Over the decades tales have emerged from the shadows of history, tales suggesting that Rudolf was murdered for political reasons. Unlike some of the more imaginative stories surrounding his death, these, at least, offer a motive firmly grounded in one of Rudolf’s more troubling misadventures.
Hungary looms large in several of these alternative theories. Although Rudolf had once insisted that the country must forever remain part of the Habsburg empire, his views softened over time and he discreetly threw his support to those aligned against the liberal Hungarian prime minister Kálmán von Tisza.1 Hoping to counter Rudolf, Tisza sought to neutralize the crown prince with a powerful appeal to his vanity. The Ausgleich of 1867 preserved, at least in theory, Hungary’s right to demand its own king; in 1883 Tisza suggested that Rudolf could assume the throne. Hungary would remain part of the Habsburg empire, but Rudolf would take Franz Josef’s title as Apostolic King of Hungary.2
Agents shadowed Rudolf’s every movement, and a network of spies regularly intercepted, read, and reported his private correspondence to his great-uncle Archduke Albrecht. The humorless Albrecht was aghast on learning of the Hungarian proposal. “I must warn you against it,” he counseled Rudolf, “because the title of Majesty that you would acquire would only flatter your vanity.”3 And so the crown prince let himself be talked out of the idea—a move he deeply regretted as the years passed and political power and influence remained elusive.
Rudolf nursed his regret for five years, until the autumn of 1888, when he joined a shooting party at Sáromberke, the Transylvanian country estate of his close friend Count Samuel Teleki von Szék. One alcohol-fueled evening, the story goes, talk turned to Hungarian independence, with Teleki making a plea for Rudolf’s cooperation. A document was supposedly produced, and an inebriated Rudolf signed his name, pledging to support a rebellion that would give him the Hungarian crown.4
The idea that Rudolf was actively plotting against his father is certainly startling, yet the remaining evidence seems conclusive. In his last weeks of life he was reading books about the coup against Paul I of Russia, led by his son and heir, Alexander.5 According to Stephanie, Rudolf was indeed involved in “secret plans” that she found “wholly repugnant.” While Rudolf had “great respect for the Emperor, he was ready to fling this respect to the wind as soon as anyone reminded him that he himself would one day mount the throne. His conviction was that he was predestined to inaugurate a new era, and he was ready to hazard everything on a single cast of the dice.”6 Stephanie would go no further, at least in public; privately, though, she was more direct, referring to a “conspiracy” in which “the Crown Prince acted against the Emperor.”7
This conspiracy seems to have been something of an open secret among the Habsburgs. According to Karl I’s private secretary, Karl von Werlmann, Rudolf “had involved himself in a Hungarian adventure. Later on, he wanted to withdraw from it, but he could not find a way out.” Werlmann’s source, someone who “knew all the details personally from Franz Josef,” was almost certainly Emperor Karl himself.8 Artur Polzer-Hoditz confirmed this view, writing that Rudolf’s death stemmed from “an affair of a political nature” and adding: “From everything that has hitherto come to light about this tragedy of the Imperial House, we may infer with a probability that almost amounts to certainty that Crown Prince Rudolf regarded death as the last and only solution of a terrible conflict of a political nature.”9 In 1983 Karl’s elderly widow, Empress Zita, suggested that Rudolf had been murdered as part of a conspiracy against his father; it seems likely that the fantastic details she relayed originated in her late husband’s knowledge of a Hungarian scheme.10
The issue was to be pressed in late January 1889, when Prime Minister Tisza laid a new army bill before the Hungarian parliament. Among the proposals was Vienna’s demand that use of Magyar be outlawed in the military: German was to be the exclusive language. This infuriated Hungarian nationalists, among them Count István “Pista” Károly, a prominent member of parliament and a vocal proponent of Magyar independence. Károly opposed the bill; if the debate became contentious—as everyone assumed it would—it could be used to challenge Tisza’s liberal coalition and bring down his government.11
Károly, as everyone knew, was one of Rudolf’s closest Hungarian advisers; it didn’t take much imagination to believe that Austria’s crown prince backed the Magyar nationalists, and Károly did nothing to challenge the idea. Before the debate Károly let slip that he was in regular telegraphic communication with Rudolf. He added that “a very trustworthy source” had assured him that Hungary would soon be independent—presumably with Rudolf’s full support.12
In her book Marie Larisch told a curious story. On Sunday, January 27, Rudolf had stormed unannounced into her suite at the Grand Hotel: he was, she said, “very excited,” and seemed pale and shaken. “You cannot possibly realize the trouble in which I am plunged,” he told his cousin, adding that he was “in very great danger” from a “political” problem. He handed her a sealed box, explaining, “It is imperative that it should not be found in my possession, for at any moment the Emperor may order my personal belongings to be seized.” This was surely a reference to the Hungarian conspiracy, for he added, “If I were to confide in the Emperor, I should sign my own death warrant.”13 Larisch, for her part, was convinced that her cousin was “actively engaged” in some “mysterious political intrigues” related to a possible coup d’état against his father.14
After Mayerling, Larisch wrote, a note arrived asking her to bring the locked box to an isolated spot in the Prater. The writer had given the same secret code that Rudolf had warned her to expect—RIUO, supposedly an acronym for Rudolf Imperator Ungarn Österreich (Rudolf King of Hungary Austria).15 When Larisch went to the Prater, she was surprised to find Rudolf’s cousin Archduke Johann Salvator of Tuscany waiting for her.16 A career army officer six years older than Rudolf, Johann Salvator had become something of a Habsburg black sheep. His public calls for liberal reform and tendency to publish criticisms of the military eventually earned the emperor’s wrath.17 Johann, the emperor complained in a veiled warning to his son, had acted in a “manner irreconcilable with discipline and subordination,” and he ordered the archduke into semipermanent exile in Linz.18
According to rumor Johann Salvator was involved with Rudolf’s Hungarian plans, supposedly entrusted with secret negotiations between the crown prince in Vienna and rebels in Budapest.19 The Hofburg chaplain Laurenz Mayer even named him as Rudolf’s killer, insisting that he had gone to Mayerling and confronted his cousin over the Hungarian scheme. When Rudolf refused to honor his previous promise to support the rebels, the archduke killed him with a Champagne bottle to the head.20 Artur Polzer-Hoditz too suggested that Johann Salvator had somehow been involved in Rudolf’s death.21 Unfortunately for this theory, Johann Salvator was in Fiume when Rudolf died.22
When Larisch handed over the box in the Prater, the archduke confirmed that it held secrets related to a Hungarian conspiracy. “If the Emperor had found these papers,” he supposedly confessed, “matters would be infinitely worse. The Crown Prince has killed himself, but if the Emperor had known all, it would have been his duty to have had him tried by military law and shot as a traitor.”23
Before leaving, the archduke told Larisch, “I’m going to die without dying,” explaining that he was going to leave the country and disappear.24 In October 1889 Johann Salvator duly renounced his archducal titles and, assuming the name Johann Orth, left for South America. His ship later disappeared between ports; although he was presumably lost at sea, many Habsburgs were convinced that he’d deliberately vanished and lived out the rest of his life in exile.25
The box Larisch handed over to the archduke—like Johann Salvator—soon disappeared, though Marie Stubel—sister of his lover Ludmilla “Milli” Stubel—later confirmed that he had indeed received it.26 In 1993 newspapers reported that a locked box, said to contain a revolver, several of Rudolf’s suicide letters, and missing files, had been discovered in Canada; the owner handed it over to the late Archduke Otto, the son of Emperor Karl I. The archduke freely admitted that he had received the box but refused to comment on the contents.27
Any of Rudolf’s papers related to his Hungarian plans also disappeared. At one time a mysterious File No. 25 existed in the Austrian Foreign Ministry: This held correspondence between Rudolf and Count Károly related to the Army Reform Bill. It sat on the shelves for less than a decade before officials culled it from the archives.28 Károly also destroyed all his letters from Rudolf; nothing remains documenting their contacts during the momentous last month of the crown prince’s life.29
Though authorities did their best to systematically erase damning evidence of Rudolf’s Hungarian plans, enough solid information remains to elevate the idea beyond mere speculation. The Mayerling historian Fritz Judtmann, a sober analyst of the tragedy, confirmed the plot’s essentials with Count Teleki’s descendants.30 Rudolf’s apparent conspiracy against his father was not merely an act of rebellion; it reflected his fading grasp of reality. He knew his movements were followed and his correspondence read, and yet he plunged recklessly forward, oblivious to the probable results when his treachery was inevitably discovered.
Discovery of the Hungarian conspiracy looms large in at least one murder theory. According to this, Franz Josef learned of his son’s scheme in the third week of January 1889 and confided details to his uncle Archduke Albrecht. As a loyal Habsburg, Albrecht knew his duty: He planned to confront Rudolf at the dinner for Marie Valerie and force his withdrawal from the plan. When Rudolf failed to appear, the archduke decided that it was too late for an appeal to reason; instead, he dispatched a small group of trusted soldiers to Mayerling, where they were to arrest the crown prince for treason. A scuffle broke out: When Rudolf pulled out a revolver to defend himself, a soldier grabbed a Champagne bottle and beat him over the head, while Mary was killed by a stray bullet.31
In the 1970s the historian Judith Listowel picked up and expanded this theory. Her grandfather, a former aristocratic parliamentary figure in Budapest, told her that Rudolf’s death had “something to with Hungarian independence.”32 Further investigation led her to Rudolf Taaffe, whose late cousin Eduard had safeguarded the Mayerling files confiscated by his grandfather, Prime Minister Eduard von Taaffe. According to Rudolf Taaffe, his cousin had shared details of the tragedy before his death. Listowel then spoke to a person she identified only as one of the crown prince’s descendants, who confirmed that Archduke Albrecht had been behind events at the lodge. The elderly archduke, ran this claim, sent ten members of his Roll Commando sharpshooters unit to Mayerling to confront Rudolf with evidence of his treachery; the crown prince was given a few hours to do the honorable thing and kill himself. When he refused, soldiers broke into his bedroom and shot him.33
Listowel believed that this theory was “credible and correct.” She declared that not only was Archduke Albrecht behind the operation but also suggested that Prime Minister Taaffe himself had been involved—a startling assertion that his descendants were unlikely to welcome. It is true that Taaffe heartily disliked Rudolf; from various reports and interventions with Chief of Police Baron von Krauss, Taaffe knew that the crown prince had threatened to kill himself and had likely gone to Mayerling with Mary Vetsera, yet he did nothing. This, Listowel believed, was proof that “Rudolf’s death suited Taaffe both from a political and a personal point of view. From deciding deliberately to refrain from preventing a planned suicide it is but a short step to deciding to give the coup de grace if the victim failed in his own purpose.”34
This isn’t convincing. Doing nothing is far removed from a loyal prime minister actively participating in the murder of his emperor’s son. And the theory, it must be said, also suffers from some extraordinary lapses in logic. Franz Josef supposedly learned the truth soon after Rudolf’s death, yet he continued to pour out his favor on Archduke Albrecht, who remained inspector general of the imperial army until his death in 1895. What soldier in the Austrian army would have dared kill the crown prince without the emperor’s direct order? What guarantee was there that Loschek, Hoyos, or Bratfisch would not immediately come running and return fire in an effort to save Rudolf? Under this scenario Mary was presumably killed to silence her; how, then, to explain her death six hours before Rudolf’s, or her suicide letters? Or, for that matter, Rudolf’s suicide notes? Listowel suggested that Albrecht’s plot just happened to erupt as Rudolf and Mary were preparing to kill themselves and after they had both written their letters—an extraordinary coincidence and one that, if true, completely negated the need for anyone to further complicate matters and murder them.35
Yet the suggestion that Rudolf was murdered for political reasons has become fashionable in conspiratorial circles, and the finger of suspicion has long pointed toward Berlin and German chancellor Otto von Bismarck. This isn’t surprising: Rudolf’s antagonism toward Prussia was scarcely a secret. Like many Austrians, he despised Prussian aggression, growing militarism, and its humiliating usurpation of previous Habsburg dominance over European Germans. “Germany needs this alliance more than we do,” Rudolf once wrote to Szeps. Bismarck’s goal, he believed, was “to isolate Austria more and more from all other powers and make it dependent upon German help.”36 Bismarck, for his part, made no secret of the fact that he feared Rudolf’s eventual accession to the Habsburg throne. Although he praised the crown prince’s “mental powers and the maturity of his opinions and conceptions” to an Austrian official, privately he expressed concern over Rudolf’s “close connections with literati and journalists,” adding that “if the Crown Prince continues in this way it must fill us with apprehension for the future.”37
Rudolf, Bismarck feared, would cast aside Austria’s alliance with the German empire in favor of a new pact with England and France. With an eye to discrediting the crown prince, the chancellor had almost certainly approved the autumn 1888 German newspaper campaign against him. He also relied on a series of agents to keep him abreast of Rudolf’s indiscretions and anti-German sentiments. The Viennese police informer Florian Meissner, for example, supposedly also sold his damning information on the crown prince to the German ambassador, Prince Reuss.38
Accusations that German agents killed the crown prince were certainly in circulation at the time. On February 2 the New York Times reported rumors that some unnamed assassin had torn away gratings over the bedroom window and shot Rudolf.39 But the story really got going during World War I, when anti-German sentiment was at its height and two books, published in quick succession, blamed Berlin for the crown prince’s death. The first, written by Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves, a former member of the Prussian secret service, contained an imaginative scene of sudden attack at Mayerling, replete with invented “servants” who, though grievously wounded, managed to relate later that Rudolf had been murdered. As to responsibility, the book hinted obliquely: “Prussian diplomacy had gained such an ascendancy over the House of Habsburg and the affairs of Austria that Austria has been and is a staunch ally and supported by Germany in all its aims and ambitions. This alliance is developed to such an extent that even an heir apparent to the Austrian empire, unless acceptable to and identified with Prussian-Germanic interests, finds it impossible to ascend the throne.… Rudolf of Habsburg had to the full the proud instinctive dislike to, and rooted disinclination against, the ever increasing Germanic influence in and over his country. He died.”40
The second work, the anonymously published The Last Days of Archduke Rudolf, laid out a most comprehensive scenario. The author claimed that he was Rudolf’s personal secretary; that he was born between 1861 and 1863; that his father was a courtier; that he attended school in England; and that he entered the archduke’s service in 1887.41 From these few clues several possible candidates emerge as the author. The first is Artur Giesl von Gieslingen, a soldier who worked in military intelligence before his 1887 appointment as Rudolf’s Ordonnanzoffizier (orderly officer in attendance). Although his 1887 appointment to court matches the date given for the anonymous author of The Last Days of Archduke Rudolf, other details do not. Born in 1857, Gieslingen was older than the book’s supposed author; he was not educated in England, nor did he serve as Rudolf’s secretary. Another possibility is Heinrich Ritter von Spindler, head of the crown prince’s secretariat; Spindler, though, was even older than Gieslingen, and entered Rudolf’s service much earlier than the putative author of the book. The final candidate is Lieutenant Viktor von Fritsche, who was indeed several years younger than Rudolf and who served as the secretary to his chancellery. Fritsche was the most likely author of the book, if it was indeed written by a member of Rudolf’s staff.
The Last Days of Archduke Rudolf insisted that the crown prince had been murdered for political reasons. The enigmatic author claimed to have seen a secret letter about “a man of the first importance who, the context allowed an intelligent person to assume, constituted an obstruction in the path of those whom the writer represented, as well as a thorn in the path of other important persons.”42 He wove this together with a story that in November 1888, Bismarck had taken a special train to Laxenburg to confront Franz Josef with rumors that he planned to abdicate in Rudolf’s favor.43 There was little doubt, the author claimed, that the chancellor was behind events at Mayerling.44 A forged letter from Rudolf, the book claimed, brought Mary to the lodge. She traveled by train from Vienna to Baden, but in fact her arrival at Mayerling was a complete surprise to the crown prince.45 Ominously, the book contended, some German hunters were seen roving the forests around Mayerling just before the tragedy.46 In a final flourish, the anonymous author repeated a bit of thirdhand gossip that, on the morning of January 30, Bratfisch had heard two shots: When he went to investigate, he saw four men in hunting clothes sneaking away from the lodge.47
In 1969 the author Victor Wolfson again raised claims of a German assassination in The Mayerling Murders. He eagerly seized on The Last Days of Archduke Rudolf as a factual chronicle of events because, as he explained, “one welcomes corroboration for one’s own point of view.”48 Wolfson had no doubt that Bismarck had ordered Rudolf’s death, suggesting that Rudolf’s suicide letters could be traced “to the forgery apparatus in Berlin,” which, having planned to murder the crown prince, wanted to “make certain” that his intent was clear.49
This assertion echoed The Last Days of Archduke Rudolf, which declared that all the suicide letters found at Mayerling were clever forgeries.50 The claim wasn’t new. On February 10 the Viennese journal Schwarz-Gelb raised questions about the letters and their authenticity: “If bank notes can be forged, why cannot a Prince’s letters be forged as well, and his handwriting imitated with deceptive accuracy?” it mused.51 The problems posed by this idea are staggering. If there was some chicanery involved and the alleged forgers planned to kill Rudolf, why would the conspirators then involve Mary as an additional victim? If some foreign government forged the letters found at Mayerling, how did it then get access to the locked drawer of Rudolf’s desk in the Hofburg to plant the ones discovered there?
Though The Last Days of Archduke Rudolf contained enough accurate information to suggest a degree of veracity, it also served up a healthy dose of inaccuracies regarding Mary’s journey to Mayerling and events at the lodge. Wolfson’s attempts to dismiss evidence contrary to his theory were likewise unconvincing: He suggested, for example, that officials forced Mitzi Caspar to invent stories of Rudolf’s suicide proposals, while ignoring the crown prince’s repeated overtures to many others.52 Bismarck certainly worried about Rudolf’s accession to the throne, but no compelling evidence has emerged to support the idea that he ordered his assassination.
The highest-profile claim that Rudolf died as a result of a political assassination, though, came from a seemingly unimpeachable source: Empress Zita, the widow of Austria’s last emperor, Karl I. Zita was born three years after Mayerling, but no one doubted that she knew all the Habsburg secrets. In 1983 the ninety-one-year-old former empress insisted that Rudolf had not committed suicide but instead had been murdered as part of an international conspiracy against Franz Josef.53 According to this the French, not the Germans, were behind Rudolf’s death. The future French prime minister Georges Clemenceau supposedly approached Rudolf with a plan to stage a coup against his father, so that once on the throne the new emperor could sever the alliance with Germany and form a pact with the French Republic. Zita claimed that Rudolf refused to act in so dishonorable a fashion, and that Clemenceau then arranged for his assassination.54
On its face this seems absurd. That Rudolf admired France was no secret. “We are indebted to France,” he wrote to Szeps, “as the source of all liberal ideas and constitutions in Europe. And whenever great ideas begin to ferment, France will be looked to for an example. What is Germany compared to her? Nothing but an enormously enlarged Prussian regimental barbarism, a purely militaristic state.”55 Rudolf’s friendship with the Prince of Wales also influenced his friendly views toward France. An idea grew that if Austria severed its alliance with Germany, it would then be free to tie itself to both Great Britain and France; Germany would thus be encircled and contained. To this end Szeps even arranged a secret meeting between Rudolf and Clemenceau in December 1886, at which the potential realignment was discussed.56
Erich Feigl’s 1989 biography of Empress Zita fleshed out this extraordinary claim of French involvement. The Habsburg loyalist wrote that the former empress insisted she’d learned details of the plot from Rudolf’s sisters, Gisela and Marie Valerie: According to this, Cornelius Hertz, a Jewish banker, had led the French assassination squad.57 She even declared that Franz Josef knew all but had said, “I could not act in any other way. The monarchy was at stake. The truth would have shaken the foundations of the Empire. Everything will be published after my death. Then poor Rudolf will be entirely rehabilitated.”58
No such publication ever took place, though in 1983 Zita promised that she’d soon release secret family documents confirming her tale.59 But when the historian Gordon Brook-Shepherd attempted to pursue this pledge, the former empress backpedaled and changed her story. “Alas,” she wrote to him, “all proofs, that is documentary proofs, have either disappeared or cannot be found.” Instead she insisted that the Christian burial Rudolf received proved that the Vatican knew he had been murdered.60
Empress Zita died in 1989. No evidence supporting her claim has ever surfaced. Although convinced that she genuinely believed her story, the former empress’s family expressed embarrassment and bewilderment at her allegations. Her eldest son, the late Archduke Otto, even gently refuted his mother’s allegations in public interviews.61 Many regarded Zita as a woman of great integrity who would never have descended to gossip; unfortunately, in her last decade, she was given to any number of questionable statements, and it seems most likely that she later conflated stories she had heard about the Hungarian conspiracy and embellished them with her own prejudices. For the staunchly Catholic Zita, Rudolf’s suicide was anathema, a blemish on the house of Habsburg. It is likely no coincidence that her claim coincided with the onset of an ultimately successful campaign to see her husband, Karl, beatified by the Catholic Church as a man who sought peace during World War I.62
The war, in fact, likely also explains the former empress’s zeal to blame Clemenceau for Rudolf’s death. In 1917, without consulting his ally Germany, Emperor Karl asked Zita’s brother Prince Sixtus of Bourbon-Parma to enter into secret negotiations with France over a separate peace. In the spring of 1918, the Austrian foreign minister, Count Ottokar von Czernin, unaware of the emperor’s overtures, attacked Prime Minister Clemenceau for refusing to end the war. Furious, Clemenceau revealed Karl’s overtures; when Germany protested, Karl lied, saying he had never authorized his brother-in-law to negotiate with the French. Clemenceau produced the documents, and revelation of the affair, which left Karl dishonored and Austria weakened, which undoubtedly fueled the revolution that autumn that drove the Habsburgs from their throne. Zita never forgot this humiliation. It is difficult not to believe that her claims against Clemenceau ultimately stemmed from lingering personal animosity.
Stories of Rudolf’s political assassination remain popular in Mayerling literature. Aside from lack of proof, most share similar dismissals of all contrary evidence: The suicide letters are deemed forgeries; Rudolf’s previous declarations of suicide are put down to coercion of witnesses after the fact; and the differing times of death for Rudolf and Mary are questioned or ignored. These assertions soon amass a wealth of contradictions, implausible scenarios, and claims of vast conspiracies that put the imperial court’s efforts at a cover-up to shame. Like tales that Rudolf was killed by blows from a Champagne bottle or shot by a jealous forester, it is surely no accident that many stemmed from Rudolf’s descendants, members of the Habsburg family, or from former courtiers—those most determined to rescue his memory and proclaim him innocent of murder and suicide.