What I Am Reading: "Twilight of Empire: The Tragedy at Mayerling and the End of the Habsburgs" by Greg King and Penny Wilson

The next stop in pre-WW1 Europe, as preparation for The Proud Tower, takes us to Austria-Hungary. This book, by a pair of authors who have various books on monarchs and publications in magazines like Majesty Magazine, Royalty Magazine, and Royalty Digest Quarterly to their credit, tackles the mysterious and contentious suicide of the heir to the Habsburg throne in 1889. This may have had important reverberations through the future or European politics or, hey, it may not have. Either way, it is a very dramatic event in a family and empire that had no shortage of them. It has many layers of rumor built up and ossified over the years, and these two authors seek to provide a straightforward account of the evidence and then present their own theory on what happened at the Mayerling hunting lodge on the evening of January 30th, 1889.

Austria-Hungary was essentially the rump state of the ever-disintegrating Habsburg Empire, a cluster of territories joined together by marriage pacts and progressively spun off into nationalist entities. From 1848, the Emperor was Franz Josef. Under his leadership in the second half of the eighteenth century, the empire limped along, losing wars and bleeding constituent states, and being eclipsed in the German-speaking world by Prussia. In order to prevent Hungary’s exit from the union, the country was organized into the dual monarchy, an ungainly government whereby the two countries kept separate domestic organizations but were ruled by the same Emperor and pursued the same foreign policy.

Franz Josef was a dull reactionary who was mostly occupied with the tedious bureaucracy necessary to run the country. The capital city of Vienna was a little more boisterous and frivolous, but its elite largely confined themselves to parties and shallow social activities, and didn’t aspire to much greater intellectual heights than did their monarch. In the late 1880s, everything was fairly recently rebuilt to look as if it had been built in the renaissance, and suicides were common enough to compete for grandiosity.

This was the environment in which Crown Prince Rudolf, Franz Joseph’s only son, was raised. Born in 1858, Rudolf was an intelligent boy but one who was not nurtured by either his distant and formal family life or by his scattershot pro-forma education. He puttered into adulthood callow, adrift, and impulsive. Living up to Franz Joseph’s fears, he took after his tutors in liberalism; but this political conviction, like most of his personality, was inchoate. It led to a negative feedback loop whereby Franz Josef did not want to give his heir any governmental responsibility; so the minor functions Rudolf was allowed to perform were so clearly unimportant that he was driven to do things like write pseudonymous articles and expose government secrets to his friends like liberal editor Moritz Szeps; which led to Franz Josef having even less confidence in him and marginalizing him further.

By his late 20s, Rudolf was in decline. He had had a daughter with his wife, Belgian princess Elizabeth, before gonorrhea from his prolific extramarital sex life rendered her unable to conceive further, and caused him various symptoms for which he self-medicated. He drank too much, he took opiates, he did cocaine. He spiraled downward throughout 1888, inebriated in public and having to be saved from making a scene. His erratic behavior leads the authors to speculate that he may have been bipolar.

One of Rudolf’s many girlfriends was Mary Vetsera (not “Marie,” British names were in vogue on the continent in the 1870s, when she was born). She was an up-and-coming coquette with a late Austrian diplomat for a father and an mother from a Constantinople trading family. Her mother had social ambitious, and (despite later denials) worked to set her daughter up with the Crown Prince to open social doors for the family; though everyone but Mary knew that this would be a temporary state of affairs. Mary herself, with a string of scandalous romances and a bad reputation, was a romantic at heart, consuming melodramatic French novels and identifying with the tragic heroines. Her mother worked with the Crown Prince’s cousin, Marie Larisch, a hanger-on to the family and a procurer for Rudolf, to set the two up. Mary, contrary to her later formulation in the public memory, was probably an innocent and not the schemer behind the move.

The facts are these: in late January, Rudolf had an acrimonious argument with Franz Josef, the subject of which is unknown. Rudolf left the capital in a state of high agitation, speaking (not for the first time) of suicide. He headed to his hunting lodge of Mayerling, where he had already planned to spend a weekend with friends. Mary was brought to the lodge secretly; the Crown Prince’s aristocratic companions didn’t know that she was there. Her mother and Larisch, however, suspected what was going to happen, and worked to cover their tracks.

On the morning of January 30th, the Crown Prince was seen by a companion early, but later did not respond to calls. Upon breaking in to his room, his companions found Rudolf and Mary, both dead. She had been shot in the temple, and he had shot himself. She was naked, he was dressed, she was in a more advanced state of rigor mortis than he was. Both had left several suicide notes for their family and friends.

The alarm was sounded. The Habsburgs officially ascribed the death, at first, to a heart attack, but the true story (or versions of it) immediately leaked out in decadent high-society Vienna. Rudolf was taken back to the palace complex in a hearse; Mary’s uncles had to undergo an altogether more gruesome ride as her body was smuggled out in a carriage as if she were still alive. She bounced and jostled between them through a sleety ride to a cemetery, where she was discreetly buried. Eventually, the official Habsburg story changed to that of suicide due to mental instability, to permit Rudolf a Catholic burial. Mary’s death was not acknowledged as connected, and any publication referencing it as such was seized.

There was much speculation as to the circumstances and reasons for the deaths. The authors go through a few permutation on each, tracing their origins (if possible) and noting in each cade what evidence is contradicted or ignored. It is rumored that Mary killed Rudolf, or that he was killed by a jealous third party, or in a drunken fight, or in a duel. In many cases, such a murder would have been less difficult to admit (sans any embarrassing details) for the Catholic dynasty than was a suicide.

There are also rumors of political connections to the death. One of Rudolf’s idle intrigues was to lend support to the cause of Hungarian independence, in the hopes of becoming Hungary’s monarch. This support was hinted at by the opposition leader in the Hungarian parliament, István Károlyi, who alluded to Rudolf’s support in his unsuccessful effort to overthrow Prime Minister Kálmán Tisza that January. Some thought that Rudolf may have been killed because of this support on the orders of various links in the Habsburg chain of command; or that he may have been killed by the Germans, whom he was opposed to, or even (more absurdly) a spurned France that had hoped to recruit him as a future ally. All of the situations covered would not have accounted for every detail, would have involved people acting on information that they could not have known, involved someone being somewhere while history recorded them elsewhere, or otherwise had no evidence of existing.

In the fourth part of the book, the authors present their own theory. It seems to comport with the facts as they have laid them out, so take that as you will. They think that Rudolf, already mentally fragile from Habsburg inbreeding, drug abuse, disease, and his psychologically damaging upbringing, was pushed over the edge into his suicide (which he had often idly speculated upon during his years-long decline) by a perfect storm of interlocking stresses. He may have been told by Franz Josef the unconfirmed information that Mary was the emperor’s own child from a long-ago affair, thus making her his half-sister, and may have subsequently been told by Mary that she was pregnant, as part of Mary’s effort to continue the relationship (more on that below). He was likely also involved in the aforementioned Hungarian plotting, and his father may have revealed his own knowledge of that prior to the plot’s failure. His father may have also told him that he knew Rudolf had sought an annulment of his marriage, which is itself unconfirmed.

Under their formulation, these combined stresses all hitting at once drove Rudolf to make the decision to travel to Mayerling to kill himself in another fashionable Austrian suicide; perhaps waiting for final word of the Hungarian failure the day before doing so (as the vote of no confidence against Tisza failed by a large margin). Mary, however, was just collateral damage. Contrary to later rumors that Rudolf was inescapably romantically linked with her, it appears that she may have just been the last of his many affairs, and that he was trying to break things off in the final months of their life. Mary, however, was a romantic seventeen-year-old, who may have harbored the idea that she would be the Queen of Hungary at Rudolf’s side someday. She resisted, in the authors’ analysis, the end of the affair, and caused several public scenes for Rudolf in their final months. She may have used her (again unconfirmed) pregnancy as a trump card to try to extend her longevity or cement her permanence. Rudolf was non-confrontational, and may have used the excuse of the Emperor’s hypothetical order to end the relationship.

The authors think that Mary, having had her illusions shattered and unwilling to return to live under her mother’s control (with suggestions of an arranged marriage to one of her uncles to hide the origins of her pregnancy), decided instead to die with Rudolf. They argued about it, he shot her. He spent the final hours composing his suicide notes, then shot himself. The notes contain some references to how he “cannot be allowed to live” (paraphrased). As someone who may have been bipolar, he may have been having a manic episode.

This is the authors’ theory. It seems reasonable, though as this is my first deep dive into the topic I don’t know if anything might contradict it or provide a better explanation. The book’s postscript relates how nobody lived happily ever after. Rudolf’s wife was driven from the family, his daughter grew up to hate her mother and become a Social Democrat in the years after the Empire fell (the “Red Archduchess”). His mother, the Empress, was assassinated by an anarchist in 1898. Franz Josef lived another twenty seven years, and died during World War 1, in which his country was defeated. Like Wilhelminian Germany, it collapsed in a revolution at the war’s end, and the Habsburg monarchy ended. All of Rudolf and Mary’s facilitators, like Marie Larisch and Mary’s mother Hélène, lived and died in disgrace. And so on. Rudolf himself may not have been able to change any of this: despite his parlor liberalism, he would not have come into power for another twenty-seven years, and it is unlikely that the drug-addicted basket case exiled to the fringes of power would have lasted that long.

Not to be teleological, but Austria-Hungary was such an obviously doomed enterprise that I can’t help but love its personalities and their scandals. Mary Vetsera, though, is a sad story. Like one of Henry VIII’s wives, she paid the price for her family’s opportunistic sex-based social climbing, though perhaps her tragic end was the one she was looking for. She has not been well-served by the massive level of scandal-mongering evident in any historiography of the incident, and it is good that this book treats her with a degree of dignity and respect.