Countess Dracula (37 page)

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 spontaneous 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.

Nor is the role of women in physical atrocities unusual; the Brazilian Gilberto Freyre wrote in the 1930s of the wives of wealthy Portuguese estate owners in that country who, to avenge the ravages of age which they detected on their own bodies, tortured and blinded their beautiful young African female slaves.
²⁴
While this book was in preparation the widespread abuse of Filipina
maidservants by wealthy Gulf Arab families became an international
cause célèbre,
the wives of the households in question regularly joining in or instigating the cruelties. The parallels with feudal Hungary in terms of power, status, ethnicity do not need to be elaborated.

The women's cruelty to one another is only a reflection, a fairly pale reflection, of the tide of mayhem which the men saw ebbing and flowing outside the manor-house walls, but the men, hardened to all sorts of indignities and to the quick, casual brutalities they inflict on each other, will not conceive of physical violence by woman upon woman. Death was palatable when part of male sport, when dressed up with plumes and swagger, strutting bravado or a rapid lunge, but not when it accompanied the refined cruelty and day-by-day suffering of the secret women's world of the inner household.

By all accounts, including her own in letters and in her last testament, Countess Báthory loved her children, and fiercely protected and cherished them, fulfilling her motherly responsibilities absolutely according to custom, even without the support of her lord. It seems she could love other children, not of her blood – one witness told how she doted on a thirteen-year-old orphan girl who soon sickened and died. But the low-born were of no account. To a Báthory, as we know from the swathe her nephew Gábor cut through the ladies of his principality, even the highest-born were just playthings. From George Thurzó's own example we learn that the greater nobility could treat the lesser nobility with oppressive contempt. As for the commoners, they were literally worth less than their masters' livestock; at the end of the sixteenth century the doctor Ferenc Pápai Párisz lamented the lot of those citizens ‘living in the countryside where a sick animal gets medical aid sooner than a sick man'.
²⁵
It is quite conceivable that, just as Count Thurzó was capable of doting on his young wife, his daughters and his infant son, and executing his neighbours' servants without trial (and, come to that, of sacrificing Elisabeth's attendants without a qualm), so Elisabeth could have loved her husband faithfully and cared tenderly for her children, and yet beaten and pricked and burned and doused her maidservants with freezing water.

In the final analysis, who really suffered? The maids, the accomplices? At that time, in a Renaissance culture, their lives would be considered of no significance. Even the well-born and powerful could be poisoned with relative impunity for material gain, stabbed in a brawl. Peasants could be hanged for theft, burghers for fraud, mothers for
infanticide, old women for sorcery. The inferiority of the poor was immovably enshrined in the early modern scheme of things. The various visual metaphors which underpinned the late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century imagination – the ladder, the chain, the universe of concentric spheres – all took for granted the existence of an immutable hierarchy of being, in which the social order within human society was a stratification ordained by God. The right of the aristocrat to his or her pre-eminence normally went as unquestioned as the divine right of kings and emperors to rule: even the new modes of thought such as egalitarian Calvinism or Lutheranism, or social upheavals such as Dózsa's rebellion, failed to dent these certainties in the minds of the mass of people. If the serfs of Hungary could not think of bettering themselves, they could at least gaze on the noblewoman's castle and indulge their imaginations to their limits, speculating on the sinful excesses being committed behind its walls.

What Elisabeth herself saw, when she retired to her private chamber and pondered on her dependencies, may once have been a perfect world in miniature, but by the time she was in her late forties might well have been a messy microcosm, in her possession but only barely under her control. Threatened from the outside by covetous neighbours, political schemers, insolent Germans and marauding bandits and from within by ineptitude and feuding, the several communities she ruled over, with their population of stewards, soldiers, bookkeepers, domestics and serfs, must have at times come close to calamity. Even allowing that Elisabeth's wealth was enormous and her authority unchallenged, when epidemics struck, when incompetence went too far and could not be covered up, and when the feuds which erupted in the cloistered atmosphere threatened to get out of hand, the mistress of the house must have felt a sense of helplessness and panic. Whenever we consider institutions, especially those which are alien to us, belonging to other societies in other times, we tend to see them as they were intended to be, in working order. Just like their modern counterparts – the children's home, the hospital ward, the private academy for young ladies – it is quite likely that Elisabeth's health service and her system of schooling did
not
work. For one thing, Death kept on intruding.