Countess Dracula
Page 30
Just as in the later Hungarian case, the only surviving documents were authored by those who had set out to destroy Alice Kyteler’s reputation and who would gain from her downfall. Those documents record that, once the great lady’s survival was in doubt, her servants and her neighbours were willing to offer testimonies against her. The parallels do not end there. While her enemies waited for the right moment to seize her, Dame Alice Kyteler, like Elisabeth, gathered together her movable treasures and left her family seat. Unlike Elisabeth, before the authorities could lay hands on her she succeeded in slipping across the Irish Sea to sanctuary in England, leaving her humbly born maidservant, Petronilla de Meath, to die at the stake for the crimes of which her mistress was also found guilty and sentenced to death in absentia. Dame Alice’s son was convicted by the court, but his rank and his wealth saved him; he was pardoned and set free in return for generous donations to de Ledrede’s church.
It is extremely difficult at this remove to pronounce a final verdict upon Alice Kyteler. She may in fact have been a serial murderer – her last husband’s loss of hair and of finger- and toenails were possible symptoms of slow poisoning – and perhaps her maidservant was speaking sincerely when she scorned her judges and swore that her mistress was the greatest witch in all Ireland and England too. But it is no longer possible to see such sensational events in isolation. There were many other prosecutions of older women for witchcraft – notable examples come from as far apart as Estonia and Salem, New England, which may have been motivated at least in part by a quarrel over an inheritance or the coveting of land or money owned by the accused.11
As well as the misogyny that was universal in patriarchal societies, it has been suggested that there were deeper changes taking place in post-mediaeval cultures, with men unconsciously perceiving that women in general had gained too much power. By this theory the cult of mariolatry – the worship of the Virgin – and the veneration of a host of sympathetic female saints had begun subtly to alter the balance of power in society and undermine men’s unquestioned and absolute dominance.12 In Hungary, because of the special circumstances that arose in a country at war, women were even more in the ascendant, particularly those aristocratic women who had become emancipated by, in some cases, fighting alongside their menfolk or else by taking over traditional male roles in the family and on the estates. Deep-seated hostility to the female sex might explain not only the persecution of rich and powerful widows but why less privileged women were prepared to suffer the hardships of domestic discipline in the manor-house in return for a modicum of security and a measure of social advancement. Who is to say that the treatment they received at the hands of brothers, fathers or husbands at home was any better than the ordeals involved in a regime of servitude?
Other striking and authentic parallels to the experiences of Countess Báthory can also be found in the history of Hungary and its sister-state, Transylvania. It seems logical to look at how other noblewomen were treated, in particular widowed noblewomen, and at women who were persecuted.
One of the best-documented examples of the harassing and isolating of a widowed noblewoman occurred a few years after the death of Countess Báthory and with neat irony concerned the neighbour and former friend who had been instrumental in her capture and imprisonment and who then had robbed her. Lady Elisabeth Czobor, the wife of the Palatine, George Thurzó, once she had lost her husband and her eldest son was persecuted and ultimately ruined by the ruthlessly ambitious would-be Renaissance Prince, Nicholas Esterházy, who was assisted in his machinations by Czobor’s own daughter-in-law.
The excitable and ingenuous Lady Czobor was widowed in 1616 at the age of thirty-eight. Her letters and her behaviour after George Thurzó’s passing revealed that the death of her husband had shocked her very deeply. After some months she gathered her strength and began to assume some of the responsibilities of her late husband, and to cultivate his memory. In her instructing of Imre, their only son, she constantly cited George as a paragon of moral and political probity and as a model father and upholder of the true faith.13
Imre had fathered two daughters but was without a male heir when he died unexpectedly in 1621. The rumours suggested that he had been poisoned, but by whom was never made clear. Whatever the truth, the main branch of the Bethlenfalva Thurzós was thereby extinguished. Having lost all her close male relatives, Lady Czobor’s position as heiress to the bulk of the vast family holdings quickly became untenable. She lost the estate of Tokaj with its prize vineyards and its rich tithes. The rising star of the new aristocracy and Palatine-to-be, Count Esterházy, was distantly related to Czobor through his first wife, Lady Ursula Derssfy, and he used this fact to lay successful claim to two more Thurzó castles and promised one of Czobor’s daughters that he would send his private army to resolve a dispute over her estates. The threat had the desired effect. In October 1622, less than one year after the mysterious death of Imre Thurzó, Nicholas Esterházy ordered a comprehensive inventory of the Bytéa estates. A valuation showed them to be worth 8,000 florins. He then impounded the properties. Two years later, in 1624, he put the final touch to his campaign of acquisition by taking as his second wife George Thurzó’s daughter-in-law Lady Christina Nyáry, Imre’s widow (who had always hated her mother-in-law) and removing the grandchildren from their grandmother’s care. Lady Czobor tried to keep the children with her and appealed to the courts and the King, but when Esterházy became palatine in 1625 he easily persuaded the Diet to grant him custody. Elisabeth died, emotionally and physically broken, at the home of her favourite daughter Barbara shortly afterwards.
The most tenuous claim was all it took to launch a challenge against a vulnerable heiress, after which it was largely might that established right. The surviving members of the Thurzó line were not strong enough to oppose their enemies, and the powerful families to whom they were connected (as in Báthory’s case, the sons-in-law played a duplicitous role) were not willing to compromise their own positions to support a widow and a dying dynasty.
There is another true story from seventeenth-century Hungary whose denouement came more than two decades after the Widow Nádasdy’s lonely death, but which echoes the Báthory scandal in many ways. Not only does it concern the dispossessing of a troublesome widow, but it ends in the trial of that widow for the brutal murder of her servants.
The woman in question was a member of the senior aristocracy and a relative by marriage of the Thurzó family, at whose wedding feasts she would have met Countess Báthory, twenty-three years her senior. Her name was Anna-Rosina Liszty, known usually by the latinised form of her surname, Listhius. She was born in 1583 to János Listhius and Anna Nauhaus.14 The Listhius family originated as burghers in Transylvania and were related to a bishop who was an influential figure in Hungary at the time of the defeat at Mohács. They were ennobled in 1554, and in 1560 and again in 1586 the family received the important benefits and estates which formed the basis of their dynastic wealth. Anna-Rosina’s grandfather, the senior member of the family, first became Bishop of Veszprém, then of Györ, his sons were given the finest education and on reaching their majority were appointed regional judges. Little is known of Anna-Rosina’s mother except that she was already a widow when she married János Listhius. The family strengthened their power in the prescribed manner by arranging marriages for their offspring and Anna-Rosina was duly sent to marry Lord Stanislas Thurzó in 1598 at the age of fifteen. (We should recall George Thurzó’s letter to his wife revealing his misgivings about the match: ‘She is no Dido, but if Stanislas likes her so much that he cannot live without her, what can I do against it?’.)
Stanislas Thurzó presided over a court that was renowned for its ostentation; he, like his cousin George, became palatine in 1625 after the interregnum of Sigmund Forgách. In the years following their marriage he and his wife had seven children in quick succession, four of whom survived to reach adulthood. According to letters between husband and wife, Anna-Rosina showed no extraordinary menta
l states or eccentricity until after 1610 when she became subject to hysterical or epileptic fits followed by periods of depression. In a letter of 1621 to George Thurzó’s widow Elisabeth Czobor, the family wrote:
thanks be to God, now she is much better, and as your ladyship has written, that nothing of her deeds should be spoken of and nobody should mention this before her. But now conscious, she knows herself what she has done, and what she has spoken of. She is now firmly fixed upon it that her throat should not be bound and no one should use a knife in her presence, and people should care for her and be vigilant and when the sickness comes on her – because it came upon her before – it first strikes her on her left toe with great pain, then to her heart, then goes away . . .15
The strange symptoms as they were described do not permit a diagnosis, but prove beyond doubt that something was dangerously amiss and was being hushed up by the family many years before Lady Listhius came to the attention of the representatives of the law. The family papers also show that Anna-Rosina’s relationship with her children, particularly with the heir, the younger Stanislas, and his wife Lady Anna Czobor was fraught with tension, to such an extent that she stated that she could not bear her daughter-in-law’s company any longer, because her presence ‘always left her saddened’. In a letter to Elisabeth Czobor of 1624, Anna-Rosina herself wrote:
My dear sweet lady, I cannot bear any longer not to complain about my wicked children; my son and his wife who have caused me so much pain and sorrow and bitterness that now and forever I shall never suffer so much. I hope that God will punish them, and last Sunday I sent them away in such anger and sorrow; I do not wish to set eyes upon them, I have enough bitterness in my life . . .16
This correspondence also refers to Anna-Rosina’s relationship with her husband, Lord Stanislas, who she claimed took her side in these quarrels with her children. But examination of his will contradicts this. He bequeathed very little directly to his wife and did not allow her to handle the estates that made up the inheritance, stipulating where she could live and limiting her independence. Stanislas Thurzó died in 1625 and at the age of forty-three his widow remarried, taking as her second husband a noble of much lower station, Baron George Pográny. Pográny could not have hoped that his elderly bride would give him a male heir and must have known of her seven childbirths and her uncertain temper. His court was much poorer than that of her late husband – and the newlyweds had to face the gossip and ill-will which went with the morganatic union, compounded by a second and simultaneous mésalliance (in the eyes of society, at least) between Anna-Rosina’s daughter, Lady Éva Thurzó, and George Pográny’s brother, István. One possible clue to this may be found in George’s will: Lady Anna-Rosina had important properties in Sintava in Nitra county, owned the manor of Hlohovec and farms in Seréd and could expect in time to receive a large part of the Thurzó legacy; in 1628 the couple declared before notaries in Bratislava that each would inherit the other’s goods, an arrangement which would be far more advantageous to the impoverished Pogránys, who probably persuaded Anna-Rosina to make this double marriage to protect herself from, or to spite, her Thurzó relatives.
Éva Thurzó died in childbirth in her mother’s house, and the scene was recalled nearly ten years later by witnesses: ‘As the child reached her time in the woman’s womb, and was struggling there for two whole hours, the grandmother did not allow the child to be taken out by Caesarean section, even after the mother had succumbed, saying – let him not be taken out; let him die in her. No trace of the mixture of my blood and that executioner bastard should remain!’17
One year after their official declaration, George Pográny rescinded his oath and excluded Lady Listhius from his new will:
my above-mentioned partner in marriage, when I was sorely ill, left me, taking my medicine, and cursed me and all my family, which I witnessed with my own ears. She uttered foul words concerning me, took my food, drink and kitchen utensils, took the pillows from under my head and my bedclothes so that I had to sleep upon hay. She broke my travelling trunks, as I witnessed, and took my money and my letters. As I was seriously ill, I could do nothing against her. She kept not to her oath and was so cruel to me in my great sickness, and even spat into my beard. I will not permit her to inherit anything even if she bears my name until her death.18
But the embittered and deserted husband succumbed to his illness in 1629, leaving his widow in possession of the joint estates. István Pográny as the senior male now stood to inherit his share, but the sister-in-law who outranked him and hated him denied him the chance.
It was in 1637, some years after he had seized Elisabeth Czobor’s portion of the Thurzó family fortune, that Nicholas Esterházy, now established as Count Palatine of Hungary, turned his attentions to Anna-Rosina Listhius. The ageing, twice-widowed lady now presented an irresistible target: she had outlived her two sons by Stanislas Thurzó and was about to inherit their estates to add to the considerable wealth that was already in her hands. Of the direct Thurzó line, only Esterházy’s daughter-in-law, George Thurzó’s granddaughter Elisabeth, was still alive. Esterházy now enjoyed the almost unlimited power of a monarch and Listhius had no one left to defend her against him. But she delivered herself into the hands of her enemy by her own folly.
Although the papers from the proceedings are incomplete, the basic facts are not in question. Following reports that Lady Listhius had murdered one of her serving-women, a member of the lesser nobility, the Palatine ordered witnesses to be summoned and interrogated to determine whether a case could be brought against her. In the course of the inquiry, the eighty individuals who were questioned agreed that in the past twelve years Anna-Rosina had caused the deaths of eight or nine of her servants by beating them or having them beaten to death. In each case the victim had committed some trifling offence which either brought on or coincided with a bout of their mistress’s ‘sickness’. The Lady would become possessed by an uncontrollable fury and would begin to rave, urging her assistants to harder and harder punishments (recalling the cries of ‘Üsd, Üsd, Jobban!’ that Elisabeth Báthory was said to have uttered), then joining in herself until the object of her rage was lifeless. Only then would she become calmer, sometimes cradling and caressing the corpse and trying to persuade it to live again, or lamenting in a mixture of anger and remorse that her servant had deserted her.
While the domestics (both males and females) who died were merely commoners there had been no repercussions at all, but the latest victim had been of noble blood, and after her murder, which had been signalled by repeated threats that her mistress would ‘kill her that very day’, her daughters decided to take action. As was usual in such cases, priests were called upon to mediate, and arranged for the victim’s family to be bought off with one hundred florins in coin, one hundred florins’ worth of goods and a hundred butts of corn. In spite of the payment of wergild to the family before the case came to court, Esterházy persisted in pressing for a full trial, and this time he was fully supported by the Royal Chamber.
The charge was murder, but witnesses also accused Lady Listhius, who had long before gained a reputation as a herbalist and healer, of practising black magic. Anna-Rosina, they said, had surrounded herself with a group of powerful witches and warlocks who assisted her in casting spells, but it was known in the regions around her court that she herself was the most powerful sorceress of them all.
In 1637, when the trial against Listhius was begun, the bulk of the property was still held by her and therefore forfeit. While the remaining inheritors argued about the Thurzó estate, the case was brought against Listhius by the so-called ‘head-money’ principle, which the Fiscus had claimed could not be invoked in the case of Elisabeth Báthory. According to this tradition a successful plaintiff in a trial would receive one-third of any wealth confiscated and two-thirds went to the judge(s). In this case this was probably the Royal Chamber, the Fiscus, and the Palatine Esterházy and his henchmen respectively.19
It is obvi
ous that, through his close links with his cousin and her husband Stanislas Thurzó and through the correspondence between Anna-Rosina and his wife, George Thurzó must have been intimately aware of the peculiarities of Lady Listhius, although the murders that she was specifically accused of did not take place until after his death. It is equally certain that, when Nicholas Esterházy moved against Listhius, he was aware of Thurzó’s earlier case against Elisabeth Báthory.
The two cases have many obvious parallels. In both cases the victims were servants tortured by noblewomen, or by their order (during the investigation witnesses alleged that Listhius had been ill-treating her servants for more than twenty years, that is, since Elisabeth Báthory’s lifetime). Listhius was able to reach a compromise with the adult daughters of her victim; in the case of Countess Báthory there is no such evidence, but if she had killed young girls from the gentry, and if their relations had protested, it is quite unlikely that such an enormously rich woman could not have avoided guilt by payment. Why is there no evidence of such payments or some form of contract among the records of her case? Did the Lutheran priests try to intervene only to be rebuffed by a woman who felt herself to be untouchable? In both cases the Count Palatine initiated the investigation; in Listhius’ in spite of her de facto agreement with the victim’s family, in Báthory’s before she could take any action to defend herself by due process in the county court. If nothing else, the Listhius case proves that servants, even those of good family, were handy targets on whom their employers could vent their rages.