The marriage was by now hopelessly ruined and things were only to be made worse when the MacLeods’ son died in 1899, allegedly from congenital syphilis. Once her short-lived affair with MacLeod’s fellow officer had ended, she inexplicably returned to her husband and his drunkenness and philandering the violence resumed. Margaretha Geertruida Zelle had now begun to transform into Mata Hari, a Javanese phrase meaning “Eye of the Day.” At this point she wrote to her relatives in the Netherlands, stating that she studied exotic dancing and had taken a new name. Not surprisingly, Mata left him at least once, for another officer, and also began the study of exotic dance.
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MacLeod had a number of serious flaws as a husband and father, chief among them being that he was an alcoholic, repeatedly unfaithful and also had a fondness for brutally beating his wife on a regular basis including, on at least one occasion, using a cat o’nine tails.Īdditional to his chronic drinking and serial spousal abuse, MacLeod also kept a native wife and a concubine as well. The marriage was unhappy almost from the start. Captain MacLeod was then posted to the Dutch colonies in the Far East and Mata followed him out to Java. When she was 18 she met and soon married a Dutch Army officer with Scottish ancestry, Captain Rudolf MacLeod. Unable to keep her in the style to which she had become accustomed, Mata’s father sent her to live with her godfather for a few months before she moved to The Hague to live with her uncle.
To make matters worse, Mata’s mother then died in 1891. Early on, she developed a lifelong taste for lavish living.Īll went well for Mata until 1889, when her father’s investments took a nosedive and he was suddenly declared bankrupt. She was privately educated until the age of 13. Her early childhood was fairly lavish and she was indulged accordingly, many might say she was spoiled compared to many children of the time. Mata Hari’s father was a wealthy man who had made his considerable fortune in the oil business. She did, however, have a taste for high living and flagrant violation of the moral codes of her time (at least, the moral codes expected of women, anyway) and these characteristics were undoubtedly as responsible for her eventual downfall as any spying she may have done. Far from being the exotic and high-born Javanese princess that she claimed to be, she was a perfectly ordinary and upper-middle class Dutch girl. She was born in the Netherlands town of Leeuwarden on August 7, 1876. Mata Hari’s real name was Margaretha Geertruida Zelle. The more firmly established facts of her life strongly suggest that the truth behind the legend (as is so often the case with legendary historical figures) is somewhat more prosaic than exotic. But how much spying did she actually do? What level of secrets, if any at all, did she manage to extract? Was she really the stuff of legend, a female James Bond with an equal talent for high-level espionage and flagrant promiscuity? Did she really cause the deaths of 50,000 Allied soldiers as her prosecutors claimed? Was she really, as has long been believed by so many, deserving of a place in the Pantheon of espionage legends?
Mata Hari has long been the stuff of legend and myth, the glamorous, sexy superspy effortlessly using her feminine wiles and her physical charms to extract the highest level secrets from foolish, lecherous and indiscreet Allied officers through pillow talk before daringly passing the stolen secrets on to her German handlers. She may well have led a somewhat ethically questionable life, but in death she seems to have shown considerably greater courage, fortitude and integrity than those who had conspired to place her there. Dawn, Vincennes Barracks, October 15 1917.īrought from her cell at the Saint-Lazare Prison less than an hour after hearing that her final appeal had been denied by the President of France, alleged superspy Mata Hari faced her firing squad seemingly calm and unafraid.