Fall of Eagles: Requiem for a Crown Prince

Requiem for a Crown Prince is the best episode of Fall of Eagles, with a fascinatingly dramatic story at its centre, and all the more fascinating for being based on real events - the death of Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria at Mayerling. What we see play out is compelling, yet at the same time both tragic and farcical - as Shakespeare put it:

"If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."

This episode would also stand on its own outside the series as a whole, and indeed it is made in a slightly different style from the rest of the series - in place of Michael "Gandalf" Hordern as the narrator we get an in-character narration from Count Taaffe (Emrys James, Aukon from Doctor Who's State of Decay), the then Prime Minister of Austria, as though he was reminiscing about the incident for his memoirs, many years after the events themselves took place.

There are also superimposed captions shown on screen to let us know the precise time and date, perhaps to let us see just how quickly things unfolded and spiralled out of control.

Crown Prince Rudolf is the heir to the thrones of both Austria and Hungary, because he is the son of Emperor Franz Josef and Empress Elizabeth from Death Waltz. The year is now 1889, so both Franz Josef and Elizabeth are a lot older and so played by different actors - Franz Josef is now Laurence Naismith, who was Judge Fulton in The Persuaders!, and he will remain in the part for the rest of the series.

The plot begins when Rudolf is found dead in his room at his house at Mayerling in Austria. He is found by his valet Losehek (Michael Sheard) and his friends Count Hoyos and Prince Philip of Coburg. They rush to cover up the potential scandal - not only has Rudolf killed himself (which Catholics are not supposed to do, never mind Catholic Crown Princes), he has also killed Mary Vetsera, his 17-year-old mistress and a minor member of the aristocracy, in a suicide pact.

Count Hoyos is sent to tell Rudolf's parents the bad news while Prince Philip gets a doctor in to establish the cause of death. Things start to go wrong when Hoyos tells the Emperor, the Empress and the Prime Minister that Mary Vetsera poisoned Rudolf and herself, when the truth is that Rudolf shot Mary and himself. Count Taaffe immediately puts Olaf Pooley (Inferno's Professor Stahlman), the Chief of Police, on the case, but it still takes until the next day for even the "all-highest" Emperor to find out the truth when he speaks to the doctor (who was under the impression that Franz Josef already knew the truth).

Mary's mother Baroness Vetsera (Irene Hamilton, who would go on to play Plancina, the wife of Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso in I Claudius) also hears from Hoyos that Mary is dead, and so the cover up is threatened further when she gets her relative Count Stookau (Vernon Dobtcheff, for whom it might be simpler to list what he hasn't been in!) to go to Mayerling. There, despite the efforts of the police agents, he finds out the truth.

With news of Rudolf's death - but not the precise manner of it - slipping out and attracting the interest of "foreign press" (Taaffe can, and does, censor the Austrian newspapers), the police force Stookau to join in the cover up by helping them remove Mary's body to a quick and quiet burial at a nearby monastery - even bringing the monks into their conspiracy to do so.

Their clumsy attempts at smuggling the body past the prying journalists sees the tragedy and farce mixed together to make a great scene. All these efforts and they merely delay the truth from coming out for a few days.

The real power of this excellent episode comes from the actors, as the characters each react to the deaths in their own way, and how they interact with each other with their conflicting motivations and differing emotions. And everybody is on top form throughout.

The way in which this episode ties in to the overarching theme of Fall of Eagles is that Rudolf's death brings with it the death of reform in Austria-Hungary. Like Frederick in Prussia before him, he was a liberal moderniser in opposition to his father the autocratic Emperor and his Prime Minister. Rudolf's early demise, as Count Taaffe admits in his closing narration, removed their leader and so set the liberal movement back to such an extent that it will be episode 10 before the focus of the series will return to Austria, when a certain Franz Ferdinand will be heir to the throne...