Agnes Bernauer - Tributes To Her Memory

Tributes To Her Memory

In December 1435, Albert endowed a perpetual mass and an annual memorial celebration in the Straubing Carmelite Cloister in memory of Agnes Bernauer. In 1447 he expanded the endowment in her honor. In 1436, his father had an Agnes Bernauer Chapel erected in the cemetery of St. Peter Straubing, probably to appease his son. It is not known whether Agnes was buried in the Carmelite cloister, which was her wish, or whether Albert arranged for the transfer of her mortal remains to the chapel dedicated to her. In any event, a tombstone of red marble with an almost life-size effigy of Agnes Bernauer was fitted into the floor of the chapel. The relief shows her lying with her head on a large pillow. In her right hand, on which she wears two rings, she holds a rosary, and two small dogs at her feet are there to guide her on her way to the hereafter. It was probably an oversight that the year of her death is incorrectly given there as 12 October 1436.

There are only a few records about the memorial endowments for Agnes Bernauer from the next three centuries. In 1508 a certain Johannes Haberlander was the chaplain responsible for the Bernauer Chapel. For its maintenance and the daily reading of the memorial mass he received 17 pounds in Regensburg pence from the ducal treasury. By 1526 his office had been transferred to a Leonhard Plattner, who received for his services 48 guilders and 4 schilling in Viennese pence. It is not known how long the chaplain's office was maintained. All that is known is that the church trustee Franz von Paula Romayr had the tombstone moved to the wall of the chapel in 1785 in order to protect it from further damage “caused by depredatory footsteps”. The grave itself could not be located when the tombstone was repositioned.

Nevertheless, at the beginning of the 19th century the Agnes Bernauer Chapel became a tourist destination. One newspaper (the Bayerische National-Zeitung) even asserted it as being the only reason to pay a visit to Straubing. The locals were happy to supply visitors with information, not all of it reliable. One concerned reader wrote to the Königlich-Bairische Intelligenzblatt in 1813 that the sexton had informed him that Austrian troops had walked off with the remains of Agnes Bernauer. When the German poet August von Platen inspected the gravestone in 1822 he heard from the female sexton that Agnes and Albert had been switched as infants so that she was actually the duke's daughter and he the son of the barber-surgeon, but that the book which would have confirmed this exchange had been stolen by French soldiers.

After excavations in the Chapel at St. Peter failed to produce any results, the Bernauer biographer Felix Joseph Lipowsky had the Carmelite cloister grounds searched in 1897 for evidence of her grave. He found in the cloister archives a note indicating that the grave was in the former Nicholas chapel of the cloister church, but this chapel had been converted to a sacristy after 1692 and the vault underneath filled in. Lipowsky could only assume that her remains were reburied elsewhere during the reconstruction work. Despite subsequent searches, her grave remains undiscovered.

The Bavarian king Ludwig I, who had himself visited the Agnes Bernauer Chapel in 1812 when he was crown prince and later dedicated a poem to Agnes, saw to it that at least the masses for Agnes and Albert were again read in the Carmelite church. Since 1922, only one memorial mass is celebrated annually, due to financial limitations; it is paid for by the Bavarian government.