Just how "mad" Ludwig II of Bavaria was is open to dispute; he was certainly abnormal in some respects, but those who declared him insane in his lifetime mostly had an interested - or self-interested - motive for doing so. His death in the Starnbergersee, near Munich, in 1886 is rivalled as a late 19th-century cause celebre only by the suicide of Archduke Rudolf at Mayerling a few years later.
Apart from his tragic and watery death, Ludwig is remembered chiefly for two things: his building mania, and his passion for Wagner, which ended in disillusionment for both of them. He is, in fact, "Wagner's King" in the eyes of history, which is an injustice, since Ludwig would have been remarkable in his own right even if he had never met the composer, and the extraordinary buildings he left around his kingdom are monuments to a visionary, obsessive temperament with a high degree of visual imagination. Today, many thousands of people visit them yearly.
Ludwig was far more than a dilettante builder of "follies" at his subjects' expense. His family, the Wittelsbachs, already had a history of building on a grand scale and the Neo-classic centre of Munich - one of the finest in Europe - was the creation of his immediate ancestors. His grandfather, Ludwig I, who abdicated in 1848 mainly because of his infatuation with the adventuress Lola Montez, had been an ardent art collector and patron, so his grandson probably was far closer to him in temperament than he was to his colourless, conventional father, King Maximilian.
The rather early death of Maximilian brought Ludwig to the throne at the age of 18 - a willowy youth of six-feet-four, remarkably handsome and with a genuinely regal bearing, the sight of whom often stopped people in their tracks as he passed. Women clipped hairs from the horses he rode, and girls snatched at flowers he had unwittingly trampled underfoot while out walking. He was also exceptionally charming when he chose to be, with perfect manners, and was a superb horseman and dancer, as well as being a good linguist and exceptionally well read. In spite of his aesthetic outlook, he was also a rigid upholder of court etiquette.
In short, Ludwig had many of the qualities of a Fairy Prince, but for traditionalist, Catholic Bavaria he proved to have two huge flaws when he came to exercise power. In the first place, he had little patience for the day-to-day machinery of government and drove his ministers and civil servants to near-despair; in the second, he was homosexual, in a kingdom where the ruler was expected to marry, have children and uphold public morality and the Church. (His early engagement to his second cousin, the Duchess Sophie, ended in retreat on his part and public humiliation on hers).
Ludwig did not, in fact, lack innate political acumen or judgment. In the opinion of Bismarck, who liked him personally in spite of Prussian antagonismto Bavaria, he was highly intelligent and well informed about public affairs. But his real interests lay elsewhere, and though his style of ruling was autocratic, he ducked many or most of his daily duties and the rigid demands of protocol.
During his reign, Bavaria was twice drawn into war - on Austria's side against Prussia in 1866, and on Prussia's side against France in 1871. On both occasions he showed little concern for the Bavarian Army, which was already neglected and badly led; during the first campaign he went off to pay a private visit to Wagner in nearby Switzerland, while in 1870-1 he did not accompany his army into France and showed little interest in the battles fought. Ludwig hated war and fled from it, but to his subjects it seemed more like callous indifference, and he was hissed in the streets - an experience which infuriated him and for which he dismissed his chief of police.
This helped to undermine his people's loyalty while the affaire Wagner was another millstone which weighed him down. Ludwig, obsessed by heroic themes such as the Nibelungenlied since childhood, fell in love with Wagner through his music. For Wagner, the king's patronage and generous financial aid were a lifeline at a make-or-break point in his career, particularly since Ludwig helped to stage his operas and pave the way for his later apotheosis in Bayreuth. He became for a time Ludwig's intellectual intimate, an outlet for the king's loneliness and frustrated aspirations.
The story of their complex relationship has often been told, by Ernest Newman and others, though Greg King's straightforward account of the relationship suggests that Wagner was rather less grasping and duplicitous in his behaviour than is often claimed. But their intellectual and emotional intimacy - which duly burnt itself out on both sides - led Ludwig's courtiers and ministers to credit Wagner with having too much influence over the king, which may have been close to the truth. In any case Wagner, as usual was indiscreet and took too many liberties. His adulterous affair with Cosima von Billow was also a source of scandal, which he complicated by lying about it to the king, so eventually Ludwig backed off when he realised his own credit and prestige were at stake. Just how much his emotional disappointment over Wagner had to do with Ludwig's gradual retreat from public life, it is difficult to judge. It may have been partly his homosexuality (whose only immediate outlet was with soldiers and grooms) which drove him inwards, or boredom with provincial Munich and its citizens, or hatred of reality in general - perhaps all three. Ludwig, born out of his age, was obsessed with the era of his namesake Louis XIV, its privileges and absolutism and aristocratic sense of style, and retreated into a fantasy world in which he tried to recreate these. Munich saw him less and less, as he drove over country roads at high speed in coaches and sleighs, or oversaw the building of his fairy castles - Hohenschwangau, Neuschwanstein, Schloss Linder hof. Contrary to what is often said, he did not touch treasury funds for these, but he did borrow heavily against his civil list.
The king's staid and rather stuffy uncle, Prince Luitpold, finally decided that his nephew would bring the Bavarian monarchy, and the entire Wittelsbach family, down with him, and decided to have him legally deposed. His motives were reasonable on the whole, but to carry out his design he entered into a cabal with Ludwig's prime minister, Johann von Lutz, who played his own hand. It was largely on his initiative that the king was declared legally insane (many of his servants appear to have been bribed or suborned to give witness against him) and confined under guard at Schloss Berg, on Lake Starnberg. He was still only forty, though self-indulgence had made him overweight and puffy compared with his golden youth. Lutz's chief agent in all this was another bitter enemy of the king's, Count Maximilian von Holnstein.
Ludwig did not live long in captivity, however. On June 13th, 1886, he went for a stroll along the lake shore in the company of Dr Bernhard von Gudden, the psychiatrist under whose care he was officially. When they did not return by dark, a search began which ended in the discovery of their bodies floating in shallow water by the edge of the lake. Gudden's had scratch marks and bruises, suggesting a struggle, and one theory was that Ludwig had first drowned him, then himself. Alternatively, Gudden may have chloroformed the king in his own death grapple, so that he slid under the water and drowned.
That is the accepted version, or versions. Greg King, however, goes one better by claiming that the king did not drown, but was shot while trying to escape to a boat which he thought had come to take him to the opposite shore, where friends were waiting to rescue him. It sounds far-fetched, yet he quotes a good deal of contemporary opinion which refused to believe in Ludwig's supposed suicide and suspected a murder plot.
Ludwig was a man born for tragedy, a misfit combining the temperament of an enlightened despot with the tastes of a highly-strung Nineties aesthete. His buildings, both in their exterior designs and interior decor, are extraordinary creations in their strange, ornate, dreamlike way, carried out with an artistic ruthlessness similar to what his quondam friend Wagner showed in completing and staging his Ring cycle. If they are "follies", then they are follies of genius.
The Wittelsbach rulers fell from power in 1918, like other German royalty, but their monuments live on, and Ludwig's memory is also kept alive by the cross standing in the waters of the Starnbergersee, marking the place where his floating corpse was found by lantern-light more than a century ago.
The Mad King: A Biography of Ludwig of Bavaria, by Greg King, is published by Aurum at £19.95 in UK