On June 7th, 1886, Prince Luitpold, son of Ludwig I, brother of the late king Maximilian II, and uncle to the current King Ludwig II, attended a secret meeting of the Bavarian government convened by Prime Minister Johann von Lutz. This emergency session was the culmination of the machinations that Lutz and Luitpold had devised to seize power. The outcome was certain; Lutz had made sure, through previous consultations with all involved, that there would be no dissenters. The king was to be declared insane and deposed. The next morning, a delegation of ministers and aristocrats who had been named guardians of the mentally ill king was dispatched to Hohenschwangau Castle, the palace where it was believed the king was currently residing. Among them was Dr. Berhard von Gudden, who would later successfully take the king into custody and then be found dead with him in Lake Starnberg. When the delegation arrived at Hohenschwangau, they discovered that the king had departed for his new palace, Neuschwanstein, and had left behind a great feast that had been prepared for him. So the delegation gorged themselves on the king’s food and drink and afterward commanded the king’s head coachman to prepare conveyance for them to Neuschwanstein. The coachman refused and instead rushed away to Neuschwanstein himself to warn the king of the coup that was afoot. The king did not believe him, and perhaps this was one sign of his estrangement from reality. Even as the delegation stood outside his gate, kept at bay by palace guards, and eventually driven away by angry peasants who had heard the news that a plot was underway to dethrone the king they loved, still Ludwig looked down from his palace windows and refused to believe it was happening. Eventually, he had this delegation arrested, but they would not be jailed long, and the coup would not be stopped so easily. King Ludwig II may have had peasants on his side, but the aristocracy and the officials of his government were set against him. They saw his reckless borrowing and spending on theatrical productions and the construction of extravagant castles as indicative of the king’s break from reality as well as his negligence of duty as their sovereign. And this shirking of his responsibilities too could be viewed as symptomatic of his crumbling sanity. In fact, if he had not stayed in Neuschwanstein for so long, refusing to take the coup seriously, or even to believe it was happening, he might have successfully fought his deposition by returning to Munich and demonstrating his mental stability. Instead, he stayed in his hermitage until even his own palace staff could not justify keeping the delegation at bay. Shortly after being taken into their custody, he was discovered dead in Lake Starnberg, having murdered Dr. Gudden, the psychiatrist who had declared him insane and taken him into custody, before drowning himself. At least, that is what government officials told the press. Was Ludwig mad? Reports of his final days at Neuschwanstein, when the reality of his situation was settling in, describe his efforts to obtain poison and his numerous threats to throw himself from a nearby bridge or from the castle’s towers. Is this evidence of madness, though, or simply of despair? If he was not mentally ill, did Ludwig’s deposers actually believe him insane, or were they simply lying in order to seize his power? And if that were the case, might they have killed the king in order to protect the power they’d seized and then falsely portrayed his death just as they’d falsely portrayed his mental health?

To seriously investigate the fate of Ludwig II, we must entertain the idea that his government may have had good reason to depose him. That means taking seriously the proposition that he may actually have been unfit to rule for reasons of mental instability. In order to investigate this, we should first look to his background, as we know today that mental illness is often hereditary. So if we look to Ludwig II’s family, do we see a family history of madness? The answer is a resounding yes, and the government’s report on Ludwig’s sanity cited examples in order to demonstrate that Ludwig was not just insane but incurably so. His aunts on his father’s side both appear to have been troubled. Princess Marie appears to have exhibited symptoms of an obsessive-compulsive disorder, insisting on always wearing white so that she could more easily spot any dirt soiling her garments and immediately change clothes if she found any such filth. One might argue that perhaps she was only fastidious, but Maximilian’s other sister, Princess Alexandra, suffered delusions that cannot so easily be dismissed. She believed that she had swallowed a glass grand piano. Rather than lock her away in an asylum, she had been shut up in a nunnery. The madness rampant in the Wittelsbach line has been attributed by some to incest, as the sexual contact of cousins which so often occurs within royal families in order to preserve the bloodline can result in neurodegenerative disorders. On his mother’s side, his great uncle, King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia, was long thought to have suffered from madness as well, though historians now suspect he was actually afflicted with cerebral arteriosclerosis. Then there was Ludwig’s own little brother, Prince Otto. At first, Ludwig and others hoped the prince’s erratic behavior was a result of nervous exhaustion, but eventually it became clear that he was suffering from the madness that ran in the family. Numerous doctors all agreed on Otto’s condition, including Dr. Gudden who would one day declare Ludwig insane without even examining him in person. Otto would be confined not in Dr. Gudden’s asylum, but rather at Nymphenburg Palace, and later at the more remote castle Furstenreid. Despite his palatial surroundings, Otto’s life became wretched, a fact that Ludwig II saw on his occasional visits. His doctors padded his room to keep him from striking his head against the walls, and his screams echoed throughout the castle day and night. Ludwig surely imagined his own confinement at Castle Berg being similar, which may help to explain his nearly immediate recourse to suicide to escape such an existence.

King Otto I of Bavaria, who succeeded his brother Ludwig II but never actively ruled due to his mental illness. Public Domain.

His deposers did more than just cite examples of madness in the family, though. They also pointed to Ludwig’s own behavior. Long had Ludwig been deemed troubled, ever since his sullen youth, when it was thought he was a bit too melancholy and disaffected. Much was made of his self-imposed isolation and the fact that he kept strange hours, only rising at nightfall and staying up all night, taking sleigh rides through the dark countryside, like he was Count Dracula. Some said he would stop in the middle of a blizzard to dine. But more than this was alleged. Servants swore that he spoke to people who were not there, insisting that places at his table be prepared for Louis XIV and XV, whom they said he conversed with at mealtime even though their chairs remained, of course, empty. In his rooms at night, they said he was heard to speak as though to another person when no one was with him, and he sometimes asked servants about people he believed were in adjacent rooms when the rooms were empty. One less skeptical than I might attempt to explain this behavior by suggesting his castles were haunted, but there is a more mundane explanation. Perhaps the servants who witnessed against him were lying. Among the claims of servants were many accounts of Ludwig’s cruelty toward them, which if true meant they might have had axes to grind. And many of the witnesses, it seems, were paid off by Prime Minister Lutz in exchange for their testimony. We know that Lutz took no chances with the other members of his government, ensuring that everyone was on his side before he commenced his coup, so it stands to reason that he screened witnesses ahead of time, and that his payments were essentially bribes for telling tales that would make Ludwig seem crazy. In fact, there are records of reports from other staff who insist Ludwig never behaved strangely at all, and those testimonies remained suspiciously absent from the government’s report.

Modern psychological evaluations tend to suggest that, while his brother Otto showed definite signs of schizophrenia, Ludwig himself appeared to be displaying the symptoms of a personality disorder, at most. Besides the supposed hallucinations, most of what was alleged amounted to eccentric behavior—slovenly table manners, outrageous rudeness, giving shocking commands that he likely did not intend to be taken seriously just to see people’s reactions, and once even inviting his favorite horse to dine at his table with him. As I will speak more about shortly, much of this behavior could be attributable to having an odd sense of humor. And if not, some further circumstances offer still other alternative explanations besides hereditary madness. Due to the king’s indulgence in sweets, he had lost his youthful good looks and become heavier, but he had also lost teeth and suffered from terrible and frequent toothaches. These tooth infections may have caused him to behave in uncharacteristic ways. For example, it was said that he only agreed so readily to offer the imperial title to his cousin Wilhelm in Prussia because he was suffering from one of these toothaches and simply couldn’t deal with the situation. Then there is the fact that he relied on drugs to ease the pain of his toothaches. His chloral hydrate habit, as well as the possibility that he may have relied on laudanum or opium to find further relief, may help to explain much of his eccentric behavior, as use of these narcotics can result in the very episodes his servants described, such as sudden fits of rage and hallucinations. Then there is the fact that some brain disease may have contributed to his changes in behavior late in life. The postmortem revealed that Ludwig’s brain was abnormally small, with unusual thickening in the frontal region, though some historians have suggested that these findings were falsified to support the government’s claims of insanity. If the results can be believed, some have attributed the brain abnormality to a youthful bout with meningitis, while others have suggested that it is evidence of syphilis. The latter theory does much to explain any degeneration of his mental state, and if it was contracted in youth from his father or his wet nurse, as has been speculated, it may also account for Otto’s mental illness. If, however, it was contracted later in life, it may have been through homosexual affairs, which itself may account for the government’s veil of secrecy surrounding his illness.

Photo of Ludwig II toward the end of his life, showing his weight gain. Public Domain.

When the government undertook to investigate and create a report on the king’s mental illness, a curious proviso was given that the investigation should not extend to his sexual affairs. Certainly there were rumors of the king’s homosexual relationships with certain figures in his orbit, as well as with the occasional servant, so for the government to exclude this element from their investigation seems to indicate that the king’s sexual orientation was something of an open secret. Of course, there had been many whisperings about Ludwig and his favorite, Wagner, but that appears to have been a different sort of relationship. Ludwig’s first and perhaps only true love was likely the young Prince Paul von Thurn und Taxis, who was married to Ludwig’s second cousin. Ludwig and Paul appear to have had a passionate affair when Ludwig was just 18 years old, a romance that would last years, only fading when Ludwig began to hear rumors about Paul’s dalliances with a variety of women. Over the course of his life, he would seek “friendship,” which in his estimation meant a very intimate same sex relationship that at least meant dressing in theatrical costumes and reciting love poetry to each other if not sexual contact. Sometimes his attentions were not met with enthusiasm, as in the case of the handsome young officer Baron von Varicourt, who felt he had to clarify to the king that his affections were “of a purely spiritual nature,” to which Ludwig took exception, demanding some explanation for why the baron felt disposed to emphasize this, for as he said, “it is a matter of course that they were of a purely spiritual nature.” Another relationship, with a young theater performer, was likewise doomed for its one-sidedness. Ludwig plucked Josef Kainz from the stage and was at first disappointed when the actor seemed stiff and nervous at their first private meeting. Afterward, Josef’s friend advised him to act in order to win the king’s favor, which he did, delighting Ludwig with a new, more confident and bold personality, like the one Ludwig had seen on stage. In return, Ludwig showered Kainz with gifts and took him traveling. Still, Josef Kainz does not appear to have felt for Ludwig what Ludwig felt for him. He was performing a part, simply trying to please the king, and the king’s night owl schedule kept him up all night, exhausted. Eventually, Ludwig tired of Kainz because he kept falling asleep and snoring. Still, it seems that King Ludwig II found many young men who did respond to his affections. Numerous were the stories of stableboys chosen by Ludwig to accompany him on sleigh rides and on trips to his hunting lodges, afterwards finding themselves assigned to some elevated duty and seen wearing pieces of extravagant jewelry the king had given them.

The king’s romantic entanglements did cause the royal family and his government some embarrassment and difficulties. Bavaria was a predominantly Catholic country, but Catholic or Protestant, conservative or liberal, few would have openly approved of his same sex relationships if they had not been cloaked as “friendships.” What was perhaps more damaging was the fact that Ludwig displayed no desire to marry, which meant there would be no heir to the throne, especially with Ludwig’s brother unmarried and confined to a padded cell. There are some reports of Ludwig’s seemingly trying to engage in heterosexual affairs, which tended to end in disaster. In 1866, he became enamored of a Hungarian actress named Lila von Bulyowsky, whom he had seen portray Mary, Queen of Scots, that other doomed monarch whom I discussed in another Royal Blood Mystery. He wrote her long letters, and Lila began to tell friends she was in love with the still handsome and dashing king. One night, Ludwig invited Lila to Hohenschwangau, and they ended up in his royal chambers, on his bed, where Lila read poetry to him. He confessed to her that he sometimes thought of her at night, in bed, and kissed his pillow. Understandably, she responded by leaning in for a kiss, but Ludwig shrieked in horror and cowered away from her in a corner. Lila tried assuring the king that she loved him, but Ludwig merely fled the room, and Lila left the castle in anger, declaring the king “as cold-blooded as a fish!” The next year, Ludwig settled on a marriage with his cousin, Princess Sophie, not because he was entranced with her, but because she shared his love of Wagner’s operas. He kept up appearances for most of a year before canceling the wedding, stating that he did not truly love her and she deserved love. The king appears to have felt great guilt and terrible self-loathing because of his sexual orientation. A few years after his failed engagement, he began to keep a journal, which for years after his death was hidden by family members but eventually came to light in the 1920s. In it, he made cryptic, almost coded entries that were actually records of every sexual fantasy he had, every time he touched or kissed or embraced another man. He wrote them as reminders of his failure to resist temptation, and at the conclusion of each he would swear that it would be the last time. The result is a record of the king’s sex life as well as of his tortured psyche. It stands as clear evidence, not of the king’s madness, but of his depression and the further contributing factors that may have driven him to suicide that night on Lake Starnberg.

Ludwig II and his fiancée Duchess Sophie in Bavaria in 1867. Public Domain.

But can we even accept as true the claims that Ludwig II was suicidal? We certainly have the statements of some close to him in those final days who said he asked that poison be obtained for him, that he spoke philosophically of the immortality of the soul, that he was giving away money as a kind of parting gesture, that he asked for the keys to the tower or threatened to throw himself from a nearby bridge into the waterfall below. But how many of these reports can be taken at face value? We have already discussed the bribery that government officials used to get the stories they wanted from servants, and others were eager to maintain their positions in the forthcoming regime. Perhaps in answer to this question, we should ask whether or not Ludwig was violent and capable of murder, since this version of events has him killing Gudden before killing himself. In fact, there were numerous incidents in Ludwig’s life that do indicate his propensity toward violence. As a boy, he was no stranger to death, having once watched in horror as his military instructor suffered a seizure and fell from a mountainside to his bloody demise. And he seems to have been fascinated from an early age with the notion of ordering an execution. He was once caught threatening to behead his brother Otto, whom he had tied up. Once king, he seems to have relished ordering violent punishments for minor infractions. For such small offenses as looking at him, or leaving a room with their heads raised, he had ordered servants to be whipped, or skinned alive, or even killed, though such punishments were never actually carried out, and it is unclear how serious the king might have been in ordering them. Once, he pulled a gun on an official who was briefing him and calmly told him to continue while he waved the firearm at him. He seemed to think it was funny, and it’s unclear how many of these incidents represent a morbid sense of humor, or his autocratic attitude toward governing revealing itself in an exaggerated pronouncement meant only to frighten someone who had displeased him. He was, however, known to lash out at some of the servants who angered him, striking them with a fist or kicking them. In fact, once, an outrider in his guard did something equally trivial to upset him, and Ludwig beat him quite badly, so badly, in fact, that within a year he had died, it was believed, because of internal injuries the king had inflicted on him in his fit of rage. If this is any indication, it does seem that Ludwig was capable of killing Dr. Gudden, who had enraged him far more than any servant ever had, that rainy night on the lake.

When King Ludwig II and Dr. Gudden were discovered dead in Lake Starnberg, some at first believed it had been an accidental drowning, occasioned by the king attempting to escape by wading out into the lake. However, the scene did not support this presumption. The water was only deep enough to reach the king’s knees. While this theory maintained that he had been drunk, and his feet becoming caught in the stones on the bottom may have caused him to trip and drown, this simply doesn’t account for Dr. Gudden, who surely would have saved the drowning king. Alternatively, some have suggested that Dr. Gudden had chloroformed the king to stop him from escaping, which then resulted in the king drowning, and these theorists suggest Dr. Gudden, in his panic over accidentally killing the king, then dropped dead of a heart attack. But Dr. Gudden’s feet were still on the shore, and his face, covered in scratches, cuts, and bruises, was in the water. The best explanation appears to be that the king overpowered Gudden and thrust his face violently into the water to drown him, in the process wounding the doctor’s face on the shoreline rocks. Then the king would have been free to wade out into the lake and lay down to purposely drown himself. Despite some officials attempting to strengthen this version of events by claiming there were strangulation marks on Gudden’s neck, the evidence from the scene was strong enough and needed no embellishment. Nevertheless, those who believe Ludwig was murdered would point out that all of this evidence comes to us from the very government that wanted Ludwig out of the way. Ludwig remained a clear threat to the Lutz regime. Before being taken into custody, Ludwig II had released a statement to his subjects, the people of Bavaria generally, many of whom still adored him, especially the peasants, which ended with a clear call to arms: “…let this appeal be a reason to My People to help Me defeat the plans of the traitors in arms against Me.” As long as Ludwig lived, there was the possibility he could prove his sanity or escape and be restored by force. It is clear that his uncle Luitpold and Prime Minister Lutz had no intention of reevaluating the king’s sanity after a year, as would be customary. Instead, in their secret meetings, they spoke of the king’s incurable illness and made their plans to confine him for the remainder of his life, just like his brother. Thus Lutz’s decision to keep the king at Castle Berg instead of a more remote and secure castle, and Gudden’s choice to allow him to walk beside the lake without guards to accompany him, reeks to many like Ludwig’s captors were purposely making him vulnerable to assassination.

Portrait of Johann von Lutz, the man who dethroned Ludwig II. Public Domain.

Supporters of the murder theory suggest it is suspicious that the postmortem makes no mention of water in Ludwig’s lungs, and speculate that the fact he was found floating proves that his lungs were not full of water. Beyond this speculation, they point to evidence that appeared years later. A physician, Rudolph Magg, who supposedly examined the king’s body before it was sent to Munich is said to have made a deathbed confession that he had falsified his report at the government’s insistence, and that he’d actually seen a bullet wound in the king’s back. The king’s fisherman, Jakob Lidl, left behind a diary that claimed he had been waiting to rescue the king in a boat and had watched as the king was shot while trying to escape. In 1967, art historian Siegfried Wichmann encountered a canvas on which were sketched the portraits three men, the king’s personal physician, Dr. Schleiss von Löwenstein, on the left, an intimate companion of the king, Richard Hornig, depicted weeping on the right, and in the center, what appeared to be Ludwig II’s corpse. Wichmann authenticated the sketch as the work of the painter Hermann Kaulbach, presumably rendered at the scene of Ludwig’s death. Wichmann believed the sketch depicted blood coming from the corners of Ludwig’s mouth, which he says proves he did not drown. Wichmann then went on to purchase some books from the estate of Dr. von Löwenstein, and astoundingly, he claimed to find a handwritten note in one book revealing that Löwenstein, Hornig, and Kaulbach had gone to Castle Berg to check on the king and discovered Dr. Gudden stanching the blood from the king’s bullet wounds. According to the note, Gudden had rushed at them with a syringe, and Hornig had strangled him. Knowing that the truth of the murder would be covered up, Löwenstein asked Kaulbach to sketch the bleeding king. And finally, in 2007, a Munich banker named Detlev Untermöhle signed an affidavit asserting that fifty years earlier, he and his mother had visited Countess Josephine von Wrba-Kaunitz, and that during coffee and cake, the Wittelsbach Countess had produced her favorite conversation piece, a gray Loden coat. In a conspiratorial undervoice, she told them that this was the coat Ludwig II had worn the night he died, and then she showed them the two bullet holes in its fabric.

Now what are we to make of all this? Let us take each claim individually. First, it is not exactly true to claim that drowned bodies do not float. This depends on the qualities of the water, as well as on whether or not putrefaction has begun to release gasses. Of course, putrefaction would not have already set in to this degree when Ludwig was discovered, but it also must be remembered that he died in extraordinarily shallow waters. So perhaps he was not floating so much as still visible above the surface when he was found. The deathbed confession of Rudolph Magg sounds damning, until one discovers that it was supposedly a written confession, and was only rumored to have been seen and has never actually been confirmed to exist. Likewise, Jakob Lidl’s diary page has since disappeared. While it is true that photos of it still exist and handwriting experts have confirmed its authenticity, the fact that the original can no longer be examined causes some doubt. Then there’s the coat that Countess Wrba-Kaunitz liked to show her guests, which, if it existed, was destroyed in a 1973 house fire. But even if it did exist, it might have simply been a coat with holes in it that the Countess had spun tales around. As for the discoveries of Siegfried Wichmann, it is rather hard to believe that Wichmann stumbled onto not only the amazing portrait but also the secret note, both of which he conveniently authenticated himself. But even if the portrait were authentic, the supposed blood from the corners of Ludwig’s mouth might be intended as shadows, or may represent some artistic embellishment, or may even have been added after the sketch’s discovery, perhaps even by Wichmann himself. In the end, all the evidence for murder fails to stand up under scrutiny, but so too do the witness statements and reports that comprise the evidence for Ludwig’s suicide. It may be that we shall never know what happened on Lake Starnberg with any certainty, unless the Wittelsbach dynasty submits to having Ludwig’s body exhumed for a modern inquest. As of now, though, this request has consistently been refused, which is enough to keep the conspiracy theory fires burning in perpetuity.

Sketch depicting Ludwig’s doctor and friend seeing his corpse, discovered by Siegfried Wichmann and claimed to have been sketched in the presence of Ludwig’s body. Reprinted from The Epoch Times, image may be subject to copyright.

The Fate of Ludwig II: Part Two - The Mad King (A Royal Blood Mystery)

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