1898 was quite a trying year for the Empire. On 10th September Empress Elisabeth, everyone's darling Kaiserin 'Sissi,' was murdered by the Italian self-styled 'individual anarchist' Luigi Luccheni outside Hotel Beau Rivage in Geneva as she was boarding the lake steamer. This was particularly upsetting for the Hungarians, whom Erszébet had appeared to champion, or at least favour, but also for the ageing and increasingly lonely Emperor, who on 15th December celebrated his fiftieth year of accession to the Habsburg throne. For the most venerable of Habsburgs was still without a definite and officially recognized heir.

The Emperor's son and heir Rudolf, unhappily married to the plain and gauche Princess Stéphanie of Belgium, Princess of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Duchess in Saxony, was clear-thinking and intelligent with ideas for reforming and modernizing the ailing and autocratic Habsburg Empire, but doomed to take part in his father's politics without ever being able to oppose them. Melancholy and depressed (a sufferer of advanced gonorrhoea and a morphine addict, he had infected his wife and knew he could never cire an heir), Kronprinz Rudolf shot his 17-year old lover Baroness Maria Vetsera and then himself at his hunting-lodge Mayerling on 30th January, 1889, in a strange suicide pact, the circumstances of which are to this day still not entirely clear [there was much mutual enmity between Rudolf and the Austrian Prime Minister, Edvard Graf von Taaffe, who may or may not in some way have been involved ...]. With the Emperor's brother Maximilian executed in 1867 in Mexico, next in line to the throne was the Emperor's second brother, Erzherzog Karl Ludwig, Franz Ferdinand's father. But Karl Ludwig, besides marrying three times, almost laconically showed no interest whatsoever in politics, having found his vocation in the patronage of Arts and Sciences. So when Karl Ludwig died in 1896 his eldest son, Franz Ferdinand, became de facto Thronfolger. But he was at the time deemed close to death from pulmonary tuberculosis, convalescing as he was in Egypt, and so heir apparent status and duties were surreptitiously transferred to Franz Ferdinand's younger and flightier brother, the hedonistic Archduke Otto ... who had on one champagne-happy evening strolled naked into the Hotel Sacher lobby, save only for the badge of the Order of the Golden Fleece hanging from his neck. Some approaches were also made to Franz Ferdinand's youngest brother, Ferdinand Karl; this action would lead to the brothers falling-out later on.

But both Heir Presumptive status, upon the death of his father Karl Ludwig (19th May, 1896), and Heir Apparent status – and with it the 'title' of Thronfolger – 'reverted' to Franz Ferdinand upon his being declared in full health on 23rd March, 1898, although no official de jure proclamation was made.

Ten years later Ferdinand uttered a quite profound statement: he described the Habsburg crown as a crown of thorns. How right he was, for the Empire's problems were legion – although he failed to appreciate the irony that he had himself become one of those thorns. Just about the only thing that held the ultra-conservative Empire together was the dignity of its elderly Emperor, Franz Josef. But with the tragic suicide of his son and heir Rudolf (1889), and then the murder of his beloved wife Elisabeth (1898), the bewhiskered Franz Josef needed someone to talk to, someone to just listen to his melancholy thoughts and feelings. Throughout his estrangement from Sissi – who had, incredibly, even endorsed this unconventional liaison, perhaps to somehow make up for her virtual abandonment of him as a husband and as a sovereign – this 'conduit' was the Burgtheater actress Katharina Schratt. For many years now, Franz Josef had looked forward to – and perhaps even needed – his daily café-au-lait chats with Die Gnädige Frau, not only for her soothing and diverting companionship, but also for keeping him more or less informed of the general goings-on throughout the Empire, the mood in the capital, the 'word on the street,' or of Gräfin Larisch's latest Society soirées and shenanigans. There was mutual affection, but never any real impropriety. He talked, she listened. Sometimes they strolled around Bad Ischl together, sometimes arm-in-arm, rarely hand-in-hand. Knowing the old boy was lonely, people were often heartened to see their much-adored Emperor have Someone. But a coolness had arisen between them in 1899 when Franz Josef studiously remained aloof from a dispute concerning the renewal of Katharina Schratt's contract at the Burgtheater. Studious, in that the courteous old gentleman had avoided embarrassing her by a public intervention, yet Katharina seemed to take this courtesy the wrong way, slowly allowing her mutual affection with the Emperor to drift away. Brooding afterwards, Franz Josef wrote to her, "You yourself wanted to bring this about ... I feel endlessly sad in my hopeless loneliness; my age is making itself more and more felt, especially recently, and I am very tired." Lonely and increasingly isolated, the old boy desperately needed a confidant, now more than ever.

Unfortunately, it was not going to be his obstinate nephew, Franz Ferdinand. For this impetuous fellow was about to upset the House of Habsburg-Lothringen, impugn its dignity, affront the Emperor – along with just about everybody else at the Hofburg – and bring about a constitutional crisis. All at the same time.