A Murderous Affair: Death at Mayerling (Part 2)

**Tom Holland** (0:12)
An old servant was waiting for us by a small iron door. He led us through a number of dark stairs and rooms until he asked us to enter a certain door. As I crossed the threshold, a black bird, some kind of raven flew at my head. A voice called from the next room, Please come in.
Marie ashed me in. We talked a while about Vienna. Then he said to me, Pardon me, but I would like to talk to the countess privately for a few minutes. Then he went with Marie to another room.
I looked around me.
On his desk was a revolver and a skull.
It picked up the skull, took it between my hands, And looked at it from all sides. Suddenly Rudolf came in and took it from me with deep apprehension. But when I said that I wasn't afraid, he smiled. So that is an amazing scene, like something, and we said it before, from a kind of Gothic melodrama, Edgar Allan Poe or something like that. But in fact, that is a letter that was written by the 17-year-old Baroness Mary Vetsera to her old governess in the autumn of 1888 In fact, it's like something out of Dracula, isn't it? A letter written to a governess by a 17-year-old girl who has invited herself into the room of an exceedingly sinister man. She is describing there a secret meeting with the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Crown Prince Rudolf. This had happened a few days earlier on the 5th of November. Dominic, if listeners, which I hope they will have done, have heard our first episode, then they will know where this is heading. It is nowhere good for Baroness Mary because she is heading to a hunting lodge at Mayerling in the Vienna Woods. What happens there is going to be one of the greatest scandals in the entire history, not just of Austro-Hungarian, but of European royalty. It is going to be a murder-suicide pact that will shake the Habsburg dynasty to its very foundations. So Dominic, it's an amazing story.

**Dominic Sandbrook** (2:48)
Yeah, it is an amazing, amazing tale. And today we'll be telling the story of that secret affair between Rudolf and Mary. We will get deep into what exactly happened at Mayerling, and we'll talk about the implications for the Habsburg dynasty and for the Austro-Hungarian empire.
But just to remind ourselves exactly when and where we are, we're in Vienna in 1888 The world of Klimt and Freud and Marla and these titanic cultural figures. Also, the world of Crown Prince Rudolf, the sinister man in the Gothic melodrama that you described so chillingly, I have to say, in your introductory reading.

**Tom Holland** (3:25)
Thank you.

**Dominic Sandbrook** (3:26)
Crown Prince Rudolf is 30 years old. He is, to remind people, he is the son of Emperor Franz Joseph and his very glamorous melancholy wife, Cece.

**Tom Holland** (3:35)
Very thin, very long hair.

**Dominic Sandbrook** (3:37)
Rudolf, who takes after his mother, I think it's reasonable to surmise, he is a very troubled, unhappy, morbid young man.
He's almost certainly suffering from incurable gonorrhea. He's probably off his face on morphine, and he is suffocated by the expectations of his role as Crown Prince. Also, I think he is being eaten away by a sense of uselessness and futility, as he waits for his father to die and to vacate the throne. Into Rudolf's orbit, as we described last time, has come the teenage Baroness Mary Vetsera. She's precocious, she's a social butterfly, she's a social climber. She's ambitious, but she's also incredibly romantic in a very 17-year-old teenage girl way.

**Tom Holland** (4:27)
Well, you could see, couldn't you, from that extract that she wrote? Is it actually like a Gothic melodrama or is she putting that spin on it?

**Dominic Sandbrook** (4:34)
Of course.

**Tom Holland** (4:35)
A bit of both probably.

**Dominic Sandbrook** (4:36)
Was there really a blackbird? You know?

**Tom Holland** (4:38)
Yeah, I mean, it's improbable.

**Dominic Sandbrook** (4:41)
And she had gone to that meeting with her older friend, Countess Marie Larrish, who is Rudolf's cousin. And basically, the Countess, Larrish, has acted as the sort of intermediary and put the two of them together.

**Tom Holland** (4:54)
The board.

**Dominic Sandbrook** (4:55)
She is the board. Yeah. You could say she's the procurer, as it were.
So the events that you described, Monday the 5th of November 1888, we ended the last episode with this scene. Countess Larrish has offered to take Mary's shopping with her mother's permission. They went to the Grab and the great shopping street in Vienna. They went to a society photographer to have Mary's picture taken. But then they went to the back entrance to the Grand Hotel, to a carriage, which was waiting for them, driven by Rudolf's coachman, Josef Bratfish.