690. A Murderous Affair: Death at Mayerling (Part 2)

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2:17Includes up to 20 gigabytes of hotspot. Capable device required. Affailability, speed and coverage varies. See mintmobile.com. An old servant was waiting for us by a small iron door. He led us through a number of dark stairs and rooms, until he asked us to enter a certain door.

2:49As I crossed the threshold, a black bird, some kind of raven, flew at my head. A voice called from the next room. Please come in.

3:02Marie ushered me in. We talked a while about Vienna. Then he said to me, Pardon me, but I would like to talk to the countess 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.

3:35Suddenly, Rodolf 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. Like something, and we said it before, from a kind of gothic melodrama, Edgar Allan Poe, or something like that. But in fact, that is a letter that was written by the 17-year-old Baroness Mary Vetsera to her old governess in the autumn of 1888.

4:09In fact, it's like something out of Dracula, isn't it? A letter written to a governess by a 17-year-old girl who has invited herself into the room of an exceedingly sinister man. And she is describing there a secret meeting with the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Crown Prince Rudolf. And this had happened a few days earlier on the 5th of November. And Dominic, if listeners, which I hope they will have done, have heard our first episode, then they will know where this is heading.

4:43And it is nowhere good for Baroness Mary, because she is heading to a hunting lodge at Marling in the Vienna woods. And what happens there is going to be one of the greatest scandals in the entire history, not just of Austro-Hungarian, but of European royalty. It is going to be a murder-suicide pact that will shake the Habsburg dynasty to its very foundations. So, Dominic, it's an amazing story.

5:15Yeah, it is an amazing, amazing tale. And today we'll be telling the story of that secret affair between Rudolf and Mary. We will get deep into what exactly happened at Marling, and we'll talk about the implications for the Habsburg dynasty and for the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But just to remind ourselves exactly when and where we are. We're in Vienna in 1888. The world of Klimt and Freud and Mahler and these titanic cultural figures. There's also the world of Crown Prince Rudolf, the sinister man in the Gothic melodrama that you described so chillingly, I have to say, in your introductory reading.

5:52Thank you. So, Crown Prince Rudolf is 30 years old. He is, to remind people, he is the son of Emperor Franz Joseph and his very glamorous, kind of melancholy wife, Cece. Very thin, very long hair. And Rudolf, who takes after his mother, I think it's reasonable to surmise. He is a very troubled, unhappy, kind of morbid young man. He's almost certainly suffering from incurable gonorrhea. He's probably off his face on morphine. And he is suffocated by the kind of expectations of his role as Crown Prince.

6:25And also, I think he is being eaten away by a sense of uselessness and futility as he waits for his father to die and to vacate the throne. And into Rudolf's orbit, as we described last time, has come the teenage Baroness Mary Vetsera. She's precocious. She's a social butterfly. She's a social climber. She's ambitious, but she's also incredibly romantic in a very 17-year-old sort of teenage girl way. Well, you could see, couldn't you, from that extract that she wrote, is it actually like a gothic melodrama or is she putting that spin on it?

7:01Of course. Bit of both, probably. Was there really a blackbird, you know? Yeah, I mean, it's improbable. And she had gone to that meeting with her older friend, Countess Marie Larish, who is Rudolf's cousin. And basically, the Countess, Larish, has acted as the sort of intermediary and put the two of them together. The board. She is the board, yeah. You could say she is the procurer, as it were. So, the events that you described, Monday, the 5th of November, 1888, we ended the last episode with this scene.

7:33Countess Larish has offered to take Mary shopping with her mother's permission. They went to the Graben, the Great Shopping Street in Vienna. They went to a society photographer to have Mary's picture taken. But then they went to the back entrance to the Grand Hotel, to a carriage, which was waiting for them, driven by Rudolf's coachman, Josef Bratfish. Bratfish. Yeah, it's a great name. That is worthy of an American. Totally. It is, yeah. And Dominic, this whole thing about women being taken to the, you know, to hotels, the back rooms of hotels and things, and being driven off in carriages.

8:08Faint echo of Diana about this, isn't there? We've kind of mentioned it in the context of Sisi. Yeah, definitely there is. I mean, it's very much a kind of Diana in the 1990s vibe to this, I think. Yeah. The Diana story doesn't quite have that gothic element to it, though, does it? It's rather more Hello Magazine. This is much more Hello Magazine meets Bram Stoker, as you said. Yeah. So from there, she was taken to the Hofburg, the Imperial Palace, to Rudolf's private apartments, and then we get the scene with the raven and the skull. And so begins their relationship, their affair.

8:42Now, this is not unusual for Rudolf. Rudolf has had a lot of affairs. And all the time, he's still seeing his chief, his regular mistress, who is the former courtesan, Mitzi Kaspar. And Mary herself, actually, this is not her first rodeo. So she, for an aristocratic girl of 17, is probably quite experienced. She'd been on a trip to Egypt a year earlier. And it was generally thought that she'd been carrying on with a British brigadier. Oh, my goodness. Not General Gordon.

9:12Yeah. That would be improbable. Wow. That's a twist. General Gordon, who is still alive in this version of history. Okay, fine. Well, anyway. Anyway, she's had loads of admirers, not just Crown Prince Rudolf. So what makes this particular liaison so special? Well, you described how Mary Vetsera's account owes something to Gothic melodrama. But it pales by comparison with this, which is from Rudolf's military aide, Victor von Frischta.

9:45And he tells this absolutely extraordinary story. He said later, you know, when we were young men, we were stationed in Prague when we were younger. And we once went, me and Crown Prince Rudolf, to the ghetto cemetery. You know, the old town cemetery in Prague? Very evocative, moving. With the grave of the rabbi who created the golem. The golem, exactly. The kind of prototype for Frankenstein. So this really kind of haunting, spooky kind of landscape. And they went there and the cantor was singing prayers during a funeral.

10:19And Rudolf was very taken by this, according to his aide, and particularly by the cantor's raven-haired daughter. And she became obsessed with Crown Prince Rudolf, too. So obsessed that her father had to send her to a provincial town to get her away from him. But she came back to Prague. She stood every night under his castle window through the winter. Rudolf eventually found out that she was standing underneath his window. But when he sent people to look for her, they reported that she had just caught pneumonia and died.

10:52And Rudolf went secretly to her grave and left roses by her tombstone. So do you think there's a possibility that that raven was the reincarnation of this girl who died of... And I imagine it wasn't pneumonia. I imagine it was consumption. Well, I think Viktor von Fritsch has a very lively imagination.

11:13Because Viktor von Fritsch, Rudolf's aide, said, The Crown Prince clearly believed that this Mary Vetsera was the reincarnation of this Jewish girl from Prague. Oh, God, there is reincarnation. And this is why he was so obsessed with her. This is his interpretation. Whether listeners believe this, I'll leave to them. I mean, I don't think she probably... I don't think she was the reincarnation of this girl, but who knows? But I suppose the question is whether Rudolf might have thought that. He might have done. He might have done, because he has that kind of sensibility, doesn't he?

11:44He absolutely does. And the way their relationship is carried out is all like they're sort of cosplaying in a gothic melodrama. So they would always meet kind of at dusk in the shadows. Or they'd meet in his very gloomy kind of palace apartment with a skull on the table. God. I mean, they would so be into black eyeshadow if they lived now, wouldn't they? They completely would. They're total goths, aren't they? Or emo or whatever. Yeah. So they're going on these sort of carriage rides in the dusk to the abandoned, deserted Prater Park and all of this.

12:14After a few days, Rudolf gave her an iron wedding ring. It was inscribed with the letters I-L-V-B-I-D-T. In Liebe vereint bis in der Tod. Through love united unto death. And she wore it on a kind of chain under her bodice. And she is clearly absolutely infatuated with him in a very recognisable kind of teenage way. So she wrote to her old governess, if I could give my life to make him happy, I would gladly do it because I do not value my own life. And in one of these letters, she says to her governess, we've discussed what would happen if people found out about us.

12:49We have made a pact covering such an eventuality. After a few happy hours at a place nobody knows, we will enter death forever. Now, at one level, this is not unusual. This is the kind of slightly madly overwrought thing that teenage girls who are going out with married older men write. He hates his wife. He will abandon me and we will go into the shadows. All of this. And especially in fantasy eclair, Vienna. Exactly. That kind of mood of lush morbidity.

13:20Yeah, completely. On the other hand, there are hints that Rudolf sees this as something more than just a sort of love lord joke or something. So on All Souls Day on the 2nd of November, he met his mother's lady-in-waiting, Countess Festetich, in a palace corridor. And he said, are you off to the cemetery, Countess? And she said, yes, your imperial highness, to pray for my dead. When I'm gone, will you pray for me? Will you include me among your dead? And she said, your imperial highness is smiling. It is a joke. A smile doesn't always mean a joke.

13:52Your imperial highness, I'm much older than you. I pray God I shall never have a chance to do what you ask. I mean, he's clearly a man who's just walking around the palace talking to people unnecessarily about death and about his own death. Yeah. Anyway, the weeks pass. In early December, I mean, don't forget they haven't been going out very long. They've been going out for four weeks. In early December, Countess Larish has to go back to her husband's estate in Bohemia, and they need a new way of hooking up Rudolf and Mary. And the way they find is through the unlikely romantic lubricant that is Richard Wagner.

14:25He's very romantic. I mean, literally, you know, the song is death. I suppose, yeah. But I mean, if you said to somebody, why don't we use Doug Wagner as an excuse to go on dates? I mean, that's a very particular vibe, is it not? Well, I entirely approve of. I mean, the thing is, if she doesn't like Wagner, then perhaps she'd be better off going out with the Kaiser. Yes, exactly. Who had laughed and chatted all the way through for Wagner in the previous episode. Yeah. And also, the Kaiser's not a man who's ever going to top himself, right?

14:57The Kaiser is a better investment. I think so. Yes, I think so. He's also not riddled with gonorrhea. Well, quite. So, anyway, the Court Opera is doing this big new production of the Ring Cycle, starting with Das Rheingold. And the Wetzelers have a box at the opera. But Mary says to her mother, I hate Wagner. This would have been a red flag for you, Tom, if you and Mary had matched on Hinge. You'd have been like, what? No interest in Wagner? Unbelievable. I'm out. So, she tells her mother, I'm not going to Wagner.

15:27She keeps coming up with excuses not to go. And then when her mother and sister went off to the opera, she would slip out of the house. Bratfish, the coachman, would be waiting at the corner. I can't believe he's called Bratfish. And he would drive her to Schönbrunn Palace, the Austrian Versailles. And she and Rudolf would kind of walk in the darkness of the park. And then she'd always be back in time for her mother and sister's return at 10 o'clock. So, it's brilliant, isn't it, that Wagner's operas are so long? Amazing. But there's still no sort of physical side to this relationship, it seems.

15:59Frederick Morton, in his book, Inerva Spenders, says the reason is that Rudolf is postponing this because Rudolf believed that climax meant end, meaning death. It's sad, isn't he, that Freud never got the chance to psychoanalyse him. I know. He just feels an ideal patient. Completely, with his mother, his distant father, all of this. The yearning for death. I mean, it's, yeah. Anyway, we get to Christmas. So, the imperial family for once are actually reunited at the palace. Sisi's birthday is on Christmas Eve, Sir Rudolf's mother's birthday.

16:32And that, in Austria, is when the Christkind brings your presence, the Christ child. She's just got back from Corfu, which she loves. You've seen her palace in Corfu, have you not? Yeah, the Killeon. And she's come back from Corfu with an anchor tattooed on her shoulder. Yeah. Which is punchy. I always thought this was unusual behavior. But a whole host of members of royal families throughout the late 19th century were doing it. Yeah. So, it had obviously become a kind of royal craze. It was, exactly. George V and his brother went off to Japan, I think, and got dragons tattooed on their arms or something.

17:05Incredible. Anyway, they gathered in Sisi's apartment that night. And Rudolf, very thoughtfully, had laid the table with presents. He got her a book of letters by Heine, who was her favorite German writer, and a packet of 11 original Heine letters that he'd sent to a relative in Paris. That is thoughtful, Dominic, because there's nothing more thoughtful than giving someone a letter written by someone they particularly admire. Can you think of an example of this, Tom?

17:37Anyone who does that, I think, is beneath the show of cynical cruelty or whatever it is. Yeah. A cherubic lovable. Is there anything you want to share with the listeners? Yeah, because you bought me a letter written by Nelson. There you go. Thank you. One of my most treasured possessions. That comparison with Crown Prince Rudolf that has dogged me all my life. Yet more ammunition to the people who say, is he the reincarnation of Crown Prince Rudolf? Because the parallels are uncanny. Yeah, they are. I would work on an encyclopedia if my father ordered me to.

18:09And he's been working on his Austro-Hungarian encyclopedia. So he's got copies of that wrapped up. I mean, you write history books that are like encyclopedias. Correct. Yeah, thank you. I was fishing for that. And there are presents all around. So Franz Joseph and Cece have got presents for Rudolf and Stef and his daughter, Elizabeth. I mean, it's often forgotten in this story that he has a daughter. I think she's about five or six. And they've got her kind of toy garden furniture made in Corfu. Can I just ask, he's got a lovely present for his mother.

18:39Yeah. Has he got anything for his father? No mention. No mention of that. It's not his father's birthday, though, to be fair. That's true. Also, what do you give the man who owns Central Europe? A uniform. Yeah. You give him Venice back or something. That's what he'd like. Yeah. So this sounds lovely, but Rudolf spends the festive season brooding darkly. His hatred of the Kaiser has now reached absolute fever.

19:06Basically, since the Kaiser went back to Berlin, Berlin newspapers have just been mercilessly mocking the Austrian army. And this has driven Rudolf mad. And Rudolf has written to his mate, Maurice Sepps, the kind of newspaper editor. And he says, I can give you information about that when we went hunting in Styria with Kaiser Wilhelm, a prostitute stole Wilhelm's cufflinks. Do you know who this unexpectedly reminds me of? It's Harold Wilson in 1974.

19:37Really? Releasing mad stories to the press. Yes, I can see that, actually. Clearly made up. Yeah. Well, do you think this is made up? Or do you think a prostitute? I think the Kaiser is precisely the kind of man who might have his cufflinks stolen by a lady of the night. No? Yeah, I suppose. He'd be an unpopular customer. He wouldn't be a great tipper. And in revenge, his escorts would steal items of his personal apparel, hoping to blackmail him later. Anyway, Rudolf sends this in this letter and says, I want you to hold on to this.

20:09If the Berlin press continues slagging me off, you can print it. And then a couple of days later, he writes again to this editor and he says, I feel the storm clouds are gathering over Austria. In international politics, there is a temporary quiet. The dangers threatening us from Serbia. Wow. That's a little preview of what's coming. I'll postpone for the moment. But this uncanny stillness gives me the impression of calm before the storm. It can't go on like this. That's my consolation. And this editor writes back and says, you're not feeling good.

20:41That's a shame. I think you're brilliant. The future is yours. You never tire, unlike so many other people. And it's because our crown prince never tires that we still believe in a great, glorious, free and prosperous Austria. So basically sucking up to Rudolf to try to modify him. The very end of the year, Rudolf and Stephanie, his wife, they go to a place now called Opatia, but at the time called Abatsia, which was on the Adriatic. It's on the Croatian coast. It was the Cannes or the Saint-Tropez of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

21:13So palm trees, hotels, sort of tea lounges, all of this. Rudolf doesn't like it. He finds it very boring. He comes back early to Vienna. It's not very gothic, is it? No, it's not very gothic. It's very dull, as far as he's concerned. And he also, he finds his wife very dull. He comes back to Vienna. He finds, as usual, there have been meetings of the army command without him, which he's very annoyed by. They didn't invite him because they thought he was on holiday. Then they're into the carnival season. Now, because the Austrian court are still mourning the death of Kaiser's father the previous summer, court sort of regulations forbid them from going to balls.

21:49So what that means is they have to just give a series of dinners for visiting dignitaries, royalty, aristocracy, and so on. Rudolf again finds this very boring. But the one consolation is that he can resume his affair with Mary Vetsera. And the key date here is the 13th of January. And we know this from Mary's letter the next day to her old governess. She said, I must make a confession. I was with him yesterday evening from seven till nine. We both lost our heads. Now we belong to each other, body and soul. On Saturday, I hope to get away from a ball and then I will rush back to him.

22:23So we belong to each other, body and soul. We lost our heads. We all know what happened between seven and nine that evening. And that same day she went to the most expensive jewellery shop in Vienna and she ordered a gold cigarette case inscribed with the date of their Tristanite before the 13th of January and she wants to give it to the crown prince to remember the occasion. And my guess is that it was probably around now that he floated seriously the idea that he had mentioned a few weeks earlier, which she mentioned to her governess.

22:54The idea that one day they will be discovered, that we will go to a happy place that nobody knows and then we will enter death together. And this is not the first time that Rudolf has mentioned this to a woman because we know that he had mentioned it to his regular mistress, Mitzi Kaspar, before Christmas and she had laughed at him and thought it was a joke. I thought that there were inversions I've read of this. She goes to the police and tells them and the police refuse to listen to her because she's just a prostitute.

23:28Is that not true? Yeah, I don't know how true that is. So I've seen that online and I've seen that repeated in kind of general histories, but I'm not convinced how true that, I mean, it may be true. Maybe listeners who, particularly Austrian listeners who might have read German language versions of this, may be more familiar with it. But in, for example, Frederick Morton's book, which is kind of day by day, there's no mention of this, just mentions her laughing at him. There's a slight disconnect actually between laughing at somebody because you think they're joking. Yeah, and then going to the police.

23:58And then going to the police. Is it a better story if they go to the police? She goes to the police. Maybe it is a better story. What we do know for certain is that Mary didn't laugh. Mary is not a joker in that way. And she takes her relationship with the crown prince incredibly seriously. She sees it in these very overwrought terms. But of course, this is, again, what we don't know. We don't know what they said to each other. We cannot know how much she was coerced. You know, he's 30. He's the crown prince. She's a massive goth, though, isn't she?

24:30I mean, you said. She's a massive goth, of course. But how much she enters into this pact, you know, voluntarily, difficult to say. Anyway, Rudolf's friends and acquaintances suspect absolutely nothing. That month, he seems calm. He seems untroubled. He seems polite. He goes repeatedly to operettas or to the opera. On the 23rd of January, for example, he goes to see a comedy called The Dandes of Vienna. And he's cheered by the audience. He's working on his encyclopedia. He writes an article, one of his many anonymous articles from a monarchist periodical, in which he basically says, people should stop going on about Germany and how brilliant Germany is.

25:07People should put their faith in Austria, ancient, united and undivided. And, of course, being a Habsburg, he does a lot of hunting. So he's not quite in his cousin Franz Ferdinand's league. So Franz Ferdinand, his kind of younger cousin and protégé and sort of a world-class butcher of birds. But Rudolf still, you know, he sees an eagle. He likes to shoot it. So he shot three eagles on the 20th, three more on the 21st and five deer on the 23rd of January.

25:39On the 24th of January, so Thursday the 24th, he now has less than a week to live, by the way. Bratfish drove him to meet Mary by the Prater Park. Again, it was very cold, very, you know, deserted, no one there. And they fixed a date at this meeting. And they said, let's go to the Myling Hunting Lodge on Monday because he said, I'm going there anyway with some friends to do some more hunting. And that evening, the evening of Thursday the 24th, he went to the court opera and he sat beside his father in the imperial box.

26:10They were spotted deep in a very serious conversation, but nobody knows or will ever know what was said. On Friday the 25th, he has five days to live. He goes hunting again on the banks of the Danube. He shot 26 ducks. Seems like a lot, actually. Then he went back to town. He went to Hodeck's taxidermist shop on the Maria Hilferstrasse, where they'd been stuffing his eagles for him. God. I mean, the whole empty fairgrounds.

26:42Yeah. Stuff the taxidermist. It's brilliant. It's got it all. I was thinking about this. I think this would be a brilliant Alfred Hitchcock film. David Lynch. I would enjoy it as well. Yeah. There are lots of directors who would do really, really good different versions of this. Yeah. Christopher Nolan would cast Cillian Murphy, surely, as Crown Prince Rudolph. A young Cillian Murphy. Yeah. And Michael Caine as his father. Yeah. I was about to say Tom Hardy. Tom Hardy's the coachman, surely. Yes.

27:13Tom Hardy is Bradfish. Surely. Everyone wants to see that. That would be the spinoff series. Bradfish. Yeah. He's solving crimes with Sigma Void. He's solving crimes with Freud.

27:26Fantastic. All right. So he's gone to the taxidermist shop. Then he goes to a painter's studio. I've put the painter in just so I can say his name. His name is Tadeusz Adjukowicz. And he is a Pole, I think, given his name. And he's painting Rudolph on horseback, showing him he's an infantry general. And then he goes to the palace for dinner. Does the painting, the portrait of Rudolph, start to weep tears? Surely. Yeah, definitely. Of blood. So Saturday, the 26th, he has four days to live. The same routine.

27:57And as if to punish him, the fates are mocking him. Because that evening, there's a court dinner to celebrate, of all things, Kaiserville on the second's birthday. So Rudolph has to dress up in his uniform as an honorary colonel of the 2nd Brandenburg Ulan Regiment. And this must be a terrible thing for him, because he regards the Kaiser as the worst man in history, a dreadful bounder. But he has to sort of smile and make small talk about how brilliant the Kaiser is. The next day, Sunday the 27th, there are now three days to go.

28:29Same routine, hunting, taxidermist shop, portrait. And then he rushes back to the Hofburg. And he changes into civilian clothes. And Bratfish drives him to the back entrance, the tradesman's entrance of the Grand Hotel. And there he goes upstairs, up the back stairs, to Countess Larish's suite. So she's come back from Bohemia. She's the go-between once again with Mary. Then he goes back into the coach. They go off to the Prata, the deserted park. Mary is waiting there in a coach of her own.

29:01Again, a hurried meeting with Mary to finalize the plans for tomorrow. And then back to the palace. Another quick change into another German uniform because he has to go to another reception for the Kaiser's birthday. Oh, God. No wonder he shoots himself. Imagine your most hated enemy having to dress up in uniforms and go to... Solution. It's like a nightmare, right? Or a Greek punishment. It's like Sisyphus had it easy. So he has to go to a reception at the German embassy

29:34for the Kaiser's birthday. Now, at this reception is his father and also his wife, Crown Princess Stephanie. She's looking very elegant. And his lover, Mary Vetsera. So they're all there. Is their relationship now common knowledge? Does Stephanie know, do we think? I don't know. We just don't know. So there is a moment, supposedly it's a moment, I think this is made up actually, where Stephanie and Mary came face to face and there was apparently a little pause

30:06before Mary curtsied just too... She waited just too long, like a little gesture of disrespect to Rudolph's wife. Well, that's what people said afterwards, but I suspect at the time. Yeah, so it sounds retrospective. It's retrospective. Yeah, exactly. Now, Rudolph is very pale and quiet at this reception, partly because he hates the Kaiser, but also maybe for other reasons. At one point, he's making small talk with a sculptor called Victor Tilgner and later claimed, again, this may be retrospective, that at one point, Rudolph gave a kind of shiver or shudder

30:37and said to him, this whole uniform is distasteful to me, unbearably heavy. And that that was the only hint of something. But of course, that could be just a banal thing. It could be he hates German uniforms. I mean, it really could be heavy. It could indeed. I imagine there were a lot of medals. Surely. And epaulettes. Yeah. Weighing his shoulders down. He doesn't stay long at this reception, though. By midnight, he's gone, and he doesn't go back to the palace. He goes to the apartment of his mistress, Mitzi Kaspar, and they drink champagne laced with cognac.

31:08Our favourite drink. Our favourite tipple. Our favourite drink. Exactly. We'll be drinking that at the Rest of History Christmas party. And Rudolf says to Mitzi, tomorrow morning, I'm leaving to go hunting forever. And Mitzi kind of laughs at him. She doesn't go to the police. She laughs. And she thinks to herself, this is the kind of mad thing that Rudolf says all the time, because he's a bit of a goth. He's always saying morbid things like this. Three o'clock in the morning, he leaves her apartment to go back to the Imperial Palace, the Hofburg.

31:39And there's an odd little gesture. As he leaves, he makes the sign of the cross on her forehead, even though he doesn't believe in God. He's told her he doesn't believe in God. We talked about this yesterday, about whether he would have viewed suicide as a sin, but clearly not. So he goes back to the Imperial Palace. He has a couple of hours sleep, and he's up by seven o'clock in the morning. He goes through his paperwork. He has meetings with officials. At 11 o'clock, outside his office, the clock of St. Michael's, which is the chapel next door, sounds the hour.

32:10And Rudolf calls in his adjutants, and he says, cancel my appointments, please, for the rest of the morning. I'm going shooting. Now I'll be back tomorrow, five o'clock. I'm going to have dinner with the Emperor, as agreed. And on his way out of the palace, he stops briefly at his wife's apartment. He says goodbye to Stephanie and to their daughter Elizabeth, and he repeats this message. I'll be back tomorrow for dinner. So by half eleven, he's on his way, and Rudolf has left the palace. Now, meanwhile, Mary Vetsera and Countess Lares have already left

32:41the Vetsera family mansion, which is on the Silesiana Gasser in Vienna. They told Mary's mother they were going shopping, which they've said so many times at 10.30. But once they got into the cab, they changed the address. They went to the Hofburg Palace, back entrance again. Once again, Rudolf's coachman, Mr. Bratfish, played by Tom Hardy, is waiting and he takes them out of the city. So the carriage rolls out of the city and they go into the Vienna woods and they stop beside an inn

33:12called the Red Barn, the Ruter Stadel, which is closed for the winter. Again, a very Gothic scene, this abandoned inn. People are always being murdered in red barns, aren't they? Yeah, right. Good spot. So they wait for 20 minutes in the cold by this inn and then they see a man in a fur-collared coat coming through the woods towards them and this is Crown Prince Rudolf. It's such a great film. It is. Isn't it? It'd be amazing. Of course. He's coming through the mist or whatever. Yeah. He comes through the trees

33:43and he gets into their carriage. His own carriage that brought him out of the city is now going back to the city being tailed, as always, by the police. So the police always followed him. So they've shaken off the police now. Now he's shaken off the police. So he and Mary and Bratfish drive on together towards his hunting lodge at Meierling, which is about 20 miles southeast of Vienna and they arrive round about sunset. So that's about five o'clock. Of course they do.

34:13Of course. It's the ravens flock around the gatehouse. It's a really cold, dark evening. The servants have lit the fires in the hunting lodge. Here they will be alone. Well, alone, except for all the servants until the next day. But back in the city, Countess Larish, who has engineered all this, has this flash of revelation. And we absolutely don't know why.

34:43Is it something that Mary said before she left? Is it something that Rudolph said in the last few days that has been, you know, preying on her mind or who knows? But at lunchtime, once she'd seen Mary off, she went back to the Vetsera mansion and she asked to see Mary's mother and she said, I've lost your daughter. I don't know where she is. I'm worried about her. And that afternoon, one of Mary's uncles, Alexander Baltazzi, went to see the police commissioner of Vienna and he said, we've lost Mary. We've lost the 17-year-old

35:14baroness. Can you help us find her? And eventually, he said to the police commissioner, look, we think she's gone off with Crown Prince Rudolph. And the commissioner said, well, come on. I mean, if she's gone off with Crown Prince Rudolph, we're hardly going to launch a massive police investigation. For one thing, we are constitutionally barred from investigating the imperial family. But for another, what are you so stressed about? The Crown Prince has loads of affairs. Clearly, Mary Vetsera is one of his mistresses. She's 17 years old.

35:45She knows what she's doing. You know, she's quite racy. She's matured beyond her years. These things happen. What are you worried about? Yeah, what's the worst that could happen? What's the worst that could happen? Well, we will find out the answer to that question after the break. Hey, this is Michael and Hannah from Goalhangers. The rest is science. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. What if your immune system could learn to recognise cancer cells? That's immunotherapy.

36:15One type is CAR T-cell therapy. T-cells are your body's watchmen and doctors can now extract these and reprogram them to spot cancer. CAR T-cells, they've started showing this real promise in treating cancers of the blood like leukemia because unlike most cancers, blood cancer cells, they float around separately and that makes it easier for CAR T-cells to seek them out and destroy them. And now, Cancer Research UK funded scientists are designing CAR T-cells that can tackle solid tumours too,

36:45making them tougher so they can survive a more crowded and hostile cancer environment. Now, these approaches are experimental, but they do start to show where treatment might go next. And over the past 50 years, Cancer Research UK's pioneering work has helped to double cancer survival in the UK. I mean, this shows you how far research can take us. For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org forward slash rest is science.

37:16This episode is brought to you by Hamilton, the musical. Tom, when we think of America's founding fathers, we think of dusty portraits, grim-faced men with terrible teeth and of course unpaid tax bills, don't we? That's right, but what we don't see is the struggle, the resentment, the euphoria, the love, the rapping, all in the name of American independence 250 years ago. That's what we love, doesn't it, about Lin-Manuel Miranda's award-winning musical Hamilton,

37:46which we went to see with our team just the other day. It brought the story of those turbulent years to life beyond the walls of a museum from the room where it happened. It's an incredible depiction of the life and legacy of Alexander Hamilton, who was George Washington's right-hand man, an incredibly politically significant figure. It is an absolute cultural phenomenon and you can experience it right now at London's Victoria Palace Theatre. Book tickets today at hamiltonmusical.com

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39:25and welcome back to The Rest is History where it is the early morning of Tuesday on the 29th of January 1889 and we are in the Meierling Hunting Lodge some 20 odd miles outside Vienna where two friends of Grand Prince Rudolf Count Josef Hoyos and Prince Philip of Coburg have arrived for a day's sport. They're going to go out and murder birds. And Dominic what happens as they

39:56approach the hunting lodge? Well a very sort of gothic or fairy tale scene. They approach the house and it's completely still and silent and they see that the curtains on the bedroom windows of Rudolf's ground floor apartment are closed. But the servants are up the servants admit them and in the billiard room Grand Prince Rudolf is waiting. So alive and well. He's alive and well and he seems in good form. Or is he well? Well he's not well he's got gonorrhea

40:26and he's off his face on morphine and champagne but apart from that and he looks really haggard and gaunt and looks like a man who's conceived a murder suicide pact but apart from that he looks like he's in brilliant form. And has he got a little snuffle? Possibly yes. He's got a bit of a cold he says he's got a silk scarf tied very tightly around his neck he says I've got a cold and I probably won't come hunting with you lads after all so you go ahead I'll sit it out. They have a cup of coffee and then Hoyos and Coburg go out to do some hunting

40:57and they return at lunchtime and Rudolf is waiting for them and he's still in good form. The Prince of Coburg is going back to Vienna straight away the afternoon and Rudolf says well because of this cold I'm not going to head back when I thought dinner with my father so please pass on my message and he also says