Naturally, this outsize display, designed to rankle the queen, achieved the desired effect. Lettice had publicly humiliated her—risky behavior indeed.
Elizabeth’s wrath increased in February 1586 after she heard the rumor that Lettice planned to join her husband in the Netherlands, where he’d been posted in 1585 to serve as Governor-General. Evidently, Lettice had no intentions of traveling light, but rather “with suche a train of ladies and gentylwomen and such ryche coches, lytters, and sidesaddles, as hir majestie had none suche, and that ther should be such a courte of ladies as shuld farre passe [far surpass] hir majestie’s courte heare.”
The queen was seething. According to Dudley’s factor at court, “This informacyon dyd not a lytle sturre hir majestie to extreme collour [choler] and dislike.” He added that upon hearing that Lettice was outfitting an entourage that rivaled her own royal train, Elizabeth had released a string of “great othes [oaths], that she would have no more courtes under hir obeisance but hir owen [her own], and wold revoke you from thence with all spede.”
Dudley’s brother, the Earl of Warwick, warned him that “Her malice is great and unquenchable.” The magnitude of the queen’s ire was corroborated by her secretary William Davison, who told Dudley that the rumors regarding Lettice’s extravagant travel plans “did not a little encrease the heat of her majesties offence against you.”
Only when the tales turned out to be “most falce,” and little more than malicious gossip, was Elizabeth mollified. But Lettice remained a pariah and would never be forgiven for what the queen perceived as the deepest possible betrayal short of political treason.
On September 4, 1588, just weeks after England’s naval triumph over Spain’s armada, Dudley died at Cornbury in Oxfordshire, possibly from a malarial infection. Elizabeth was utterly devastated and took to her bedchamber for days. The earl had appointed Lettice to be the executor of his estates; therefore, any legal wrangling over the distribution of his property became her responsibility. Robert Dudley, the earl’s “base” son by Douglas Sheffield, was one such claimant. He had inherited Kenilworth, but the home’s adjoining manors comprised part of Lettice’s jointure as Leicester’s widow.
Lettice was also saddled with her late husband’s massive debts, amounting to about £50,000 (more than $16 million today), half of which was owed to the crown. Under the circumstances, Elizabeth had no intentions of forgiving so much as a farthing. To satisfy a mere fraction of Dudley’s encumbrances, the queen demanded Leicester House and commanded Lettice to hand over a quantity of jewels.
Lettice complied. She’d been metaphorically bloodied, but remained unbowed. And like a cat (or perhaps more specifically, a cougar), she landed on her feet. Rather than grieve and mope about after Dudley’s death, Lettice, who was described by a contemporary as having “a light, easy, healable nature,” swiftly found herself another man. In July 1589 she took a third husband—a boy toy twelve or thirteen years her junior named Christopher Blount. Blount had been Leicester’s Master of the Horse. He was also a hellraising friend of her oldest son, Robert Devereux, who was now the 2nd Earl of Essex.
No stranger to scandal when it came to picking men, Lettice had once again set tongues wagging; even her own son tsk-tsked over his mother’s “unhappy choyce.” The rumor mill churned up lurid tales that Lettice had become Blount’s lover in 1587 and had poisoned Leicester so that she could wed her young stud.
Even with Dudley dead and buried, Lettice remained the target of Elizabeth’s rage, and the cousins’ games of brinkmanship continued. If Lettice could find herself a hot young guy to wear on her arm, Her Majesty could do the same. And Elizabeth’s choice would really push Lettice’s buttons and punish her for her arrogance. Who better than Lettice’s own son, Robert Devereux, the 2nd Earl of Essex? The fifty-something queen took her handsome young cousin under her wing when he was in his late teens. Essex became the monarch’s new favorite, in many ways replacing Dudley, his late stepfather, in her affections. Lettice was forced to bite her tongue and tamp down her ego with the recognition that the sovereign was able to give the young man something his man-stealing mother never could: power, prestige, and the indulgent, lavish attention of a queen.
Charming and hotheaded, young Essex was quite the philanderer, even though in 1590 he had clandestinely wed the young widow of Sir Philip Sidney. It’s no wonder that the new favorite kept his nuptials a secret; predictably, Elizabeth became furious when she ultimately found out about it, viewing his wedlock as a personal betrayal, but she soon forgave him. Her male courtiers rarely suffered the penalties she meted out to the ladies of her court, Lettice’s banishment being the ultimate case in point.
In January 1598, Lettice, who had spent the past two years rusticating at her Staffordshire estate, Drayton Bassett, heard that the queen might be willing to welcome her back to court. So she made haste for London and settled in with her son at Essex House (formerly Leicester House, restored to young Essex by the queen) to await Her Majesty’s invitation.
It was the event of the decade for the courtiers, who eagerly anticipated the reunion of the two formidable redheaded cousins. According to Rowland Whyte, “The greatest newes here at Court is an expectation that my Lady Lester [sic] shall come to kisse the Queen’s hands. Yt [it] is greatly labored in, and was thought shuld have bene yesterday, but this day a hope is yt will be.”
But the summons from sovereign to “she-wolf” was not forthcoming.
Four days after he wrote his first announcement, Whyte offered an update: “Her Majesty will not yet admit my lady his [Essex’s] mother to come to her presence, having once given some hope of yt.”
Was Elizabeth deliberately tormenting Lettice, or had she changed her mind about seeing her?
Finally, a summit was arranged for March 1, 1598, on neutral ground, at the home of Lady Chandos. A “great dinner” was prepared in anticipation of the meeting, and Lettice was ready to tender the queen a peace offering, to wit, a “faire jewel of £300” (worth approximately $67,000 today).
But “upon a soddain [sudden] she [Elizabeth] resolved not to goe, and soe sent word.” Essex was so livid that the queen had once again humiliated his mother that he tried to gain access to Her Majesty while he was still in his nightdress. His entrance to the queen’s chamber was refused and he went back to bed in a snit.
Angry at being played for a fool, Lettice was on the verge of returning to Staffordshire when she received the long-awaited and much-desired call. The courtiers were undoubtedly disappointed that both of the women assumed their best behavior in each other’s presence. Rowland Whyte observed that “My Lady Lester [sic] was at Court, kissed the Queen’s hands and her brest, and did embrace her.” Elizabeth kissed Lettice as well, and their interview ended.
However, the royal embrace was not the kiss of peace. Lettice remained unforgiven, and when she asked to kiss Elizabeth’s hands a second time, the monarch curtly rebuffed her. A few days later the queen was overheard referring to Lettice with “some wonted unkind words.” The young Earl of Essex attempted to intercede, but Elizabeth brushed him off, brusquely insisting that she had no desire “to be importuned in these unpleasing matters.”
But Lettice wasn’t about to give up easily, and continued to press for the queen’s formal recognition and reconciliation. She sent Elizabeth a dress worth £100 (more than $22,000 today), but the queen, refusing to be bribed into granting Lettice her favor, deemed the gift inappropriate. In the year 1599, Lettice once again petitioned her cousin for an audience, but this time it was not for her own sake; she was pleading for clemency for her son. The hotheaded Earl of Essex, having successfully secured a commission to command a military expedition in Ireland, had mucked everything up by flouting Elizabeth’s orders and negotiating an ill-advised treaty with the enemy.
Essex had been forbidden to return from Ireland until the queen commanded him to do so, but he violated her orders and sailed for England. After two trials he was eventually found guilty of treason an
d incarcerated. In February 1600, Lettice moved into a residence with a view of the prison. Although it was rumored that mother and son could see each other from their respective windows, the queen refused to permit Lettice to visit him.
The dowager countess eventually moved into Essex House and the earl was released, but by then he had been stripped of public office and his only source of income, a monopoly on sweet wines, was rescinded by the queen. Broke and angry, he stewed and seethed at Essex House, as his mood shifted “from sorrow and repentance to rage and rebellion.” In 1601, he began to stockpile weapons at Essex House and amass supporters for what would be the ultimate act of treason. In a spectacularly arrogant and misguided move, Essex tried to raise an army against the queen, intending to topple her from the throne. One of his coconspirators was his drinking buddy and Lettice’s young husband, Christopher Blount.
Essex and Blount were sent to the Tower. This time Lettice did not ask her cousin for clemency on her son’s behalf. She surely realized that such a suit would be fruitless; not only did Elizabeth continue to despise her, and would therefore be disinclined to pardon Essex, but the earl had brazenly committed treason, and the punishment for it was death. On February 25, 1601, Lettice lost her beloved son. On March 18, her young husband was also beheaded.
Essex’s execution broke Elizabeth’s heart as well as Lettice’s. Once again, the two cousins had something in common: the love of the same man, and the aching void left by his demise. But they never met again. And Lettice never again wrote to the queen requesting Her Majesty’s permission to return to court. According to Elizabeth’s principal secretary, Sir Robert Cecil, “for her marriage with him [Leicester]” Lettice “was long disgraced with the Queene” and their rift was a permanent one.
In the wee hours of the morning on March 24, 1603, Elizabeth died. Lettice outlived her by thirty-one years, a lifetime in itself in the seventeenth century. She died a wealthy woman at the age of ninety-three on Christmas Day, 1634.
At her request, Lettice was buried at St. Mary’s, Warwick, “by my deere lord and husband the Earle of Leicester.” Reposing beside him for all eternity, which Elizabeth (who was interred at Westminster Abbey) could never do, it was Lettice Knollys who had the last, celestial, laugh.
ERZSÉBET (ELIZABETH) BÁTHORY
“The Blood Countess”
1560-1614
THE “CRIMES” COMMITTED AGAINST THEIR FAMILY MEMBERS and their subjects by the royals profiled in this book run the gamut from arrogance to zealous slaughter. But there is one “pain” who took such pleasure in inflicting it on the most innocent of victims that her conduct can be described only as criminally insane.
She made the Marquis de Sade look like Mother Teresa. In an age when her English counterparts were engaged in such ladylike pursuits as plying their needles or playing the virginals, Erzsébet Báthory was employing red-hot pincers and bathing in virginal blood.
Erzsébet Báthory is technically not royalty in the manner of western European kings and princes, but she earns her chapter in this book because the terminology used to describe central European rulers is somewhat different. What was known as the kingdom of Hungary during most of Erzsébet’s lifetime was ruled by a sovereign, yet within this kingdom were principalities (such as the principality of Transylvania), wherein local nobles or voivodes oversaw their own demesnes, similar to the structure of a medieval feudal society. Erzsébet Báthory was a countess within the kingdom of Hungary; and on her lands, her word might as well have been law, even if local officials existed to keep the peace.
The Báthorys were one of the elite Hungarian Protestant families whose members became voivodes; in fact, Erzsébet’s maternal grandfather, Stephan Báthory, had been a voivode of Transylvania.
Erzsébet’s parents, György and Anna, were cousins from two different branches of the family tree. Like most members of the nobility, the Báthorys prided themselves on the purity of their line, and of course rampant inbreeding often leads to insanity. Unsurprisingly, Erzsébet’s family had its share of mentally deranged relations. She came by her brutality honestly—or at least genetically. Her aunt Klara was a bisexual sadomasochist with a specific talent for flagellation; one of her uncles was into devil worship; while Erzsébet’s brother was merely a libidinous drunkard. Her own predilections appear to have been a fatal combination of nature and nurture.
Because of her noble rank, it was beneath Erzsébet’s dignity, even as a child, to be scolded for anything she did; consequently, she grew up vain, willful, and arrogant. She would also become quite a beauty: tall, raven haired, and voluptuous, with fair skin and catlike amber eyes. Desperate to appear as fashionably pale as possible, she slathered herself with various unguents and herbal concoctions that would yield the desired pallor, particularly on her face and hands. She usually dressed in white, her gowns and headdresses encrusted with Venetian seed pearls.
Although western Europe had emerged from the Dark Ages into the comparatively enlightened and cultured Renaissance, much of the central and eastern areas of the continent had yet to cast off the brutality and superstition of the Middle Ages. Hungary was still a feudal society. The nobles owned the serfs or peasants who worked their lands and toiled within their castles and manors, although independently governed towns and villages would emerge during Erzsébet’s lifetime. The Báthorys, governing Ecsed (now only a small village in present-day Hungary), were so powerful that for years local officials, including clerics, dared not challenge their authority.
When Erzsébet was a little girl in Ecsed she was permitted to witness a public execution where a Gypsy (the malfeasor) was stuffed into the freshly slit belly of a horse (while the completely innocent beast was still alive), and sewn into the warm, bloody cavity. The tortured horse writhed in pain and tried to rid itself of its unwelcome burden, while the Gypsy struggled in vain to free himself from the horse’s gut. Both expired in due course, but not until they’d provided an afternoon’s entertainment with their highly gruesome display.
Perhaps Erzsébet inherited her predilictions, or experiences like this may have bred in baby Báthory her taste for gruesome torture. In any case, she lived in an especially violent culture and came from a particularly demented family with a ghoulish cast of role models. Witnessing this unique form of execution, Erzsébet might have assumed that no form of torture was so grim as to be unpalatable.
She was never quite right in the head, however. At the age of four or five, Erzsébet began to experience epileptic seizures as well as the violent mood swings of a classic manic-depressive. She also suffered from brutally painful migraines. Though her temper was fierce, her noble birthright shielded her from chastisement, let alone punishment, for any bad behavior. Thus, she was able to get away with tormenting her playmates, servants, and pets.
In 1570, at the age of nine, Erzsébet was contracted in marriage to a youth six years her senior, Ferenc (pronounced Franz) Nádasdy, the son of a neighboring count, who would in time inherit the title in his own right, although the Nádasdys were not considered to be quite as illustrious or as powerful a family as the Báthorys. The couple’s formal betrothal was announced the following year. According to the custom of the time, Erzsébet was sent to reside with her future mother-in-law, where she would learn how to manage a household. There, she may have been as unsupervised as she was at Ecsed, because it was rumored that in 1574 she gave birth to an illegitimate daughter fathered by a peasant boy. The child, if there ever was one, was purportedly smuggled away by a trustworthy local woman, who was paid handsomely to take the baby to Wallachia and never to return during Erzsébet’s lifetime.
Before Erzsébet could get herself into further trouble, on May 8, 1575, in the presence of forty-five hundred guests she was married to Ferenc Nádasdy in the palace at Varannó in Hungary. Erzsébet was fourteen years old; her bridegroom was twenty. At the time Ferenc was already a war hero known for his feats of athletic prowess off the battlefield, although even his mother admitted that her
boychick was “no scholar.” Upon wedding Erzsébet, Ferenc made the rare move of adopting his bride’s surname as his own, because it would greatly enhance his prestige to be thought of as a Báthory. Their marriage united two of Hungary’s greatest families, though unlike the Báthorys (who were known to be psychotic), the Nádasdys were believed to be respectable, conservative, and even pious. Yet Ferenc, a fearsome general and the scourge of the enemy Turks, was somewhat afraid of the intensity and formidability of his adolescent bride. Even as a child growing up in his family’s home, Erzsébet had unnerved him during his infrequent return visits for rest and recreation.
Ferenc wouldn’t be the first to marry a younger, smarter wife. Erzsébet was much better educated than her husband, able to read and write in Greek, Latin, German, and her native Hungarian. Nevertheless, it’s always good for spouses to have common interests, and in the case of Erzsébet and Ferenc, they shared a particularly unusual one: Both were sadists.
Ferenc’s temper was notorious. His favorite parlor trick was to toss a pair of Turkish prisoners in the air and catch them on the points of his swords. As a warlord he didn’t spare the rod, savagely flogging and beating both adversary and underling, and earning himself the swaggeringly cool nickname “the Black Hero of Hungary.” His wife’s sobriquet was equally insouciant; in due time she would be known throughout Europe as “the Blood Countess.”
After a brief stay at Nádasdy Castle in Sárvár, Hungary, where Erzsébet whiled away her hours as Ferenc studied in nearby Vienna, the couple took up residence in the thirteenth-century Castle Csejthe (pronounced “Chach-teetz-eh,” it’s also spelled Čachtice), a gloomy fortress perched high in the Little Carpathian Mountains near modern-day Trenčín, Hungary. It had been a wedding gift from the Nádasdy family to their teenage daughter-in-law. The castle, or the picturesque rubble that remains of it, is located in present-day Slovakia.
Royal Pains: A Rogues' Gallery of Brats, Brutes, and Bad Seeds Page 15