The son and successor of Maria Theresa, Joseph II., attempted, in his summary way, by arbitrary edicts promising liberty and equality, to subvert the constitution of every country he governed, and to extend to them all one uniform despotic system, founded on that of Austria. To him Hungary is indebted for the first gleam of religious toleration; but his hasty and despotic attempts to suppress national distinctions, national institutions and languages, provoked a fierce and armed resistance in Hungary, and in other portions of his dominions, and more than revived all the old aversion to Austria. His more prudent successor made concessions to the spirit of independence, and the love of national institutions, which Joseph had so deeply wounded. Leopold regained the Hungarians; but Belgium, already alienated in spirit, never again gave her heart to the emperor; and he never lost sight of the uniformity of system that Maria Theresa had done so much to promote, and which Joseph, in his haste to accomplish it, had for the moment made unattainable. From the days of Ferdinand I. until now, the attempt to assimilate the forms and system of government, in every part of their possessions, to the more arbitrary Austrian model, has been steadily pursued throughout the reigns of all the princes of the house of Hapsburg. These persevering efforts to extend the power of the crown by subverting national institutions, and thus to obliterate so many separate nationalities, have aroused for their defence a spirit that promises to perpetuate them.
Feelings of community of race and language, which had slumbered for many generations, have been revived with singular intensity. Italy for the Italians—Germany for the Germans—a new Sclavonic empire for the western Sclaves—the union of all the Sclave nations under the empire of the Czar—are cries which have had power to shake thrones, and may hereafter dismember empires.
The separation between the different members of the Austrian empire, which the havoc of war could not effect in three centuries, a few years of peace and prosperity have threatened to accomplish. The energies that were so long concentrated on war, have now, for more than thirty years, been directed to the development of intellectual and material resources. The ambition that sought its gratification in the field, now seeks to acquire influence in the administration, and power to sway the opinions of men. The love of national independence, that repelled foreign aggression, has become a longing for personal liberty, that refuses to submit to arbitrary power. The road to distinction no longer leads to the court, but to the popular assembly; for the rewards conferred by the voice of the people have become more precious than any honours the sovereign can bestow. The duty of allegiance to the crown has become a question of reciprocal obligations, and has ceased to rest upon divine right. The only bond that held the Austrian empire together has thus been loosened, and the parts are in danger of falling asunder.
Lombardy, which was united to the German empire nine hundred years ago, renounced its allegiance, and refused to be Austrian. Bohemia, a part of the old German empire, inhabited chiefly by a Sclavonic race, has been dreaming of Pansclavism. Carried away by poetical rhapsodies, poured forth in profusion by a Lutheran preacher at Pesth, and calculated, if not designed, to promote foreign influence and ascendency, she has awoke from her dreams to find herself engaged in a sanguinary conflict, which was terminated by the bombardment and submission of her capital. Vienna, after having twice forced her emperor to fly from his capital, has been taken by storm, and is held in subjection by a garrison, whose stragglers are nightly thinned by assassins. Hungary, (to which we propose chiefly to direct our attention,) whose blood has been shed like water in defence of the house of Hapsburg—whose chivalry has more than once saved the empire—whom Napoleon, at the head of a victorious army in Vienna, was unable to scare, or to seduce from her allegiance to her fugitive king—whose population is more sincerely attached to monarchy than perhaps any other people in Europe, except ourselves, is in arms against the emperor of Austria. All the fierce tribes by which the Majjars are encircled have been let loose upon them, and, in the name of the emperor, the atrocities of Gallicia, which chilled Europe with horror, have been renewed in Pannonia. The army of the Emperor of Austria has invaded the territories of the King of Hungary, occupies the capital, ravages the towns and villages, expels and denounces the constituted authorities of the kingdom, abrogates the laws, and boasts of its victories over his faithful subjects, as if they had been anarchists who sought to overturn his throne.
The people of this country have long entertained towards Austria feelings of kindness and respect. We may smile at her proverbial slowness; we may marvel at the desperate efforts she has made to stand still, while every one else was pressing forward; the curiously graduated system of education, by which she metes out to each class the modicum of knowledge which all must accept, and none may exceed—her protective custom-houses, which destroy her commerce—her quarantines against political contagion, which they cannot exclude—her system of passports, with all its complications and vexations, and the tedious formalities of her tardy functionaries,—may sometimes be subjects of ridicule. But, though the young may have looked with scorn, the more thoughtful amongst us have looked with complacency on the social repose and general comfort—on the absence of continual jostling and struggling in all the roads of life—produced by a system, unsuited to our national tastes and tempers, no doubt, but which, till a few months ago, appeared to be in perfect harmony with the character of the Austrian German. We respect her courage, her constancy in adversity. We admire the sturdy obstinacy with which she has so often stood up to fight another round, and has finally triumphed after she appeared to be beaten. We call to mind the services she rendered to Christian civilisation in times past. We remember that her interests have generally concurred with our own—have rarely been opposed to them. We cannot forget the long and arduous struggles, in which England and Austria have stood side by side, in defence of the liberties of nations, or the glorious achievements by which those liberties were preserved. It is because we would retain unimpaired the feelings which these recollections inspire, because we consider the power and the character of Austria essential to the welfare of Europe, that we look with alarm on the course she has pursued towards Hungary.
The time has not yet come when the whole course of the events connected with this unnatural contest can be accurately known. The silence maintained and imposed by Austria may have withheld, or suppressed, explanations that would justify or palliate much of what wears a worse than doubtful aspect. But the authentic, information now accessible to the public cannot fail to cause deep anxiety to all who care for the reputation of the imperial government—to all who desire to see monarchy come pure out of the furnace in which it is now being tried. The desire to enforce its hereditary policy of a uniform patriarchal system would not justify, in the eyes of Englishmen, an alliance with anarchy to put down constitutional monarchy in Hungary, or an attempt to cover, with the blood and dust of civil war, the departure of the imperial government from solemn engagements entered into by the emperor.
The nature of the relations by which Hungary is connected with Austria—the origin and progress of their present quarrel, and the objects for which the Hungarians are contending—appear to have been very generally misunderstood, not in this country only, but in a great part of Europe. Men whom we might expect to find better informed, seem to imagine that Hungary is an Austrian province in rebellion against the emperor, and that the origin and tendency of the movement was republican. The reverse of all this is true. Hungary is not, and never was, a province of Austria; but has been and is, both de jure and de facto, an independent kingdom. The Emperor of Austria is also King of Hungary, but, as Emperor of Austria, has neither sovereign right nor jurisdiction in Hungary. The Hungarians assert, and apparently with truth, that they took up arms to repel unprovoked aggression, and to defend their constitutional monarchy as by law established; that their objects are therefore purely conservative, and their principles monarchical; and that it is false and calumnious to accuse them of having contemplated or desired to found a republic—a form of government foreign to their sentiments, and incompatible with their social condition.
The kingdom of Hungary (Hungarey) founded by the Majjars in the tenth century, had for several generations been distinguished amongst the nations of Europe, when another pagan tribe from the same stock—issuing like them from the Mongolian plains, and turning the Black Sea by the south, as they had done by the north—crossed the Bosphorus, overturned the throne of the Cæsars, and established on its ruins an Asiatic empire, which became the terror of Christendom. The Majjars, converted to Christianity, encountered on the banks of the Danube this cognate race, converted to Islamism, and became the first bulwark of Christian Europe against the Turks. The deserts of Central Asia, which had sent forth the warlike tribe that threatened Eastern Europe with subjugation, had also furnished the prowess that was destined to arrest their progress. The court of Hungary had long been the resort of men of learning and science; the chivalry of Europe had flocked to her camps, where military ardour was never disappointed of a combat, or religious zeal of an opportunity to slaughter infidels. In 1526, Ludovic, King of Hungary and Bohemia, with the flower of the Hungarian chivalry, fell fighting with the Turks at the disastrous battle of Mohacs—the Flodden field of Hungary. The monarchy was then elective, but when the late king left heirs of his body the election was but a matter of form. When the monarch died without leaving an heir of his body, the nation freely exercised its right of election, and on more than one such occasion had chosen their king from amongst the members of princely houses in other parts of Europe. In this manner Charles Robert, of the Neapolitan branch of the house of Anjou and Ladislas, King of Bohemia, son of Casimir King of Poland, and father of Ludovic who fell at Mohacs, had been placed upon the throne. Ludovic died without issue, and he was the last male of his line—it therefore became necessary to choose a king from some other house. Ferdinand, brother of the Emperor Charles V., had married his cousin Anne, daughter of Ladislas, and sister of Ludovic the late King of Hungary and Bohemia. His personal character, his connexion with the royal family of Hungary, and the support he might expect from the emperor in the war against the Turks, prevailed over the national antipathy to Austria, and he was elected to the vacant throne, though not without a contest. He was crowned according to the ancient customs of Hungary, and at his coronation took the oath which had been administered on similar occasions to his predecessors. He thereby bound himself to govern according to the laws, and to maintain and defend the constitution and the territory of Hungary. He was likewise elected King of Bohemia, after subscribing a document, by which he renounced every other claim to the crown than that which he derived from his election. The emperor surrendered to him the crown of Austria, and these three crowns were thus, for the first time, united in a prince of the house of Hapsburg. These states were altogether independent one of another, had their separate laws, institutions, and customs, and had no other bond of connexion than the accidental union of the crowns in one person—a union which might at any time, on the demise of the crown, have been dissolved. It resembled, in this respect, the union of the crowns of Great Britain and Hanover in the persons of our own sovereigns, that it left the kingdoms both de jure and de facto independent of each other. In 1558, Ferdinand was elected Emperor of Germany; but as emperor he could claim no jurisdiction in Hungary, which was not then, and never was, included in the German empire. The monarchy of Hungary continued to be elective, and the nation continued to give a preference to the heirs of the late monarch. The princes of the house of Hapsburg, who succeeded to the throne of Austria, were thus successively elected to that of Hungary; were separately crowned in that kingdom, according to its ancient customs; and at their coronation took the same oath that Ferdinand had taken.
In 1687 the states of Hungary decreed that the throne, which had hitherto been filled by election, should thenceforward be hereditary in the male heirs of the house of Hapsburg; and in 1723, the diet, by agreeing to the Pragmatic sanction of Charles III. of Hungary, (the Emperor Charles VI. of Germany,) extended the right of succession to the female descendants of that prince. These two measures were intended, and calculated, to perpetuate the union of the two crowns in the same person. The order of succession to the crown of Hungary was thus definitively settled by statute, and could not legally be departed from, unless with the concurrence both of the diet and of the sovereign. So long, therefore, as the crown of Austria was transmitted in the same order of succession as that in which the crown of Hungary had been settled, the union would be preserved; but any deviation in Austria from the order fixed by law in Hungary would lead to a separation of the crowns, unless the Hungarian diet could be induced to consent to a new settlement. Thus we have seen the crowns of Great Britain and Hanover united for four generations, and separated in the fifth, because one was settled on heirs male or female, the other on heirs male only.
An attempt has been made, with reference to recent events, to found on the Pragmatic Sanction pretensions that might derogate from the absolute independence of Hungary; but the articles of the Hungarian diet[31] of 1790 appear to be fatal to any such pretensions. By Article 10 of that year it is declared, that "Hungary is a country free and independent in her entire system of legislation and of government; that she is not subject to any other people, or any other state, but that she shall have her own separate existence, and her own constitution, and shall consequently be governed by kings crowned according to her national laws and customs." By Article 12 of the same diet it was declared, that the power to enact, to interpret, and to abrogate the laws, was vested conjointly in the king, legitimately crowned, and the diet; and that no attempt should ever be made to govern by edicts or arbitrary acts. By Article 13 it was decreed, that the diet should be called together once every three years at the least. By Article 19 it was declared, that imposts could not be levied at the king's pleasure, but must be freely voted by the two tables (houses) from one diet to another. All these acts received the formal assent of Leopold II., and thus became statutes of the kingdom.