The Royal Love Story That Ended in Murder

Tom Holland: 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's that on steroids. Her nickname was Cece, and she was a sex symbol. She was a fashion leader. She was an influencer. She was uh the personification of glamour. She was a romantic heroine. She was a sports woman. 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 Juke Maximleian and he was an absolute madman. He was obsessed with circuses and he he didn't give her 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. Exactly. So she's only sort of half educated. She's a bit of an autodiact.

Dominic Sandbrook: Rudolph 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. We mentioned the electric shocks in the Praa Park. He still believes very much in the empire and the Hapsburg ideal. He's very keen on the army. He wrote to his friend who was a liberal newspaper editor called Morris 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 his friend and saying, you know, 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, you know, radical late 19th century, early 20th century rhetoric, but one big contrast, as I've already said, he's very keen on um the Jews of the empire cuz 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 Sherner and the PGermans. They say he's a puppet of Jewish capitalism and all this.

Tom Holland: We talked a while about Vienna. Then he said to me, 'Pardon me, but I would like to talk to the countest privately for a few minutes.' And then he went with Marie to another room. I looked around me. On his desk was a revolver and a skull. I picked up the skull, took it between my hands, and looked at it from all sides. Suddenly, Rudolph 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. Uh like something and we said it before from a kind of Gothic melodrama, Edgar and Poe or something like that. But in fact, that is a letter that was written by the 17-year-old Baroness Mary Vetera to her old governness in the autumn of 1888. In fact, it's like something out of Dracula, isn't it? A letter written to a governness by a 17-year-old girl who has invited herself into the room of an exceedingly sinister man.