Lost History – unravelling the royal mystery of the Mayerling incident

On 29 January 1889, at the imperial hunting lodge of Mayerling, the heir to the Habsburg throne, Crown Prince Rudolf, was discovered dead alongside his 17-year-old mistress, Mary Vetsera.

Both bodies had sustained gruesome gunshot wounds, and wild rumours of murder, political plots and a possible suicide pact quickly spread. The truth of the mysterious event remains contested, and to this day, the Austrian government is reluctant to release official papers about the tragedy.

Some historians argue that had the prince lived, many subsequent disasters could have been averted, and the course of European history might have turned towards a radically different direction.

Rudolf was the only son and heir to Emperor Franz Josef and his famously beautiful Empress, Elisabeth. The stern and courteous Franz Josef had reigned since 1848 and inevitably harboured high expectations for his successor.

Despite Rudolf inheriting his mother’s frail constitution, Franz Josef deemed it necessary to impose a gruelling routine on his son and heir. To keep the child alert at all times, Crown Prince Rudolf was often woken up in the middle of the night by random gunshots being fired by his chaperones and was regularly instructed to run barefoot through the snow to increase his physical tolerance. Though cruel, in the Emperor’s mind these measures were merely to ensure that Rudolf would be able to endure the rigours of sovereignty.

This tough-love approach fractured their already complicated relationship, and Rudolf naturally sought to define himself in contrast to his overbearing father. He took an active interest in progressive politics and proposals for reform, paying particular attention to calls for independence from the Hungarian parliament.

His tumultuous family life was somewhat improved by an arranged marriage to a Belgian princess, a union that produced a daughter whom Rudolf loved dearly. However, the brooding prince’s circumstances were about to change for the worst.

Deprived of any real authority by his suspicious father, Rudolf filled his free time with hunting, drinking and womanising. From one of his many mistresses, he reportedly contracted syphilis and inadvertently infected his beloved wife, rendering her infertile.

Some Habsburg historians believed this bad luck tipped the macabre prince over the proverbial edge, and he started to consider suicide as an honourable exit from a life that offered him no prospect of fulfilment.

At around this time, he supposedly began a scandalous affair with the teenage beauty, Mary Vetsera. They made no effort to conceal their romance from court circles, and his father is said to have forbidden his son from continuing his relationship with the girl.

The prince and his young lover journeyed to the imperial hunting lodge at Mayerling on 28 January, where Crown Prince Rudolf planned to meet a hunting party comprised of his closest friends and cousins.

When his guests arrived on the morning of the 29th, they found Rudolf’s room locked and could not rouse their host for the festivities ahead. His increasingly nervous servants were ordered to knock down the door, and upon entering, the group found the two bodies slumped next to each other.

The authorities in Vienna were contacted and a clandestine inquiry was conducted to find out the truth and prevent an international scandal.

Initially, Rudolf’s parents were informed that Mary Vetsera had probably poisoned the prince before taking her own life. Still, as the investigations went on and two suicide notes were uncovered, it became obvious that Rudolf had intended his demise all along.

A well-known Viennese actress and long-term mistress of Rudolf’s, Mizzi Kaspar, admitted to the secret police that the prince had suggested a suicide pact to her some months before.

She was less impressionable than the naive Vetsera and flatly refused. I wonder if Mary would have gone through with Rudlof’s morbid plan had she known she was his second choice?

These egregious circumstances have been dramatised and romanticised on numerous occasions, with Omar Sherif playing the prince in a celebrated Hollywood film and the Royal Ballet company basing a gaudy ballet on the misfortunate, but the likely causes certainly seem more sinister than sentimental.

His position as heir to the Habsburg crown was assumed by his cousin, Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination in 1914 sparked a chain of events that led to the Great War.

Due to Rudolf’s liberal tendencies, some scholars have speculated that, had he lived, he would have done everything in his power to defuse the tensions that sparked the First World War.