Mad King Ludwig Dines Alone

From his opulent, solitary dinners to the amazing Neuschwanstein Castle, it's no surprise that King Ludwig II was known as an eccentric. In fact, people thought he was mad. But why? Tune in and learn more about Mad King Ludwig in this podcast.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy. Today we're going
to start our episode with a housekeeping tip from King Ludwig,

(00:22):
the second builder of Neuche Bonstein and patron of Wagner.
Sarah take it from here, all right. So, if you
enjoy really opulent multi course dinners with your imaginary friends,
but you don't want a bunch of servants and footman
interrupting the changing of the course, is interrupting the service,
you should install a trap door dinner table. So that way,

(00:44):
when you're done with your plate, or when Louis fourteenth
is done with his plate, you simply press a button
and then wait in your settings will descend into the floor,
and soon enough the whole table will reappear, freshly laid out,
new food, new plates, and you can get back to
entertaining your guests. That is a true story, and it's

(01:05):
no wonder that Ludwig is part of a popularly requested
trio of topics, the king himself, his castles, and his composer.
And there's a lot of lovable weirdness here in this story,
and some eccentricities, plus some enormous building projects and bizarre
royal families, which you know how much we love those,
and you know who knows. We might even mention our

(01:28):
most favorite theme of all, which are most loyal listeners
will know what that is right away. But to start off,
we're gonna go for another common theme, which is sad
royal childhoods. So Ludvig the Second, who is also known
as Louis the Second, was born in Munich at Nimfenburg
Palace on August, which interestingly was the same day and

(01:51):
same hour that his grandfather and namesake was born, and
he is a vital Spock, a member of Europe's longest
ruling dynasty. They ruled Bavaria continuously from eleven eighty to
nineteen eighteen, which is when the last of their line
was forced to abdicate at the end of World War One,
and initially this family ruled as dukes and duke electors.

(02:13):
Some were Holy Roman emperors, but by eighteen o six
their duchy is raised to a kingdom by Napoleon and
they become kings. Max the First, Ludvig the Second Great
grandfather is the first vittle spot king, but Livig grandfather,
King Ludvig the First, is more famous for his womanizing
than anything else, and he's even decorated the Nippenberg Palace

(02:37):
with portraits of all these gorgeous society women. It's called
the Gallery of Beauties. You can still see it today.
I liked author Michael White described it as a room
of high class pin ups. But um, this is a
pretty conservative state, so people would like their king to
at least keep this discreet. And he loses it completely
when he meets Lola Montez, who is a beautiful old

(03:00):
Irish woman who's pretending to be a Spanish aristocrat. She
is a trip. We have to cover her in a
later punchet, Yeah, we we might, And they have this
very open relationship. People really don't like it, and the
king is forced to abdicate in favor of his son,
Maximilian the Second, and this is of course Lidvig the
seconds father. So Maximilian is not a big fan of

(03:21):
being a king though he would really rather be a
professor study read books. And he's also not interested in
his son. So this gives you a little background on
what Lidvig's childhood is going to be like and his mother,
Marie of Prussia, is exactly the opposite of her husband
in every way except one. But she's also completely uninterested

(03:42):
in her children and spends maybe an hour a day
with them at the very most. She's athletic and pretty
and is proud to say that she's never read a book.
So I don't think she can hang with us there, No,
not at all. We should also say that Livig's parents
are cousins, and that his family, aside from his parents
being cousins, is severely inbred. Another thing to keep in

(04:03):
mind as we go on. So Little Ludwig becomes heir
to the throne at two and a half, and life
is pretty sad for a crown prince. He's lonely, he's neglected.
He's also pampered though, because every wish must be catered to,
and he's very undisciplined. And the birth of his brother
Otto only further splits this very limited attention, and especially

(04:30):
this is bad when Otto starts to suffer from hallucinations
and requires a lot more care and attention than Livic himself.
And his childhood, as Sarah points out, is actually a
lot like the palace he was born in. It's very formal,
it's grand, but it's also isolated. And so perhaps it's
no wonder that he turns to elaborate reimaginings of medieval

(04:53):
architecture as an adult. But since architecture is such an
important part of Ludvig's later life, we should into a
little more detail about his childhood architecture. He grows up
around the Victuals Box. Official home is in Munich. They
don't spend or at least Ludvig doesn't spend a terribly
large amount of time there because being in Munich means

(05:15):
work in business, and two didn't do a lot of family.
And Livig instead grows up at Hohenschwangau, which is about
forty miles away from Munich, and it was a palace
built by his father, and the walls there are covered
in murals of German legends and you can actually see
these today, they're still there. And uh, these legends, along

(05:38):
with biblical stories, really fuel this poor lonely young boy's imagination.
So you're bored at home, you read some Bible stories,
maybe you dress up like a nun. This is what
he does and are shy imaginative boy is also really
obsessed with his own power. It's not all these sweet

(05:59):
imaginative At one point, he tries to strangle his younger
brother and instead of apologizing, he says that Otto is
his vassal and had disobeyed him. And he steals from
a shop and tells the governess it doesn't matter because
everything will belong to him someday. So very healthy mindset. Yeah, So,

(06:19):
becoming Crown Princess Ataler was obviously the first major event
in Livig's life, really shaping who he became in his future.
But the second major event in his life is his
discovery of Richard Wagner at age thirteen. And I'm really
tempted to talk more about the composer in a later
episode because he's really interesting and really controversial, but for now,

(06:42):
we're just going to say that Ludvig loved Wagner in
caps on my outline. Yeah, he wants to be Wagner's
Swan Knight. He loves the music, he loves the big,
elaborate theatrical sets, and most of all, he loves the
stories because, after all, a lot of Wagner's music is
based on those same Teutonic legends that Lidvig has literally

(07:06):
grown up seeing around his bedroom walls. Yes, his imagination
comes to life in a moody teenager. And our moody
teenager became a moody king when his father died in
eighteen sixty four, possibly of syphilist This might be our
other new theme. And eighteen year old Lidvig inherits the throne.
And he looks like a king. He's very tall, he's

(07:29):
six four, he's slender, he has a thick, curly black hair.
He's extremely handsome. He looks like what Prince Charming should be.
People go crazy when they see him during the funeral procession.
And he's a romantic hero as well as the king. Yeah,
it almost only helps that he's so moody and so bookish.

(07:51):
It adds to this the handsome, brooding men exactly so.
Like we said earlier, though, he's really obsessed with Wagner,
and one of the first matters of business when he's
king is to send for the composer, and the very
indebted Wagner moves to Munich, makes all these immediate financial
demands like I need a new theater. King Ludwig, and

(08:14):
Ludvig is happy to oblige the politicians. However, um freak out.
To put it in nice historical terms, they're also getting
really worried, not only because Ldvig is spending so much
money on this composer, but because Ludvig really loves Wagner
like I loves loves Yes. He writes sham passionate letters,

(08:36):
and Wagner, who's smart enough to work his job, returns
in kind. Wagner at the time is of course hooking
up with his mistress and future wife, Kalsima, who's the
daughter of Frm's list and the woman largely responsible for
later creating the cult of Wagner, and once the team

(08:57):
king told Wagner that he would give up his king
ship and come live with him, Wagner realized perhaps things
have gone a little too far, had to talk him down,
hides the woman in his bed, and eventually the Bavarian
cabinet says that enough is enough, and Wagner is kicked
out after a year. Yeah, we don't want another Lola Montez, everybody,

(09:18):
so moving on from this early infatuation, Ludwig seeks consolation
in his best friend who is this cousin Sissy also
the Empress of Austria, and she's a little out there too,
like a lot of the victuals box. She suffers from interaxia,
she suffers from manic depression. But she really understands Ludwig,

(09:41):
and she understands the problems he's facing and is able
to talk to him. You know. They write letters to
each other, and suddenly he's engaged to her little sister, Sophie.
And you might wonder how this extremely awkward young man
comes together with this beautiful young woman and their apparent interests.

(10:03):
Shared interest was Wagner, of course, and I feel like
today they would meet on some sort of internet message board.
If we're both attractive and we both love Wagner, we
should probably get married. So they get their official photos
made up, they planned the wedding, and then he starts
to get cold feet, and he pushes back the wedding date.
He asks his doctor to certify him as unfit to marry,

(10:26):
and finally he tells Sophie that there is not the
love which is necessary for a matrimonial union. So burn Sophie,
And that, of course is because he was probably gay
and in addition to his obsession with Wagner and his
secret diaries disclosed liaisons with lots of actors and maybe

(10:46):
some military officers, and they were destroyed in World War Two.
But a lot of his inner turmoil seems to have
come from guilt about his sexuality, because he was a
devout Catholic. But this is an all to say that
Ludvig is totally isolated from matters of state. At this
point of what we've described so far might sound like

(11:06):
somebody who isn't going to work every day, um, But
that isolation really comes later. In eighteen sixty six, he
actually enters the Seven Weeks War on the side of
Austria against Prussia. UM. But at the defeat of Austria
he signs an alliance with Prussia and works to reconcile
these two big powers in Germany. So this alliance with

(11:27):
Prussia comes into play in eighteen seventy when there's a
war against France and he sticks with Prussia, avoiding a
potential Franco Austrian Bavarian alliance and Prussia wins, and then
at the urging of Bismarck, Ludvig actually helps put out
the call to all the other princes of Germany to
unite into this German Empire under the rule of the

(11:49):
Prussian king, who is from there on out known as
the Kaiser. But Ludvig is kind of disappointed with aspects
of this new arrangement. It's not exactly what he had
hoped it would be. His territory isn't expanded, and you know,
as as one of the kings who's not the Kaiser,
he doesn't have as much power as he liked. And
he thought there would maybe be some sort of sharing

(12:11):
of the crown between his state and Prussia, and that's
not how it worked out. So he's still King of Bavaria,
but now it's just a state and not a kingdom.
And again he's a bit of a figurehead, so you
know why bother he retreats into increased solitude. And what
do you do when you don't really have a kingdom

(12:33):
to run, you don't have your composer to live with,
and you really don't want to get married. You build
your own kublican right or three of them. Soldvig builds
three castles and designs three more, and they occupy him
during his increasingly isolated life. That starts in the eighteen
seventies and from this point on he's mostly alone. He

(12:56):
dines alone, he goes to his theatrical performance as a own.
He switches to this vampire like nocturnal schedule where he
gets up at five pm UM. But his first major
building project, he doesn't. He doesn't start off right away
with a huge castle. He starts off with a remodeling project,
and that's redecorating his father's castle and his childhood home

(13:18):
at hohen Schwamgau. And he must have caught a nice
view from there because he starts to plan a bigger project,
which of course is Nisch von Stein across the lake.
And this is seriously the Disney Castle. And while it's
not the most elaborate of his creations, it's definitely the
most recognizable. It's a reimagining of what a medieval castle

(13:41):
looks like with plenty of French Rococo and Bavarian Baroque
thrown in. And it's planned by a theatrical designer, not
an architect, and it's basically Wagner themed, with Swan shaped
taps and an indoor grotto from Venusberg. The opening apparition
in Wagner's opera Townhouser, and it takes seventeen years to construct.

(14:04):
It's actually never finished, and Ludvig only spends about six
months their total all added up together. So the next
place he builds is Linderhof, which is of homey or
sort of residents, and it's about twelve miles from Nu Schwanstein,
and he builds it between eighteen sixty nine and seventy eight,
and it's actually modeled on China on though so not

(14:28):
terribly homy to most of the still an elaborate palace.
He really liked the Bourbons. His coaches and his slaves
were staffed by coachman dressed in reproduction Louis the fourteenth Livery.
He would spend about two weeks of every month at
this house and had a harmonium set up for Wagner
along with that disappearing table we mentioned in the intro.

(14:51):
But it's here that he starts all the weird stuff,
waking up at five pm, dining with his imaginary friends,
then going out for midnight carriage rides as he again
just retreats more and more from society, but he sticks
with the Wagner theme for this place. To Linderhoff has
the Venus Grotto another Venus grotto imagined again from town Hauser,

(15:15):
and he would row around in the man made lake
on this gilded seashell. You can look up pictures of this.
It's pretty cool. Sara sent me one today and we
decided that might be a better use of our time.
And the lake is actually illuminated by one of Bavaria's
first power plants, because who wants a dark, creepy cave
made out of plaster needs to have all these cool

(15:35):
blue and red lights. It also had a moorish pavilion
with a peacock theme perfect for opium smoking if you're
so inclined, and a hunting cabin with plenty of faux
wood stumps and fake trees again Disney Alert. But his
final big project was Haren Hemsey, which was constructed between

(15:56):
eighteen seventy eight and eighteen eighty five. And this time
you really honors the Bourbons and even tries to upstage
them because the castle is a copy of their PSI,
only bigger and better. Yeah, it has an even grander
hall of mirrors where he would read under the light
of seventy nine candelabras with one thousand, eight hundred forty

(16:18):
eight candles. It seems like you need a lot of
servants for that. Or he would take a bath in
this marble tub that took eight hours to heat and fill.
And we didn't mention this yet either. The castle was
built on an island in the middle of an Alpine lake,
a very exclusive island. I would imagine, a very exclusive island.
It's gonna make it harder to build too, if you

(16:40):
have to row everything out to the island well, and
this castle is his downfall. Only twenty of the seventy
rooms are finished. It cost more to build than nishevon
Stein and Linderhoff together, and he only spends nine nights there,
so multiply these candles by nine nights exactly. So this

(17:01):
makes us come to the question how did Ludwig pay
for all this? And initially he financed these castles himself.
He saw himself as a modern son king, and accordingly
he thought he needed to celebrate this through the construction
of castles through the patronage of artists such as Wagner
and others. But it's not that long before he runs

(17:22):
out of money. Obviously, he starts to borrow in his
own pay way way ahead. He tries to get loans
from the Shawl of Iran, from the Turkish Sultan, from
the Duke of Westminster. He even orders his cabinet to
find loans and is very threatening and forceful when they're
coming up short. And so by eighteen eighty six he's

(17:42):
being sued for debt, which is terribly embarrassing, and he
has this hair brand plan to rob a London bank.
Doesn't work out, so the government is starting to get
seriously worried, like is our king crazy or is he
just spending way too much money? Either way, this has
got to stop. He was certainly lonely, he told an

(18:04):
aide de camp. Sometimes I call one of the domestic
servants or postilions and asked him to tell me about
his home and his family, otherwise I would completely forget
the art of speech. And in his private journals he
appeals to dead rulers for help. Louis the fourteenth, Charles
the first of England. These are his friends, and it's

(18:25):
interesting a lot of the stuff I read about these
castles and about Ludvig. Apparently the tour guides refrain from
calling him the mad King anymore, which has long been
his nickname. It makes sense. It's not a very nice
thing to call someone. Sorry for using it in our title.
Little Eccentric is more often used today. But his family

(18:45):
definitely has some mental health issues. His brother Otto, who
we mentioned at the beginning, is schizophrenic and he's put
into an asylum. His aunt Alexandra is put into a
convent because she's positive she's swallowed a glass grand piano.
But if Livig is crazy, he's very lucid at times too.

(19:06):
He writes these eloquent letters, he studies French history and literature,
and he's even politically astute when he actually tries, you know,
when he's not worrying about his castle castles or his
opera and actually gets to work. Well. His best friend,
I think, says it best Sissy, and she said he's

(19:26):
not mad enough to be locked up, but to abnormal
to manage comfortably in the world with reasonable people. So
that's the assessment from the person who knew knew him
better than anyone. Yeah. So finally the fiddles Box, worried
that Livig would bankrupt their family, go to the Prime
Minister and say that, well, you know, we'd be okay

(19:48):
if you deposed the king, and so a panel of
doctors declare living insane without seeing him. It's kind of
like the tabloid um. And the noted chiatrist doctor Bernhard
von Gutten is one of these, and so on June tenth,
Prince Leopold, who is Ludwig's uncle, declares himself Prince Regent

(20:11):
and Otto will be king officially, Otto the first and
Lidvig is at Nisch von Stein when the delegation finally
comes to arrest him, and the soldiers and peasants try
to stop them, try to save Ludwig, but he's led away.
He's taken to the viddles Box castle Berg, which is
on Lake Starnberg, and he's attended there by the doctor,

(20:34):
and that's when things start to get kind of weird.
On June thirteenth, he asks to attend mass but is refused,
and later in the day, after a huge meal lots
of wine, he gets Dr Gooden to walk along the
lake with him, but they don't come back, and a
search party finds that the king has drowned face up,

(20:55):
which is strange because he was a very good swimmer.
He was only in four ft of water. Dr Gooden
is also dead, so what happened there? Obviously a lot
of theories about this, and the main assumption for many
years is that the king committed suicide because he had
no future. He was essentially a prisoner, and Dr Guten

(21:21):
drowned trying to save him. Others have suggested that he
was perhaps trying to cross the lake to meet people
sent by Sissy and escaped to Austria and escaped to her,
and then others say he was murdered, maybe even that
he was shot and not drowned at all, And we
would probably no more I feel if we opened his

(21:43):
crypt in Munich at St. Michael's. All of the victuals
box are interred there and they have identical cripts, but
his stands out because it's always covered with flowers. And
he's still very popular despite the fact that he nearly
bankrupted his family. His castles are to a among Bavaria's
main attractions. Who doesn't want to go see the Sleeping

(22:04):
Beauty Castle? Yeah? Well, and interestingly they started to become
these major attractions. I think within weeks after his death
people were paying to go to them. So in the
long run, it's been a pretty good investment for Bavaria.
I'd say Ludvig's own memorial is far simpler than any
of these castles. It's across in the lake at the

(22:24):
spot where he drowned that Sarah and I were talking about.
It's always so strange for us to talk about these
subjects who are supposedly so well loved. We keep reading,
you know, the well loved so and so, but we
have no idea how these people are actually viewed in
their own country. Yeah, if you're in Bavaria, let us
know what you think about Ludwig. It always says a
little funny thing. Supposedly you people love this guy, but

(22:48):
you know, maybe not. It's easy enough to see though,
why he would be so well loved. He's a gentle
pacifist king. He's extremely eccentric, but that only makes him
more interesting. It's also always interesting, like we talked about
in our Emperor Norton podcast, to try to diagnose people

(23:08):
posthumously and figure out what sort of mental illness Ludwig
was grappling with any was in fact anything at all,
And that's one of the reasons I think people are
so interested him. That end, his gorgeous castle and this
mysterious fate that we simply do not have the answer to. Yeah, well,

(23:29):
that mention of Norton brings us to listener mail. So
our first emails from Derek in California, and he was
of course writing about the Emperor Norton podcast and he
actually mentioned that he's seen Norton's grave that would want
cemetery before. But his message was mostly about how his
father is a part of the historical society e Clampus Vitas,

(23:53):
and he said that they have gatherings that go on
for a couple of days, they involve a fair amount
of alcohol, and that this idea itself was formed during
the gold Rush. But probably the most interesting part is
he said that one of their slogans is no Known Cure,
which means that after you complete your initiation ceremony, which
is kept secret to everyone outside of the group, then

(24:14):
you were a member for life. So he's hoping for
a podcast on this group. Um, let us know what
you guys think. Cool historical society, but I don't know,
maybe we should form our our own historical a drinking
one or irregular type. I have another Grave of visiting email.
It's from Kyle and he recently went on a tour

(24:34):
of St. Louis Cemetery number one and visited Marie Lebo's
grave and sent us all kinds of pictures. But he
also said while on the tour, the tour guide told
the story of the wishing on her grave. She said
that when your wish came true, you were supposed to
come back and circle your exes, and none of the
exes are circled, as you can see from the pictures
he sent us. She did encourage us to make a

(24:57):
wish on her tomb, though without the desecration part. And
he said also that he'd included a picture of a
ridiculous looking pyramid shaped tomb that is the future resting
place of Nicholas Cage. Oh dear, it's it's hard to
follow that. If you would like to send us any
cool pictures are interesting facts where at history podcast how
stuff works dot com. We're also on Twitter and Facebook

(25:20):
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(25:40):
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