Many reasons have been put forward as to why he committed this horrendous act, but most of the evidence was destroyed on orders from Franz Joseph himself. On the 30th of January 1889, Elisabeth's only son, the handsome and talented heir to the throne, Crown Prince Rudolf, murdered his beautiful seventeen year old mistress, Baroness Maria Vetsera, at his hunting lodge of Mayerling, south of Vienna, and then shot himself.
After his tragic death, Elisabeth, who had been extremely close to her cousin, became haunted by ghostly images of the tragic King, which even her religious fervour could not dispel. Eventually, Ludwig was deposed by members of the Bavarian government and died mysteriously by apparently drowning in the cold and dark waters of the Starnberg Lake, near the castle of Berg. Like Sisi, Ludwig was not of this world, preferring the solitude and isolation of the Bavarian mountains, where he built his fantastic fairytale castles and worshipped his hero, the composer Richard Wagner. One of the most traumatic experiences in Elisabeth's life was the tragic and mysterious death of her cousin, the so-called "mad" King Ludwig II of Bavaria.
She became insane and was finally incarcerated in the gloomy castle of Laaken outside Brussels, where she died in 1927 at the age of 86. The shock of his death was too much for his Belgian wife, Charlotte, who had been lobbying the rulers of Europe for support for her husband. His mutilated body was eventually returned for interment in the Capucin crypt in Vienna, the final resting place of his Habsburg ancestors. Finally, Maximilian was captured by Juarez's forces at the Mexican town of Queretaro and, after a mockery of a trial, he was executed by a firing squad on the ironically named "Hill of the Bells". After only a few short years, however, Maximilian's dreams were shattered, when Mexico revolted against him under the guerrilla leader Benito Juarez, and Napoleon withdrew his support for Maximilian's regime. Elisabeth's mother-in-law never forgave Elisabeth for taking the child with her on this visit and went out of her way to ensure that Sisi had little contact with her following two children, Gisela and Rudolf, and brought them up as her own.Įlisabeth's brother-in-law, the handsome and talented Archduke Maximilian, was persuaded by Napoleon III of France to accept the vacant throne of Mexico and to become a puppet ruler. Only three years after her marriage to Emperor Franz Joseph, her first daughter, Sophie, on whom she doted, died as the result of what is thought to have been scarlet fever, during the imperial couple's first state visit to Hungary. Nothing could be further from the truth, as her life was one of recurring tragedy. A cursory examination of the Empress Elisabeth's life would lead one to wrongly surmise that she was a woman who had everything - wealth, beauty and an enviable social position.
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