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Written by Don B. Kates
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Tuesday, 10 March 2009 15:04 |
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FACT: During the night of Jan. 30-31, 1889 the 30 year old heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne and his 17 year old lover Baroness Maria were mysteriously killed at his remote hunting lodge. It bears emphasis that this is virtually the only verifiable fact in a case that has been inundated ever since in rumors, lies, delusions and propaganda.
Immediately after the deaths were discovered A-H officials sought to suppress all knowledge of the deaths. This having proven impossible, the empire belatedly announced the deaths w/ the story that Prince Rudolf had murdered his lover and then himself in a fit of insanity.
This became part of the generally accepted version. One argument for it rests on speculation as to why the A-H empire announced this - that the only reason they promulgated this horrible embarrassment to the royal family must be that it was true. But it is also true that concocting the madness story would have served an ulterior purpose. It prevented an even worse embarrassment for the ultra-Catholic emperor - denial of Catholic burial unless the prince was deemed insane. (Members of the royal family are buried in a special crypt which is now a tourist attraction in Vienna, It is consecrated ground. Ordinarily a suicide could not be buried there but madness is an exception.)
The generally accepted version goes even further, however. It asserts that the deaths resulted from a suicide pact between Rudolf and Maria. This is supported by the following unverified claims: That Maria adored the prince and would do whatever he asked; that on previous occasions Rudolf had asked first his wife and then another woman to commit suicide w/ him; that during the night he wrote a will leaving his estate to this other woman; that he had killed Maria and then allegedly wrote farewell letters to various people substantially admitting this; that next morning the servants had to break into the lodge - so no murderer could have gotten out and left everything locked from the inside.
Again I stress that these are all unverified claims. Note also that the madness-suicide pact theory is undercut by the following unverified claims:
1) Initially Maria was declared to have been shot. A later claim was that Maria was not shot but beaten to death. This allegedly was determined at a late 20th Century autopsy which occurred after her body was stolen and then retrieved;
2) that the gun w/ which the Prince was killed was not his; it allegedly belonged to some unknown other person. Also it is said the gun had six expended shells in it. (But that cuts in favor of suicide. A man committing suicide might not be careful to first clean and then fully reload a gun he had previously used for target practice. But a murderer trying to fake a suicide would be careful to plant a gun w/ no inexplicable other casings.)
3) that 30 years later the emperor said his son was murdered;
Alternatively, there are two theories which are even more unlikely than a suicide pact between Rudolf and Maria.
ALTERNATIVE THEORY # 1: The emperor had Rudolf murdered because of their political disagreements. This is the rankest speculation, inconsistent w/ all that is known about his personality, highly implausible and there is no evidence supporting it. (Inter alia, why would he have Rudolf killed w/ his mistress, thereby promoting scandal, rather than waiting to get Rudolf alone sometime?)
ALTERNATIVE THEORY # 2: Thirty years later the emperor told his successor's wife that the French had murdered Rudolf. Supposedly they had proposed that R revolt against his father and take over as king of a Hungary divided from Austria but Rudolf rejected this and was going to tell his father.
This theory of the crime is preposterous. Yes, the dying old man would have wanted to believe his son died because of loyalty rather than being a crazed murderer. But the theory itself is absurd. In 1889 France was diplomatically isolated in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War in which Prussia had trounced France. By 1889 Prussia had become much more powerful yet as the leader of a united Germany and was in alliance w/ Austria-Hungary. Assassinating the heir to the Austrian throne would have been suicidal for France and would have united Europe against her. That isolated, friendless France would risk committing an act of war against those two mighty powers by murdering a royal prince - absurd. (Remember that 30 years later WWI stemmed from the assassination of another Austrian heir by an obscure Bosnian fanatic. Austria blamed its enemy Serbia and demanded humiliating concessions - nearly all of which Serbia offered to make in order to avoid a war in which its association w/ the assassin's group made Serbia look to be involved in the murder.)
Besides, there is not the slightest evidence for the French assassins theory. It is most likely a delusion that appealed to the aged emperor 30 years after R's death when A-H and Germany were engaged in WWI against France. If we are going to engage in baseless speculation about assassination, looking back to 1889 the most probable assassins would have been the Germans. It was they who benefitted from the death of R, a liberal who (once he became emperor) might have withdrawn from the alliance his far right-wing father had made w/ Germany. Note that positing a German assassin eliminates the complication of imagining baseessly: a) a French plot to put R on the Hungarian throne; b) that the French had revealed the plot to R; c) that he had rejected the plot; and d) that the French then decided to kill R even though his eventual ascent to the throne would have favored the French. To reiterate, if some European power would have killed R, Germany is the logical candidate, not France. But the emperor would not tend to think that 30 years later when Germany was his ally in WWI against France.
Moreover, if we are going to imagine a murderer out of whole cloth, why imagine a political murderer? why not imagine up a rejected rival for M's favor who sneaked into the lodge and murdered them both?
Sherlock Holmes famously remarked that when all plausible theories are eliminated, the implausible must be accepted. Implausible as the suicide pact theory is, it is still less absurd than the alternatives. (The suicide pact theory actually has some cogency: a) Rudolf was allegedly deeply upset because he and his father were deeply opposed politically and his father would not trust him w/ any duties; and b) after centuries of inter-breeding, madness in the royal houses of Europe was not unknown.)
ADDENDUM
After reading all this, my wife remarked that murder-suicide is far more common, far more likely, than a suicide pact. This set me to thinking.
What if, as my wife suggested, Rudolf killed her in a fit of rage at something and then felt that he had to kill himself to avoid scandal and prosecution?
First objection: would he have expected some adverse consequence or would the murder have just been covered up?
Answer: a cover-up would have been difficult. Maria's family was important and they could have made a terrible stink, Plus the emperor was a very moral man who might not have allowed a coverup.
Second objection: wasn't Maria just another easily replaceable girl; why would he have killed her, given the terrible problems that would cause, rather than just drop her as he had dropped all her predecessors?
Answer: what if R really was mentally unstable and just snapped -- ending up w/ a dead girl on his hands and to his unstable mind suicide seemed the only option? Incidentally, how do we know that Maria wasn't just one of a succession of girls R snapped with - except that Maria wasn't just another poor street girl whose disappearance would go unnoticed?
Of course R murdering M seems implausible. But more so than the alternative which is that the 30 year old heir to the A-H empire and a beautiful, wealthy 17 year old baroness would commit suicide together?
The fact is that we have little information on the relations between, and feelings of, R and M. But we do know that all the time men murder women w/ whom they have had (or wanted to have) romantic relationships. In fact, while men are murdered for many reasons, the majority of murdered women die at the hands of men w/ whom they have had romantic relationships.
This has seemed unlikely in this case because all observers seem to have felt M was wildly in love w/ R, but that she was "just another girl" to him. But, to reiterate, we have little real information on the relations between, and feelings of, R and M. Of course it would seem a mere dalliance to observers of a relationship between the 30 year old heir to the A-H empire and a 17 year old girl. But how do we know that was the way R saw it?
All the time we see people madly in love w/ others whom we feel are beneath them or maybe not the best match for whatever reason. But they disagree. So it is conceivable that R was wildly in love w/ M whom he quarreled w/ and murdered and then he killed himself out of remorse or shame or grief or whatever.
CONCLUSION
What we have here is a vast superstructure of unverified claims inundating a small quantum of actual fact. We know two young people were killed and we don't know much more than that.
Rethinking all this in light of my wife's comments, I now VERY tentatively conclude that R murdered M for some unknown reason and then killed himself.
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