Odd this day
Ah, the 135th anniversary of the Mayerling incident: Rudolf, 30-year-old Crown Prince of Austria, shot his 17-year-old lover Baroness Mary Vetsera, and turned the gun on himself. She had been his mistress for 16 days.
Rudolf was apparently one of those young royal men of whom young women like to collect photos (even though the photos offer modern eyes little evidence as to why this might be). Mary was one such young woman, and after seeing him in the flesh — at a distance — in April 1888, she wrote to the prince expressing a heartfelt desire to meet him.
Rudolf, who had shagged around enough to give his wife gonorrhoea (or possibly syphilis), wasn’t the sort of man who couldn’t read signals. (So, 30-year-old married man with money, power and a noted disinclination to keep it in your trousers: what first attracted you to the 17-year-old who threw herself at you?)
They met, suitably chaperoned, a number of times before… eventually managing some alone time. He had been wanting to leave his wife for some time, but been forbidden (by his emperor father) from writing to the Pope asking for an annulment. This terrible injustice having undone his appetite for life, he suggested a suicide pact to his principal mistress, actress Mizzi Kaspar. She inexplicably turned down this highly attractive invitation, so he turned to someone younger and more impressionable.
Mary had no idea she wasn’t (a) the only mistress, and (b) even the first one to be asked. She just thought they couldn’t be together in life, so the next best thing was to be joined forever in that swooningly romantic thing, death. Or, at least, that’s what he managed to convince her of. As she wrote in a note left behind for her sister:
We are both going blissfully into the uncertain beyond.
This being a royal scandal, and it being the 19th century, there was, naturally, a cover-up — or, as History Today puts it:
In the following weeks the imperial family sought to erase all memory of the baroness’ presence at Mayerling, knowing that her murder would deny Rudolf a Catholic burial
They managed to get Rudolf buried with his ancestors in the imperial crypt in Vienna thanks to a special dispensation from the Pope saying he’d been suffering from a mental imbalance. Mary was smuggled out of the building by two uncles (hers) who propped her up between them in a carriage to make her seem alive. However, as with all of these things, it’s the cover-up that does the real damage, and:
This, combined with the mixed messages the royal household sent out to the public about Rudolf’s death, began a game of whispering and finger-pointing that continues today.
The royal family suppressed Mary’s mother’s writings which demanded justice for her daughter, what with the prince having shot her (making this not a suicide pact, but a young woman being murdered), and didn’t let her visit her teenage daughter’s grave for some time. The story got out anyway.
In 2015, Mary’s letters were discovered in an Austrian bank vault, and while they make it “clear … that she went willingly to her fate”, there is still the pretty large question of the imbalance of power between the parties.
Mary suffered further indignities in death when her remains were disturbed in the 20th century: in 1946 by occupying Soviet troops, in 1959 by a doctor (who had, in his defence, a member of the family with him), and in 1991 by an obsessed furniture dealer who dug them up at night, paid for a forensic examination, and then tried to sell the skeleton.
Rudolf was the emperor’s only son, so the succession passed to the emperor’s brother, Archduke Karl Ludwig. He died the same year, passing the job to his eldest son.
Archduke Franz Ferdinand. He died in 1914. You may have heard of him.
