by Greg King
On reaching his majority, Rudolf became entitled to an annual stipend from the government’s civil list of 45,000 gulden (approximately $287,550 in 2017).48 This was a considerable amount of money: A university professor typically earned some 2,000 gulden a year ($12,780 in 2017). Yet his wandering mother regularly spent three times her son’s annual allowance on one of her frequent European holidays.49 Franz Josef also typically gave archdukes palaces in Vienna when they reached their majorities; he refused to do so with his son, handing over a bachelor apartment in the Hofburg’s Schweizerhof wing and forcing Rudolf to share his roof, as if reinforcing his subservient position.
The emperor also appointed a group of officers as his son’s new household, naming Vice Admiral Count Karl von Bombelles, whose father, Heinrich, had once procured Franz Josef’s mistresses, as the crown prince’s Obersthofmeister, or lord high chamberlain of Rudolf’s court.50 The choice proved disastrous for the impressionable Rudolf. Described as “unscrupulous, with the mentality of a lackey” and a “hard-living man of the world,” Bombelles followed his father’s example by introducing Rudolf to the pleasures of women and alcohol. He had, complained a courtier, “a masterly capacity for flinging open to the Prince all the doors of worldly distraction,” acting “the role of Mephistopheles to perfection” as he shepherded Rudolf “into all possible and impossible adventures.”51
At the beginning of 1878 Rudolf traveled to Great Britain, where he hoped to reunite with his mother, who was there to ride to hounds. But the empress, who prided herself on being a brilliant equestrienne, caused problems. Rudolf was an indifferent rider at the best of times; worried that he would disgrace himself, Elisabeth warned her son that he wasn’t good enough to emulate her pursuit.52 “I shall certainly take care to avoid riding to the hounds,” Rudolf sarcastically replied. “Our public does not regard it as heroic to break one’s neck, and my popularity means too much to me to throw it away on such things.”53 The situation was so tense that, although they traveled aboard the same train, Elisabeth avoided being alone with Rudolf.54
Rudolf generally acquitted himself well, however, and pleased Queen Victoria by being “most easy to get on with,” though she worried that he “looks a little over-grown and not very robust.”55 But his subsequent visit to Ireland went badly: No seat had been provided for him at a ball in his honor at Dublin Castle, and neither the viceroy nor the lord mayor of Dublin would cede his chair. After the lord mayor cut in front of the crown prince on the way to dinner, Rudolf had had enough, and despite apologies abruptly left the next day.56 His foul mood eventually erupted against his mother. There was much gossip about Elisabeth’s relationship with her favorite riding companion, Captain George “Bay” Middleton, and Rudolf let it slip that he thought his mother was infatuated with her handsome English friend and making a fool of herself. Elisabeth was furious; “filled with bitterness,” she insisted that she would never again trust her son.57
The usual course of action for a Habsburg archduke—service in the army—awaited Rudolf on his return to Austria. Franz Josef appointed him a colonel in the 36th Imperial and Royal Infantry Regiment stationed in Prague, though not before he had replaced liberal officers with reliably conservative voices.58 The commanding officer, Major Friedrich Hotze, praised Rudolf as “quite extraordinary,” noting his “warm heart and a noble character developed beyond his years.” Yet Hotze couldn’t ignore his “impetuous and impulsive” nature, warning that without clearly defined goals the crown prince could veer into an aimless, idle life.59
“I belong to the Army, body and soul,” Rudolf once insisted.60 But Latour von Thurmberg, the man who knew him best, thought that the crown prince “lacked almost everything” necessary to be a good soldier. Unlike his martinet father, who obsessed over the smallest of military details, Rudolf was undisciplined and careless about appearances.61 A fellow officer once complained that Rudolf seemed “tired, bored, and absent-minded” during drill: He ignored the regimental report and “gazed vacantly into space,” more concerned that his boots were splashed with mud. In the midst of the review he summoned a groom, who rushed over with a cloth and carefully wiped his boots. When this was over Rudolf continued to “stare into space, without taking the least notice of what was going on around him.”62
By the time he was twenty Rudolf had grown into an elegantly attractive though not particularly handsome young man of medium height; a wispy mustache and side-whiskers echoed his slightly curly, reddish-brown hair.63 Light-hazel eyes constantly shifted according to Rudolf’s moods; after their meeting in 1878, Russian aristocrat Princess Catherine Radziwill recalled “a certain mournful expression” in them, along with a wistful, almost sad smile.64 But there was an air of delicacy about him, reflected in his slight frame and often wan complexion.65 Rudolf spoke with the accent peculiar to aristocratic Vienna, a distinct mixture of musical notes and guttural intonations; he often skipped “from one subject to another” in disjointed fashion.66 He had inherited his mother’s charm, yet his polite and courteous manners, thought Princess Radziwill, “were rather cold and not exempt from a shade of disdain.”67
Intelligent, well read, interested in science, and a talented writer, Rudolf impressed many. “He is clever,” recorded Empress Elisabeth’s lady-in-waiting Countess Marie Festetics, “but after all, he is young still and has had no guidance.”68 A former tutor, decrying the “Mephistophelean expression” on Rudolf’s face, warned: “Do not allow the introspective speculations I detect in your eyes to embitter your existence.”69 Rudolf’s mercurial moods were famous—“one moment gentle and shy,” recalled a cousin, “and the next blazing forth at some fanciful iniquity like a savage Oriental despot.”70
Franz Josef appreciated his son’s intellect but did not share it: He took Rudolf’s curious, often abstract ideas and liberal opinions as wayward rebellion. Never able to bridge the emotional gulf separating them, father and son maintained an outwardly pleasant détente that cloaked insecurities and mutual distrust. To the end Rudolf craved his father’s approval, but Franz Josef could never bring himself to confide in his heir or entrust him with any real responsibilities.
Empress Elisabeth once deemed her son “a bad-minded boy” and a “very dangerous enemy,” warning that he would turn on anyone “if he ever gets the chance.”71 Rudolf had essentially grown up alone, tended by nannies and tutors but with no real sense of family intimacy. Until the age of six he was closest to his sister Gisela, but education separated them; after Gisela married Prince Leopold of Bavaria in 1873 he rarely saw her. A ten-year age difference meant that Rudolf had little in common with his youngest sister, Marie Valerie: indeed, although they shared the same roof, Marie Valerie admitted that she often went months without seeing her brother.72 Not that Rudolf would have confided in her: Marie Valerie was their mother’s pet, her favorite child and constant companion, upon whom she showered all the attention and affection she had denied her son. “It is you alone that I love,” she once confided to her youngest daughter.”73 Resenting this obvious favoritism, Rudolf often treated Marie Valerie coldly. For her part, Marie Valerie complained that her brother was so formal and aware of his own position as crown prince that he even kept his own family at arm’s length and never offered confidences.74 Considering himself far superior to the Wittelsbachs, Rudolf caused great offense by insisting that his mother’s Bavarian relatives treat him as crown prince.75
Twenty years of life had left Rudolf a young man of immense contradictions. Heir to unprecedented privilege, he had suffered through a childhood that left him psychologically damaged and emotionally abandoned. Family life offered no comfort: The distant father, the absent mother, and the strained formality of the Austrian court only enhanced feelings of isolation and alienation. A haphazardly enacted education had awakened sparks of imagination within his keenly intelligent mind, yet it had left him without the skills needed to analyze and reason through contradictory information. Liberal inclinations clashed with autocratic conceptions of hi
s own position, resulting in wildly conflicting ideas for the future. And yet this was the emotionally fragile young man on whose thin shoulders rested the fate of his father’s uneasy empire.
CHAPTER THREE
“Love,” wrote Rudolf at fifteen, “is certainly one of the most beautiful things in the life of all living things.”1 A year earlier Latour von Thurmberg had escorted him to a fish hatchery, where doctors explained the facts of life.2 Abstraction gave way to reality when, according to rumor, Franz Josef tasked an adjutant with procuring a healthy, discreet young woman to shepherd his son through his first sexual encounter.3
A perfect storm quickly surrounded Rudolf. “What temptations assail such a young man!” worried one of his mother’s ladies-in-waiting.4 Youth, wealth, and rank, he soon discovered, had their privileges. “Female hearts positively dropped into the lap of the Crown Prince,” noted a counselor at the German Embassy in Vienna. Many young ladies considered “surrender to the young, elegant and charming Prince” as nothing short of “a patriotic duty.”5
Rudolf, said a cousin, “was mad about women,” and saw no reason to deny himself.6 The Prince of Wales had recorded of the nineteen-year-old who visited London in early 1878, “For a young man of his age, it is surprising how much Rudolf knows about sexual matters. There is nothing I could teach him.”7 Rudolf wasn’t discreet about his interests, and he made few distinctions between the married and the unmarried; his romantic overtures to Archduchess Maria Theresa, the third wife of his uncle Archduke Karl Ludwig, strained an already bad relationship.8 Not that Rudolf’s taste remained consistent for long: After using his position to charm numerous women to bed, he usually grew bored and soon moved on to a new liaison.9
A courtier recalled that Rudolf had “very little regard for women, outside their appointed role in the order of things”—in other words as submissive wives and mothers. His approach was cynical. Women, Rudolf declared, were “eternal victims of self-delusion,” willing to abandon any principles in pursuit of romance.10 A streak of misogyny infused his perception: “How tedious some women can be!” he once complained. “Women bore me to death when they are not laughing or singing. As a matter of fact, are they good for anything else?”11
These affairs were physical, not emotional, and Rudolf viewed them through a curiously bureaucratic lens. The names of his sexual partners were entered in a ledger, with red ink used to denote those women Rudolf had deflowered, and black deployed for other conquests. He developed a system every bit as rigid and snobbish as the court’s Spanish etiquette to reward his partners. Those belonging to princely families recognized as being of equal rank for the purposes of marriage received a silver box engraved with a copy of Rudolf’s signature and coat of arms; noble ladies admitted to court but not of equal rank were given boxes stamped with his name and coat of arms, while those who lacked entrée received boxes engraved with his name and archducal crown.12 Dispatch of a silver box inevitably marked the beginning of the liaison’s end, usually accompanied by a warm though unmistakably final note: Rudolf asked one woman, whose virginity he had taken to remember him as the person who “introduced you into the mysteries of love.”13 His “propensity for easing persons from the memory” was true of his sexual conquests: “As soon as they had been presented with their cigarette boxes and been duly entered in his register,” wrote one relative, “the matter was closed for him, for there was little these women could give him. His sexual indulgence was curiosity rather than the urge to satisfy a physical appetite, and curiosity in this sphere was soon satisfied as there was little that was novel in it.”14
Some of these liaisons, however, were more serious than others. In 1880, the crown prince supposedly secretly married his distant Habsburg cousin Maria Antonia, daughter of Grand Duke Ferdinand IV of Tuscany, when she became pregnant. As she was dying of consumption, it is said, the emperor had the marriage annulled; Maria Antonia died in 1883, after allegedly giving birth to Rudolf’s son in 1881.15 An affair with the Viennese actress Johanna Buska is also said to have led to the birth of an illegitimate son in 1881.16 Rudolf apparently didn’t trouble himself over such developments: Indeed, his grandson Prince Franz Josef von Windisch-Grätz once claimed that his grandfather had more than thirty illegitimate children.17 Mothers were bribed into silence, their children soon forgotten.
Even the wives of Rudolf’s best friends were considered fair game. In the late 1870s, it was whispered, he began a liaison with Princess Louise, wife of his friend and frequent hunting companion Prince Philipp of Coburg.18 A member of the Austrian branch of the German aristocratic house of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, the prince was once unflatteringly described as “an unattractive, squat, myopic, coarse-natured creature.”19 A heavily built bearded man, Philipp shared Rudolf’s love of sensual pleasures and supposedly catered to his insatiable tastes. Coburg always “kept tongues wagging” in Vienna, said one lady, with his “reputation of intriguing” and boasts about being in the know in “all sorts of interesting secrets, diplomatic as well as personal.”20
In 1875 the thirty-one-year-old Coburg married his seventeen-year-old first cousin once removed Princess Louise, the eldest daughter of King Leopold II of Belgium. Horrified by her husband’s amorous overtures on their wedding night, Louise had fled the palace in her nightgown and hidden in a greenhouse before her mother, Queen Marie Henriette, lectured her on her marital duties and sent her back to Philipp’s arms.21 Louise eventually bore her husband two children and gradually carved out a life for herself in Vienna, using her husband’s money to make herself a leader of the fashionable set. Coburg was blatant about his own extramarital affairs, and Louise followed his example, though with more discretion than her husband.22
With a succession of liaisons meeting Rudolf’s amorous needs, he long resisted the idea of marriage. “I am not cut out to be a husband,” he once told Latour von Thurmberg, “and don’t propose being one so long as I can help it.”23 But by 1880 Franz Josef insisted: There was already too much talk about his son’s reputation in Vienna. According to the Habsburg Family Statute of 1839, Rudolf had to marry a Catholic of equal rank, which reduced the field of potential brides to the royal houses of Bavaria, Spain, Saxony, Portugal, or Belgium, or to one of the empire’s princely families recognized as ebenbürtig (equal for purposes of marriage).24 Franz Josef first suggested Princess Mathilda of Saxony; certain that she would grow obese, Rudolf rejected her. The emperor then proposed the Infanta Eulalia of Spain, whose lack of obvious physical charms left Rudolf cold.25
It was Princess Louise of Coburg who offered a solution. “I have a sister who is like me,” she told Rudolf.26 Belgium was a mixed bag: The monarchy had been established only in 1831, an offshoot of the German house of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, and offered little dynastic luster. But there were important ties: King Leopold II was Queen Victoria’s first cousin; his consort, Queen Marie Henriette, had been an Austrian archduchess before her marriage; and Franz Josef’s brother Maximilian had wed Princess Charlotte of Belgium—though given her insanity the latter was scarcely a recommendation. But Franz Josef charged Count Bohuslav Chotek, the Austrian minister in Brussels and father of the ill-fated Sophie—the future consort of Rudolf’s equally ill-fated cousin and successor, Archduke Franz Ferdinand—with undertaking negotiations.27 With his father insisting, and having exhausted most of the other possibilities, Rudolf reluctantly traveled to Belgium in the spring of 1880.
Like Rudolf, Princess Stephanie of Belgium, born in May 1864, had endured an unhappy childhood. King Leopold II had no interest in his daughters and treated his wife with contempt, flaunting his numerous affairs at court.28 After the death of his only son, Leopold openly resented his daughters; Stephanie later wrote of his “indifference, injustice, and unfaithfulness,” which seared her youth.29 Aside from his affairs, Leopold’s only concern was amassing a vast fortune by exploiting his Congo Free State through brutal repression. Franz Josef himself openly disliked the king, calling him “a thoroughly bad man.”30
King Leopold called Stephanie into his study. “The Crown Prince of Austria is here to ask for your hand in marriage,” he announced. “Your mother and I are very much in favor of this marriage. It is our desire that you should become the future Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary.”33 Stunned at this news, Stephanie was pushed into a room to meet her visitor. “The Crown Prince,” she wrote, “could not be called handsome, but I found his appearance by no means displeasing.” Yet she detected “something unfrank and hard about his gaze. He could not bear to be looked at directly in the face. About his wide mouth, which was half-hidden by a small mustache, there was a queer expression which was difficult to read.”34 Rudolf dutifully asked Stephanie to become his bride within days of meeting her, and, as dutiful as he, she consented. Even if Rudolf did not quite fit her image of a prince charming, the fairy tale he promised seemed enticing: “A new world presented itself alluringly to my imagination,” Stephanie recalled. “A splendid world, one in which I should have an exalted mission.”35