Countess Dracula (41 page)

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 obvious 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.

From the legal point of view, the differences are interesting. In the Listhius case the letters of interrogation have been prepared with greater care and attention to detail and the content of the ‘confessions' is more logical than in Elisabeth Báthory's case (the distinction between personal eyewitness testimony and hearsay is made clear, for example, and the chronology of events is much more consistent).
²⁰

The length of time taken over the investigation into Elisabeth Báthory, which began early in 1610 and was still incomplete at the
time of her death in 1614, contrasts with the speed and efficiency with which Listhius, a less influential woman, was tried and judgement passed. Only the condemnation and execution of Countess Báthory's accomplices was achieved speedily. In Listhius' case the order for the trial to be initiated was given on 27 June 1637; the interrogation took place on 2, 4 and 6 July.

Of all the statements transcribed in the course of the trial it is not the by now familiar testimony of the witnesses which stays in the mind, but the words used by the priest who interceded to secure the payoff – words whose wider implications have not been picked up: ‘Even should you desire to begin something, you will never get to the end of it [this must have been a common form of words; it is almost the same as the Royal Chamber's dissuasion of King Matthias in 1611], for you cannot demonstrate conclusively that the hand of the woman was the cause of your mother's death, rather than the hand of her servant.' In those days it was not possible to convict someone on the basis of indirect guilt, in other words for inciting murder rather than committing it in person. The hints in Elisabeth Czobor's cryptic note of 1610 and the ambiguity of the evidence against her mean that Báthory would certainly have used in her defence the fact that she could not be held responsible for acts carried out by other hands.

If in Elisabeth Báthory's case there is no sign of a compromise with the victims, this shows that the accusations of the murder of noblewomen are likely to be false. It also seems clear from the Listhius case that the mere murder of a commoner was not enough to start off legal proceedings; only the murder of (only one) noble victim could have this effect. The case shows that punishment of servants was the unlimited right of the lord or lady, and, if that punishment resulted in death, it was considered an unfortunate accident. Homicide was viewed as a relatively minor abuse of power or privilege, and could be compensated by money. The social rank of perpetrator and victim were of paramount importance, and, providing she limited her abuse to commoners, a high-born lady could continue for many years to exhibit bizarre behaviour or commit domestic outrages. Only when the killing of a well-born victim coincided with ulterior or exterior motives would the full weight of the law descend on the guilty party.

According to those who knew her, all Anna-Rosina's murders, like many of Countess Báthory's punishment-tortures, were the result of some insignificant breach of discipline. Could this be the way a terribly
frustrated and otherwise powerless woman released her rage? Men's rages were legitimised and dissipated in military games or real warfare, or banditry or wife-beating or hunting. Noble Hungarian women had all the responsibilities of men but few of the privileges, apart from absolute power over their female domestic staff. Where better to go to vent their anger at the intolerable tensions of their lives?

With clear evidence of her guilt, and the machinery of the state against her, the result of the trial was probably a foregone conclusion, but, as often happened in those days, during the proceedings in 1637 Anna-Rosina Listhius escaped and fled to Poland. Because of her rank and because other members of her own family were respected servants of the crown, on 27 March 1638 the King issued a letter of mercy pardoning her and even allowing her to keep some of her former family estates. The portion of the Thurzó fortune to which she was entitled very probably passed into the ownership of her accusers.

The fate of Anna Báthory, sister of the murdered Prince Gábor and niece of Elisabeth, was as extraordinary as theirs and her story, too, deserves to be looked at in detail for the parallels it contains with Elisabeth's treatment at the hands of great men.
²⁴

Anna was born in 1594 to the still pre-eminent Somlyóis, the senior branch of the Báthory family. Such was her fall from privilege and power that the exact date of her death was not even recorded – nothing was heard of her after the year 1640 and she is presumed to have passed away in penury and obscurity somewhere in Poland or Hungary. She spent the years from 1601 at the Ecsed court of her uncle Stephen, Elisabeth Báthory's elder brother and Chief Justice of Hungary, who doted on her not least because she bore the same name as his beloved mother. Among the charges later levelled against her were that she fornicated with a local silversmith while at Ecsed and that she committed innumerable acts of incest with Gábor her brother. While this cannot be disproved, it is hard to see the pious, reclusive guardian Count Stephen allowing his eight- or nine-year-old charge such freedoms. Two years before his death in 1605 Stephen drew up a will bequeathing the town of Tasnád with its surrounding lands to Anna with the provision that she employ only Calvinist priests to minister to its population. In the same will he also instructed the fourteen-year-old Gábor to take responsibility for his younger sister's wellbeing.