The life of the emperor Francis Joseph

by Francis Henry Gribble

CHAPTER VI

Attitude of the Hungarians towards Francis Joseph—They denounce him as a traitor, and banish him from Hungary—Contempt of Austrians for Hungarians—The conquest of Hungary with Russian help—Repression and atrocities—Women flogged by order of Marshal Haynau—Marshal Haynau himself flogged by Barclay and Perkins’ draymen in London, and spat upon by women in Brussels—Popular song written on that occasion.

The state of things which Francis Joseph found on his accession was this: In Vienna, all was over except the shooting and the shouting. Tyrol—the Vendée of Austria—was, as it always had been, loyal. In Bohemia, Windischgraetz had crushed the insurrection as he might have cracked a nut. But Italy and Hungary were still formidable, and had to be reconquered.

In Italy there was a renewal of the fighting; and the work done at Custozza had to be done over again at Novara—Charles Albert then taking a leaf out of the book of the Emperor Ferdinand and abdicating in favour of his son, the famous Victor Emmanuel. In Hungary, the work of conquest had hardly even been begun; and though Jellaçiç had held the Hungarians up at the gates of Vienna, they were in a position to hold him up many times before he could get to the gates of Buda-Pesth. So that the position was extremely critical.

It had been hastily assumed that Francis Joseph would be popular in Hungary. He had once been sent there, as a boy, to represent the Emperor at some public function, had made a fluent speech in the Hungarian language, and had been vociferously cheered. No doubt the precocious bonhomie of his manner had made a favourable impression; but that was not enough at a time when the old Hungarian privileges and the new Hungarian constitution were at issue. The affability of the sovereign was no substitute for the rights of his subjects; and the Hungarians would only consent to love, and be loyal to, the Austrian Emperor “on terms.”

And those terms could not be granted. Francis Joseph, brought up in the school of Metternich, would hardly have been disposed to grant them if his hands had been free; and the men who stood by him—and over him—such men as Windischgraetz and Felix Schwarzenberg—would not have let him grant them if he had wanted to. As they had already saved Vienna for him, so they now proposed to save Austria and Hungary for him—but in their own way, and not in his. Knowing what they wanted, they told him what he wanted; and they had control of the machinery. In order to understand their proceedings, we must define their attitude, noting that they were, in the first place, aristocrats, and, in the second place, Teutons.

THE EMPEROR FRANCIS JOSEPH AT THE TIME OF HIS ACCESSION IN 1848.

As aristocrats, they held that, as Windischgraetz put it, “mankind begins with the baron,” and that no men except the nobly born had any rights which it was proper to take seriously—that they themselves belonged, in short, to a divinely designated ruling caste. As Teutons they regarded themselves as belonging to a divinely designated ruling race—the natural superiors of Italians, Hungarians, and Croats. Their conception of a sound imperial policy was, therefore, to employ the Hungarians to cut the throats of the Italians, and the Croats to cut the throats of the Hungarians; while they, directing operations, unified and Germanised the Empire.

The Hungarians, however, were a stubborn race who had no desire to be Germanised. They were, they urged, an independent people whose relations to the Habsburgs were defined by the Statutes of 1723; and they should not recognise Francis Joseph as their ruler until he had been crowned by their Archbishop at Pesth, and had sworn to obey the laws of the Kingdom of St. Stephen. That was the reply which they flung in Francis Joseph’s teeth when he issued a proclamation indicating his intention to “unite all the countries and tribes of the monarchy into one integral State.” Hungary, they maintained, was not part of a State, but a State in itself, and should remain one. The Habsburgs, in trying to incorporate them in Austria, were “traitors to the liberties of Hungary,” and should be banished from Hungarian soil for evermore. On those pleas issue was joined, and the Hungarian war of 1849 began.

It is one of the forgotten wars of European history: a particularly savage war, and one of which the issue hung for a long time in the balance. The heroic Georgei, whose name was then a household word, proved himself very nearly a match for the swaggering Ban of Croatia; and it looked, for a time, as though, even if Francis Joseph did reconquer his Kingdom, the days of Austria as a first-class Power were numbered. Palmerston, for one, thought so, and said so, declaring, in the House of Commons, that “if, the war being fought out to the uttermost, Hungary should, by superior forces, be utterly crushed, Austria, in that battle, will have crushed her own right arm.”

But Palmerston was wrong; and Austria, neither for the first nor for the last time in her history, defeated the predictions of the prophets. She has been called the Sick Woman, as Turkey used to be called the Sick Man, of Europe; but the Sick Woman has had a wonderfully elastic constitution, and has been wonderfully favoured by the chapter of accidents. Again and again in her history we have a vision of disjecta membra re-attaching themselves, as it were, to the disabled trunk, so that it could once more get up and walk. It was so in 1849, when, the Poles having risen to help the Hungarians, the Russians, knowing what they themselves might have to fear from victorious Poles, crossed the frontier to Francis Joseph’s rescue. That accident—happy or unhappy as one likes to regard it—turned the scale in the nick of time; and the rest was butchery, akin to that of the White Terror in France, but worse—a blood bath which scandalised Europe: the campaign of Haynau—called the Hyaena because of his grim chuckles at the sufferings which he caused—against the defenceless.

Certain excesses had been committed, in the early days of the revolutionary excitement—the War Minister, Latour, among others, had fallen a victim to mob violence. Those excesses were now avenged, not merely on the mob, but on the middle classes and on the Magnates. Croatian soldiers were turned loose on Hungarian towns, with a free hand to loot and ravish. Hungarian officers—officers who were also noblemen—were impressed as private soldiers, and placed in Austrian regiments, with the deliberate purpose of breaking their spirits. That was the treatment meted out even to some members of the great Hungarian houses of Esterhazy and Batthyany; and a Baron Podanitzky, who had been impressed in the artillery, was actually flogged in the streets of a Hungarian town on some absurd charge of having lost part of a bag of corn entrusted to his care.

Even women were flogged. Here is the deposition of one of them, published at the time in every newspaper in Europe—the truth of the story being confirmed, after inquiry on the spot, by the special correspondent of The Times:—

“Some imperialist troops entered Ruskby. It is probable that my enviable family happiness had created enemies at Ruskby, and that they were resolved to destroy it, for I am not aware that any of us had committed any fault. I was suddenly, without a previous trial or examination, taken from my husband and children. I was dragged into a square formed by the troops, and in the place in which I reside, and in the presence of its population, which had been accustomed to honour me, not because I was the Lady of the Manor, but because the whole tenor of my life deserved it, I was flogged with rods. You see I can write the words without dying of shame; but my husband took his own life. Deprived of all other weapons, he shot himself with a small cannon.”

The story was contradicted, on the ground that no such place as Ruskby could be found on the map; but the only error was the printer’s. The scene of the outrage was Ruskberg. The punishment was inflicted by the orders of a Captain Graber; and its victim was Mme. de Madersbach, the widow of a partner in the ironworks of Hoffmann and Madersbach. It was, of course, only one of the informal, and, as it were, accidental outrages. The formal outrages took the form of military executions. Generals and Colonels of the Hungarian Army, and Members of the Hungarian Chamber of Deputies were put to death—some of them hanged and others shot—until hardly one of them was left; and most of those who were left were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment in irons; while diplomatic machinery was set in motion—happily in vain—to obtain the extradition of the few fugitives who had succeeded in taking refuge with the Turks. The demand for their surrender, addressed to the Sultan, on behalf of the Austrians, by the Tsar, gave the Moslem an opportunity which he did not miss of administering a rebuke to the Christian:

“Your adjutant” (the Sultan wrote), “has demanded the extradition of the Hungarian refugees. The demand being made to excite hate against yourself as well as against me, I desire Your Majesty will not insist on carrying that point.”

The most cruel of all the cruelties—the one, at all events, which made the greatest stir in the world—was the execution of Louis Batthyany, some time Prime Minister of Hungary. He was the grandson of the Batthyany who had saved the great Maria Theresa, when Frederick the Great chased her on to Hungarian soil, raising the cry—it was raised in Latin—Moriamur pro rege nostro; but the memory of that great service did not save him; and Countess Marie Larisch’s statement, in “My Past,” that “he eluded the executioner by poisoning himself in prison,” is incorrect. He attempted to cut his throat with a blunt penknife, and failed; and was only shot, instead of hanged, because the dragging of a wounded man to the gibbet might have made too great a scandal. His widow made his son swear an oath that never, in any circumstances, would he speak to Francis Joseph, or in any way acknowledge his existence; and the handsome young Elemar Batthyany kept his oath, and long years afterwards used to cut the Emperor in the hunting field, while making love to the Empress behind his back.

If one could hold Francis Joseph personally responsible for these atrocities, one would, indeed, have to regard him as a sinister youth who has since grown into a sinister old man. One must hope, on the contrary—and one may fairly hope, as he was less than nineteen at the time—that he was only the dummy of a sanguinary camarilla, and the obedient son of a hard-hearted, ambitious, and self-righteous mother. But he assumed the posture of a sinister youth, whether he assumed it consciously or not, by refusing mercy even when mothers, who had succeeded in obtaining audience, knelt weeping at his feet, and pleaded for the lives of their sons, and replying cynically to a remonstrance against Louis Batthyany’s execution that “the Imperial word had been pledged that every Austrian subject without distinction should be equal in the eye of the law.” So that the Vienna correspondent of the Kölner Zeitung wrote:—

“Hanging and shooting—shooting and hanging. Such is at present the manner in which the men in power say good morning and good night to the nations of Austria. The strong hand in Austria is a bloody hand, and the slaughter once begun is so tempting that our rulers cannot think of leaving off. The whole of the civilised world protests against the present doings in Hungary. Schwarzenberg and his fellows cause public opinion to extend its imprecation to a greater person—to the Emperor whom the people ought not to be taught to associate with cruelties and deeds of blood, violence, and vengeance. Under the absolute government of former times, the people of Austria were fond of their Emperor; for whatever they suffered they threw the blame on the aristocracy and the bureaucracy. They said: ‘If the Emperor could but know of it, he would help us.’ At present nobody thinks of saying such a thing. They say, ‘The Emperor knows it and he does it.’”

Cynicism reached its height—one cannot say whether it was Francis Joseph’s own cynicism or not—in the attempt to maintain the gaiety of the Court in the midst of this Reign of Terror. As Baroness von Beck puts it:—

“Ball followed ball, soirées were announced, and assemblies were held, but Rachel wept still for her children, and refused to be comforted. The Lloyd published day after day the most magniloquent reports of the Court festivals, long lists of the beauties who assisted at them, descriptions of the gorgeous costumes with which they were adorned; but they were read without any emotion. It would not do; the city was in mourning; such fantastic attempts at mirth were out of season. They jarred upon the public feeling. If they ever won a moment of public approbation, it was like a smile upon a widow’s countenance, speedily followed by a blush of reproach at her momentary forgetfulness of the one great sorrow.”

When the Archduchess Sophia drove out, in fact, the common people often surrounded her carriage, in order to shout the names of the murdered Hungarians in her ear; and Countess Karolyi, whose son had been one of the victims of the repression, cursed Francis Joseph in scathing words which seem to sum up all the possibilities of human hate:—

“May Heaven and Hell blast his happiness! May his family be exterminated! May he be smitten in the persons of those he loves! May his life be wrecked, and may his children be brought to ruin!”

A memorable curse truly, and one which one might, if one chose, take for the text of this biography, showing how time has brought the fulfilment of it, drawing the punishment out slowly, relentlessly, unceasingly. The tragedy of the Square of Queretaro, where Francis Joseph’s brother faced a firing party of Republican executioners; the tragedy of the Vatican, where his sister-in-law lost her reason; the tragedy of Meyerling, where his only son perished in his shame; the tragedy of Geneva, where his wife was struck down by the dagger of the assassin—all these things, and many others also, might be represented as so many stages in the untiring and undeviating march of Nemesis—fulfilments of the curse, and illustrations of the familiar lines:—

Raro antecedentem scelestum Deseruit pede poena claudo.

Perhaps; but, if Francis Joseph’s punishment was to come slowly, that of his instrument, Marshal Haynau, was to come quickly.

The day soon arrived when the Emperor realised that he must break his instrument. The butchery could not go on for ever, and the butcher—this Hyaena of Brescia—could not always be kept in evidence. When he had served his purpose, he must go. So his command was withdrawn from him; and he retired into private life, and went upon his travels. His travels took him to London, whither his reputation had preceded him. He called upon the banker Rothschild, who gave him an introduction to the brewers Barclay and Perkins, whose brewery he had expressed a desire to “go over.”

Whether the banker deliberately set a trap for a hyaena or merely wished to oblige a client remains uncertain, even after a careful perusal of the letters of explanation which he sent to The Times. What is quite certain is that the draymen employed by Messrs. Barclay and Perkins knew that Haynau was coming, knew that he was responsible for the public flogging of women, and resolved to deal with him accordingly. Hardly had the brewery gates closed on him, when a truss of straw fell on his head from above, and then the trouble began.

A coherent account of the adventure might be difficult to give; but there are certain details of it concerning which all the witnesses are agreed. Marshal Haynau was beaten with rods, as his victims had been beaten, and some of the rods were broken across his back. He fled for refuge into a dustbin, and was pulled out of it by the beard. Somehow or other, he escaped from the brewery and ran like a hare down the street; but he was caught, knocked over, and dragged along the ground by his fierce moustaches. A woman threw a pair of scissors out of the window of an upper chamber, appealing to the men to cut those moustaches off. Ultimately he ran into a public house, and there managed to evade his pursuers until the police delivered him.

The story was a nine days’ wonder. The Times arose in its majesty and rebuked the draymen for their presumption in imagining that the misdeeds of people of importance were any concern of theirs; and The Times might as well have rebuked a volcano for forgetting its dignity and giving way to eruptions. The general sentiment found expression in a public meeting—also reported by The Times—whereat a vote of thanks to the draymen was carried unanimously, and Messrs. Barclay and Perkins themselves were warned that, if any one of their employees was punished for his part in the transaction, no British workman, from Land’s End to John o’ Groat’s House, would ever again drink a glass of Barclay and Perkins’s beer.

Then the writers of popular songs took the matter up, and this sort of thing was circulated on broad-sheets:—

There was an Austrian General strong,

Who flogged the ladies with a thong;

He had a beard twelve inches long,

His name was Marshal Haynau.

He from his country had to run:

He loved the knife, the cat, the gun,

And cruel deeds of late was done

By this old Marshal Haynau.

From Barclay’s brew-house he did scout;

The women bawled, the men did shout;

His hat fell off, and his shirt hung out,

Oh, poor old Marshal Haynau!

At length he found a place to hide,

All at the George by Bankside,

But not till they’d well tann’d his hide,—

Barclay and Perkins’s draymen.

Then for Barclay’s men we’ll give a cheer.

May they live long to brew our beer!

And from their masters nothing fear,—

Barclay and Perkins’s draymen.

Nor was it in England only that Marshal Haynau was visited by public opprobrium. His offences were still remembered, two years afterwards, when he ventured to visit Brussels. There also, at the Vauxhall Gardens, the police had to protect him from the mob; and public opinion did not allow the punishment of the women who spat in his face in public, hissing at him the word “Hyaena.” So intensely had the Austrian excesses stirred the indignation of Europe; and the only way in which Francis Joseph was able to express his resentment at the rough handling of the butcher who had done his dirty work was by refusing to send a representative to London to attend the funeral of the Duke of Wellington.