Baring-Gould’s sources: Anciently venerated at Toss, near Winterthur, in Thurgau. Authority: — A life by Heinrich Murer {1670), derived from the chronicle of the convent of Toss.] S. Elizabeth of Hungary,3 who married the landgrave of Hesse and Thuringia, was the daughter of Andrew, king of Hungary, by his wife Gertrude, daughter of Berchthold, duke of Meran. The same king Andrew in second marriage took Beatrice, daughter of Aldobrandini, marquis of Este, and died in 1228. His wife bore him a posthumous 1 Translations of some of his exquisite sacred poetry will be found in Dr. Neale's Hymns of theEastern Church. London: Hayes, 1862. 2 Commemorated on Nov.:9th.
B. Elizabeth. son, named Stephen, who married a Venetian lady, by whom he had a son, Andrew of Venice, who succeeded to the throne of Hungary in 1290. Andrew had a daughter by a Sicilian wife, whom he named Elizabeth, after her great and saintly ancestor; she was born and baptized at Buda in 1297, and in honour of her birth all the fountains of the city were made to spout wine, and the bells pealed all day long.
On the death of his wife, Fenna of Sicily, Andrew married Agnes, daughter of Albert of Austria, king of the Romans. On the death of Andrew, in 1301, Agnes resolved on betrothing the young Elizabeth, then aged four, to her brother Henry, duke of Austria, and her dowry was fixed at three hundred thousand crowns. But in 1308 an event took place which affected and altered the fate of the princess. The Emperor Albert of Austria, the father of Agnes, was in that year invading Switzerland with his army, and had crossed the ferry of the Reuss in a small boat, leaving his suite on the opposite bank. In the boat with him were four men, John of Suabia, his nephew, whom he had wrongfully kept out of his inheritance, and who had leagued with others to slay him. The other three in the boat were Balm, Walter of Essenbach, and Wart. On reaching the bank, Balm ran the emperor through with his sword, and Walter cleft his skull with a felling-axe. Wart the fourth took no share in the murder. The imperial retainers, terrified, took to flight, leaving their dying master to breathe his last in the arms of a poor peasant who happened to pass.
"A peasant girl that royal head upon her bosom laid, ’ And, shrinking not for woman's dread, the face of death surveyed, Alone she sate. From hill and wood low sunk the mournful sun; Fast gushed the fount of noble blood. Treason his worst had done. With her long hair she vainly pressed the wounds, to staunch their tide, Unknown, on that meek, humble breast, imperial Albert died." Mrs. He mans.
A direful vengeance was wreaked by the children of the murdered monarch; not, however, upon the murderers — for, with the exception of Wart, the only one who did not raise his hand against him, they all escaped1 — but upon their families, relations, and friends; and one thousand victims are believed to have expiated, with their lives, a crime of which they were totally innocent Queen Agnes gratified her spirit of revenge with the sight of these horrid executions, exclaiming, while sixty-three unfortunate men were butchered before her, “Now I bathe in May-dew!” But ere long the dead men came back to haunt the ferocious queen, and in the agony of her remorse she founded the convent of Konigsfelden, near Brugg, in 1310, and endowed it with the confiscated property of those she had slaughtered. She retired into it, and endeavoured by penance, prayer, and almsgiving, to stifle the qualms of a guilty conscience for the bloody deeds which she had committed. It is recorded that a holy hermit, to whom she applied for absolution, replied to her, “Woman! God is not to be served with bloody hands, nor by the slaughter of innocent persons, nor by convents built with the plunder of orphans and widows, but by mercy and forgiveness of injuries.”
The horror of this great crime must have weighed on the princess Elizabeth, then a child, and the tears and frenzied remorse of her stepmother and guardian were some of first storms of life which swept before her young eyes.2 They had their effect She shrank from a position in the world, and at the head of a state, which might involve her in crime either as the instigator or as the victim; and she quitted the world to seek peace and safety and innocence 1 John of Suabia died a monk at Pisa in 1313. 2 Thus we are expressly told by the chronicler, “ Snper qnibus malis tantoquc effuso sanguine graviter compuncta Elizabeth est.” 3. Elizabeth.
in the cloister. Her stepmother desired her to remain with her in the convent of Konigsfelden, but Elizabeth recoiled from that home founded in blood, and the constant presence of the wolfish queen. She declared she must reside elsewhere, and she entered her noviciate in the Dominican convent of Toss, when aged thirteen, under a harsh superior placed over her through the influence of her stepmother Agnes, who treated Elizabeth with such severity that all the sisters pitied her. The object of the queen of Hungary was to disgust Elizabeth with cloister life, that she might return to the world, and fulfil her engagement to Henry of Austria. Before she took the veil, Henry visited the convent to claim his bride. Henry was so angry to see her in the religious habit, that he rudely plucked the veil off her head, and tore and stamped on it. He then urged his suit in a manner more likely to address itself to her heart, and Elizabeth promised to give him an answer after a brief delay. When he had left, she cast herself before the Blessed Sacrament in the Church, and besought guidance. On the return of the duke, she refused him, and was thenceforth left unmolested in her tranquil home. At one time she had for director a friar of the same order, whose rough treatment distressed her greatly. The man was bluff and uncultivated, and could not sympathise with the conscientious scruples and sensitive pains of her delicate soul, and showed great impatience at the recital of her troubles, which he regarded as the results of a morbid sentimentality. She then had recourse to the Divine Guide, and kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament, poured out her griefs in His ear. Nor was it much better when the friar, informed that his penitent was a princess, changed his tone to one of obsequious apology.
She was thoroughly unpresuming, and the sister who served as cook, declared that in all the twenty-four years that she had known her, she never found fault- with her food. Her garments were threadbare, so as to call forth the angry remonstrance of her stepmother, when she went to visit her in her convent at Konigsfelden, “ What ! you, a king’s daughter, wear an old gown like this Her cell was perfectly plain, with a crucifix, a pallet bed with straw mattress, a coverlet and blankets. The washing utensils were of wood, and were kept scrupulously clean. She was very devout at all the choir offices, and one of the sisters in a dream saw Elizabeth singing matins, and every word came sparkling out of her mouth as a diamond or a pearl, and fell into a bowl she held. These were the only jewels she possessed. Her stepmother kept from her all her fortune, and only allowed her just enough for her subsistence, and on one occasion added insult to injury by showing her all the jewels that had belonged to her father, King Andrew, which Agnes kept for herself in a great oak chest in her cell at Konigsfelden.1 She did not give Elizabeth a single gem. This was when Elizabeth, after an illness, was sent to the baths at Baden, in Thurgau, and she took the opportunity to visit the old queen. Before she returned to Toss she made a pilgrimage to Einsiedeln. She was ill again four years after, and her life was despaired of; when on S. Elizabeth’s feast in the night, after the bell had called all the sisters to matins, S. Elizabeth, her patron, appeared to her, leaning over her bed, and taking her head in her hands, laid it on her bosom. Next morning Elizabeth was better, and in a few days was well. For the four last years of her life she suffered from tertian fever.
In her last sickness, which was long and painful, we are told that two sisters were deputed to sit up with her at night. One night both fell asleep; a sudden flash of light 1The chest still exists, and is shown at the secularised abbey. B. Elizabeth.
aroused one, but Elizabeth told her to go to sleep again, and she remained wearily longing for the dawn. Then suddenly the extinguished pendant lamp above her bed kindled of itself, and shed its soft radiance over her, illumining also the form of the Crucified at the foot of her bed, to which she could look, and meditating on His passion, bear her own pains with resignation. And when the last night came, she rose from her bed, and went to the choir and knelt before the adorable Sacrament, and then crawled back to her cell without the sisters who were deputed to watch her, but who had fallen asleep, being aware till too late to prevent it As the day returned, she bade them throw open the window, and she looked out at the May buds and the blue sky, whilst the fresh spring air wafted into her sick room. Then, with her eyes fixed on the sky, she prayed, “ My Lord and my God, Creator and Redeemer of my soul, and He who rewards all our labours in the end, look on me this day with the eyes of Thy mercy, and receive me from this world of woe into Thy celestial country, for the sake of Thy bitter passion and death.” Then turning to the prioress and all the sisters, she thanked them for their kindness to her, and after that, relapsed into silent prayer, and fell asleep in Christ, on the 6th May, 1338, in the forty-first year of her age. She was buried at Toss in the convent church. The convent has been suppressed, and its buildings converted into a factor)7. The monument of the Blessed Elizabeth, with the arms of Hungary on it, is still visible m the existing church, and her remains have been left therein undisturbed.
