Royal Babylon (26 page)

As Ludwig's grasp on reality diminished, the list of court regulations grew. It became illegal in the royal presence to clear a throat, sneeze or cough. Bavarian dialect was also banned on pain of death. Many of his servants pretended to be ill rather than wait on him. He became obsessed with Chinese court etiquette and made his aides wear oriental dress and ordered them at all times to approach him on all fours. His servants were finally reduced to communicating with him through locked doors by tapping out an agreed code on the woodwork.

Luckily, his palace staff merely pretended to carry out his more inappropriate commands. Ludwig ordered his
stable quartermaster, Hesselschwerdt, to travel to Italy, recruit some bandits, then capture the Prussian Crown Prince, who was on holiday there, and keep him chained up in a cave fed only on bread and water. The stable quartermaster chose to overlook the King's orders, thereby avoiding a potential war. Ludwig casually ordered floggings and executions, none of which ever took place. His orders were ignored, and in any case the executions were nearly always commuted by the King himself, who in his quieter moments remembered that he hated violence.

His building program meanwhile carried on apace, and he doubled his personal debt to 14 million marks—about $39 million today. The King then hit upon his most insane scheme of all, one which he confidently believed to be the perfect solution to his cash-flow problems. He would sell the entire state of Bavaria, and with the proceeds buy himself another kingdom where he would find less resistance to his castle-building problem.

In 1873 the Director of the Bavarian State Archives, Franz von Löher, was summoned by the King. Löher, a minor middle-aged civil servant, was instructed to go away and find a few thousand square miles of foreign land on which Ludwig could start up a new kingdom from scratch and live undisturbed, “completely independent of seasons, men and needs of all kinds.”

Löher applied himself to his assignment with a great deal of enthusiasm. His first voyage took him to Spain and the Canary Islands, along the Mediterranean, around the Greek Islands to Constantinople, then back again—a trip which he reported upon in pedantic detail to the King. He had conscientiously inspected many sites and looked closely into the legal implications of purchasing a new Bavaria: there was, however, nothing much worth
buying. Two years later, Löher was off on another expenses-paid jaunt at the King's behest, this time to Cyprus, Crete and finally Turkey, with a view to buying part of the Crimea. Once again he wrote up a meticulous report on his investigations. The quest was still not satisfied. Löher turned his sights to Egypt, then South America, Persia and Norway. By this time, Löher's lifestyle, which had already landed him three holidays of a lifetime and authorship of a best-selling travel guide, was attracting the jealous attentions of the press and government alike. Löher sensibly conceded that he'd probably pushed his luck far enough, and advised the King that it was his regrettable conclusion that he was probably stuck with Bavaria for life.

Ludwig reluctantly abandoned his dream of Utopia, but took solace in the fact that he had a couple more castles on the drawing board. There was talk of his building a replica of Versailles at Graswangtal. He desperately needed to lay his hands on more cash immediately—another 20 million marks would do. His request for more money was politely but firmly turned down by the Bavarian government.

If Ludwig's ministers wouldn't give him the readies, he would simply have to look elsewhere. Ludwig had read about an incredibly rich Persian who could lend or donate him all the money he needed. The King dispatched an aide to beg for money from him, confident that his request would not be denied. The request was never made: Ludwig's embarrassed aide simply hid himself away in Munich for a plausible length of time, then presented himself back at the Bavarian court to break the news that, sadly, the Persian gentleman had died of cholera before he had a chance to speak to him.

Ludwig was not to be put off by this minor setback and
redoubled his efforts. Another aide was ordered to travel to England to ask the Duke of Westminster if he could spare 10 million marks (about $27 million). He sent begging letters to the Austrian Emperor, to the King of Norway and Sweden, to the Turkish Sultan in Constantinople, and to the Shah in Tehran. In the meantime, Ludwig was ready with an alternative plan: he would recruit thieves to burgle the major banks in Stuttgart, Frankfurt, Berlin and Paris. A group of his servants, with no previous experience of armed robbery between them, were dispatched to Frankfurt with instructions to hold up the Rothschild bank. They traveled to Frankfurt, hid themselves away for a few days, then went back to the King to explain that their elaborate plans had been thwarted by a last-minute hitch.

At this point his ministers agreed that the King was obviously unfit to rule and drastic action was required. It had long since become impossible to get him to attend to State affairs, and he had recklessly neglected his duties. Moreover, his begging letters had turned Bavaria into an international laughingstock. Even his subjects began to resent this remote King whom they never saw, and who according to rumor spent much of his spare time buggering his cavalrymen.

For several years Ludwig had been preoccupied by a prophecy, attributed to Nostradamus, that he believed alluded to the House of Wittelsbach. On his father's deathbed, the old King Maximilian II had whispered in Ludwig's ear the seer's prophecy: “When Good Friday falls on St. George's day, Easter on St. Mark's day and Corpus Christi on St. John's day, all the world will weep.” As St. George was also the patron saint of Bavaria, this prophecy was thought to have a special significance for the royal family. In 1886 all of the conditions listed in
the prophecy were fulfilled. This was also the year in which King Ludwig II was officially declared insane.

The King's chief minister, Johann von Lutz, consulted a leading Bavarian psychiatrist called Bernhard von Gudden and asked him to diagnose the King's mental condition. Von Gudden set about tracking down witnesses who would offer testimony about his sanity. The evidence was entirely anecdotal: Ludwig had forced his young soldiers to strip naked and dance together for him in the moonlight; he had nocturnal picnics in the woods, and insisted on eating al fresco in the middle of a winter blizzard with temperatures at well below freezing point; he made his servants play children's games such as Hunt the Slipper with him until dawn; he wanted to soar over the Bavarian Alps in a car drawn by peacocks, and ordered the construction of a flying machine; there was a holly tree to which he bowed low whenever he passed it, a hedge that he greeted ceremoniously, and a pillar at Linderhof that the King cuddled at the beginning and end of every visit there; he had ordered that his father's body be exhumed, years after Maximilian's death, so that Ludwig could give him a long overdue thrashing; he had twice dispatched one of his ministers to check that the water in his artificial grotto at Linderhof was precisely the correct shade of blue.

Without ever once personally examining his patient, von Gudden produced a lengthy medical report which concluded that the King was suffering from advanced paranoia and was incurably insane. This was enough for the Bavarian government to declare that Ludwig II was mad and incapable of exercising his duties.

         

The legal pronouncement of insanity was one thing; in order to enforce it, they first had to catch their King. In June 1886 a group of soldiers, led by von Gudden and his assistant and several male nurses, set out for him with a straitjacket and a bottle of chloroform. However, Ludwig had been forewarned and was expecting their imminent arrival. They arrived at Neuschwanstein to find the castle doors bolted and guarded by local gendarmes who refused to let them in. They were then attacked by one of Ludwig's supporters, an irate old woman with a brolly. The humiliated delegation decided upon a tactical retreat. At this point the King took the offensive and sent a detachment of local police to arrest them. They were interred in his castle lodge, with orders that they should be tortured and their eyes gouged out. The order was quietly ignored. One of the commissioners was able to escape, and persuaded the local police to let them out. Once freed, the embarrassed posse slunk back to Munich. Ludwig meanwhile contemplated suicide, but his aide refused to go out and buy poison for him, so the King paced up and down his castle considering other methods of killing himself.

When they came for the King a second time it was very different. There was no sentry to bar them, and they found Ludwig inert, dazed, and offering no resistance. They led him quietly away to his castle at Berg, on the shores of Starnberger Lake. The ex-King appeared to take this turn of events with unexpected good humor. He was in such a relaxed mood that he was given permission to take an evening stroll round the lake, accompanied by his physician and captor, Dr. Gudden. At around 6:45
P
.
M
. on
June 12, Ludwig and Gudden set out for their walk. Two hours later, Ludwig and the doctor had failed to return and the alarm was sounded. Servants and local police searched the area around the lake and the castle grounds. At around 10
P
.
M
. the bodies of Ludwig and Gudden were found floating facedown in shallow muddy water. Gudden's face was marked, showing possible signs of a struggle.

The deaths of both men remained a mystery. It is generally assumed that the King had decided to take his own life. Gudden had either drowned accidentally while struggling to prevent the suicide, or else had been deliberately drowned by his prisoner. A cross marks the spot where King Ludwig II drowned. He was forty years old.

With hindsight the straitjacket earmarked for Ludwig by his countrymen was not only a monstrous act of ingratitude but also very bad planning. They should have simply let him get on and finish the job of turning his country into a giant Wagnerian theme park. If only his contemporaries could have guessed at what their dear demented King was going to do for their balance of payments, they would have undoubtedly struck a medal in his honor. Unfortunately it took Bavaria more than a century to see the funny side.

         

The declaration of Ludwig's insanity by the Bavarian government was a grave embarrassment not only for Bavaria but for every royal household in Europe. Almost every one of them had close blood ties to a man who had just been branded a dangerous lunatic. For Bavaria the constitutional problem was far
from over. The day Ludwig II died, his brother Otto was pronounced King of Bavaria, with his uncle Luitpold acting as Regent. The government had in effect organized a coup d'état to overthrow one mad king and replace him with another. A messenger was dispatched to Castle Fürstenried, where Otto had been incarcerated ever since he was declared incurably insane in 1878, with instructions to inform him that his brother was dead and he was now King. Otto listened, but registered no emotion and changed the conversation to another subject.

Otto was three years younger than Ludwig. Although he had always been regarded as odd, in his teens he was an affable, rather excitable youth widely known in Munich as “the Merry Otto.” Almost overnight, however, he changed from a lively young man into a depressive hypochondriac who suffered from panic attacks and would burst into tears for no reason. Otto's first and last major appearance on the international scene was at the Versailles Conference, after Prussia and the other German states had defeated the French Emperor Napoleon III. Ludwig had refused to leave Bavaria on the grounds that his teeth hurt, and sent Otto to represent him instead. It was in the middle of one of history's most important conferences, in front of the crowned heads of Europe, that Otto first manifested obvious signs of mental instability. Bavaria's representative sat through the entire proceedings with his shoulders hunched, his eyes glazed, his body shaking, giving everyone the distinct impression that he hadn't taken in a single word that was said. The Prussian Crown Prince, who was seated next to him, was alarmed at how pale and strangely distracted Otto appeared.

Ludwig had been tempted on occasions to abdicate in favor of Otto, and was relying on his younger brother to produce sons and continue the dynasty. If only he could be left alone to
play with his castles, Ludwig was quite happy to let someone else take charge. After Versailles, Ludwig was forced to concede that this option was no longer open to him.

Otto's condition deteriorated rapidly. In 1871 Ludwig wrote to a friend:

         

It is really painful to see Otto in such a suffering state which seems to become worse and worse daily. In some respects he is more excitable and nervous than Aunt Alexandra, and that is saying a great deal. He often does not go to bed for forty-eight hours, and did not take off his boots for eight weeks, behaves like a madman, makes terrible faces, barks like a dog, and, at times, says the most indecorous things.

         

By 1872 Otto had become so dangerously unstable that his doctors advised that he be temporarily locked up for his own safety. He was removed to Nymphenburg and detained under mild restraint. The rare occasions when Otto was let out became a major embarrassment to the family. By 1875 his hallucinations had taken a religious turn. One day during High Mass he burst into the church dressed in a shooting jacket, threw himself at the feet of the Archbishop and began an extremely loud and hysterical confession that he had sodomized several local choirboys. After this episode it was agreed that it was time to deprive him of his liberty on a more permanent basis, and Otto was pronounced incurably insane and led away, smiling and clutching one of his favorite childhood toys, to a castle near Munich. The man who signed the certificate was Dr. Bernhard von Gudden. At first Ludwig was a frequent visitor to Fürstenried, but the
sight of his brother in a straitjacket was too much for his own troubled mind to cope with and soon he stopped visiting altogether.