R.J.W. Evans

Hungary in the Habsburg Monarchy in the 19th Century
The British Dimension ¹

 

Much distinguished work on the history of Anglo-Hungarian contacts has been accomplished over the last 100 years, since Lajos Kropf, an erudite immigrant engineer settled in London, and Arthur Yolland, a young professor of English in Budapest, began to take an interest in the subject during the years around 1900. It was always strongest on themes of culture - especially what is nowadays called political culture - and literature, and dominated by contributions from the Hungarian side: from Sándor Fest, the pioneering Anglicist at Debrecen, the scholar-littérateur István Gál and the great lexicographer László Országh to the more recent expertise of Tibor Frank and Géza Jeszenszky, besides surveys by Aurél Varannai and Lóránt Czigány of interactions in the sphere of creative writing. The more narrowly British share in such research, led by George Cushing, has been far more modest. ² I do not propose to retrace that ground directly, but rather to concentrate on the issues raised in this context by Hungary's shifting relationship with the rest of the Austrian Monarchy, on what might therefore be called the British co-ordinates of Dualism. What follows is a sketch from the years of the two states' closest co-operation, in the wars against Revolutionary and then Napoleonic France, to the eve of the widest breach, which was opened up between them by the war of 1914. More stress will be laid on the British side of the picture - not least because, however marginal Hungary might be to the country's public life, British attitudes enjoyed far greater international resonance. But I shall also seek at least to hint at certain Hungarian views which represent a kind of counterpoint.
British observers at the beginning of the period entertained two basic perceptions which might overlap, but seemed essentially incompatible: Hungary as country and Hungary as province. The former had been sustained by reminiscences of the medieval kingdom, as mediated mostly through the anti-Ottoman literature of the early modern centuries. The latter derived from the growing body of knowledge about the Austrian Monarchy and its component parts, though much vagueness persisted - and not only in distant Britain - about where the role of the Habsburgs as emperors of the (German) Reich ended and their functions as sovereign rulers of an ill-defined Austria began. ³ A growing number of travellers, from whom at this stage most British information derived, encountered both options, in reverse order of succession, since they normally began their journey in Vienna. There they were fed Austrian stereotypes about the lands across the Leitha, only to react against these often enough on proper acquaintance, especially from the 1790s onward. 'Nothing can exceed the horror with which a true Austrian regards both Hungary and its inhabitants', wrote John Paget in 1839, and his entire book constituted a kind of refutation of that starting-point. ⁴
Yet Paget, who married and settled in Transylvania, came to have his own reasons for being jaundiced about Vienna. As a geographical organizing principle - evident too in cartography - the traditional separate treatment of Hungary was surely weakened by the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 (likewise probably by the preceding extinction of an independent Poland, since the two commonwealths in the east of the continent had often been handled together) and the proclamation of a free-standing 'Habsburg Monarchy' or 'Kaisertum Oesterreich' in its stead. There is a curious simultaneity about the appearance at that very moment of the History of the House of Austria by William Coxe, a much-travelled cleric and minor diplomat. For all its failings - and it was a hidebound, pedestrian compilation from the first - this remained the only general history of the area for decades to come, perpetuating a subordinate view of Hungary, as exotic appendage within the patrimony of its august rulers. ⁵

Though Coxe was evidently not much moved by his own visit to the country in 1794, an extending network of personal links in the earlier nineteenth century would help mould British views. Alongside the leisured travellers, many of whom can already almost be called tourists, since their itinerary was shaped by the new attraction of steamship cruises on the Danube, came others who carried employable skills. Most conspicuous in their effects perhaps were skilled workers in some of the young industrial trades, not least the bridge-builders who accompanied the two Clarks to work on the Budapest Lánchíd (Chain Bridge) and allied projects. More numerous, however, and continuing to be so throughout the next decades, were the grooms and stableboys, huntsmen, and jockeys who served the new equestrian establishments in the Hungarian countryside, where British models stood in equal reverence once they had been made respectable by the great reformer, Count István Széchenyi. It would evidently be impossible to divine much about the attitude of such men to the political culture of their host realm, or even about that of their immediate social superiors; though among the 200 or so British cavalry officers noted by Paget in the Austrian army, Richard Guyon, later a hero in the war of 1848 - 9, can hardly have been the only incipient Hungarophile. ⁶
Altogether more can be known about the employers of those grooms and jockeys, Hungary's aristocrats, with their regular British connections, often through marriage. Paget's association with the barons Wesselényi - the truculent liberal, Miklós, was his brother-in-law - gave him an oppositional perspective; but other significant linkages were far more Austrian in allegiance, like those around Pál Esterházy, long-time ambassador for the Habsburgs in London. Prince Paul's son and heir Miklós married the daughter of the earl of Jersey, Lady Sarah Child-Villiers; though having borne him six children in a decade she died, still in the flower of her life, and rests in a family vault amid fair parkland in her native Oxfordshire. Still more conspicuous, because recorded in his precious Diaries, are István Széchenyi's British relations and friends. They included the sisters Caroline and Selina Meade, from an Irish clan settled in Vienna and both objects of his early passion, though the one married his brother Pál and the other a Bohemian rival. The Meades' brother Richard, 3rd earl of Clanwilliam, rose high in the British diplomatic service. Then there was István's niece Julie, with an Anglo-Welsh husband, and especially the radiant but capricious Charlotte Strachan, from another pair of eligible sisters, who married Manó Zichy-Ferraris and evidently captivated Hungarian high society in the 1840s. But she too, like Sarah Child, went to an early grave, though her vault, by contrast, adorns the Calvinist church in central Pest. ⁷
Against the broadly loyalist stance of such people, with their direct line to Vienna, stood two features, one traditional and one more novel, which were registered as distinctive of pre-March Hungary within the Habsburg context. Protestantism had long been a factor in British perceptions of the country, and it retained a certain motivating power: not for nothing was Paget, though unimpeachably a landed gentleman, a rare example of upper-class Unitarianism (his Wesselényi spouse belonged to the Reformed church). There were even some missionaries, mainly Scottish, albeit direct contacts had by now become less intensive and their political implications less clear. Ancient in form but more recent in provenance was the constitutional link. Britons showed some respect for the famous parallel uncovered by Hungarian patriots in the 1790s between their Golden Bull of 1222 and the English Magna Carta of seven years earlier, which involved a sharp contrast with the Austrian historical experience, the more so as it played on Hungary's pre-Habsburg medieval heritage. Yet British commentators, such as the well-informed travel writers Richard Bright and Julia Pardoe ⁸, just as regularly censured the noble privilege which lay at the root of Hungary's inherited constitutional freedoms.
So far our two perceptions of Hungary's situation - country or province? - appear to have remained in fairly even but uneasy balance. To bring them together would involve engaging the whole issue of (con)federal elements within the structure of Habsburg government, a subject largely taboo at home and long little discussed abroad during the age of Metternich. The first stage in unveiling it was the Zollverein debate, within and beyond Germany. The prospect of a customs union in Central Europe touched British economic interests throughout the region, and these were already prominent in commentary on Hungary from that quarter, as in the travel narratives of Townson and Bright. ⁹ That formed the main setting for the path-breaking activity of Joseph Blackwell, who became a semi-official agent in Pest-Buda in the 1840s and the first of his countrymen to look for a coherent British policy, especially in commercial matters, towards Hungary as such. Later he even embraced a precocious kind of 'Great Hungary' vision, including federal arrangements with the South Slavs. ¹⁰

Blackwell found himself highly popular in pre-March Hungary, since he embodied most visibly a nation which had begun to excite genuine intellectual enthusiasm there. 'Angolország' became a place of pilgrimage, with its industrial, mercantile and social progress and its well-modulated political freedoms, particularly after the suffrage reform legislation of 1832. English-language learning enjoyed a vogue, at least in higher society; ¹¹ English cultural influence spread, especially in architecture and garden design. The practical sense of the English was valued: "die Teutschen schreiben viel, die Franzosen sprechen viel, und die Engländer thun viel", as Széchenyi recorded in his Diary already at the time of his first visit to the United Kingdom in 1815. ¹² This was not, however, perceived as mere dependence: under the title 'English Words of Hungarian Origin', an article in the popular scientific journal Tudományos Gyuýjtemény listed over 300 (many of them with irreproachable Indo-European stems!). ¹³ Nor - more seriously - did it imply mere approbation, for some noted the shortcomings too. "Nowadays one is easily accused of Anglomania", as Széchenyi put it in his first book, Hitel, published in 1830. The disapproval included British colonization (not least on Széchenyi's own part). ¹⁴ Yet Hungarian observers apparently failed to connect this with their own 'imperial' or (to employ the native expression then gaining ground) 'közjogi' problems inside the Habsburg Monarchy.
Moreover, the more appeal was made, via the Golden Bull, to Magna Carta, the more the model seemed to be that of a purely English political and social system. Thus Scotland and all it stood for - David Hume, Adam Smith, Walter Scott, the superb medical tradition, the visits to Edinburgh and to the romantic but largely tamed Highlands - these were the fruits of Anglicizing tendencies and belonged organically to the rise of the 'Engländerek'. 'Irlandia', by contrast, was a stain precisely because of being left out of that prosperity. Several Hungarian visitors experienced there the "appalling penury, the like of which I had never seen elsewhere", as the future premier, Bertalan Szemere, observed. "Ireland speaks", wrote Baron József Eötvös, the liberal theorist, "and the nimbus dissolves. Now the tyrant steps before us, who having oppressed a nation for seven centuries, once nationality, religion, and with them every other pretext has been exhausted, begins to quake before his servant..." "How is it possible" - asked Széchenyi in Hitel - "to exclude such a large part of a nation from its patrimony? That would be as if somewhere all of a country's burdens were carried by the ploughman, in a servile capacity, and a few thousand families lived like useless drones off the fat of the land!!!" ¹⁵
His three exclamation marks signify that Széchenyi was not thinking just of the United Kingdom. And yet Ireland still did not rank as a fundamental flaw, or as a serious analogy to the Austro-Hungarian relationship. Széchenyi - preparing his book during 1829 - soon relaxed when he heard the news of Catholic emancipation. ¹⁶ The young Queen Victoria should pay a visit to correct the abuses, reckoned Szemere a few years later. Even Eötvös, who saw most deeply and wrote an earnest historical study of the underlying religious-cum-racial discrimination and repression, trusted in the British government's newly-implemented measures and urged the O'Connell party to forbearance. He did not regard the Irish issue as a question of either nationality or self-government. István Gorove and Lőrinc Tóth, two further travellers from the ranks of the liberal opposition, likewise both met O'Connell, but they detected no kind of political similarities with the Hungarian situation. ¹⁷ Thus O'Connell did not become a paragon for Hungarian reformers, as would be the case, thanks to the journalist Karel Havlíc©ek, with their equivalents in Bohemia. Besides, the best-instructed Irish observer of the Monarchy at that time, the physician William Wilde - Oscar's father - was strongly Austrophile. ¹⁸
When the Continent exploded in revolution in 1848, there was widespread British acclaim for young nations breaking free from their ancien regimes. But that meant in the first instance Italy and (more guardedly) Germany, not yet the Hungarians. The official view continued to be that "the British government has no knowledge of Hungary except as one of the component parts of the Austrian Empire", in Palmerston's notorious words to László Szalay who had arrived in London to seek support for the new regime in Pest-Buda; and the public at large hardly seems to have disagreed until the spring of 1849, when the Habsburgs called on Russian troops to restore their authority. ¹⁹ Then suddenly Hungary became, to most British eyes, a country with the right to self-defence, not a province at the mercy of ruthless autocrats. That sympathy came too late for Blackwell, who had been forced to abandon his campaign. And it issued in a passion for Blackwell's bęte noire, the man whom this best-informed Briton of his day regarded as a dangerous agitator: Lajos Kossuth.
Kossuth was, of course, a liberal hero, and his triumphs abroad consolidated Hungary's constitutional claims. However, we should note that his cult in the United Kingdom - however much the Lutheran Kossuth himself scrupulously eschewed religious issues - coincided with a peak of revived anti-Catholic agitation there, and that he excited particular fervour among Nonconformists. ²⁰ At all events the extremer wave of adulation rapidly subsided. It had again, as with the Hungarian connection in the pre-March years, involved a number of high-status women, like Lady Langdale and her daughter Jane, who married Count Sándor Teleki, or Lady Stafford, who was involved with Széchenyi's son Béla. Such people mainly soon passed, or reverted, to Italophilia, whose symbiosis with Hungarophilia in the mid-nineteenth century would merit further study (Italy was also a main focus of the Protestant crusade). ²¹
The British - with the ironic exception of Blackwell - manifested next to no interest in confederal plans for Danubian Europe, of the kind formulated by the exile Kossuth. But nor did an independent Hungary, within whatever borders, make any sense. The post-World War One scenario still lay far in the future. Rather the Kossuthist enthusiasm left a sediment of support for the events which led to Hungary's reconciliation with the Habsburgs in 1867. Indeed, by dint of some slightly creative diplomatic activity in the Blackwell tradition by Graham Dunlop and the young Robert Morier, the government in London marginally contributed to that outcome. ²² Tibor Frank has ably chronicled British satisfaction over the Compromise: the very word, as a translation of kiegyezés or Ausgleich, hints at a degree of decent moderation on both sides. Altogether the 1860s witnessed a peak of British interest in the Monarchy, most of it broadly favourable to the constitutional outcome. ²³ It went with pleasure at seeing the Austrians cleared out of Italy and Germany, Catholic views - like those of the young (Lord) Acton - carrying little weight. Not by accident was the fledgling James Bryce, author of a dazzling and highly influential account of the history of the old Reich which viewed the Habsburgs as its chief gravediggers, already moving towards that favour for Hungary which he would sustain throughout his long life. ²⁴
Britons perhaps initially saw the place of Hungary in the Dual Monarchy as a quasi-Dominion arrangement, a point to which I shall return. Then increasingly they may have come to endorse enhanced Hungarian influence as a counterweight to the growing political confusion inside Cisleithania. But the equilibrium with Austria was crucial. It formed a platform for closer contacts with Hungary over the later Victorian decades. They were facilitated by the foundation (at last) of a consulate in Budapest, a post earlier coveted to no avail by Blackwell. Beginning with Edmund Monson in the earlier 1870s, the consuls sought, alongside low-level information-gathering in the region, to promote commercial intercourse. ²⁵ Prominent among economic initiatives were not only the import of Hungarian produce and export of finished goods, but interactions in the machine sector, involving British market-leaders in agricultural machinery, such as Clayton-Shuttleworth, on the one hand, and the innovative Hungarian milling technology - Ganz, Haggenmacher and the rest - on the other. Then there was a cultural nexus: the reception of Hungarian authors, especially the novelist Maurus Jókai (as definitively recorded by Czigány); the first bilingual dictionaries for those more ambitious to find out about the other side; the activities of Arthur Patterson, Yolland's pioneering predecessor in English studies at Budapest. The whole nevertheless operated squarely under the aegis of the Monarchy as a whole, and often via Vienna, as with the Anglo-Austrian Bank. Monson returned as ambassador there in the 1890s.

With the satisfactory ordering, as it seemed, of Hungary's relation to Austria, the constitutional issue shifted to the political and cultural claims of nationality within the country. Of course, that problem was nothing new. Even standard compendia in faraway Britain knew that Hungary was "peopled by numerous distinct races, speaking different languages [of whom] the chief are Hungarians/Magyars, Slavonians, Germans and Wallachians"; and that 1848 had revealed the consequent underlying tensions, with 'the predominant power of the Magyars destroyed and the rival nations who helped to secure the victory to Austria rewarded [!]' ²⁶ Yet Hungary's ethnic diversity appears to have been regarded by Britons in the complacent Victorian era as an essentially ethnographical curiosity, like the yet more complex and picturesque pattern of peoples scattered across the huge expanses of their own empire.
Disapproval of Hungary would gradually grow in Great Britain, in good part from new or revived worries about threats to the authority of the Monarchy which might be exacerbated by the domestic politics of the Hungarian government - and of her Austrian counterpart - vis-ŕ-vis subordinate nationalities. It derived also in roughly equal measure from the beginnings of more generalized pro-Slav views. Whereas earlier Polonophile sentiments in the United Kingdom had sat easily with sympathy for the Hungarian cause, above all in 1848 - 9, now South Slavs, Czechs and Slovaks (and even to some extent Rumanians) entered British consciousness, bringing much less compatible agendas. There was, for instance, the eloquent advocacy of the cause of the Balkan Slavs by the historian Edward Freeman and his son-in-law, the celebrated archaeologist (Sir) Arthur Evans; the philological work of William Morfill, who had contact especially with Czech scholars; and the writings about Bohemia by Frederick Maurice, and then by that country's noted Anglophile aristocrat Francis Lützow from the turn of the century. Not least there was the mighty vogue for the music of Antonín Dvor©ák - he toured England nine times between 1884 and 1896 - and the revaluation, both cultural and political, of Britain's attitudes towards Russia, upon which her dealings with Austria-Hungary would ultimately depend. ²⁷
These partially critical voices, however, as yet lacked almost all contact to Hungary's non-Magyar oppositional forces. Meanwhile the Magyars themselves, and those who increasingly assimilated to Magyar culture (above all from within the Jewish community), came in ever greater numbers to be personally acquainted with British life (which was likewise marked by the rapid integration of Jews). Examples are the Orientalist Arminius Vámbéry and the historian Henrik Marczali, as well as - more to the present purpose - Lajos Kropf and his close contemporary Emil Reich, who compiled the first English-language account of Hungarian literature. Again well-born diplomats - now a Count Apponyi and a Count Károlyi in place of an Esterházy - and other officials were to the fore. But at the same time the Protestant connection gradually attenuated, apart from pockets of intensive co-operation, as amongst the Unitarians; ²⁸ and the constitutional parallel lost much of its thrust, beside its important rhetorical uses, even though scholars (or semi-scholars) engaged with it more and more.
And what about 'Great Britain', in the eyes of such visitors or those who stayed at home? The rarity in Hungarian of that expression and its cognates tells its own tale. 'Anglia' was what mattered. It is true that England anyway represented a far more preponderant element within the whole of the United Kingdom than it had a century earlier, particularly in terms of population statistics (where its share had risen from circa 50 to circa 80 per cent). In that respect the 'English' were far more successful than the 'Magyars'. But the narrowness of focus went deeper, as the Welsh case can show. Wales became, through a famous poem by János Arany, a major symbol of the infraction of Hungary's state rights after 1849. Yet she never meant much more to Hungarians than her (supposedly) butchered bards, despite the ardour of her people for Kossuth. Wales was "an English principality [hercegség], the western part of England proper", according to a typical encyclopaedia entry. Little had changed since Ferenc Pulszky and the Bohemian patriot Leo Thun in the 1840s, arguing about the Slovaks, agreed with each other on one thing: that the modern Celts and their cultures counted for nothing. ²⁹
Much the same applied even to Scotland. The same compendium remains suspiciously terse on the recent history of this 'kingdom united with England' - until we realize a little further on in the work that Adam Smith is regarded as a renowned English writer on political economy. And Britain's Achilles heel? As far as I am aware, Ireland's troubles - and it was famine and emigration there which had done much to massage those population figures in England's favour - came to feature less in Hungarian public opinion by this stage (at least they have not yet been revealed by research). Now the Irish question took on, for some, rather the function of mirroring relations under Habsburg governance. The most notable commentator was Gladstone - the man who already back in 1832, while travelling through Innsbruck, had set eyes on the aged Emperor Francis, and who much later espoused the cause of insurgent Southern Slavs, accompanying it with some thinly-veiled censure of the Habsburgs. From the 1860s to the 1890s Gladstone several times adduced the Dualist pacification as a possible model for Home Rule ("the altogether new experience of Austria-Hungary' [etc.] require consideration of the whole position") ³⁰. Likewise Bryce, one of the most respected Constitutional theorists of the age ³¹. And such views anticipated the Sinn Fein leader Arthur Griffith's fairly detailed and informed Resurrection of Hungary, with its very different spin ³². Already Florence Arnold-Forster, author of a life of Ferenc Deák, had pondered with her Dublin circle the necessity of an 'Irish Deák'. ³³ But Hungarians either paid little attention - or else feared anything which might look like intrusion into British affairs. One wonders what the Budapest press made of Parnell.
If we review these developments at the turn of the twentieth century, we should avoid too much hindsight. The "lost prestige" identified by Jeszenszky, the blackening of Hungary by 1920, is another story. Certainly there was already some recognition of the country's own multinational status as a potential pro-blem. But it would take the constitutional schism of 1905 - 6, followed by a degree of diplomatic estrangement from 1908, all aggravated by larger fears of German hegemony and the increasingly radical dictates of some liberal consciences, to create the climate in which Robert William Seton-Watson and Henry Wickham Steed could move to their root-and-branch censure of Dualism. Even then the die was by no means cast before the political and military outcomes of the Great War. In some ways quite the reverse: 1907, the year of Seton-Watson's first critical examination of the future of the Monarchy, witnessed the triumphant London premier of Lehár's Merry Widow, that apotheosis of the operetta as a vehicle for Austro-Hungarian loyalism. ³⁴
By the fin de sičcle Hungary at last seemed an established, even familiar element on the European scene. A degree of convergence is reflected in the common interests of a Kropf and a Yolland. In social terms too the old aristocratic and diplomatic preference for Austria, still embodied at the end of the century in such as Horace Rumbold, Monson's successor as ambassador, was now to all intents and purposes reconciled with the gentry, middle-class, intellectual and Protestant bases of Hungarophilia. ³⁵ And equine mutualities remained strong, now in both directions: Hungarian horses were sold to the British army for service in the Boer war. ³⁶ Dualism still looked a balanced, even model constitutional arrangement. Hungary was no longer perceived to be either a separate country or an incorporated province, but an integral part of the 'bipartite state called the Austro-Hungarian Empire' (or some similar formulation), the more so given the apparently final uncoupling of Austria from the geopolitical space of the Reich, alias Germany, since her defeat by Prussia. ³⁷
In fact 1867, the very year of the Compromise, had been a pivotal year in the constitutional history of the British Empire too: the British North America Act brought together Upper and Lower Canada with New Brunswick and Nova Scotia (thus creating an integral realm at home) as a federal union under the crown, autonomous except for certain common affairs with the motherland,
after a long period (since the Durham report in the late 1830s) of instability and threat of foreign invasion. Have we not heard all that before, in a central European context? Thus Canada became the first formal Dominion - Australia, South Africa and New Zealand, even Ireland in due course, would follow. Did Hungary take notice of this? Probably not much. Yet such themes offer exciting perspectives in the comparative study of empire: the oldest European incarnation of the idea, long furiously impugned from within by the Hungarians, as against its most vigorous contemporary global manifestation. ³⁸ British-Hungarian linkages afford some of the wherewithal which gives us scope to juxtapose the two.

1 - This is the revised text of a talk given to the Britannia-Kör in Budapest on 4 April 2003. Some related reflections in R.J.W. Evans, 'Hungary in British Historiography: C.A. Macartney and his Forerunners', in Mives semmiségek. Elaborate Trifles. Tanulmányok Ruttkay Kálmán 80. születésnapjára, ed. G. Ittzés and A. Kiséry (Piliscsaba, 2002), 476 - 92; and id., 'Austria-Hungary and the Victorians: Some Views and Contacts', in Great Britain and Central Europe, 1867 - 1914, ed. Evans et al. (Bratislava, 2003, 11 - 23).
2 - The main titles for present purposes, here once for all: essays of Sándor Fest now collected in Skóciai Szent Margittól a Walesi bárdokig. Magyar-angol történelmi és irodalmi kapcsolatok (From Saint Margaret of Scotland to the Bards of Wales) ed. Lóránt Czigány and János
H. Korompay (B[uda]p[est], 2000); István Gál, Magyarország, Anglia és Amerika, különös tekintettel a szláv világra; vázlatok a nemzetközi vonatkozások köréből (Hungary, England and America, with Special Regard to the Slav World. Sketches of International Relations. Bp. [1944]); Tibor Frank, The British Image of Hungary, 1865 - 70 (Bp., 1976); Géza Jeszenszky, Az elveszett presztízs: Magyarország megítélésének megváltozása Nagy-Britanniában, 1894 - 1918 (The Lost Prestige. Hungary's Changing Appraisal in Great Britain. Bp. [1986]); Aurél Varannai, Angliai visszhang (Bp., 1974); Lóránt Czigány, A magyar irodalom fogadtatása a viktoriánus Angliában, 1830 - 1914 (The Reception of Hungarian Literature in Victorian Engand. Bp., 1976). The contributions of Országh and Cushing remain widely scattered.
3 - Much miscellaneous material is listed in György Kurucz (comp.), Guide to Documents and Manuscripts in Great Britain Relating to the Kingdom of Hungary from the Earliest Times to 1800 (L[ondon], 1992). Cf. Grete Klingenstein, 'The Meanings of "Austria" and "Austrian" in the Eighteenth Century', in Royal and Republican Sovereignty in Early Modern Europe, ed. R. Oresko et al. (Cambridge, 1997), 423 - 78.
4 - Paget, Hungary and Transylvania (2 vols., L., 1839), i.2.
5 - Apart from the inclusion as a supplement from the 1850s of Count Franz Hartig's thoroughly conservative 'Genesis of the [1848] Revolution in Austria', successive editions of Coxe remained substantially unchanged.
6 - Grooms etc.: Gróf Széchenyi István naplói (The Diaries of Count István Széchenyi) ed. Gy. Viszota (6 vols., Bp. 1925 - 39), ii.368, iii.10; cf. Evans, 'Austria-Hungary and the Victorians'. Officers: Paget, Hungary, ii.46; István Deák, The Lawful Revolution. Louis Kossuth and the Hungarians, 1848 - 9 (New York, 1979), 11.
7 - Cf., in general, R.J.W. Evans, 'Széchenyi and Austria', in History and Biography. Essays in Honour of Derek Beales, ed. T.C.W. Blanning and David Cannadine (Cambridge, 1996), 113 - 41. Important information on the Clanwilliam family and their papers is at ttp://www.proni.gov.uk/records/private/clanwm.htm. I plan to draw together elsewhere the story of Charlotte Zichy-Ferraris.
8 - Bright, Travels from Vienna through Lower Hungary (Edinburgh, 1818); Pardoe, The City of the Magyar, or Hungary and her Institutions in 1839 - 40 (3 vols., L. 1840)
9 - Robert Townson, Travels in Hungary, with a Short Account of Vienna in the Year 1793 (L., 1797). For contemporary British views on the Zollverein and related questions, see most recently British Envoys to Germany, 1816 - 66, ed. Sabine Freitag and Peter Wende (Cambridge, 2000), vol.i, and Franz L. Müller, Britain and the German Question. Perceptions of Nationalism and Political Reform (Basingstoke, 2002).
10 - J.A. Blackwell magyarországi küldetései, 1843 - 51 (J.A. Blackwell's Missions in Hungary) ed. Éva Haraszti-Taylor (Bp. 1989); Tamás Kabdebó, Blackwell küldetése (Blackwell's Mission. Bp. 1990): two simultaneous but quite separate editions/commentaries.
11 - Ernő Solymos, 'Angol nyelvtanulás Magyarországon' (The Learning of English in Hungary), in Angol Filológiai Tanulmányok, ii. (1937), 118 - 30.
12 - Széchenyi naplói, i.158.
13 - Reproduced in Tudományos Gyuýjtemény [válogatás], ed. István Juhász (2 vols., Bp., 1985), i.397 - 409.
14 - Széchenyi, Hitel (Credit) 115; Naplói, iii.76, 220, 306.
15 - Szemere, Utazás külföldön (Journey Abroad) ed. Ágota Steinert (Bp., 1983), 354ff. 'Szegénység Irlandban' (Poverty In Ireland), in Eötvös, Reform és hazafiság, (Reform and Patriotism) ed. István Fenyő (Bp., 1978), 133-205, at 133; translated in Ireland through Continental Eyes, ed. M. Hurst (Bristol, 2000), 1 - 63. Széchenyi, Hitel, 115 - 17.
16 - Ibid., n.: 'azon időközben, mig ezen munka iratott, Irlandia természetes jusaiba lépett.'
17 - Cf. László Országh in Angol Filológiai Tanulmányok, iii(1938), 112 - 30 at 124 - 5.
18 - Oscar Wildes Vater über Metternichs Österreich, ed. Irene Montjoye (Frankfurt a.M. etc., 1989).
19 - Charles Sproxton, Palmerston and the Hungarian Revolution (Cambridge, 1919), still covers this ground. Cf. Thomas Kabdebo, Diplomat in Exile: Francis Pulszky's Political Activities in England, 1849 - 60 (Boulder, Colo./New York, 1979), 7; Jeszenszky, Elveszett presztízs, 45f.
20 - For background see the superb account of Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church. I: 1829 - 59 (2nd edn., L., 1972), ii, esp. 232-309. Welsh Dissenters: Marian Henry Jones, 'Wales and Hungary, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion', 1968, 7 - 28.
21 - Some reflections on that phenomenon in R.J.W. Evans, 'Linda White és Gál Polixena: egy barátság (Linda White and Polixena Gál: A Friendship), 1857 - 63', Aetas, 1995/4, 71 - 100.
22 - Lajos Lukács, 'Anglia és a magyar kérdés 1860 - 61-ben. Mr Graham Dunlop magyarországi küldetése' (England and the Hungarian Question in 1860 - 61), Századok, cxxiv (1990), 242 - 74; id., 'Anglia és a magyar kérdés 1865 - 66-ban. R.B.D. Morier magyarországi küldetése', (England and the Hungarian Question in 1865 - 66. The Hungarian Mission of R.B.D. Morier) Történelmi Szemle, xxxiii(1991), 185 - 202.
23 - Frank, Image of Hungary, 177ff. Harry Hanak, 'Die Einstellung Großbritanniens und der Vereinigten Staaten zu Österreich(-Ungarn)', in Die Habsburgermonarchie, 1848 - 1918, ed. A. Wandruszka and P. Urbanitsch. Vol. VI: Die Habsburgermonarchie im System der internationalen Beziehungen (2 vols., Vienna, 1993), ii. 539 - 85.
24 - Ágnes Deák, 'Lord Acton és Ausztria az 1850 - 60-as évek fordulóján' (Lord Acton and Austria at the Turn of the 1850 and 1860s), Századok, cxxxi (1997), 1157 - 91. On Bryce, for present purposes, see József Balogh, 'Lord Bryce and Hungary', HQ, 4 (1938), 750 - 6.
25 - Károly Tüzes, 'Hungary in the Dual Monarchy as Reflected in British Diplomatic Materials', in Great Britain and Central Europe.
26 - A. Keith Johnston (comp.), A General Dictionary of Geography (L., 1882), 654 - 6.
27 - A still largely untold story? Hints in R.J.W. Evans, Great Britain and East-Central Europe, 1908 - 48. A Study in Perceptions (London, 2002).
28 - E.g. John J. Taylor, 'Narrative of a Visit
to the Unitarian Churches of Transylvania', Theological Review, vi (1869), 1 - 48.
29 - Wekerle László (comp.) Kislexikon (Bp., [1886]), col. 1978.; cf. in general R.J.W. Evans, Wales in European Context. Some Historical Reflections (Aberystwyth, 2001).
30 - The Gladstone Diaries, ed. M.R.D. Foot and H.C.G. Matthew (14 vols., Oxford 1968 - 94), entries for 27 - 8.6.32; 4.5.80; 8.9.85; and cf. 17.7.85.
31 - Frank, Image of Hungary, 194f. & n. 470.
32 - Arthur Griffith, The Resurrection of Hungary. A Parallel for Ireland (Dublin, 1904). Cf. most recently Thomas Kabdebo, Ireland and Hungary. A Study in Parallels (Dublin, 2001), 19 - 46.
33 - Florence Arnold-Forster's Irish Journal, ed. T.W. Moody et al. (Oxford, 1988), esp. 214, 252, 369.
34 - Graphic description in W. Macqueen-Pope and D.L. Murray, Fortune's Favourite. The Life and Times of Franz Lehár (London 1953). Cf. the argument of Moritz Csáky, Ideologie der Operette und Wiener Moderne. Ein kulturhistorischer Essay zur österreichischen Identität (Vienna, 1996).
35 - Cf. the argument of Jeszenszky, Elveszett presztízs, 31ff.
36 - Hanak, 'Einstellung Großbritanniens', 561f.
37 - Quoted from Johnston, loc. cit. The terminology of 'empire' was, of course, strictly inapplicable - as Hungarians insisted - to the Habsburg Monarchy after 1867, though it continued to be widely used abroad (and unofficially in Austria too).
38 - Masterly new reflections on this whole subject in D.C.B. Lieven, Empire: The Russian Empire and its Rivals (L., 2000).

 

R.J.W. Evans
is Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford. He has written and (co-)edited a number of works on the history of the Habsburg Monarchy, most recently and relevantly Great Britain and Central Europe,1867 - 1914, Bratislava: VEDA, 2003.