Royal Pains: A Rogues' Gallery of Brats, Brutes, and Bad Seeds

by Leslie Carroll

  Some historians claim that Erzsébet was arrested along with her servants; others state that because she was a noblewoman she could not be arrested. Because aristocrats were not permitted to be placed on trial, Erzsébet was never called upon to testify in her defense, although King Matthias’s royal envoy wanted the countess to be tried like any other murderer and to be compelled to take the stand. “There are crimes to which no more than allusion has been made,” the envoy insisted, and the crown wanted an airtight conviction.

  Thurzó, however, was intent on shielding his kinswoman from the inevitable (and devastating) publicity. He maintained that putting Erzsébet herself on trial would permanently destroy the names of both the Báthory and Nádasdy families, damaging the reputations of her children, relations, and in-laws, all of whom had no connection to any of her crimes. “As long as I am the Lord Palatine of Hungary, this will not come to pass,” Thurzó insisted. “The families which have won in the eyes of the nation such high honors on the battlefields shall not be disgraced by the murky shadow of this bestial female. . . . In the interest of future generations of Nádasdys everything is to be done in secret. For if a court were to try her, the whole of Hungary would learn of her murders. . . .”

  Consequently, in the name of protecting their own reputations, the powerful Báthory and Nádasdy families were able to keep all mention of Erzsébet’s heinous deeds—her mass murders, cannibalism, and vampirism—out of the official trial records.

  From January 2 through 7, 1611, Erzsébet’s accomplices were tried before a panel of twenty judges. In a highly unusual move for a trial involving charges of witchcraft and sorcery, the Church waived its right to try Erzsébet, or even to question her—an indication of the Báthorys’ level of influence in the realm. Two hundred witnesses testified against the absent countess.

  What they had to say undoubtedly shocked the court. When asked about the recruitment process Erzsébet’s servants testified that they went from village to village seeking new blood, so to speak, and they named additional accomplices who performed the same duties.

  Dorottya Szentes, known as “Dorka,” testified that when her mistress was ailing and not feeling physically up to the task of inflicting major torture, “she would draw one of the serving maids suddenly to herself and bite a chunk of flesh from her cheeks and sink her teeth into her breast and shoulders. She would stick needles into a girl’s fingers and say, ‘If it hurts you, you famous whore, pull them out’ but if the girl dared to draw the needles out her Ladyship ordered her to be beaten and her fingers slashed up.”

  And Ilona Jó, another accomplice (and the nanny for Erzsébet’s children), told the judges that “Both her Ladyship and the women burned them [the servant girls] on their lips with the iron used to goffer [pleat] her ruffs,” as well as in their “nose and the inside of their mouths.”

  The accomplices also testified that the girls, who were usually starved before they were tortured, were occasionally fed the roasted flesh of recent victims. Cannibalism was also inflicted upon the youths who dared to look lustfully upon young girls. Janós Ponikenusz, the priest from Csejthe who eventually blew the whistle on Erzsébet, reported that “We have heard here from the mouths of girls who had survived the ordeal that some of their fellow victims were forced to eat their own flesh roasted on fire. The flesh of other girls was chopped up fine like mushrooms, cooked and flavored, and given to young lads who did not know what they were eating.”

  Among the other revelations was the fate of a twelve-year-old girl named Pola who had managed to escape Erzsébet’s clutches but was pursued by Dorka and Ilona and brought back to the castle. Pola was placed inside a spherical cage lined with dozens of spikes. As the cage was hauled up by a pulley, the unfortunate child was pierced all over and bled to death.

  An aristocratic girl who tried to flee was also recaptured but committed suicide in her cell, preferring to die by her own hand than those of her tormentors. And one of Erzsébet’s diary entries referred to a young maid who had died too quickly for her demise to provide much amusement; in her notations the countess deemed the girl “too small.”

  Matthias’s representative also demanded that the countess’s four accomplices be questioned about the torture and murder of the twenty-five young noblewomen, because the eleven identical questions posed to each of the defendants during the trial didn’t even refer to the subject! But in the long run, the additional interrogation wouldn’t have mattered, because the outcome of the trial offered few surprises.

  Finally a verdict was rendered: The servant girl Zusanna was acquitted. Katarína was imprisoned for life. The dwarf Ficzko was beheaded and then burned. Erzsi, Dorka, and Ilona were all pronounced guilty of being witches; and because their fingers had been quite literally “dipped in the blood of Christians,” these appendages were ripped from their hands with hot pincers, a weapon with which they were undoubtedly all too familiar.

  But when it came to the countess’s punishment, the Royal Magyar Chamber sent a petition to Matthias in March 1611, urging him to forgo the death penalty. “The choice is yours, O King, between the executioner’s sword and perpetual imprisonment for Erzsébet Báthory. But we advise you not to execute her, because no one really stands to gain anything from the alternative.” What the royal chamber was really saying was that treating a powerful member of the ruling class like a common criminal was bad for business. In the same blue-blooded vein, the High Court of Justice could not sentence Erzsébet to death because they had not found her personally complicit in the murder of the twenty-five noblewomen. Thurzó had done his best to suppress the information about the countess’s literal bloodbaths. The High Court determined that the quintet of peasant accomplices was entirely responsible for the girls’ deaths. King Matthias knew it was untrue and wrote a letter to that effect, but even a sovereign could not overturn a verdict rendered in a court of law. Although Matthias was confident of Erzsébet Báthory’s complicity, he remained powerless to affect the wheels of justice, no matter how unevenly they turned.

  Still, the countess did not get off entirely scot-free, and her sentence was rendered from a surprising source. Since Erzsébet’s rank and influence had prevented her from being tried, her relatives took it upon themselves to exact punishment, an action that was hardly altruistic, because it conveniently kept her property within the family. (And because Erzsébet had cleverly, and legally, willed her property to her children, who were completely unconnected to her crimes, the crown could not have touched her estates even if she were to be executed.)

  It was the ultimate house arrest. Erzsébet’s family had her walled up within her bedchamber in Castle Csejthe, leaving only small slits in the thick walls and at the bottom of the heavy door that provided a bit of light and air and permitted food and water to be passed into the room. Immured in her cell, the “Blood Countess” was no longer considered a danger to anyone and she remained out of reach of King Matthias. She was denied all human contact; unseen hands delivered her daily nutrition. The workmen who bricked up her chamber placed a quartet of scaffolds at each corner of the castle walls to indicate that a condemned person dwelled within.

  Erzsébet’s house arrest lasted a little more than three years. On August 21, 1614, the fifty-four-year-old countess was discovered lying facedown in her makeshift prison, having recently breathed her last. She was buried in the church at Csejthe, but after an outcry from the villagers, who refused to have a serial killer reposing among them, Erzsébet’s body was moved to the Báthory family crypt located near her birthplace, at Ecsed.

  In 1729, one hundred and eighteen years after her servants were tried and executed, the minutes of their trial were discovered by a Jesuit priest named Laszló Turáczi. The paper had substantially deteriorated, making some of the testimony illegible. Rats had chewed off part of the final page. In 1744, Turáczi published a treatise on Erzsébet Báthory, based on the documents he had found, as well as others relating to the trial that had been preserved in the Hapsbu
rg archives in Vienna for years before being sent on to Budapest. Finally the gruesome story of Erzsébet Báthory was brought to light.

  Although we may view Erzsébet’s Transylvanian countryman Vlad Dracula (or even Ivan the Terrible, the other aristocratic, autocratic butcher in this volume) as a mass murderer, Vlad might have argued in his defense (if he didn’t impale you first) that his brutality was a necessary evil in order to maintain law and order in a culture that lived and died by the sword, and to retain his occasionally tenuous possession of the Wallachian crown. Erzsébet Báthory—the “Blood Countess,” the “Beast,” and the “Tigress of Csejthe”—was also a royal mass murderer; but there was no political rationale for her bloodlust. Her atrocities were committed for sport, though admittedly there came a time when they became a vital part of her skin-care regimen. Vanity never had a higher, or more gruesome, price.

  PRINCE HENRY

  Duke of Cumberland and Strathearn

  1745-1790

  DURING THE MIDDLE AGES, AN ENGLISH MONARCH’S younger brothers all too often dedicated their lives to the pursuit of usurpation. By the eighteenth century, when Parliament wielded more political power than the sovereign, the siblings’ primary activity became dissipation; conquests in the boudoir replaced those made on the field of battle. And the poster child for this brand of wildness was the randy and scandalous Prince Henry Frederick, Duke of Cumberland, a younger brother of King George III.

  Actually, the rigidly moral George had two younger brothers whose amorous adventures embarrassed the crown and personally mortified the monarch. But the libidinous exploits of Prince Henry also had a lasting effect on British history.

  The prince was seven years King George’s junior, with the typical Hanoverian coloring—a fair complexion with rosy cheeks. An unusual facial feature, his nearly white eyebrows, made him easy to spot in a crowd. Henry suffered from another Hanoverian trait as well: an impediment that made his speech sound thick. Slight and slender, at least he had somehow avoided the royal family’s gene for corpulence. And he was never regarded as the brightest of the brothers; their sister Augusta observed in 1764 that “dear Henry” would be much admired “if he can learn to think before he speaks.”

  In October 1766, when the prince reached his majority, King George created him Duke of Cumberland and Strathearn in the English peerage, and Baron of Dublin in the Irish peerage. Parliament granted him an annual income of £17,000 (almost $2.9 million today). At the age of twenty-one, Cumberland established his own household in the posh Pall Mall and set out to grab life with both hands—life consisting of a juicy female with a wellpadded bumroll. Lady Sarah Lennox—who enjoyed the distinction of being George III’s first crush—nicknamed Henry “the white pig” after he tried to seduce her, presumably without success.

  In order to present a useful face to society so that Parliament could justify his income, in July of 1766 the young duke assumed the office of Ranger and Keeper of the Great Park at Windsor, a post previously held by his uncle, William Augustus, the former Duke of Cumberland. Henry immediately proceeded to install at Windsor Great Park his mistress of the moment, a petite, vivacious redheaded prostitute named Polly Jones. Her name suited her, as the duke developed a jones for this young lady after spotting her strolling in the Vauxhall pleasure gardens, a usual haunt for women of her ilk. He had purchased Polly’s full-time favors from a madam named Mrs. Mitchell for the impressive sum of £70 (nearly $12,000 in today’s economy).

  Ann Sheldon, another woman of dubious repute, who was canny enough to pen her own memoirs, recalled Cumberland and Polly’s antics at Windsor: I now made frequent visits to Miss Jones, and used to accompany her and The Duke in their walks, which seemed chiefly to be taken in order to amuse His Royal Highness with her tumbling in the grass. . . . While she was tumbling heels over head, and throwing herself into indecent postures, he used to laugh with a degree of violence that I never beheld before or since.

  But not too much later, according to Sheldon, Cumberland had confided that Polly’s vulgarity “quite disgusted him”—at which point he promptly propositioned Miss Sheldon. Ann felt enough sororial affection for a fellow whore to tell Polly what her protector had done.

  In solidarity, both women abandoned the duke. Polly, savvy girl, took her case to the press, claiming that Cumberland had stripped her of everything but the clothes on her back and that she merited restitution, telling anyone who would listen that her former royal lover had sent “the proper officers to dispossess me of my household furniture, which had been provided at his expense, and left me destitute, friendless and almost penniless after he had professed the greatest regard, esteem, and even love for me.” Soon, everyone in London knew her sob story. And before we cue the violins, it should be mentioned that this cavalier behavior was par for the course among the Hanoverian males. Is it any wonder that the Duke of Cumberland would eventually be viewed as a mentor by his nephew, the Prince of Wales? The future George IV would treat the actress Mary Robinson, his first paramour and the toast of Drury Lane, with the same callous disregard when he tired of her charms.

  Although Polly Jones swiftly found herself another noble protector whom she managed to fleece out of an annuity, through her tell-alls she was able to keep the Duke of Cumberland’s name in the press (and in a decidely unflattering light) for more than a year.

  In 1769, London could boast of having sixty newspapers. Several of them were the gossip blogs of their day, little more than sensationalist accounts of the scandalous shenanigans of society’s upper crust. Because of England’s rigid libel laws, the names of the parties in question were referred to by their initials, and often included a few of the letters in between, the intention being to “out” the participants in a scandal without running afoul of the law. To a public avid for salacious gossip, it became a grand guessing game, although the papers tended to print enough clues in a given article to allow little room for conjecture. Those in the know knew.

  That year, Town & Country magazine’s highly popular Tête à Tête feature exposed the Duke of Cumberland in yet another sex scandal, obliquely referring to Henry as “Nauticus” because of his brief career in the Royal Navy. After a year as a midshipman, in 1769 he was promoted to rear admiral; the following year he would receive another promotion, due more to rank than merit, becoming a vice admiral.

  Admiral of vice was more like it.

  The Tête à Tête in question revealed “Nauticus’s” liaisons with various ladies, from Polly Jones to the more sophisticated, and celebrated, courtesan Grace Elliott, an Italian singer-dancer named Anna Zamperini, and Camilla D’Onhoff, a widow of dubious repute who claimed to be a Polish countess. More probably she was the castoff mistress of Poland’s king.

  George III feigned unconcern over the public airing of his brother’s soiled social linen. Rather than reprimand Cumberland for getting his sexual shenanigans splattered all over the press, the king seems to have kept his counsel. But there would come a time when it would be impossible for him to ignore Henry’s escapades.

  Richard, Baron Grosvenor, was one of London’s wealthiest citizens, owning half the real estate in the posh neighborhood of Mayfair. On July 19, 1764, at the age of thirty-three, the tall, swarthy, rakish baron had married a pretty brunette named Henrietta Vernon, though like most men of his class, he didn’t feel bound to give up his horses and his whores just because he needed to beget an heir. In fact he wasn’t faithful for five seconds. Grosvenor was especially fond of blond street girls, procuring many of his conquests from the ubiquitous Ann Sheldon. Small wonder that he was riddled with venereal disease.

  Still in her twenties at the time she met the Duke of Cumberland, Lady Grosvenor was beginning to regret her decision to marry the baron. Theirs had not been a lengthy courtship, as they’d gone to the altar only a month after they’d met during a chance rainstorm in Kensington Gardens.

  About a year after their wedding, Henrietta told her brother that her husband had “used her extremely ill�
�� and she was miserable. After she accomplished her dynastic duty by giving Grosvenor an heir in March 1767, she resumed her former social whirl, where she met the Duke of Cumberland. By the end of 1768 his attentions to her were becoming more persistent. The duke romantically flung himself at the unhappy baroness and she caught him with glee. During the early months of 1769, the lonely and neglected Lady Grosvenor and the young duke grew closer; by then, what had begun as a diverting flirtation had blossomed into a full-blown affair.

  Lord Grosvenor was rich and powerful enough to have informants everywhere. It was easy to spot his wife because the baron’s carriage was very recognizable and Henrietta tended to frequent popular public recreation destinations, like the opera and the pleasure gardens at Vauxhall and Ranelagh. Her twenty-three-year-old royal lover was also quite identifiable, with his odd white eyebrows, as well as his own familiar coach and liveries.

  Nevertheless, the clandestine affair galloped apace, and naturally, Cumberland thought he was being discreet. Henrietta and the duke would tryst at the home of his former lover the countess-courtesan Lady D’Onhoff, who was mercenary enough to charge Henry for the privilege of using her apartments. To arrange their rendezvous, the illicit paramours corresponded through one of Lady D’Onhoff’s servants, heedless of the dangers of committing their passion (and their eventual whereabouts) to paper. They were young and in lust; it was all too heady for either of them to stop and think about the consequences if their affair were to be discovered. After learning from the duke that he was ailing, Lady Grosvenor wrote to him: I thank you for your kind note, your tender manner of expressing yourself calling me your dear friend, and at this time that you should recollect me. I wish I dare be all the time by your bed and nurse you—for you will have nobody near you that love you as I do, thou dearest angel of my soul. O that I could but bear your pain for you I should be happy. What grieves me most is that they who ought to feel don’t know the inestimable prize, the treasure they have in you.