While the basic report is clear, the further details are muddy and complicated. What was the motive — what were the motives — for this horrifying act? Who may have had knowledge or suspicions about it beforehand? One of the factors for the lack of clarity about these further questions was an organized coverup orchestrated by the Habsburg dynasty.
A number of individuals are involved in the events: Rudolf’s wife, Crown Princess Stephanie, who was wounded by the illicit affair between Rudolf and Mary, and who yet needed her marriage to Rudolf to maintain her status near the very top of the dynasty; Rudolf’s mother, Empress Elisabeth, who had been habitually disengaged in her son’s life and thereby perhaps by means of this neglect created a psychological neediness in him; Rudolf’s father, Emperor Franz-Josef, who relationship to Rudolf was distant and disparaging; and Mary’s mother, Helene von Vetsera, who raised her daughter to be an ambitious social climber. To these main figures is added a long list of other family members, a number of various government officials, and a handful of friends.
“Even after more than a century, the subject of Mayerling remains controversial,” note co-authors Greg King and Penny Wilson. The case presents “few known facts” but many “divergent ideas offering alternative explanations.” King and Wilson venture some hypotheses:
Despite the rather obvious hurdles involved in tackling an historical affair and two mysterious deaths clouded by decades of controversy, we believe that we’ve been able to reach some new conclusions offering a starkly different take on the liaison between Crown Prince Rudolf and Mary Vetsera.
The complexities of investigating the Mayerling case are amplified by the secretive reaction of the Habsburg dynasty. Documents relating to the deaths of Rudolf and Mary have disappeared in some cases, or remained state secrets for many years in other cases.
The royal family had motives to suppress information which might fuel narratives unfavorable to the dynasty, and had motives to promote accounts of the incident which cast the family in a more favorable light. To which extent did the dynasty act on those motives?
Given Rudolf’s geopolitical importance, diplomats and governments around the world produced fevered speculation in large quantities, further muddying the investigative waters. While the case was a personal tragedy, it was also a matter of state.
The starting point for all hypothesizing was the deaths of Crown Prince Rudolf and Mary Vetsera on January 30, 1889 in the family’s hunting lodge in Mayerling. The event seemed prima facie to be a murder-suicide by gunshot wound. Letters written by Rudolf and Mary were found, seemingly confirming the murder-suicide hypothesis.
Soon, however, alternative narratives appeared. One version supposed that Rudolf had secret connections to a Hungarian nationalist group, and that when it seemed that these connections might come to light, Rudolf chose suicide rather than have his political entanglements exposed. Another version posited that a member of the royal family murdered both Rudolf and Mary, and that the dynasty was engaged in a coverup to protect the murderer.
The passage of decades has been a double-edged sword: one the one hand, the motives of defending the dynasty’s honor and of geopolitical relevance of Rudolf and his death have faded, lessening the tendency to manipulate the narrative in order to serve either, or both, of those purposes. On the other hand, some of the physical evidence, living witnesses, and relevant texts have gradually ceased to be.
Historians Greg King and Penny Wilson write:
More than 125 years have passed since the tragedy at Mayerling. Shifting stories, deliberate lies, wild theories, and the disappearance of evidence have shrouded the story in seemingly impenetrable layers of mystery. Absent documentation, history can only speculate about what happened between Rudolf and Mary at that isolated lodge. But enough remains, when coupled with modern forensic evidence and psychological analysis, to weave together a plausible version of events, one that not only fits within the framework of known facts but also offers a believable and ultimately devastating reconstruction of those final, fateful hours.
King and Wilson go on to offer scholarly support for the most sober interpretation: that they only two people in the room were Rudolf and Mary, that there was no third-party murderer, and that it was a combination of political and personal stressors, with the added factor of Rudolf’s personal dissipation, that pushed him to, and beyond, the idea of suicide — and Mary with him.
Rudolf’s life, as King and Wilson write, was falling apart, both personally and politically. Mary had become fixated on Rudolf and could imagine no future without him. Rumors add the possibilities that Mary was pregnant with Rudolf’s child, that Mary was actually Rudolf’s half-sister by means of a youthful indiscretion on the part of Emperor Franz-Josef, or that Mary had been infected by Rudolf with a sexually transmitted disease. It is not possible to prove or disprove any of these possibilities.
Politically, Rudolf encountered perpetual frustration: The Emperor failed to take seriously any of Rudolf’s policy views or suggestions. Rudolf was on track to become Emperor, but it would be another twenty-five years before that could happen: twenty-five years of waiting and of being unable to shape policy. Rudolf feared that, when he finally might become Emperor, it would be too late: that, by such a time, the European situation would have deteriorated so far that meaningful reforms could not succeed. Rudolf was correct: the dynasty would fall in 1918. Rudolf believed that he could have saved the dynasty by reforming it.
Beyond the speculations about the nature of the two deaths are the speculations about the ripple effects those deaths had on world history. Had Rudolf lived, he would have had a hand in imperial politics for the next twenty-five years, and then he would have become emperor. Could Rudolf have exerted enough influence in his father’s government to avert WW1? Even if he had been unable to prevent the war, would he have been able to find a better end to it if he’d taken the throne upon his father’s death in November 1916 — two full years before the war’s end?
Franz-Josef had planned for Rudolf to succeed him on the throne. After Rudolf’s death, the next person in the line of succession was Archduke Karl Ludwig, who would have been emperor had he not died in 1896. Karl Ludwig’s son Franz-Ferdinand then became the heir to the throne until his death in 1914. When Franz-Josef died in 1916, the throne was passed to Karl, who was a nephew of Franz-Ferdinand and a grandson of Karl-Ludwig. So it was that Emperor Franz-Ferdinand outlived three different men, each of whom was slated to be his heir.
The sad deaths of Rudolf and Mary leave many questions which will probably never be conclusively answered. The case continues to attract attention both because of its human interest and because of its location in history as a point of contact between a variety of geopolitical and sociopolitical trends.
