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

This episode is brought to you by the Lloyds 5K House Deposit and this is something that was last seen in 1996. Yes, 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. At the economic growth of the time, the technological developments, the sort of sense of an endless golden summer where everyone is listening to Blair and Oasis looking forward to buying their first houses and that of course takes us to mortgages. Now the good news is that in a nod to the 1990s, Lloyds are offering 5K Deposit mortgages to first time buyers. So search 5K first time buyer. 1996 average first time buyer deposits are based on ONS data. To status your home may be repossessed if you don't keep up repayments and conditions apply. Hello everyone and before today's show, I have incredibly exciting news for you about a live show. On Friday the 4th of September, Dominic and I will be at the South Bank to do something that we have not done before. So you will be the first people to hear it. We are telling the story of what is the ultimate Victorian adventure. The date is 1868. The location is Abbasinia and the Emperor of Abbasinia has been writing letters to Queen Victoria who rather rudely has not replied to them. So the Emperor of Abbasinia annoyed about this has kidnapped a number of British subjects. In response Britain sends an expedition to rescue the captives and it is no exaggeration to say it is massive. On this expedition 13,000 soldiers, 40,000 animals including 44 elephants and the British even put down a railway line to transport everything. It's an incredible story full of jaw dropping events, ludicrous characters, lots of moustaches, lots of general Victorian shenanigans and as I say it is the first time that we have ever done it on the rest of history. I don't want to blow our trumpet but I think it's going to be an absolute rest of history classic. So if you want to get a ticket for the ultimate Victorian adventure at the South Bank in London on Friday the 4th of September, you know where to go. The rest is history.com. Cat Hoyos and the Prince of Cobrag ordered Losschek to break down the door. Out of breath, half crying, Losschek whispered that he had to inform their serene lordships that a lady, the Baroness Mary Vetzera, was staying in his imperial highness' room. Cobrag and Hoyos are recoiled. They retreated to the billiard room. Losschek kept knocking and calling. A kitchen made 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. Losschek raised it to smash the lock. The lock resisted. Losschek 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. Losschek hacked out a gash. The gash became a hole. Framed in jagged wood, smoky with blurred candles. The bark with the drawn blinds. The room inside was visible. Only then did Losschek 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 Fandasyekler Vienna. At the end of the 1880s, and it is a tremendously gothic account of the most notorious murder suicide in European history, a scandal so fantastically lurid that it makes the travails of our own beloved royal family. Well, like nothing very much at all in comparison. And the context couldn't be more colourful. But just outside Vienna, the year is 1888, Vienna of course at this period the city of Marla of climped the young Freud busy developing his theories of psychoanalysis, his notions about the sexual etiology of neurosis and the question of sex and neurosis will not be irrelevant to this story. And Vienna is the capital of an empire that is struggling to cope with forces that in the 20th century will have an absolutely explosive effect, nationalism, anti-Semitism, a host of other modern pathologies. But the scene I just described Dominic, I mean it does read like something out of a kind of 19th century gothic thriller, doesn't it, like something out of Edgar Allan Poe. Yeah, absolutely it does. So hi everybody, the scene is a remote hunting lodge in the woods at Sylviana and the two principal characters. So I'm going to give the game away right away. Akkilla is the 30 year old heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, his crown prince Rudolph, an idealistic haggard man, his office face on morphine and champagne, he is riddled with gonorrhea, and he is the kind of man who keeps the scholars of paperweight. I mean he's another of the many people in history who look like our producer Callum. He's a 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 Akkilla in that series, but here there's not much doubt, is there? There's no doubt whatsoever. So this crown prince Rudolph and then there is his accomplice and victim and this is his teenage mistress Baroness Mary Vetzera who is a fashionista, she's a party girl, she's a social climber and she has become infatuated with him to the point of self-destruction. And it's a brilliant, brilliant story. I mean all through the decades writers and artists have been drawn to it. There are manga comics, there are plays, there are operas, there's ballet, Kenneth McMillan's great ballet from the 1970s, a real favourite at the Royal Ballet in London. Yeah, because it was staged this spring at Coffingard. Yes. So it's a fantastic story and we'll get straight into it and we'll begin with the time and place which is a great favourite of the rest is history. The Austro-Hungarian Empire, so worlds of gigantic cakes, even more gigantic moustaches, insanely dapper uniforms, waltzes, nationalism, you know, simmering beneath the surface, the subconscious sexil psychosis. Exactly, we are here for all of it. That's a remind listeners, particularly people who didn't hear our series about the build up to the First World War and the Austro-Hungarian Empire last featured. It's in central Europe, it's this mosaic of languages and ethnicities. Half of it is ruled from Vienna, half of it from Budapest. There are 13 million German speakers, 10 million Hungarians, five million checks, there are polls, Italians, Slovenes, Jews, you name it. And what binds them is their unity to the Habsburg dynasty. So it's a 13th century dynasty to the Habsburgs, Rudolf, of course, is a Habsburg. In his book that you mentioned, brilliant book and nervous, spend a 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 Rudolf's father, and that is Emperor Franz Joseph I, a great, great favorite of the show. So because basically he lived forever, easy list but the second, isn't he, of 19th century history, he completely is and we'll get, because he's the father of the killer will spend a bit of time with him, because he's such an important figure in this story. So at this point, although he died in 1916, but at this point, 1888 he is not yet 60. And he was born in 1813, Schoenbrun Palace, the Austrian kind of Versailles outside Vienna. And he was really the ultimate Habsburg. He says, if you take the sort of Habsburg spirit, was that decent, stodgy, staunch, drab, he's Peacabsburg and distilled it in human form. You have this guy. So he's very, he's very pious, pious, Catholic. He's completely committed to the Imperial ideal. He grew up as a little boy with a passion for uniforms and parades and toy soldiers. And that runs all the way through his life. And in the history books, he's generally, historians tend to 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. It's too. And the uniform means a lot to him. There are loads and loads of stories of him losing his temper when people come to court in the wrong 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? How dare you turn up with the wrong number of buttons?" And various other people explained to the emperor that tailors had stopped making these decorative buttons because they were pointless. And Franz Joseph was absolutely crushed and he said, "It's quite wrong. It's monstrous." Because this is a signal that nothing is stable and all may pass. Exactly. So, as I just thought about our protagonist, Cronprin's Rudolph, so he's growing up with a father who is intensely conservative, who's emotionally very tacit and 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 Cronprin's Rudolph gets to where he gets to. Fade 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 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 and preferred Nand who was epileptic abdicated. And in this moment of great tension and great flux for the Austrian empire, Franz Joseph was parachuted in his 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 Rudolph's mother. Oh, yes. So, surely the most romantic, certainly the most romantic, monarchical figure in central European history, Elizabeth of Bavaria. Now, people in the English-speaking world may not gauge just how popular she was in central Europe. She was the focus of an absolutely intense cult, personality cult. Basically, if you think about Princess Diana in the 1980s and 90s, she is that on steroids. Her nickname was CC. And she was a sex symbol. She was a fashion leader. She was an influencer. She was the personification of glamour. She was romantic heroine. She was a sportswoman. For a lot of people, she was basically a saint and a martyr. And her story really is bonkers. So she was born in 1837 into a sort of minor branch of the Bavarian royal family. And her father was called Duke Maximillion. And he was an absolute madman. He was obsessed with circuses. And he didn't have a proper education because unusually, he hoped that his daughter would grow up to join the circus. Run away from a palace and join a circus. Exactly. So she's only sort of half-educated. She's a bit of an auto-diadect. Well, do you know Dominic? I've always found that a very appealing aspect of her because she, you know, she had this enormously long hair. Yeah, that's her ankles. Yeah, down to her ankles. And it was so heavy that she would complain that it's 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 learnt Hungarian. She became hugely popular with Hungarians as we will find out. And then she learned ancient Greek. And I had to learn ancient Greek. And I unfortunately didn't have as long, didn't have a long hair. And I didn't have attendance to comb it. But I, nevertheless, why is that my ablutions I would try and emulate CC by learning regular Greek. When you're combing your hair. Yeah. Okay. Well, that's impressive. So she's a role model still to this day. Is what I'm saying. She and Franz Joseph have an incredibly romantic, an origin story as a couple. So when she was 15, she went with her mother and her older sister, Ellen, Nene, she was called to the Spar town of Bad Ishal. Great to have a Spar town. It is great. And the reason they were going there was they're going to meet Franz Joseph because the two mothers had agreed basically that Franz Joseph would marry Ellen. Franz Joseph was then 23. And his mother, Sophie, she was called, had picked out Ellen as a sort of German speaking Catholic, you know, ideal regal bride, period bride. When they met for tea, Ellen was very shy and serious. And she was poor at small talk as was Franz Joseph. Yeah. But 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. C.C. was there and she was only 15. She was basically there for, you know, she was along for a jaunt. So she was in great form joking, you know, good humid, shaking her very long hair. Exactly. She's a very elegant looking sort of innocent teenage girl. And after this dead had tea, Franz Joseph's brother said to their mother, he said, "Mama, Franz, he likes C.C. very much better than Nene. You will see. He will choose her instead of the elder one." And their mother said, "No, no, no, he'll do as he's told. He may be the emperor, but he'll do as I tell him." Anyway, Franz Joseph went to see his mother that evening and said, "It's C.C. on nobody. I'm in love." I mean, how awful for Helen. Right, gutting for Helen. Although the upside for Helen, she didn't have to marry Franz Joseph. So, you know, it's twinkzing around her pants. Anyway, the next day they had a big ball and Franz Joseph danced with C.C. to the exclusion almost to everybody else. And when servants gave him loads of flowers, give to all his dance partners for the day, he gave them all to C.C. A people said, "Oh, well, there's no fighting this." So the next day, which was his birthday, the two mothers said, "They got together and they said, fine." You know, Franz Joseph can marry C.C. after all. So a very romantic story. They went from midnight carriage ride and he wrapped C.C. 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 Joseph, you know, she is a dream. She's his fairy tale princess. And a year later she arrives in Vienna for the wedding and there are huge crowds. There's merch and there's an amazing scene. So the Countess of West Smolland was there to see it happen, to see her arrive. And she described how the boat docked, the emperor ran onto the bridge and embraced her opening. She said, "I can't tell you the effect of the simple natural act, not only thousands of spectators on the banks burst into prolonged cheers, but many eyes besides mine were wet. She's a thousand times better than her portraits. None of them give an idea of her freshness, her air of candor and gentleness and intelligence. So this sounds great, right? This sounds fantastic." But the reality is a little bit different. You know, it's a fairy tale. We're not unfamiliar with this, of course, in modern British history, a fairy tale royal wedding that doesn't turn out quite as happy as you would think. So in his great book on the Habsburgs, Andrew Weakroft's British historian says, "Behind the fairy tale image, the reality was a ghost and rather difficult girl, flattered yet terrified by his overwhelming passion." And this is absolutely right. C.C. 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 the fan stress of his mother. No, the mother's awful, isn't she? I went, I went, she has children, they're always taking the children away and not letting her have anything to do with them." Exactly. Constantly squabbling, you know, the worst kind of mother and all, basically. But in C.C., I think partly because she's been brought up to be in this circus. She never quite grows up. So she's always a little bit of a sort of spoiled child. She's very moody. She is brooding. She is stubborn. These are qualities that she will pass on to her son, Rudolph. I mean, it helps, presumably, that she's incredibly beautiful and glamorous because if your moody and beautiful and glamorous then it comes to seem out 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 C.C., who was only 20 at the time, a shattering moment from which she probably never really recovered, as we got honest. Anyway, a year later, 1858, 21st of all, this 1858, she has a son. And this, of course, is giving France Joseph what he wants a male heir. And this is our protagonist, our killer, Crown Prince Rudolph. And he was named after Rudolph the first, who was the first Habsburg to be King of the Romans, basically Holy Roman Emperor. And that name tells a story because at this point in time, the 1850s, 1860s, the Habsburgs, all the rages, what's called historicism. So they are looking back constantly to try to find some historical legitimacy for their embattled dynasty in their state. And Rudolph is the focus for enormous expectation right from day one. So they had a big gala at the court theatre in Vienna to celebrate his birth. And they had an actress. I thought this would appeal to you, Tom. An actress playing the part of Cleo, the Muse of History, who has a golden tablet on stage and she writes his name and the date of his birth on the tablet. And then she says to the audience, "But the rest of the tablet I leave empty. There must be room for his deeds and I divine greatness which I shall record here yet. It's like something from a Greek myth or a fairy tale, isn't it? Because of course his deeds will indeed be written down in the annals of history but not quite as his parents would hope. No exactly. So like his father, Rudolph is brought up. If they're fatally trained to be a soldier because the army is the supreme Habsburg institution. I mean, don't you say he's raised up. The day after his birth he has appointed the colonel of an infantry regiment and given the order of the Golden Fleece which regularly listens, may remember Edward Habsburg, who is a member of the Habsburg. I think the only Habsburg we've had on the show and who did a whole episode about that space and he promised me that I would join the order of the Golden Fleece. I promise he hasn't yet delivered and also young Rudolph, he got his first military uniform and he was too. That does not surprise me. So when he was six, he was hand-stained over to a general to tutor him and this bloke was an absolutely monstrous kind of military taskmaster so he'd 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 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 the cage? With lions? I don't know. I just saw this detail and I wrote it down in the nose. I'd love to have time to research this proper more in more detail, the zoo, the sling in the zoo in the monkey house. That makes sense. In the reptile enclosure. What's the thing? Anyway, Rudolph was completely traumatised by this and basically after two years of this, a courtyard mentioned to his mother that this was happening and she complained to a sleepy with snakes. She complained and the general was fired but it obviously, I mean, you don't have to be a great psychoanalyst. You have to be sick and we don't have to be forgotten. This will probably really screw you up. Anyway, so it also tells you something about C.C.'s parenting. The fact that it's taken two years to notice that a 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 Frans Joseph, she said, I need to go to Medira for my health. I need to go immediately. Frans 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 elapsed. You must go to Medira. 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 Medira, she spent the whole winter there and then she came back to Vienna for a little bit and then she said to Frans Joseph, I need to leave again. I need to go to Kofu now and then she went to Kofu and she loves Kofu, doesn't she? Oh, she absolutely adore Kofu. She built the Achilles on. Yes, exactly, which we've talked about. And Frans Joseph went to visit her in Kofu and said, you know, how are you getting on? You're feeling better. She's had not really I'll probably stay here for a while, yeah, for a few weeks, maybe months, maybe years. Yeah. And this is basically the story of the next few decades. She's traveling constantly. She's going to England a lot, doesn't she? She goes to Fox Hunting in Northamptonshire, bizarrely. She goes to Northamptonshire. She also likes hanging out in Ireland and again going hunting as sort of hanging out with the Anglo-Ara Shara Stocracy and then occasionally she's going 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 and Kofu. I'd play the tables. I'd go to Fox Hunting England. I'd hang out in Kofu. I'd be moody. You know what? I'd say 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? I'm usually tall and madly thin. So she, her waist is 16 inches. So the corsets are vice-like and she never weighs more than 110 pounds ever. And if she does, then she goes on these kind of massive, well, she basically refused to eat. And she goes to a gym. So she's one of the earliest women in European history regularly to go to a gym. And she has an absolute horror of fat women. And she raises her children to regard them with dread and terror. And she get 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 clearly tall. She wears herself out of terror. Well, the photographers have this great battle about whether or not she was anorexic or bulimic or something. I think she was. Because the occasion is she'd go off in eat cake. They would describe her eating enormous meals and then somehow miraculously being incredibly thin. And she would never eat meat, which she would, she'd have beef steaks kind of squeezed and the blood would drip out and then she'd have it with water. 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, she's an incredible hunt woman. But one day she's going to fall off and break her neck and all of this. And the corsetry, the whole corsetry thing. I mean, it's kind of it's so extreme as to be almost fetishistic. Exactly. She's punishing herself effectively. Now, while she's gone, Franz Joseph, he has a fairs with these sort of very boring discrete 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 Katarina Shrat. And that was basically set up there by his wife. He'd long admired this actress. And Cici said, well, as a present to you, I'll get her portrait painted. And maybe you'd like to meet her. And she introduced them. And they have this very close relationship. So Katarina Shrat would, she was basically as confident. And she was very jolly. And she was a good listener. She would make him cakes. She would cook goulash for him. And she would tell him all the backstage gossip. And Cici was very happy with this. She encouraged us. And she would sort of sometimes the three of them would hang out together. Did they go on? Cici and Katarina. I think it's because Cici had arranged it because she knew this actress group was no conceivable threat to her. Yeah. I mean, Cici's not a goulash cooker, I imagine. No, she's not going to make you cakes until you great banter about actors. Of course, if she'd joined the circus, as was intended, it would have been a very different story. But the person that Franz Joseph loves is always clearly Cici. He's got her portrait in his study with her hair down to her ankles. He's always sending her presence in Kofu. He writes her sweet letters all the time. He always calls her my dear dear angel. He signs himself your little man. Or he calls, 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 boil 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 Cici 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, Sulfurino in 1859. That lost Lombardy Northern Italy for Austria, paved the way for Italian unification. And he basically had a 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 pressure. Basically, it takes seven weeks. There's a catastrophic defeat for the Austrians at the Battle of Königgritz. And after this, the Austrians are driven out of the German-speaking world, which is now free to unite and oppressions leadership to become Germany. That is a devastating moment for Austria and for France, Joseph. Basically, he's been emperor for 20 years. Everything he's touched has turned to ashes. He's lost Italy. He's lost Germany. 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 basically half the empire and are rebelled already in 1848, then are questioning the legitimacy of the entire enterprise. They're not paying their taxes. There's a huge pletal crisis. It looks as though the whole thing's going to fall apart. Everybody Vienna hates the Hungarians and says they're terrible people. Except one. And you've already mentioned this, Tom. And that's easy. She's been busy learning Hungarian while having a 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 hungry a land of gypsy fiddlers, dance and bears. Yeah. Sort of count the mass of the stars. She's all of this. She loves all of us. She's a retainer basically. It's a retainer. It's a retainer. Basically. 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 introduced us into these national leaders, Count Andrasian Ference Deac, who are the big Hungarian sort of big wigs. She passes letters between them. She encourages the husband to be 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 Emperor 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 in the Czech Republic, so Bohemia, Moravia, includes Glecion, Poland, Ukraine, and Ecclid Slovenia and so on and so forth. And in Vienna, France chose different 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 since Stephen to be given the scepter and the orb. And the Hungarians absolutely love her. They give her a palace. She went over, she goes, she wears Hungarian national dress as she said, she speaks Hungarian, all of this. So it looks like everything's gone well, but with the Hapsburgs in this period, there's always some sort of amusing calamity. Just, what happened 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 Max Million Hapsburg who'd gone off to become Emperor of Mexico. It's all gone terribly wrong for him. He's France chose his brother and he ends up being a cornered in Keter Tadorl in Mexico and shot by a firing squad and Franz Joseph's reaction is so Franz Joseph. He's told your brother's been shot by firing squad and he says, "What a shame. He was an excellent Huntsman and we will miss him at our next shoot. However, and I quote, we may still look forward to good sport, which I think is an admirably sanguine way to mark your brother's demise as an Englishman. You're at the mayor of the Stiff Appalib." So one has to respect that, exactly. So, the net result of all this, we're now into the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary. The upside is it keeps the empire going. The downside is it basically institutionalises constant squabbling between the Austrian and Hungarian halves of the empire about tariffs, budgets and the army and things like this. And it also kind of institutionalises an instability at the heart of the empire. The Hungarians have had special treatment now. There are lots of other groups, Slovaks, Romanians, Croats and stuff who are now being ruled from Budapest with an iron fist by the Hungarians and they don't like this at all. They'd rather have the Austrians. The Austrians are a bit softer on their minorities than the Hungarians. The Hungarians are a bit more insecure, I think. So, it's a great tragedy in some ways to the Austro-Hungarians. For the advent of proper parliamentary politics coincides with effectively the invention of national identities. So, there's a great book on the Habsburgs by Martin 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, we're 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 linguistic groups who will set up competing and I quote, "quires, fibrogades, 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 Tafor, he's of Irish descent, interestingly. The Irish landowners, they've moved to Moravia in the Czech Republic and they've settled there, done very well. And he had been from France, Joseph's childhood friend. And he creates a coalition, this guy Tafor, of sort 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 swerve 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 an Irish accent." That's bonus content. That's for club members, the Irish accent. Now, one of the things that he has to do as part of this 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 slabs. And some of the German speakers say, "Look, Germany's 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 slabs. Austria-Hungary is clearly destined for the scrap heap. We, our future lies in a greater Germany. And so, in the 1880s, which is the decade leaning up to the Miling incident, you have the growth of this very noisy, aggressive pan-German movement that is bitterly opposed to what this uses as the sort of woke multiculturalism of the Habsburgs. And would much prefer union with Berlin. And their spokesman is a guy called Georg von Schernerer, who is the leader of this tiny sort of German nationalist party. And he is a pioneer of extremist, anti-Semitic nationalism. We kind of know where this is going to lead. We do indeed. Because Schernerer, he wants to change the calendar, dating all years from the Battle of the Tuttaburg Forest. Yeah. The defeat of Augustus is the Three Legions. Exactly so. Because he says, that was the last point, basically, when Germany, the German-speaking world was free from the taint of kind of Borscht, where 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 repays it with something called Yulfest. And the Austrians greet each other by saying, "Gruß Gott", he says, "Get rid of that". Why do we say, "Hail"? Yeah, why not? Could really catch on. So you can see 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 now the focus to Vienna in August 1888. On the 18th of August, Franz Joseph is due to celebrate his birthday. They actually pours to the reins, so it's postponed for a couple of days. And that means that it coincides with what's scheduled for the 20th, which is this guy, Georg von Schernerer, the Pan German extreme nationalist. Is due to report to the Landis Gericht Strasse prisen, because he's been sentenced to three months in jail for leaving an attack on a Jewish-owned newspaper. And the very next day, the 21st, our protagonist, Achiller, Crown Prince Rudolf, is due to mark his own birthday. It's his 30th birthday. And although none of them know it, it is also going to be his last, because something is very, very seriously wrong with Crown Prince Rudolf. Are we going to find out what is wrong after the break? Definitely. They miss it then. This episode is brought to you by National Geographic. Tom, we're familiar on with what happened in Pompeii when Vesuvius exploded. We absolutely are. So AD 79, Vesuvius blows its top. Debrae reigns down on Pompeii. It ends with a pyroclastic flow, which essentially in tombs, the city in tombs, everyone left living there. And it lay there waiting to be brought to light, centuries and centuries later. Now 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. Hello everyone and welcome back to the rest of history. And to the story of one of the great royal scandals of central European history. And indeed, I would go so far, 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. So we already mentioned, you know, Marla, Clinton, 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 or a centre, the ass 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 centrepiece of their sort of city planning project. It's probably at the time though, it's famous boulevard in the world, which is the Ringstraacer. You go there today. It's still a kind of breathtaking spectacle. These magnificent buildings, the Opera House, the court theatre, the parliament, the city hall, museum and natural history, the art museum, enormous buildings around this kind of circular, I mean, you might call it a ring road if you were being dismissive. And their design tells you something about the Habsburg project in the 19th century. Because the very first buildings on the ring were 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 of the parliament another. And basically they were saying, well, the Habsburgs are the heirs to all historical styles. But then by the 1880s, when they're finishing off the Ringstraacer, Franz Joseph's architects have settled on just one style, which was Neo-Berock. 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, classist neoclassical was all the rage, which was kind of slightly colder and more austere. And the Viennese wanted to say, or not like the Germans with their cold classissants, and we're more fun. We're more, you know, a little bit more flowery. But I mean, that's not entirely a sensible policy, is it? Because if you've got a serious architecture, and you've got a kind of wedding cake architecture, which one is, you know, going to have the most potent empire? Well, I suppose so. I suppose so, although. I quite like that 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 to even today, to Trieste, to Leviève, to Krakow, to Prague, wherever you can see this sort of Habsburg architecture is very recognizable. Now I called it a stage set. And this, the 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's summer at 1888. There were the first long-distance telephone calls in, in Central Europe. They're from Vienna to the suburb of Barden, sort of just as Syviens, there's not that long distance. And you were limited to ten minutes, but people are very excited by this. I would like more cake. Well, actually what it is, the greetings that people gave, the sort of, you know, fraul, you know, hair doctor, whatever, whatever, took so long, they took so long, that you basically only gave you like two minutes at the end of the call. Anyway, if you went to the Prater amusement parks, if you've seen the film The Third Man, 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 at the execution themselves, but swells from there, the sort of aristocratic bits of Vienna, would basically bribe the people running the machine to give them bigger and bigger shocks. And they would just have, they would be carted off all the time to hospital ambulances because they'd electrocute themselves. Right, so aristocratic self-harm, bit of a theme. It's a theme. Now, if I'm, we mentioned this book by Frederick Morton, a nervous splendor, and he sort of, you know, zero zero on a few characters, say you've got Gustav Klimt, who is painting the new court theatre, he's painting a ceiling panel called The Chariot of Thespis. You have Marla, who's about to move from Vienna to Budapest to run the opera and Budapest. You have Freud, who then is in his 30s, is a nerve doctor, but he's just beginning work on the theories of the sort of subconscious. And it's interesting that two of these names, so Marla and Freud are Jewish. And actually, there's lots of Jewish influence in a fantasy sect of Vienna. It's as Vic and Stein, the Scherneberg, there is Arthur Schnitzler, the great 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've 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, of course, means that they're very convenient and easy scapegoats for people like Georg von Schernerer, 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 Scherneerer 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 Johangory, King of Bohemia, Dalmatius, Transylvania, blah blah blah blah blah all of this. So basically, his military education has made him kind of woke a little bit. Yeah, a little bit. So we were talking before the break about he's stepped 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, his sister'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? 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. So he's not very optimistic about his own inheritance. And you might say, well, he's a typical teenager, a bit miserable, a bit downcast and depressive and whatnot. But I think there's more to this than your usual teenage woes. So there we've got another quotation, Tom, I think. Thoughts of every kind, right to end this through my head, all this confusion by Brian C. And one 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 I even black with rage. I fight some and struggle with them, and out of it all the truth at last will come. He's not a bundle of laughs, I think it's true to say. So when he was 21, his father arranged a marriage for him, and he arranged a marriage to Princess Stephanie. She's jolly, fun-loving, fun-loving bride. She's not a funster. She's a good person, I think Stephanie. She's quite decent, a 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 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 as follows. "What a night, what torment, what horror. I had not the ghost of a notion of what lay before me, but had been led to the altar as an ignorant child. My illusions, my youthful dreams were shattered. I thought I should die of my disillusionment." Is this, um, a kind of John Ruskin reaction? I mean, what's going on there? We don't know. I think what torment, 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 Rudolf 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 Rudolf 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. And your wedding night with like 16-year-old? I mean, it's poor for me, 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, socialists and was called the Red Arch Duchess. God, so even Wokeer than her father. Even Wokeer, the Nazis centered a Dachau and she lived on a stream age and died in 1963. Same year as John F. Kennedy. Yeah, the Arabietal mania. She lived long enough to watch TV footage of people screaming at the London palladium or something of the Beatles. Incredible. Anyway, the marriage was not a success. Rudolf was very disillute. He's a good-looking man, I think. You compared him to Callum and producer Sir 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 authorial and he's incredibly impressed. So he said of Rudolf, for a young man of his age, it is surprising how much he knows about sexual matters. There is nothing I could teach him. And that's when Rudolf was 19, which you want Edward VII to be your instructor. I mean, well, Rudolf 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, he will be coming to you, you can't wait for him to appear on the show. So Rudolf's favourite mistress was a woman called Mitzi Caspar who came from Graz. It was said that she's worked as a prostitute in Madame Vulff's Vienna brothel. I don't know how true this is. She becomes very close to Rudolf. 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, 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 the 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 I personally 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 behavior. 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 jotting switch or come to. So before the break, we got to his birthday, which was the 21st of August 1888. And he celebrated that, that's when he turns 30. And his castle, which is called Lachsenburg in the Vienna woods. And Stephanie was there, his wife and their daughter Elizabeth, who was only I think she was four or so. His parents didn't go. They just sent telegrams and that tells you about their very sort of chilly four-one relationship. And Rudolf, I mean, this is where Kalem, our producer, may object to the comparison. Rudolf had just shaved his beard. Kalem still has his beard. Exactly. That's the point. That's the lesson that Kalem has to learn. And also he has to learn not to get to Goneria, which I think is a valuable lesson for any young producer. Yeah. Rudolf was very haggard. He seems constantly exhausted, which is actually a symptom of Goneria. 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, and 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, where I mentioned the electric shocks in the Prater Park. He still believes very much in the empire and the Habsburg ideal. He's very keen on the army. He wrote to his friend, who was a liberal newspaper editor called Modus Seps. 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' friend and saying, "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 radical late 19th century, 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 Seps is Jewish. And that makes Rudolph a hate figure for churnera 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 discuss this, I guess. I think if you're brooding all the time in a very slightly weird insults, I mean, it's the opposite of an insult, actually. But he's a man who would spend a lot of time on YouTube watching dark web material. Yes, but because he's not an emperor, because he's not an emperor. But if he was an emperor, perhaps he would have. I don't know, I'm crunchy as to what I say. I tell you what would have completely recast the map of Europe if he'd been an emperor. He was not a fan of Austria's chief ally. The Germans. He's not a fan of the Germans. 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 victory. And he likes the future. It would be seventh. But there's one man in Europe whom he despises, it's 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 of his history. The founder, brackets, general Oaf, Kaiser Wilhelm II. So they're cousins and they're almost exactly the same age. I think Rudolf is five months older than Wilhelm. And Rudolf absolutely despises Wilhelm. He hates him. And when Wilhelm became emperor of Germany, Rudolf was appalled. And he wrote to his friend Maurice Cepse. He said, "By the grace of God, he is dumb of the Kaiser." But he considers himself the greatest genius. I imagine that in a few years he will bring a hoenzolle in Germany to the past it deserves. It is not wrong. So Krampritz Rudolf has all these ideas in his head. But he can't tell anyone. He has to bottle them up. Because his father doesn't give him anything to do. In fact, the only thing his father lets him do. I mean, I quite admire this. I like this. And I'd actually love to get hold of this. His big passion project is a massive encyclopedia of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. So when I say massive, it took 16 years to compile it. It was 24 volumes. It had 400 contributors and it was 12,000 pages long. And it basically goes through every part of the empire, its history, its geography, its architecture, its floor and fauna, all of this. The nickname for it. Because he was the sponsor. It was called the Krampritz work, the Kronpritzveck. And he does this. So he's doing this in Cyclopedia. And he also writes anonymous articles for liberal newspapers. And he will send them in via servants, you know, and that they will always be printed by his friends in the sort of in the liberal press. And they usually, they're asking for reform of the empire, slacking off the Germans. So when he turns 30, he feels very miserable. He thinks my life has been wasted. And he writes to his mate, Maurice Cepst. 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 one that isn't very pleasant. Much time has passed. Spent more or less, justfully. But devoid of real action on success. We live in a slow, rotten time. Who knows how long this will continue. Every passing year makes me older. Less keen. Less fit. So unlike his mother, he's not keeping up with the gym. He's not here. I think he's to use the expression that, uh, it's shortly his friend, the Prince of Wales would have used. He feels very CD. And he spends a lot of his time retreating. He's got a new bolt hole, a hunting lodge in the Vienna woods called Myeling. And he will go there with his iriscratic mates. They go shooting in the day time 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's as tremendous actually. That sounds quite fun, doesn't it? And the next rest is history scheduling meeting. We could have fun. We could order champagne laced with cognac. You could find a hunting lodge. Get in a bit of hunting. Get out the morphine and the cognac. Yeah. You can see this Tom, but Alia is, uh, in recording with me. She's absolutely crying with laughter and thoughts of this hunting lodge in 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 this 30th birthday when Crown Prince Rudolph meets the woman who 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 Vetsera's are a recently enabled family. They're kind of parvin used. Her father was a diplomat. It was a noble by Franz Joseph. Her mother came from a Greek financial family from Constantinople. called the Baltaxes. And the Baltaxes 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 Katarina Shrat, Franz Joseph's kind of muse. And Franz Joseph actually said to her, "Stay away from those Baltaxy brothers, they are, their reputation is not entirely correct." So she was born Marie, but she called herself Mary because unusually in world history, it was seen as cool to have an English style name. So that's very nice. And her mother was very ambitious for her. And she went to a conference school for nobleman's daughters. Her father had died in 1887. So when she was, that was the year she turned 16. Now at this point when her father died, she already had quite a racy reputation. I have to say, if you Google her, I don't want to sound un-gallant, but she doesn't leap out of the photograph as a great beauty. However, she's a great party girl. So she's a girl who will, if you have a party in Vienna, she will come dress as sexy chamber maid, kind of French maid, that kind of exactly. And she's a massive social climber like her mother was. So the Jucca Bruganza set his capeter, 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 fallen because her mother had tried to seduce Rudolph. I think to no effect 10 years earlier, but now Mary wants to have a go, and she is absolutely infatuated with them. So she told her maid, he is mine. He may not even know I exist, but he is mine, I feel it in my heart. So it's a very sort of teenage infatuation. Anyway, in the summer of 1888, she went off to England. And she comes back from England, she's 17 years old, and she is absolutely determined. I'm going to meet Rudolph, and I'm going to have my way with him. She goes to all the fashionable race meetings. She's very stylish. The V&E's papers say she's one of the sort of best dressed girls of the season. She wrote to her governess, I cannot live without having seen or spoken to him. And as luck would have it, she's about to see him. Because one afternoon, she's in the tea pavilion at the races when Rudolph walks in with the future ed, with the seventh prince Wales, we've already described, tried to give him instructions, sexual matters, but found there was nothing that Rudolph didn't know. Now Edward Bertie, as he was called, slightly confusingly, recognized her from England. And he sort of stopped to say hello and he introduced Rudolph. Hello, my dear. Yeah, very much. Looking very pretty, if I may say so. It's a fine filly. Exactly. And he introduced Rudolph. Have you met my good friend, the crown prince? But Rudolph just bowed and he didn't say anything to her. He obviously wasn't that taken with her. Or is he playing hard to get? Well, we don't know. A few days later, they passed crossed again at the court theatre. But Rudolph didn't, again, didn't really interact with her at all. And the reason for that is he's got these royal guests. So first of all, he's had the prince of Wales. And they had a brilliant time. They went to the races, we've just heard. They go to the hotel, Sacher, and have Sacher taught. And they laughing and having a great time, having champagne, shorty 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 of Wales. In this very feverish political environment, they're publicly associating with well-known kind of Jewish figures. And Rudolph said to Stephanie, his wife, "Oh, this is brilliant. He's indefatigable. Nothing seems to tire the old boy." So they were having a great time. But Rudolph knows that soon as the prince of Wales goes, things will take a turn for the worse, because the worst person in the world in his mind is about to arrive in Vienna. And that is the Kaiser. And of course, the timing is really bad, because there's been all this holo blue about Shunara and the Pan Germans. And Rudolph and his fanatitis father and the court and general are worried. Though when the Kaiser arrives in Vienna, all the Pan Germans will come out on the streets till him demonstrations shouting out brilliant the Kaiser is. And that's not good. And Rudolph actually said to Stephanie, his wife, the splendid lie, left to me, I would invite Phil Helm only to get rid of him in some elegant hunting accident. We sort of have been an amusing way to get rid of the Kaiser. Anyway, the Kaiser arrived in Vienna on the 3rd of October, and I'm very, very sorry to report that he let himself, Germany, and the podcast down immediately. They brought the court opera orchestra to the palace, to the 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. 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 got a sort of Donald Trump approach to diplomacy. And then he goes to a palace reception, and he really disgraces himself by attacking the Austrian army. He says, "You've ordered a wrong ammunition for your man-licker, repeater brighals. You made a school wearer. What kind of, who's the inspector general of your army? What a muppie must be." And who is it, don't you? That's a crap prince Rudolph. Oh no. Standing right next to him. Is he amused by this? No, he bowled, clicked his heels and left, as did his mother. So the Russian ambassador who was there said it was absolutely excruciated, but obviously par for the course of the Kaiser. Now it's about this point in time, but perhaps unsurprisingly, people start to notice a marked change in Rudolph's demeanor. So his wife Stephanie wrote later, "I could not fail to notice an alarming change in him. He was not only that he was more restless and distraught than ever before. In addition, he had become prone to outbursts to 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 Maurice Seps, the newspaper editor, and he says, "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, and 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 his key moment in the story, mid-October, another of his cousins, Countess Marie Ladish, comes to see him. And she is the same age as Rudolph. She's 30. She's a relative of his mother. She's the sort of social butterfly, V&E's social butterfly. She has appointed herself Mary Vetzera's mentor. What does that mean? Basically her board? Or. Yeah, a little bit like the. Who's the Madame de Mertoy? Is it in dangerous liaisons? The sort of glim-close figure who grooms the younger women, Lady Melbourne. Exactly right. So Mary Vetzera has told Countess Larrish that she fancies Crown Prince Rudolph and the Countess has said, "I'll fix it for you. I'll sort the sound." So the Countess says to Rudolph, "My young friend Mary met you at the races. She didn't get a chance to express the loyalty and admiration she feels for you, and she'd love to have another meeting with you." And Rudolph said, "Oh, didn't. haven't I seen her in the fashion pages?" And Countess Larrish said, "Oh, yes. She's a most interesting and captivating person. There'll be a new court theatre opening on the ring stress 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 theatre opening. And Mary is there in the Vetzera family box with her mother and her sister. She's very elegant. The intern actually has 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 senses elderly valet, he's called Nihama, with a message for Countess Larrish. And the day after that, Countess Larrish picks up Mary Vetzera 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 Larrish. And then a few days later, on the 5th of November, the decisive encounter. Countess Larrish says to Mary's mother, "I'd like to take Mary 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 Rudolph's coachman, and he takes them to a back entrance to the palace, the Hofburg. And there, Mary is led upstairs to Rudolph'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 Rudolph came in and took it from me. And when I said that I wasn't afraid, He smiled my goodness. Cliff hangers, we've got him. So next time the mystery of mailing races towards its spectacular bloody and empire-shaking conclusion and members of the rest of the history club, of course, can hear that right now at theresetisthistory.com and just to say fabulous news Dominic, we are running a summer sale. If you're not a member of the rest of the history club, for a limited time you can get an extra 20% off. I mean that's insane value, isn't it? That's giving it away. It's madness. I think it's too much. 20% off an annual membership using the code summer26 and that's only valid until August 31st. So absolutely not something to leave hanging. I urge people not to do this because I don't want them to have that deal. It's too good a deal. 20% Dominic 20%. Too much. Are we doing this for nothing? Yes. My council will be raging. Just incredible value there. There's even better news, isn't there? It's not live show news. Yes, there is. I've forgotten about that. If you think the mailing incident is an amazing story, then we have an even better one coming up and this is the ultimate Victorian adventure, the Abyssinian expedition of 1868. Incredible. By some measures, a tragic story and by some measures, a richly comical story. We'll have a comical story. And we'll be trying to blend the two aspects of that. And we 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, Rudolf, Mary Vetsera and the shocking climax of the mailing incident. I'll be there saying. Bye-bye. [Music]