Countess Dracula (34 page)

Although he was headstrong to the point of folly, Gábor was not stupid. He began to sense that circumstances could quickly rearrange themselves very unfavourably: there was news that Kendy was in touch with the Voivode of Wallachia and was recruiting Cossacks in Poland for an attack on Transylvania.

Gábor occupied the Szeben Saxon cities which had refused to acknowledge his authority (violating the Saxon leaders' wives too, it was said), and took Wallachia, but could not keep it. Radu Sherban fled to Poland. If Báthory had managed to explain the Wallachians' pro-Habsburg machinations, the Turks would probably have supported the Voivode's deposing and the state's annexation, but by the time Báthory's envoys reached Constantinople, the Porte had mobilised its pashas in the occupied zone to attack the Hajdúks' towns and villages in eastern Hungary while the men were fighting on Báthory's behalf in Wallachia. When they heard that their settlements had been burned, the Hajdúk regiments withdrew.

Gábor had far-reaching ambitions. Hoping to create an empire consisting of Transylvania, Wallachia and Poland, he requested the Turks' support for an attack on the pro-Polish Voivode of Moldova, followed by an invasion of Poland itself. He hoped to forge a Russo-Turkish alliance – not a completely outrageous conceit in that the Poles had just occupied Moscow. Báthory did not take account of the recent compromise between the Polish nobles and the Swede Sigismund III and the internal problems of the Ottomans. The Turkish Porte's diplomacy became ultra-cautious and the Habsburgs put diplomatic pressure on Constantinople. Báthory had to withdraw and was left without even Wallachia.
³⁰

It was now June 1611, and Sigmund Forgách's Hungarian forces chose this time to intervene. The Saxon cities of southern Transylvania had asked for aid from the Habsburgs but could not get either money or soldiers. Although he hated and despised Gábor, George Thurzó counselled caution, but against his advice the Habsburg court gave Forgách permission for an armed attack on Transylvania. Before they invaded, the deposed Voivode attacked with Polish Cossacks and Moldavian troops, first ousting his replacement in Wallachia and then entering Transylvania at the behest of the Brasov Saxons.

Báthory had now resorted to his drinking companions for policymaking. He was flaunting his scandalous life, appearing in public with his illicit lovers and appeasing the cuckolded husbands with large estates. He
was morose after the failure of the Wallachian campaign and did not send his tributes to Constantinople on time. The Hajdúk Andrew Ghyczy, a flamboyant and dashing figure but a criminal and fraudster too, became Gábor's favourite, but soon began to plot against him. The disaffected parties in the Principality sent Ghyczy as their representative to ask the Turkish Sultan to depose Báthory in favour of Ghyczy himself, and the pretender entered the independent city of Brasov as a prince, while the legitimate ruler was distracted by the pleasures of the flesh. The Voivode of Wallachia would not support this coup, however, and neither Ghyczy nor his patron, Weiss, the chief magistrate of Brasov, had any military expertise. When Báthory's soldiers moved decisively against them, they were quickly defeated and Weiss was killed. The legitimate Prince, now in a constant state of intoxication, began to issue contradictory commands and indulge his tyrannical fantasies, first by executing Andrew Nagy, the leader of the Hajdúks. Alienating the fanatical Hajdúks was an act of utter folly, but his next impulse was yet more dangerous: it was to make an enemy of his patron, confidant and most able political tactician, Gábor Bethlen. The two quarrelled when Bethlen attempted to restrain the Prince. Báthory's response to the man he began to see as a rival was to draw his sword in Bethlen's presence – a mortal insult to a Renaissance gentleman – and, worse, to put a lighted candle to his beard. Bethlen left the court and found shelter with his associate, the Turkish Pasha of Timi
ş
oara. Gábor Báthory came partially to his senses, and sought a rapprochement with Royal Hungary – but doing so, astonishingly, with the assistance of Ghyczy. His misfortunes were an unexpected gift to the Habsburgs, and the price of peace with the Germans of Brasov and with Hungary was Báthory's agreement to abide by Hungarian policy, to lend troops to campaign against the Turks, to restore religious freedom to the Transylvanian Catholics and to pardon the Brasov Saxons.

Gábor Báthory's outrageous personal immorality and disregard for the traditional rights of the nobility in Transylvania made another plot against his life an inevitability. The Reformation had focused on the need for moral codes – the Popish way or the Protestant way. Gábor's way was a profligate personal abandon that flew in the face of both. The feudal knight and satyr was a figure out of time, and now without friends.

In Constantinople Bethlen was urging the Turks to support his own claim to the throne, a claim supported by the Szeben Saxons, whose territory Báthory had refused to give up. Once again Gábor
Báthory's envoys belatedly left for negotiations with the Turks when the latter's armies were already
en route
for Transylvania with Gábor Bethlen at their head. Báthory fled westwards with Ghyczy and a troop of Hajdúks, only to meet Forgách's invading force at Várad in the Partium. Ghyczy betrayed his friend yet again, inducing the Hajdúk bodyguard, who had not forgiven the killing of their leader, to murder the Prince. The Nero of the
Siebenburgen,
the Transylvanian Casanova, the last feudal hero – and, as it transpired, the last hope of glory for his line – was dead at twenty-three.

In February 1613 all the protocols were assembled to allow the formal trial of Countess Elisabeth Báthory finally to start. With nearly 300 depositions, the comprehensively damning contents of the letter from Ponikenus and a medical certificate for appearance's sake, Thurzó had all he needed to have Elisabeth brought to trial on a charge of his choice: mass-murder, treason or sorcery – they were all capital crimes. But nothing happened. There is no record of any further moves by the family on behalf of the widow in the castle or any reference to her in official correspondence during the time that remained to her.

Gábor was shot down in October 1613, and once he was dead the ‘Báthory faction' in Hungary ceased to exist. The ‘Transylvanian party', after initial disarray, regrouped around the figure of Gábor Bethlen, who now saw himself as a rival to the Báthorys, though at that time he held no significant estates inside Hungary. There was no reason for King Matthias to pursue the case: Elisabeth was powerless; her estates had officially been disposed of; George Drugeth was scheming to promote his own pro-Habsburg coup in Transylvania; and the other heirs had, despite earlier suspicions, remained loyal to the crown. The Royal Treasury could gain nothing from reopening the investigation. While Elisabeth was alive, for instance, the powerful Lord Zrínyi could be accused of proximity to the Transylvanian party, so she was useful for political blackmail, but once Gábor was dead her value to the Palatine and to the King dwindled to nothing. She was now an unperson, legally if not physically dead, with no hope of rescue and nothing left to bargain with for her freedom.

The heirs of the Widow Nádasdy had first come together to discuss the division of their inheritance on 8 October 1611, and on that occasion Nicholas Zrínyi was given a share of the
Č
achtice estate, which he appointed one Matthew Teöteö
sy to manage on his behalf.
³¹
In the one strange sequence in her will of the previous year, Elisabeth Báthory had asked to be allowed to keep her ‘wedding dress and jewels', so she had not in fact disposed of all her property, and it was certainly those jewels that Elisabeth Czobor had succeeded in seizing.
³²

On 18 August 1614, Counts Nádasdy and Homonnay Drugeth met again to finalise their arrangements for the estates of
Č
achtice and Beckov. According to the chronicles, ‘Lord Nádasdy gave Homonnay his part,' but it seems that there was some sort of disagreement between the two men and the partition was not finalised: the same village chronicles record again on 9 March 1616 that ‘Csejthe and Beckov were this day divided between Paul Nádasdy and Homonnay.'
³³

The idea of a continuing dispute over land, with George Drugeth agitating for more than his share, is supported by the fact that on 31 July 1614 Elisabeth herself made a declaration to two priestly scribes, Imre Egry (or Egery) and Andrew Kanpelich (or Kerpelich), members of the Esztergom Chapter in Trnava, who travelled to
Č
achtice castle to take down her instructions, which the literature calls her second will.
³⁴
This short text was not an alternative will in either format or content, nor was it in the usual form of a codicil. In this declaration she says that when she was arrested there was an agreement that she should give her estates around the eastern Keresztúr into the use of George Homonnay Drugeth, so that during her imprisonment he could support his mother-in-law with the income. (This contradicts the terms written down in the earlier will, which may even cast doubt on the latter's authenticity; perhaps it was meant only to be bruited, or alternatively was actually composed by the family and Thurzó and not by Elisabeth, unless under duress.) The later declaration seeks to make clear that Homonnay's wife, Elisabeth's second daughter Kate, had no greater rights to the future ownership of that estate than the other two inheritors.

The declaration to the two priests is convincing proof that Elisabeth was still in possession of her faculties, and suggests that her final recorded act was to exercise her remaining authority to dispose of her estate as she saw fit. The timing of her move may have been dictated by the wishes of the family, but in the light of what followed it is likely that the Lady was ailing and preparing for her own death as best she could. Unfortunately her two visitors, the only ones on record, limited themselves to the task at hand and left no description of the circumstances in which they found the prisoner. The priests did not
speak of any obstacles in communicating with her, and it seems certain that, although confined and helpless, she was not literally walled up as writers have liked to suggest. By the seventeenth century the mediaeval practice of immuring had all but disappeared; it had been a barbaric method of punishing recalcitrant brides in the dark ages, and King Mátyás Corvinus was said to have walled up the Archbishop of Kalocsa, Peter Vardá, in a tiny recess in Árva castle in revenge for a treaty he had drafted which granted too many concessions to the Turkish enemy.

Elisabeth had been placed outside the bounds of society and there is, not surprisingly, no record of any family visits, no accounts in the family archives to indicate who cooked for her and what she ate, no word at all of how she passed her time in the secluded fortress, looking out over the rivers and the forests. In the warm months the deserted castle must have looked imposing on its peak as the sun caught its painted walls, but in the winter the place would have been cheerless and uncomfortable behind the metre-and-a-half of stone, in the part-furnished rooms which had been designed to hold the roughest of soldiers under siege and not to act as living quarters for a gentlewoman. Deprived of her healers, her witches and her apothecaries, with no musicians to entertain her, the Countess would have heard only the sounds of the owls and ravens and the barking of guard dogs and the coughing of foxes interrupting the deep quiet below her. Although educated, she was a woman of decision rather than contemplation, and it seems unlikely that she committed her thoughts and reminiscences to paper. If she did, they are lost; the only document recovered by her son, and immediately handed to his mentor, her enemy Megyery, was her copy of the will, carefully preserved in her little box.
³⁵

Three and a half years after the start of her confinement, Elisabeth Báthory approached her guards and held out her hands to them. ‘See my hands, how cold they are,' she said. It was a summer evening, but it must have been chill inside the thick stone walls. ‘It is nothing, my Lady,' the guards assured her. ‘Will you not now retire for the night?'

The next morning, 25 August 1614, hearing no movement, the guards entered her chamber and found her lying on the floor with her feet supported by a pillow. She was dead. As Stanislas Thurzó wrote to his uncle the Palatine, ‘She left this world suddenly . . . there is as yet no news of the funeral arrangements.'
³⁶

The diary written in Latin kept by Thurzó's secretary George
Závodský was published in the eighteenth century by the antiquarian Mátyás Bél in his
Notitia Regni Hungaria.
Závodský recorded, ‘the surviving widow of Francis Nádasdy, who some years before had been thrust away into perpetual imprisonment on account of her great, unprecedented and most cruel crimes, in that same place
Č
achtice died pitifully during night-time . . .'
³⁷
He confirmed the date as 21 August and the year as 1614, as did the later
Chronicles of Csejthe,
which specified the time of death as two in the morning, but another anonymous account collected by the Jesuit István Kaprinai has the date as 16 August 1616 – surely a mistake – and reads in translation, ‘the widowed consort of Francis Nádasdy, the servant of His Royal Majesty, died in captivity in
Č
achtice – a sudden passing without light and without crucifix'.
³⁸
Stories circulating long afterwards claimed that she had been singing and praying during the small hours, others that she had starved and neglected herself. The only certainty is that Elisabeth had died of unknown causes at the age of fifty-four.