Countess Dracula

by Tony Thorne

  In the event, the dangerous morass of Transylvanian politics, the machinations of his domineering ally Bocskai and the pressure of an arranged marriage to Maria-Christina, a Habsburg princess, were too much for Sigmund. He abdicated four times and reclaimed his throne three times in eight years; having turned over the Principality to his warrior cousin Balthasar Báthory, he was pushed back into power by Bocskai and forced to execute his kinsman and wipe out the pro-Turkish faction which Balthasar had led and which had included two of his most faithful counsellors, his confidant Paul Gyulai and his tutor John Gálfi. He avoided his wife, who complained in letters to her family (‘those things have not yet taken place . . .’) that Sigmund had not consummated their union; he was henceforth branded by history not only as capricious and sadistic, but as impotent, or bisexual, or a pederast, or all three. In fact Maria-Christina was suspected of frigidity by many Hungarians simply on account of her nationality; more charitably, she may have been under orders not to yield to her husband’s advances for fear of giving birth to a new royal dynasty which would combine the prestige of the Habsburgs and the Báthorys and prove more powerful than either. At the same time, Sigmund seems to have been impressionable and highly strung and may have been persuaded by his Spanish confessor, Carrillo, that celibacy would spiritually ennoble him.

  While he was in power Sigmund pursued a policy of terror against many of his subjects, so that when he abdicated for a second time in 1599 in favour of another cousin, the peaceable Andrew Báthory, a cardinal who had spent most of his life in the humanist atmosphere of the courts and cloisters of Italy, the latter stood very little chance of holding on to the throne. On 9 November 1597, this Andrew, whose spies had been sheltered in Hungary by his cousin Elisabeth,4 was trapped in a Székely village while on the run from the Voivode Michael the Brave. The Székelys recognised him as a kinsman of Sigmund, who had bribed them to fight for him, then cheated them of their reward. They cut Andrew into pieces, some of which were reassembled later so that his body could be exhibited to his subjects in the capital, Alba Julia. The cardinal’s head, bearing an axe wound above the right eye, was portrayed in engravings resting on a cloak before being sewn back on to the rest of the remains.5

  Sigmund returned again to the imbroglios, and his subjects had little to choose between the cruelties perpetrated by his enemy, the Habsburg General Basta, and his own forces’ excesses. After Sigmund temporarily abandoned his followers in 1602:

  The people of the region were forced to flee to the forests, to the high mountains – in the horrible cold. But they could not hide! They were tracked down in the woods, dire cruelties were committed, many were burned with fire, many had their heads twisted, so that their eyes started out from their heads – many of them were later seen begging, who had been men of property beforehand, carrying themselves well; many were burned with hot iron, their stomachs and backs were burned with live coals, thongs were cut from their backs for merriment, many were hanged by their hair and straw-fires were lit under them – they [Basta’s men] laughed at it. What they did to women, I will not relate, as it was such an infamy. Those Magyars among Basta’s troops were alike, women’s breasts were cut through, their hands drawn through the wounds, and in this way they were hung up on nails.6

  Finally pushed aside and into exile and obscurity in Poland, Sigmund was, much to everyone’s surprise, still alive in Silesia when in 1613 the last member of his family to achieve a temporary glory, Gábor Báthory, was murdered.

  When we turn to the more obscure corners of the family, history even more quickly becomes confused with fabulation. Father Revický’s 1900 life of Countess Báthory provides examples in the form of quasi-scholarly cameos: ‘One of her uncles was a very lustful man, and his sinful passion destroyed his health early on in his life. But he did not care: when his wife died he married one of his wife’s former maidservants, which brought great shame on his family in those days.’7

  Lady Klára Báthory, Elisabeth’s aunt on her father’s side, has been remembered in the histories as an insatiable bisexual adventuress – ‘that madwoman, who picked up lovers on all the roads of Hungary and bounced chambermaids on her bed . . .’8

  The nobly born pastor and man of letters Bornemissza was the first to mention her, when he referred to his own sins and those of his contemporaries in his sixteenth-century work, The Temptations of the Devil, a polemic against suicide which reveals the prevalent attitudes to sin and abnormal behaviour among the Hungarian elite.9 Bornemissza cites Klára as a sinner, simply stating that she had a lover and that the lover killed her husband. The popular version of Klára’s story is that her first husband, Stephen Drugeth, died after a few years of marriage and she had her second husband, the bedridden Lord Anthony Losonczy smothered in his bed. In the words of Revický, the priest of Čachtice, who is retelling nineteenth-century stories:

  Klára Báthory, the wife of Michael Várday [sic], became the murderer of her husband because she wanted to enjoy her sinful passion of love with her husband’s best musician, who was a violinist. Her lustful passion – according to the letter from Cardinal Forgách – had grown so much that even in the prison where she was confined as a murderess, she made sinful love with her guards and with other prisoners.10

  Her other husbands and lovers included John Betko and Bálint Benkő of Paly. Then the story lurches into the fantastic. Klára was said to have taken up with a very young lover and made him a present of one of her castles. The amorous pair were taken captive by a Turkish pasha, who had the young man skewered and roasted on a spit. Klára’s punishment was to be raped by every member of the Turkish garrison in turn, before being put out of her misery by having her throat ceremonially cut.

  The notorious aunt was reconstructed for the 1995 novel in English by Andrei Codrescu. In this version she is, perversely, unmarried, but the voracious sophisticate serves as one of the young Elisabeth’s many initiators into the carnal mysteries.11 But little is known of the real Klára’s character, and her sins must be partly mitigated by the fact that most historians confused her with Elisabeth Báthory’s younger sister of the same name, adding that lady’s husband to the list of the older Klára’s victims. She has also provided a useful element otherwise missing from the myth: the decadent, worldly mentor who might have initiated Elisabeth into a life of sin. There is certainly no hard evidence of her lesbianism, which was in any case an abomination that was literally indescribable with the words available at the time. She seems more like a headstrong English noblewoman of the nineteenth century whose contemporaries could not forgive her for living openly with her secretary – a commoner – whom she later took as her third husband. If Klára had been younger and less sure of her status, a family court would normally have been convened and she would have been put under trusteeship. But the message that infuriated squires and plebeians alike was that, in her rarefied world, a Báthory again went her own sweet way in proud disregard for the conventions that the rest lived by.

  What Klára’s case does reveal is the sixteenth century’s obsession with family honour and public propriety, which were taken more seriously in aristocratic circles than occasional lapses such as the manslaughter or rape of a commoner. Remarriage was common, even necessary to protect inheritances, but multiple marriages by a woman could not be condoned, and all Europe thrilled with indignation at the exploits of adventuresses such as Jeanne d’Aragon, the wayward daughter of the King of Portugal; rumour invented melodramatic explanations – poison or suffocation – for the non-violent deaths of husbands. One sort of sinful behaviour implied another, and religious or social lapses became elaborated, particularly in the black propaganda of the Catholic pamphleteers, into sexual perversion and incest.

  The nineteenth century’s concern was to build a convincing and, if possible, exciting narrative out of the mixture of fragmentary documentation and outright rumour that it had inherited. From that time on it became necessary not only to marvel at the Báthorys but to analyse and make sens
e of them. Eccentricity and deviancy were cited: ‘Most of the Báthorys in both family branches shared extreme character traits. Many of them leaned towards tyranny, complacency, pride, cruelty, carnality and sexual perversion.’12

  Elisabeth was much closer to her elder brother than to Klára. Even during his lifetime Stephen Ecsedy Báthory’s strange behaviour was misunderstood by his bewildered servants, and their gossip became the substance of later tales in which he is reconstructed as an alcoholic, a lecher and a probable lunatic. The unfounded charge of alcoholism seems to be an attempt to explain his reclusive nature, and the lechery is simply guilt by association with his scandalous relatives. Stories of lunacy are more revealing of the wonder which the workings of the cultivated imagination provoked in simpler minds. Stephen was excessively devout and recited his own poems and probably also sang religious songs late into the night; the noises were taken to be the ravings of a man possessed. To travel on the waterlogged causeways which crisscrossed the marshes surrounding Ecsed castle, he put his carriage on ski-like runners; the legends record that he was so thoroughly demented that he rode on a sleigh in summer. If we search Stephen’s surviving writings for dementia and dissipation, we find only piety and lucidity.13

  There was also a strong element of religious prejudice in the gradual composition of a family mythos. Catholics later condemned Elisabeth as an agent of Calvinism; yet, although she was praised in her lifetime for her understanding of doctrine, there were no signs in her letters of fanaticism, or even deep devotion.

  Literary authors have even more licence to rearrange and embellish the residue of past lives and use the results for their own ends. Elisabeth plays a central role in the 1925 novel Ördögszekér (the literal translation is ‘Devil’s Wagon’, but the meaning is ‘Tumbleweed’) by Sándor Makkai. The writer, a noted theologian and historian and a Calvinist, like Elisabeth Báthory herself, was elected Bishop of Cluj in Transylvania (now Romania) the year after the book’s publication. In the book, Elisabeth (‘of wondrous beauty’) instructs her niece Anna Báthory – aged fifteen and ‘awakening to the magic of her beauty’ – in the ways of the world:

  The chief pleasure for some, to love and to sacrifice oneself, is absolutely nothing for us. For us the pleasure of love is the pleasure of conquest. We enjoy the burning of those who wither in our embrace more than the fire in our own blood.

  When the Emperor’s envoy arrives, Elisabeth ‘bewitches’ him, and Anna also applies what she has learned to a member of his retinue, a noble officer:

  Elisabeth and Anna laughed long at the Emperor’s men, of whom they had made fools. They sat together for quite some time, and finally, Elisabeth proposed that Anna should sleep with her, not go back to her own quarters.

  ‘You are a wonderful apprentice!’ Elisabeth said, embracing Anna. She held her tight, passionately, did not let go of her. Her embrace grew hotter and hotter, more and more overwhelming, her face distorted in the dark. The beautiful beast embraced and kissed her till dawn.14

  For Elisabeth Báthory, 1610 was the year in which the events of her private life and the political manoeuvrings taking place beyond her walls came together, culminating in the transformation of the country’s most formidable woman into a prisoner without a social identity or any hope of salvation.

  As the new year began, Countess Báthory was still in firm control of the family’s business affairs: she personally negotiated the loan of 400 gold pieces and a plot of land to one Andrew Orossy in January.15

  At the same time from Vienna King Matthias was anxiously trying to extend his control over the senior Hungarian nobles with the help of George Thurzó, the newly appointed Count Palatine, whose first priority was to deal with the anti-Habsburg elements who were gravitating towards Gábor Báthory just as they had towards Bocskai. Among the key figures who had to be brought under the Habsburg wing at all costs were Count Nicholas Zrínyi, Elisabeth’s son-in-law, and a powerful twenty-seven-year-old grandee whose family had supported Bocskai but were themselves pretenders to the Transylvanian throne, George Drugeth of Homonna. George Homonnay Drugeth has been described – in the dismissive shorthand favoured by old-fashioned historians, as ‘a notorious adventurer’ and was accused by the seventeenth-century essayist Máté Szepsi Laczkó (whose writings tend to the sensationalist, as in the case of Chancellor Kátai) of poisoning his cousin and his son for the inheritance. The year 1610 was a momentous one for Drugeth, too; on 6 January he celebrated his wedding to the younger daughter of Countess Báthory, Lady Kate Nádasdy. Later in the same year he converted to Catholicism and declared for the Habsburg cause.

  The north and west of the country was now in a state of uneasy peace, and there was nothing but the winter weather to prevent guests from attending Lord Drugeth’s nuptials. During the festivities the village of Čachtice would have been lit with torches and bonfires and hung with evergreen branches and the small square crowded with well-wishers. Inside the manor, according to the witness Török and others, the corpses of two girls were concealed in the private apartments of the Countess, after which, the priest Fábry claimed, they were secretly buried without his permission in his parish of Kostol’any. Whatever had gone on in that closed world was not allowed to disturb the celebrations, but the court of justice at Nové Mesto recorded the news of the deaths. No action was taken; no official dared interrupt such a glittering occasion, although Elisabeth’s enemies, the Lutheran priests, were well aware – indeed may have reported the news – and would have informed their patron, George Thurzó. The cabal of local squires around Daniel Pongrácz kept the rumours on the boil, and these cases could have been the immediate pretext for the judicial hearings which started two months later.

  Elisabeth began her annual progress around her estates by travelling to Sárvár some time in March. In the meantime the new Palatine was determined both to move against his enemies and to increase his personal wealth as decisively and as quickly as practicable, but did nothing about the widow Nádasdy for the time being for the very good reason that he was waiting on the outcome of the plot, which he and his circle had covertly encouraged, by Chancellor Kendy and his associates to murder Gábor Báthory in Transylvania.

  On 5 March, Thurzó initiated an investigation into crimes alleged against Countess Báthory by ordering the secret examination of witnesses from the counties of Györ, Veszprém, Pozsony, Trenčín and Nitra, in western and upper Hungary.16 The wording of his letter of instruction is important as it set out for the first time the accusation that was being made, for the time being in private, against the Widow Nádasdy: ‘several maids and virgins and other women have been killed by various means, who were in her apartments’. The interrogations began on 22 March. Shortly afterwards the second phase of the inquiry opened, with witnesses summoned from the west and south-west.

  On 10 May, Palatine Thurzó was forced to travel east to the Seven Counties to deal with unrest caused by Hajdúk bands who were looting and burning the estates of the lesser gentry and killing the proprietors. Thurzó was still in that region on 7 June when Elisabeth’s sons-in-law joined him secretly for discussions. Also in June Thurzó met with Prince Gábor Báthory at Majtény and tried to persuade him to declare formally for the Empire against the Ottomans. Gábor refused.

  On 19 August, Countess Báthory accompanied a widowed gentlewoman named Hernath to the Vasvár-Szombathely county court near her Sárvár estates, and a voluntary deposition was formally lodged with the local justices.17 The lady stated on oath that her late daughter, Susanna Ungváry, who had been in Elisabeth’s service, had died of natural causes and that the marks to be found on her body after death were the result of disease and not of violence, her employer being wholly innocent of her untimely death. This document, which has been mentioned in passing in some recent accounts of the case, deserves closer attention. It proves firstly and beyond doubt that Elisabeth Báthory was aware of the accusations that were being laid against her elsewhere (although the investigation was proceeding in
private and in secret) and was ready to move decisively to defend herself. Had she been guilty of causing the death of a servant and had wished to admit it, there was a course of action that was open to her at almost no risk; this was the private negotiated payment, a later version of the old Anglo-Saxon wergild, whereby a killer could compensate the victim’s family in cash or in kind and avoid further punishment. But there is no evidence that Elisabeth ever contemplated this strategy, although, as we shall see, it was employed by a noblewoman in circumstances very similar to hers.

  Just as Pastor Ponikenus said, the Countess thought that the county courts would be her salvation. The statement given by her maidservant’s mother shows that Elisabeth was aware of the sort of evidence that could be brought up in any trial – the same evidence that was indeed being put forward at the secret sessions. An important part of the information lodged against Countess Báthory and her senior domestics concerned the signs of torture visible on the bodies of the many young girls carried out for the informal burials that so provoked the local clergy. Although the descriptions taken down are too sketchy to allow a proper analysis, it is possible to offer a sceptic’s explanation for some of the marks that witnesses claimed to have seen.