The two readings A Royal Babylon and A Nervous Splendor both share a reoccurring theme of corruption in the Royal Empire. In A Nervous Splendor we see this in the suicide of Crown Prince Rudolf. Because his death was a suicide he could not be buried with the rest of his family line. However, his father Franz Joseph was able to hold a proper Catholic burial for Rudolf as well as erase his lover Mary Vetsera from history.
First Joseph silenced Mary's mother, bribing her to leave the country, before so giving consent to the secret burial of her daughter in an inconspicuous grave at Heiligenkreuz Monastery. Mary who was not a Habsburg, "was subject to common authorities in life or death... but if Mary Vetsera were to be declared a suicide, then the Crown could not honor its pledge to give Mary a Catholic funeral" (250). However, Joseph being the Emperor made it happen. Mary's body sat in Rudolf's cabin for 40 hours before she was bathed, dressed up, and carted in a carriage with a broom along her spine to the Monastery. Where as they waited for the rain to pass to bury Mary in an unmarked grave, sat and drank refreshments inside. A death certificate was never issued, and an entry into the parish death registry would not be made for weeks. Mary had virtually vanished from Europe, no printed mention was ever made of her death or her prominent life in Europe except for a short mention in the Illustriertes Grazer Extrablatt, claiming that Mary had died in Venice and was now resting in the Family tomb in Bohemia.
As for Rudolf, well, he was a Crown Prince and he needed a proper burial. Upon finding his body, it was immediately brought back to the palace where two doctors claimed that upon examining Rudolf's body, "certain pathological formations had been found, such as the clear flattening of cerebral convolutions... usually accompanied by abnormal mental conditions and therefore justify the assumption that the deed was committed in a state of mental confusion" (254). Therefore Rudolf had not been mentally stable when he shot first his lover and then turned the gun on himself, meaning in the eyes of the Church Rudolf could be buried in the crypt of the Capuchin friars. For his funeral, the sealed his head back together with wax, combed his hair, removed his insides, and placed in a vault under the High Altar of St. Stephens Cathedral.
The cover up of Mary and Rudolf's suicide would not have been possible if it wasn't for Rudolf's fathers position and power of the Empire.
The Royal Babylon describes the atrocities of some of the royal families of Europe. The Hanover family was notorious for their reputation for adulterous fornication, George the First's father took him aside at a young age telling him he could sleep with whomever he wished as long as nobody found out. As well as being well known for his different concubines he was indifferent to his subjects and, "at fifty-four he was too hold to absorb any of the new English culture" (193), a common theme among Hanover rulers. George the Second fancied himself as a sexual athlete, his wife going so far as to select mistresses for him, he would eventually die of a heart attack on while on the toilet.
As for the Saxe-Coburgs, they proved to be equally as abusive of power as the Hanover's. The Duke Ernest was known to spend the entity of his youth seducing mistresses by the dozen, it was also said that Ernest amused himself by kicking hussars to death and shooting live rats into the Palace. However adultery among men didn't transfer over to their wives, for when Ernest's wife was caught in an affair with another man he banished her from court leaving her young children without a mother. Ernest's good luck with women would run out however wan a former mistress, becoming a famous actress began to share with the world how terribly Ernest had treated her. In an effort to silence her he tried to kidnap his bastard son, when that failed he tried to arrange their deaths in a coach ride accident, however both survived. Ernest's awful behavior progressed from, "molesting his servant girls to an adulthood given over more or less entirely to indiscriminate adultery and lavish spending on his droves of mistresses" (260), politicians were even advised to leave their wives at home if they were visiting his court.
The most atrocious of all was perhaps Queen Victoria's cousin Leopold the Second, who cared neither for the country of the people he governed. In an elaborate scheme, Leopold declared himself King-Sovereign of the Congo Free State where, "over a period of fifteen years, the population of the Congo had fallen by about 3 million" (266). In this time Leopold enslaved the people of Congo into mass producing rubber; whole villages were wiped out, women were raped and beaten, children were thrown to the crocodiles. Leopold's agents, to prove they had done their jobs, were expected to return to Leopold with a certain quota of hands taken from the dead. When a missionary finally discovered what Leopold was doing and got word to the United States, Leopold simply received a slap of the wrist for executing a holocaust for rubber.
These are only a handful of dozens of examples spreading across one hundred pages of royal crimes. The Hanovers, the Saxe-coburgs, and the Austrian Empire are all examples of how these people used their born titles to commit thousand of crimes against humanity, more often with no repercussions of their actions. Showing the vast power and control that the Empire had over the common people, and of the law.
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