Crown Prince Rudolf
It was essential that the monarchy had a new heir for the throne. Elisabeth gave birth to such an heir on 21st August 1858. He was christened Rudolf. This time she only recovered from the birth slowly and with difficulty. She also had to put this child in the care of her mother-in-law and was never able to build-up a real mother-child relationship with him.
Crown Prince Rudolf was an intelligent and very sensitive child. He was also a sickly one and should have been given a great deal of attention. On his sixth birthday he was separated from his beloved sister and Franz Joseph charged Count Gondrecourt with his education. This man had the job of making a ‘good soldier’ out of Rudolf. To this end, the little crown prince was subjected to relentless and often extremely brutal physical exercises. Some of the consequences of what was supposed to have toughened him up were to trouble him for the rest of his life. Neither anything nor anybody could bring the Emperor to feel any pity for his son. Treatment with water and shocks would have soon reduced him to idiocy, maybe even have cost him his life, as Elisabeth and her lady-in-waiting, Marie Festetics, observed. So Elisabeth intervened, and this time with surprising fervour She gave the Emperor an ultimatum: Either he left all aspects of the child’s upbringing to her or she would leave him. This worked. Gondrecourt was sacked and Rudolf’s education was put in the hand of predominantly middle-class, liberal-thinking tutors sought-out by Sisi herself. The deciding factors in making a choice were no longer aristocratic birth or military prowess but purely their academic qualifications. These tutors helped to make a roundly educated, critical and liberal-thinking individual out of Rudolf, just as Elisabeth had hoped they would.
For the rest of his life Rudolf was grateful for his mother’s firm-handed intervention. Other than this, though, he hardly really had any kind of a relationship to her at all, just like his sister Gisela. He developed a coy respect and chivalrous admiration for her. He never plucked-up the courage to talk to her about personal matters. For her part, Elisabeth did not really seem to be interested either.
The marriage between the prince and his princess Stephanie of Belgium which their entered when he was twenty-two and she was sixteen-years old, was an unhappy one for both of them. Following the birth of their first child, christened Elisabeth, Rudolf contracted a venereal disease which he subsequently passed on to his wife, making her incapable of bearing any more children.
The mayerling tragedy
One particular twist of fate robbed Elisabeth of the last of her ability to enjoy life: On 30th January 1889 her only son, Crown Prince Rudolf, took his own life taking his seventeen-year old lover, Baroness Mary Vetsera, with him. The tragedy occurred at Rudolf’s hunting lodge, Mayerling, in the south of the Vienna Woods and came completely unexpectedly to everybody, even the closest member of the family. Nobody knew of the extent of the problems facing the heir to the throne, let alone could have guessed that he would commit suicide. Rudolf was survived by his wife, the formed Belgian princess Stephanie, and a dauhter, the little Archduchess Elisabeth.
For the rest of her life, the Empress was a broken woman. She never wore anything but mourning until the day of her death, nine years later, and her restlessness only increased.
For Rudolf Mary Vetsera was the only one of many lovers. She was, in contrast to him though, hopelessly in love with the Crown Prince and so she was prepared to join him in death. To avoid publicity, she was buried at night in the utmost of secrecy and without rites in the nearby cemetery at Heiligenkreuz.
Archduchess Elisabeth, Rudolf’s daughter joined the Social Democratic Movement and went down in history as the Red archduchess. Rudolf is buried in the Imperial Crypt under the Capuchian church in Vienna. The doctor who carried out the autopsy attested that Rudolf had not been responsible for his actions at the time of his suicide. This meant that he could be buried on hallowed ground.
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