on the 3rd of October and I'm very very sorry to report that he let himself, Germany and the podcast down immediately.

1:05:31Dominic Sandbrook:They brought the court opera orchestra to the palace, to the Hofburg, to play selections from Wagner in his honor. And the Kaiser disgraced himself by a quote. He talked and laughed noisily during the performance. So bad behavior from him. For the next few days, he does nothing but tell the Austrians, you know he's just such a terrible guest he's constantly saying to the austrians this is wrong you should do this you're not doing this properly he's terrible at that he says you're too lax with your newspapers you're too soft on the slavs he says at one point if you were ever to give the slavs more political rights and move towards a more federal structure we'd probably have to drop you as an ally you know he's he's got a sort of donald trump approach to diplomacy 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 what kind who's the inspector general of your army what a muppet he must be and who is it dominic it's grand 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 excruciating 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 sepps 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.

1:07:45Dominic Sandbrook:Mid-October, another of his cousins, Countess Marie Larish, comes to see him. She is the same age as Rudolph. She's 30. She's a relative of his mother. She's a sort of social butterfly, Viennese social butterfly. She has appointed herself Mary Vetsera's mentor. What does that mean?

1:08:04Tom Holland:Basically, her board?

1:08:07Dominic Sandbrook: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 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 larius 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 rudolph goes to the court theater opening and mary's there in the in the vetsera family box with her mother and her sister She's very elegantly turned out.

1:09:09Dominic Sandbrook:She's got diamonds in her hair. And they don't speak, but Rudolf can see her watching him through her opera glasses. And then a couple of days later, he sends his elderly valet, who's called Nihama, 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 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 Larish.

1:10:01Dominic Sandbrook: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 he takes them to a back entrance of 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.

1:10:37Dominic Sandbrook:Suddenly, Rudolf came in and took it from me. And when I said that I wasn't afraid, he smiled.

1:10:44Tom Holland: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 Restless History Club, of course, can hear that right now at therestlesshistory.com. And just to say fabulous news, Dominic, we are running a summer sale. So if you're not a member of the Restless History Club, for a limited time, you can get an extra 20 % off. I mean, that's insane value, isn't it?

1:11:20Dominic Sandbrook:That's giving it away. It's madness. I think it's too much.

1:11:24Tom Holland:20 % off an annual membership using the code SUMMER26. And that's only valid until August 31st. So absolutely not something to leave hanging.

1:11:33Dominic Sandbrook: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, 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?

1:11:49Tom Holland: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 South Bank Centre in London on Friday, the 4th of September. And take us, of course, at therestishistory.com. But for now, thank you, Dominic. Thank you, everyone. and we will be back next time with the crown prince rudolph mary vetsera and the shocking climax of the mailing incident i'll see you soon bye