Countess Dracula
Page 27
Writers have ground more than one axe before contending with the Blood Countess, and a former prime minister of Hungary, the late Dr József Antall, combined two contentious themes, the sexual and the religious, in a quasi-scientific analysis written with a fellow-historian of medicine, Károly Kapronczay, which appeared in 1973. The essay begins from the stated assumption that Elisabeth was ‘schizophrenic and insane [sic]’ and cites the interrogation statements, before concluding that ‘eroticism played an important part in her mental life . . . prodding and scorching naked bodies is a sign of sexual perversity coupled with sadism. We may also take into account the possibility of an epileptoid manic state which occurred on a hysterical basis. . . there is no evidence of homosexual aberration . . ,’13 Antall was a devout Catholic and he and his co-writer accused the Countess of religious fanaticism, which they suggested might be further evidence of a hysterical personality.
Of those contemporary historians who have written on Elisabeth it was László Nagy (a military historian who published a life of Francis Nádasdy and a short history of the controversial members of the Báthory line) who most trenchantly questioned the assumptions made by his fellow ‘experts’. Nagy suspected that Elisabeth had sided with Prince Gábor Báthory, who was trying to gain territory in Habsburg Hungary, an act of high treason on her part which would normally have been punished by beheading and confiscation, shaming and impoverishing her heirs, too; this would provide a rationale for the investigations and the trial-without-a-trial. He also reminded readers that at the end of the sixteenth century the right of life and death over serfs was still enjoyed by individuals of Elisabeth’s rank and that the country was on a war footing during much of her lifetime; this could account for the instances of cruelty. Nagy admitted that his researches had not enabled him to settle once and for all the question of Elisabeth’s personal innocence or guilt. In 1985 he summed up his position as follows:
I posed two questions: one, was it possible for Elisabeth Báthory to have done all those things of which she had been accused? To this I answered yes, because the age in which she lived was a very brutal one. It was not impossible for a female aristocrat, especially when menopausal [!], to punish some of her maids . . .
Nagy secondly asked himself whether there was any reliable evidence to substantiate such charges and whether the official proceedings which were carried out were lawful: ‘To this second question I had to answer, no.’14
Another Hungarian authority on the case is Professor Katalin Péter, a believer in Elisabeth’s guilt who is routinely consulted by writers and film-makers on the subject. Katalin Péter considers that the affair illustrates the unfettered nature of feudal power and the lack of protection for the lower-ranking members of society. She sees the avoidance of dishonour as the key to Thurzó’s prosecution of the Widow Nádasdy rather than political machinations, and Elisabeth’s ‘diseased sexuality’ as the trigger for the systematic murder of the girls.15 Professor Péter believes that Elisabeth’s strict Calvinist upbringing instilled in her the idea that her ungovernable desires were wrong, and as a result ‘her sickness – her nymphomania [sic] – overcame her’. At the same time she subscribes to the view of this Báthory as a rara avis, a freak.
There is no doubting the scholarly credentials of Nagy, Kočiš and Péter, and there are no signs of crude prejudice intruding into their work. But it is worth noting that they were all three writing during the last years of communist regimes – relatively liberal in Hungary, illiberal in Slovakia – under which opportunities for research and publication were limited and orthodoxies (such as the ritual excoriating of feudalism) had to be observed, and within which complex issues of nationalism were bubbling up from deeper strata. Ideologies and personal slants were not confined to scholars under socialism: in 1990 the German Michael Farin published a comprehensive collection of source material on the Báthory case entitled Heroine des Grauens (roughly, ‘Horror-Heroine’). His work was dedicated to the surrealist 1960s experimental rock musician Captain Beefheart, and in his own commentary took for granted the guilt of the Countess.16
There are hints of complex motives behind the most recent treatment of the case, a work which examines in forensic detail the statements gathered during the investigation and extends its analysis to the social networks operating in and around the Nádasdy and Thurzó courts, the political changes taking place as the case progressed and the legal system which obtained in the Hungary of the seventeenth century. The author of the work, which was undertaken as a thesis, is Dr Irma Szádeczky-Kardoss, the former judge and legal adviser to the Hungarian government, now a practising solicitor. Her title is Báthory Erzsébet – Igazsága (the last word can be translated as ‘the Truth’ or ‘Justice’), and is subtitled, ‘The Signs of a Frame-up’. Its stance is confirmed on the first page: ‘I dedicate this book to all who bear the stamp of false accusation, injustice, harassment and indignity on their destiny, their minds and their memories.’17
Szádeczky-Kardoss, a descendant of Gáspar Kardoss, the Bytča notary who was one of the prosecutors at the trial of Elisabeth Báthory’s servants, uses her knowledge of law and experience of actual trials to demonstrate the illegality of the sentence passed upon Elisabeth by George Thurzó, and to refute the testimonies lodged against the Countess by identifying inconsistencies, possible collusion and hidden motives on the part of the witnesses and their masters. Drawing on research into healing practices by Ágnes R. Várkonyi, an authority on the early modern era in Hungary, she also demonstrates elegantly and at length how each of the tortures described in the case papers mirrors a method of healing that was in use at the time: even the more outlandish procedures – rolling in stinging nettles, smearing with honey, poking the genitals with metal rods, chaining the victims, can be rationalised in this way. Some dissenting historians have criticised Dr Szádeczky-Kardoss for applying modern standards of proof to a pre-modern society and others, including Jožef Kočiš, have rejected the emphasis on medical practices, pointing out that there were no explicit references to healing by witnesses. But the general thrust of her argument – that Elisabeth Báthory was unjustly condemned and possibly quite innocent – has caused many in Hungary and some in Slovakia to revise their opinions.
A younger generation of historians in Budapest and Bratislava are anxious to avoid what they see as the distractions of psychosexual theories and underlying nationalist issues which have re-surfaced to cloud the judgement of writers and to look instead for a more objective assessment. Discussing the case with them points up the beginning of a consensus view based on the facts now uncovered set against a greater understanding of the way in which early modern societies worked.18
All accept that the letters discovered at Bytča show an agreement between the Zrínyis and the Nádasdys (in the person of the tutor Megyery) to avoid a Habsburg-style show trial, to save the estates (vast, strategically placed and potentially providing the Habsburgs with a crippling power-base in the middle of West and Upper Hungary) and thus protect the family inheritance. That George Homonnay Drugeth was a party to this is implied by his meetings with Thurzó in 1610 and by his later actions. The plan that was formulated would not necessarily have advantaged George Thurzó personally (although at different stages of the investigation he probably had hopes of intervening to enrich himself – perhaps it was the Čachtice estate that he coveted above all), but would have safeguarded the interests of the great families of Hungary and helped to ensure their loyalty to his masters.
Comparisons suggest that Elisabeth Báthory was not treated so harshly compared to other victims of the Habsburgs, who had to forfeit their estates and flee for their lives, but this is to underestimate the overwhelming effect of the weight of shame on a personality like hers, not to mention the physical privations of captivity. Before her arrest, Elisabeth was in any case in a very precarious position. As a rich widow she was permanently vulnerable and the letters printed for the first time in this work make it clear that she had been pla
ying an active role in family politics, and was in close contact with her nephew in the period just prior to her arrest. We can be fairly certain, although there is only circumstantial evidence for it, that Elisabeth was for a time the focus of the ‘Transylvanian party’ in Western and Upper Hungary, and that she was secretly funding the ambitions of the Habsburgs’ arch-enemy and the personal enemy of the Palatine, her nephew Gábor Báthory. Sooner or later the threat posed by the Prince would have prompted action against her. By the standards of the time it was laudable to prevent a show trial and protect the inheritance for those who had more claim to it than an obstinate elderly woman: the children of the most illustrious Hungarian families, Nádasdy, Zrínyi and Drugeth.
The two alternatives to a private resolution of Elisabeth’s case were each in its way unthinkable: arraigning Countess Báthory before the tabular court at Bratislava would both expose Thurzó to counter-accusations from her and her fellow-aristocrats (and the mediaeval lex talionis – like for like – could still be invoked) and give the King and his advisers a chance to commandeer the proceedings, as they had done in the case of Illésházy. Bringing Elisabeth before the county court would allow her to have her say and enable her to mobilise supporters and suborn witnesses, perhaps buy off her accusers.
Just as in the show trials mounted by totalitarian governments this century,19 the sheer weight of allegation and incidental detail that was amassed, even if much of it is inconsistent, is very persuasive, but this was a prosecution without a defence. No counter-argument was or could have been expressed unless the Countess herself was put on trial. Had she eventually been allowed to speak and had she condescended to do so, she would have been an articulate and forceful witness in her own defence, even though she had been deprived of her most powerful potential supporters, her senior servants.
Elisabeth was never, as far as we can determine, given the chance simply to reply to the central accusation, that of the murder of servant girls. In Ponikenus’ letter she is described as railing against her enemies, not denying their allegations; the letters from her relatives contain not one exculpatory plea by her or on her behalf. But to imagine Elisabeth anxiously hoping for a chance to testify would be a modern misconception; taking the stand would have been demeaning, an insult to her name. She had never in her life been required to explain herself. As the petitions of her subjects in Vas county show, she was used to sitting in judgement on others. On her own estates her right to punish those who served her as she saw fit was unquestioned, and it seems that the lex scutari – the right of the sword, known to the Magyars as palios jog – was still enforceable: Pastor Ponikenus had written that she threatened to have her footman beheaded if he failed to bring her Majorosné’s magic prayer.
Just as it would be anachronistic to imagine Elisabeth in the position of a defendant in a modern criminal process, students of seventeenth-century techniques of persuasion stress that it would be naive to blame George Thurzó for fabricating evidence against her. Of course Thurzó had to make propaganda to render the case believable, but had he not done so he could not have removed it from the hands of the court and the Habsburg state. By creating a personal scandal with sexual overtones, he pre-empted a trial for treason or political subversion, which would have been much more dangerous. In this sense his actions were quite consistent with the skilful use of black propaganda, and manipulation of opinion which was practised in the seventeenth century. Why did Thurzó choose those particular crimes? (He carefully hinted at witchcraft in case this should be needed at a later stage; also witch-trials provided a useful precedent for local, peremptory judgements.) Why were mass-murder and torture the preferred crimes? To ensure that the state would not intervene, and to cover up the illegality and the clumsy, personalised execution of the investigation, the prosecutors needed an offence that could whip up a temporary public hysteria – particularly among those whose views counted for something, the lower nobility and the townspeople. Public outrage at personal crimes precluded the Habsburgs from mounting a political trial. The exposé of the crimes also pandered to the sado-erotic fantasies then current and to contemporary notions of defiled purity, lives cut off before motherhood, and so on. Infanticide was not an option in the case of a middle-aged woman, nor was promiscuity, particularly given that Elisabeth had not married her clerk and was not living with a commoner (but Ficzkó’s story of Ironhead Steve was placed on file just in case – and of course might have been true). And if one wanted to blow up minor but persistent cruelty into atrocity, where would one look for models? The visualisations of suffering by Brueghel and Bosch, inflammatory religious pamphlets, the practices of war, backroom surgery, strange healing practices, witchcraft – and, perhaps, the rumours of insanity and murder which were emanating from other courts as well as her own.20
The Palatine and his henchmen did not need to base their case upon fantasy, for the head women in the Widow Nádasdy’s household were indeed extremely cruel, and it was common knowledge that the local priests had complained of this in the past. This provided the idea for a campaign of propaganda against Elisabeth Báthory, in which the priests themselves, the link between the lords and the populace, could be used to manipulate opinion. Everyone knew that these women were ill-treating the girls in the castle, but accepted it as this was the only hope of the girls bettering themselves. As for their mistress’s guilt or innocence, testimony by Elisabeth’s confidantes and by other witnesses who were excluded from her private quarters is often ambiguous on the question whether it was the Lady’s own hand that slapped or maimed, or whether the atrocities were carried out on her behalf. We must remember that if the real purpose of the hearings was a smear-campaign and not the death penalty, it was not necessary to prove direct guilt, but for anyone who is searching for the truth this question becomes absolutely crucial, once it is accepted that there is any substance at all in the accusations.
There was a tacit agreement in the Báthory case, not only among those intimately involved, but among the rest of the senior Hungarian aristocracy. There was no outcry, a fact which can again be characterised as a typically eastern European scenario: everyone knows that the real decisions are made behind the scenes; everyone knows the unwritten rules of the game. (The playing of a complex game with unwritten rules was an inherent part of the post-Renaissance scene and is reminiscent of the behaviour of the secretive socialist regimes of the 1940s and 1950s.) No one necessarily believed in the accusations of witchcraft, or cared whether the allegations of cruelty were true. Everyone realised that it was an extremely clever manoeuvre to isolate and neutralise Elisabeth Báthory while keeping the affair out of the grasp of the Habsburgs, who would have granted her lands to their own German- or Czech-speaking nobles. King Matthias’ letters reveal that he did not want to risk a confrontation with the Hungarian Palatine on this issue; he just wanted to show that he, too, was quite aware of the stratagems that his opponent was using.
Regarding the regime within Elisabeth Báthory’s court, there is a clear parallel with military colleges, orphanages and other closed, regimented institutions where the relatively powerless are exposed to the whims of the all-powerful. In such environments, domestic spite can shade into perversity, and regulations be too earnestly enforced into institutionalised sadism. It is not even necessary to direct our minds back to the Dickensian clichés of the nineteenth century to find examples of these institutional purgatories: during the preparation of this book there have been in Britain revelations of cruelty and neglect in children’s homes, rest-homes for the elderly, psychiatric wards.
The regime of punishment imposed by the old women who surrounded the Countess – assisted when brute force or menial labour was necessary by the factotum, Ficzkó – must have been frighteningly harsh, even by the standards of the time. Just as medical techniques, whether carried out in an army field hospital or in a castle chamber, were hard to distinguish from torture, so the punishment of servants, sometimes public and ritualised, sometimes just the spontan
eous exercise of power or spite, looks to modern eyes no different from sadism. It seems likely that abuse of servants was much more widespread than the records show and that it was seen as acceptable within the norms of cruelty of the age, not only in Hungary, but anywhere that the ruling elite enjoyed absolute power in their own domains. Whether or not such cruelty was systematic and tinged with sexual perversity would depend in a neurotic age upon the neuroses suffered by the lady or lord (or steward or governess) in question.21
But it would be ingenuous to see this as a feature of the seventeenth century, or exclusive to Hungary. Wherever total power is exercised within an institution, particularly by individuals who command no authority outside it, that power is abused, whether the setting is a prison, a school, a family home. Leading figures of that age and later ages advocated physical punishment: Cardinal Peter Pázmány, the most influential Jesuit propagandist of the Counter-Reformation in Hungary, wrote, ‘beat your children, for it is useful so to do . . .’;22 George Thurzó mentioned in a letter to his wife that ‘I beat that miscreant until the stick broke in my hands . . .’23 Popular public entertainments of the period included bear-baiting, dog and cock fights, blind beggars set to clubbing pigs to death, and the staging of fights between village idiots or madmen. In British upper-class households and in Viennese, to name only two instances, junior servants and children were routinely beaten until the last years of the nineteenth century.