A theory that Rudolf and Mary were murdered (and at the instigation of the imperial crown, no less) had gained little traction by the mid-twentieth century because there was scant documentation to support it. But by the last quarter of the century, the concept of a murder plot gained credence, and persists today, having found its way into Gabriel Ronay’s 2008 article for History Today titled “Death in the Vienna Woods.”
It was a cadre of Italian clerics who first propagated the idea of a double murder, although none of them had examined the bodies. Enhancing the credibility of their murder theory were the results of a forensic investigation conducted by Austrian authorities soon after the bodies were discovered, concluding that the revolver found at Rudolf’s bedside did not belong to him. The report also asserted that all six shots of someone’s revolver had been fired; that bullets were found embedded in the furniture; and that the victims had sustained “other wounds.” No alternative theory was ever proposed regarding what the murder or assault weapon might have been, had it not been the revolver alone that caused the injuries. Further assertions were made that the wounds were not found in the victims’ temples but on the tops of their skulls, with some theorists alleging that Rudolf’s skull had been crushed, while others insisted that the top of his head had been so violently blown off that one could see his brain oozing out of his skull. Yet only one of the authors of these claims, the court secretary Dr. Heinrich Slatin, had closely inspected the corpses. It was Slatin who observed the prince’s “face scarcely disfigured, but the top of his skull blown off, with blood and parts of the brain welling out, as it seems to me from a shot from closest range. . . .”
Clearly, there was a massive cover-up afoot. Reports were written and filed by people who never even witnessed the crime scene, or who had merely accorded it a cursory look, rather than a full investigation. Dr. Slatin, one of the few men who did see the victims, got the location of Mary Vetsera’s body all wrong, an indication that his observations of Rudolf’s corpse may have been invented as well, or that he chose to lie about the prince’s naked lover for propriety’s sake. Yet this is hardly the sort of notation one should expect from a medical man—a man of science who should have been fastidiously concerned with making an accurate report of the aftermath instead of putting a spin on it for some reason.
And in all the various conspiracy theories propounded since 1889, no one has ever questioned the legitimacy of Mary Vetsera’s handwriting. Are we really expected to believe that a bunch of thugs held her at gunpoint, waiting for her to write her suicide notes—letters that echoed what she had personally been telling her confidantes for weeks? Found inside Mary’s clothing was an unfinished letter to her sister regarding the reasons for her impending death.
Today he finally confessed to me openly that I could never become his; he had given his father his word of honor that he will break with me. So everything is over! I go to my death serenely.
To Countess Marie Larisch Mary sent an odd sort of warning: Dear Marie!
Forgive me all the sorrow that I have brought upon you. I thank you most warmly for all you did for me. If life should become difficult for you, and I fear it might after what we have done, follow us. It is the best you can do.
~Your Mary
Franz Joseph had never given credence to the idea that the crown prince had been murdered. This provided the conspiracy theorists with the argument that the emperor had tacitly accepted the double-suicide theory because it saved him from undertaking the unpleasant task of issuing a manhunt for the crown prince’s alleged murderers—particularly if Rudolf’s death was a politically motivated assassination carried out by men who might have been exceptionally close to the throne.
The only thing that doesn’t quite tally with a double suicide, or even a murder-suicide scenario, is one report that the entire right temple of Rudolf’s skull was smashed, which is seemingly inconsistent with a gunshot wound inflicted to the left temple. On the other hand, the report itself could be suspect.
Stephanie’s impression of the events was written in her memoirs long after the tragedy. It is worth noting that she does not castigate Mary Vetsera as the rest of the imperial family had done.
As he found no-one else prepared for self-sacrifice, he used Mary Vetsera’s passion to address his terrible request to her. She agreed blindly. . . . She really loved him. Let this observation, that Mary Vetsera’s love for the Crown Prince was deep and genuine, be the flower which I, the deceived wife, place in forgiveness upon the resting place of the poor, misguided girl.
Additionally, there was one letter that Rudolf waited to write until he arrived at Mayerling. It may even have been penned after Mary Vetsera’s death, because it contains the admission, “I have no right to go on living; I have killed.”
And yet, if Rudolf and Mary had forged a premeditated suicide pact, what did he mean? Had the original intention of the plot been for Mary to kill herself and for Rudolf to follow suit—a double suicide after all? It was easy to scribble maudlin, moonstruck meditations on the subject of suicide, but as she held a gun to her temple, was she too terrified to do the deed; and had Rudolf then done the job for her—which had never been part of the plan? With a rose and handkerchief clasped poetically in her pale hands, had she in fact begged him to kill her because she didn’t fear dying—but couldn’t bring herself to pull the trigger? Was that what the imperial family was so eager to subvert: Their son’s confession, written to his mother, that he had murdered Mary Vetsera? It was scandalous enough that the married crown prince had been found dead in the company of an equally dead (not to mention naked) girl. The only thing that could have been worse was that he had murdered the woman.
And yet, before long, Rudolf’s image began to receive a radical makeover. In the years immediately following his death, the crown prince became the subject of a cultish fascination, and the tragedy at Mayerling was romanticized by the pop culture of the day, most notably in a stage play starring a cross-dressing Sarah Bernhardt.
The real players in the drama received their own denouements. No longer a member of the imperial family, the widowed Stephanie moved on with her life. On March 22, 1900, she married a Hungarian count, Elemér Count Lónyay de Nagy-Lónyay es Vásárosnamény, moving to western Hungary, where they lived at Orosvár Castle. Stephanie died in 1945; her daughter by Rudolf, Archduchess Elisabeth, who was born on September 2, 1883, married Prince Otto of Windisch-Graetz on January 23, 1902. Elisabeth was divorced after World War I and married a member of Parliament, a Social Democrat named Leopold Petznek. She died in 1964 at her little villa located in Hütteldorf, a small town on the outskirts of Vienna.
The hunting lodge and its outbuildings at Mayerling became a Carmelite convent in 1889. After Franz Joseph oversaw its construction, he considered any self-imposed penance accomplished and refused any further association with the Carmelites.
As the Second World War raged on, in 1945, during a battle at Heiligenkreuz the Russians demolished part of the Carmelite convent and the adjacent cemetery. The bombing partially dislodged and disturbed several tombs, including that of Mary Vetsera. Many of the grave sites were looted; Mary’s original copper coffin was among them.
Since her remains had been exposed already, what was left of Mary’s body was examined, giving rise to additional conspiracy theories. One report claimed that there was no exit wound in her skull and that rather than her having been the victim of a bullet, her head had been crushed. Unfortunately, it’s entirely possible that this accident occurred when the zealous Russians tore open her tomb with a garden hoe, searching for jewelry. The allegation in question is also contradicted by the 1889 medical report of Dr. Auchenthaler, which accords with the testimony of three eyewitnesses who saw Mary’s dead body hours after her demise.
And yet—and yet—the funeral director’s report raises the possibility that Mary was shot from above. This does not eliminate the contention that Rudolf murdered her, as no one has ever genuinely believed that Mary took her ow
n life. It only contradicts the theory that the bullet entered her temple.
In 1992, Mary’s remains were again disturbed and a forensics examination concluded that she died from several blows to the head. Gabriel Ronay in his 2008 article for History Today mentions that the document alleged to be the original 1889 police report finally came to light, and that it contains some startling revelations: namely that Rudolf had put up a fierce struggle before he died, suffering contusions to his knuckles and a broken jaw. But when did this report surface and why would it have been concealed or withheld for so long? It seems strange that at least two of Rudolf’s more prominent biographers omit this information in their discussion of the police report.
Even in death, Rudolf was a royal pain—his bloody demise an embarrassment to the empire. But had his own family set him on the inevitable crash course with disaster? Should they share the blame for his becoming a bad seed?
Deprived well into adulthood, as were so many royal heirs, from exercising any role in his father’s government and thereby denied any apprenticeship in how to rule, he had too much time on his hands, even as a military officer. The crown prince’s progressive politics put him on the outs with his conservative imperial father, so despite his intellectual gifts, he became frustrated at being reduced to a political nonentity who was expected to fritter away his life at the racetrack and the opera while waiting for the emperor to die. Rudolf’s acquaintance, the Prince of Wales, found himself in a similar situation, but Rudolf lacked the ebullient bonhomie that enabled Bertie to hang in there.
Consoling himself with liquor and lovers tarnished Rudolf’s reputation and cast him as a pleasure-seeking waste of time and space, yet his dubious extracurricular pursuits didn’t even begin to fill the aching void. Already a couple of knaves shy of a full deck, Rudolf became addicted to morphine in the final months of his life; and that, intensified by his alcohol consumption, was a recipe for disaster. His demons finally triumphed, and the tragedy at Mayerling permanently besmirched the Hapsburg family name and tarnished the imperial crown.
Although it remains speculative, only one conclusion makes any sense: Rudolf took his own life at Mayerling, and the great secret that no one wanted the world to discover was that he had murdered Mary Vetsera, whether the act was premeditated or a spontaneous change of plans. For the heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire to have done something so heinous, so criminal, would certainly appear worthy of being suppressed by the imperial bureaucrats and respun to cast anyone else as the perpetrator. Better for the reputation of the young baroness to be dragged through the mud. Failing that, it was preferable to allow rumors of conspiracy theories to run rampant and gain traction over the ensuing decades than to admit that the crown prince was a psychopath and a cold-blooded killer.
Some of these theories fingered the emperor himself. But any character study of Franz Joseph would illustrate that he could never have authorized the political assassination of his own son. True, Franz Joseph was an autocrat, but he never considered a single member of his family expendable, nor judicial murder a viable or expedient method of eliminating a political dissident. Sadly, rather than bringing the emperor closer to his beloved but peripatetic wife, Rudolf’s death estranged his parents further, both geographically and emotionally.
Had Rudolf ascended the imperial throne upon the death of his father, perhaps there would have been no world wars; and if a European conflict had broken out nonetheless, it might have been over the new emperor’s policies of religious and other forms of tolerance that would have been unacceptable to the anti-Semitic, anti-progressive Austrian aristocracy. We will never know.
PRINCE ALBERT VICTOR
Duke of Clarence and Avondale
1864-1892
ALTHOUGH HIS OWN CONDUCT CERTAINLY CONTRIBUTED in some way to his unfavorable reputation, Prince Albert Victor, whose father, the Prince of Wales, was the only one standing between him and the English throne, was more or less an “accidental pain”—earning his stripes by implication. Through a chain of circumstances the young prince, known within the royal family as Eddy, became embroiled in a series of scandals, one of which made international headlines during his brief lifetime. Another devastating contention—that he was the infamous serial murderer Jack the Ripper—posthumously haunts Eddy and continues to smear his reputation, because it remains one of the first things that springs to mind when his name is mentioned.
The allegations and assertions about Eddy’s conduct and character, several of which might just as easily have been lifted from the plot of a tawdry Victorian melodrama, have twisted his image into a “grotesque,” someone his own relatives would not have recognized. Yet the prince’s behavior (and, just as often, his inactivity) did frustrate and sometimes mortify the royal family. His apparent lack of academic acumen made him the butt of journalists’ jokes and the subject of rampant speculation that when such a moron eventually ascended the throne it would spell the downfall of the English monarchy. Even worse than being a reigning dope or dullard was the possibility that Eddy might not be elegible to rule at all. Whispers of “gross indecency” grew to a roar. And practicing homosexuality, a felonious offense, was on the short list of items that could bar a prince from ever inheriting the throne.
Although his connection to a high-profile investigation into London’s seedy gay underworld was never proved, Eddy did love, not wisely but too well, which created plenty of other scandals (including his potential ineligibility to become king) without the fictional addition of monstrous violence, secret babies, clandestine marriages, insanity, and “the love that dare not speak its name.”
Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale, was the son of the Prince and Princess of Wales, “Bertie” and Alexandra of Denmark: He was born nearly two months premature in early January 1864, and two months later was christened Albert Victor Christian Edward—the name chosen by his royal grandmama Queen Victoria. During the Victorian era, plumpness connoted good health; consequently the queen found her infant grandson too frail. The queen, who never thought much of babies, with their “big body and little limbs and that terrible frog-like action” described Eddy’s appearance when he was a year old as “a perfect bijou—very fairy-like, but quite healthy, very wiselooking and good. He lets all the family carry him and play with him—and Alix (Eddy’s mother, Alexandra, Princess of Wales) likes him to be accustomed to it. He is very placid, almost melancholy-looking sometimes. What is not pretty is his very narrow chest (rather pigeon-chested) which is like Alix’s build and that of her family. . . . He is decisively like her; everyone is struck by it.”
In truth, Eddy had his father’s eyes—the heavy-lidded, protuberant Hanoverian orbs. When that particular genetic trait took on a certain vacuity of expression as he aged, it was small wonder he was often thought to be a dullard.
Princes have few friends, and Eddy’s constant companion throughout his childhood and teenage years was his younger brother, George (the future George V). George was seventeen months Eddy’s junior, and they also had three younger sisters (Louise, Victoria, and Maud, born in 1867, 1868, and 1869, respectively). The children traveled about with their parents, schlepped from one royal demesne to another as the family maintained its annual traditions, celebrating Christmas and the winter months at Sandringham in Norfolk; spring at the Waleses’ London home, Marlborough House; and summers at Cowes for the regatta and at Balmoral in Scotland.
Neither of the Waleses was keen on forcing their sons to receive the sort of rigid upbringing that Bertie himself had endured, and the parents eventually reaped what they had sown. In fact, Bertie’s chief aim, so he told his mother, was to keep the boys “simple, pure, and childlike for as long as possible.” Unamused by their devil-may-care upbringing, Queen Victoria found her two grandsons “such ill-bred, illtrained children.” Additionally, neither of the young princes was remotely intellectual, and by the time their private tutelage ended, their education was so sorely inferior to that of their fellow students that the
y were always at the bottom of the class, although their exalted status excused them from having to take regular exams.
A number of elements contributed to Eddy’s lackluster aptitude for learning. He did not possess a terribly keen mind to begin with and neither of his parents were readers, so the concept of losing himself in a good book and catching a bit of knowledge on his own was an alien one. Reverend John Neale Dalton, the tutor engaged to educate both Eddy and George, who were schooled side by side, was evidently not only a dull lecturer but a terribly inept instructor. And Eddy seemed to tune out when a subject didn’t interest him, which prompted many people, including Queen Victoria’s private secretary, Sir Henry Ponsonby, to assume that the prince had inherited his mother’s otosclerosis, a form of deafness that the Princess of Wales had inherited from her own mother, Queen Louise of Denmark.
Reverend Dalton condemned Eddy as a rather indifferent scholar, citing “the abnormally dormant condition of his mind,” although the boy seemed to have energy to spare for the sportive pursuits in his curriculum—tennis, archery, gymnastics, fencing, and even croquet—and as he matured he would become a passionate hunter. It never occurred to Dalton that his pedagogy might be the reason for Eddy’s lethargy.
Prince George was just as weak a student as his older brother, yet it was Eddy who seemed to be suffering from an inferiority complex. Dalton opined that “there was in him an apathy which his father tried—perhaps too roughly—to combat.” Many years later, Sir Lionel Cust (who’d met Eddy when the prince was a student at Cambridge) wrote in his memoirs that he “told me of his devotion to his mother . . . from whom he inherited much which, had he lived, would have perhaps gone to a nation’s heart and won it as Queen Alexandra (Eddy’s mother) had done herself.” However, Eddy had also “confessed . . . to being rather afraid of his father, and aware that he was not quite up to what his father expected of him.”
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