BY WILLIAM RITCHIE
A Short History of British-Hungarian Encounters
‘The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East; the most splendid bridges over the Danube, which is here of noble width and depth, took us among the traditions of Turkish rule’
Bram Stoker ‘Dracula’
‘No country may boast more of its city, and any that has seen the King of England’s gardens, the people of his court and his palaces in this city will consider as nothing the graceless peasants of Germany’
Marton Szepsi Csombor ‘Europica Varietas’
In October 1851 London was gripped by a phenomenon, ‘Trafalgar Square was black with people’ and it had seemed like a ‘coronation day of Kings’. Kossuth mania had arrived.
Entering the capital after captivity in Turkey, Lajos Kossuth was the most famous revolutionary of his age – a man who brought the Habsburg Empire to its knees in the 1848 uprising and had come close to forcing independence for his beloved Hungary.
During his procession across England Kossuth spoke to thousands receiving flags of the Hungarian Republic and caused some consternation to an establishment wary of public excitement.
To liberals Kossuth was expounding a very English sense of freedom, one rooted in individual rights and constitutional tradition. His orations, performed in a unique Shakespearian vernacular, helped enforce the impression that his aspirations though pledged to an exotic land had local resonance.
In a sense this interplay of the strange and the familiar is central to the relationship between the two countries; both at the margins of Europe surrounded by powerful neighbours each had to find a security best suited to their geographical position.
Dynastic politics offer the first glimpse of contact as Medieval Europe tentatively emerged. We see the Anglo-Saxon prince; Edward the Exile son of King Edmund Ironside, spirited to Hungary in 1016 after a Danish invasion displaced the royal house.
His host was the great Arpad monarch Stephen I, the founder of Christianity in his country and the architect of the Magyar Kingdom.
Whilst there, Edward married a Hungarian noblewoman Agatha, their daughter Margaret would go on to become a celebrated Queen of Scotland later canonised for her good works.
Exile remained a source of community after the Norman invasion of 1066, when Anglo-Saxons fighting in Constantinople for the Byzantine Emperor sought out Hungarian priests for confession, affirmation of their shared Western rite.
Most significantly continuity was established by the great constitutional advances of the 13th century.
In 1222, just five years after Magna Carta, Andrew II of Hungary was compelled by his nobility to sign the Golden Bull. This document reiterated nearly all the points gained in the English charter: inalienable rights were granted to the elite and crucially the King could be lawfully opposed if acting against the common interest.
Each country had successfully created an aristocracy whose corporate role as the defender of national liberty and culture was at least as powerful as the royal prerogative.
By the 15th century a mutual consolidation had occurred and both were fledgling imperial powers; Henry V had brought France under his suzerainty and his counterpart in Buda castle Sigismund of Luxembourg was the Holy Roman Emperor.
United by shared ambitions and responsibility the men had a strong friendship. After spending four months at the Lancastrian court Sigismund declared ‘when in England he had felt like being in Paradise’.
He went so far as to award Henry the ‘Order of the Dragon’ a chivalric brotherhood committed to defending Christendom from the Turks. It was from his father’s membership that Vlad Tepes (the impaler) gained the sobriquet Dracula.
Sheltered on an island the English watched with dismay as the Ottoman Empire rose inexorably taking Constantinople in 1453. Much was said about the need to protect the border territories like Hungary but the Reformation and consequent sectarian strife made concerted action elusive.
Magyar bravery though was not forgotten. Awaiting trial in the Tower of London Thomas More wrote ‘A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation’. Set in a Hungary menaced by invaders the work uses vulnerability as a way of counselling faith and forbearance.
As the renaissance spread, a new humanist internationalism promised to transcend the intractable challenges of continental travel. Scholars could access printed texts which, written in Latin, were accessible to a cosmopolitan intellectual elite.
Erasmus in particular illuminated the possibilities of travel and the beginnings of a shared European consciousness.
Marton Szepsi Csombor was an intrepid devotee of this spirit of inquiry.
Born to a bourgeoisie family in 1595, Csombor developed huge curiosity about the world beyond Hungarian borders and after a university education wandered as far afield as France and England.
His account is principally an attempt to help Hungarians understand the dimensions and mind-sets of the West. England is recorded for its order, the excellent quality of its beer and the pervading snobbery he encounters.
Fortunately his regard for fellow Protestants compels him to overlook such frivolous infringements.
For British travellers making the opposite journey a curious sense of timelessness was experienced – in a country where enclosure was practised and scientific farming just beginning the East seemed a remnant of an older world. William Lithgow writes:
‘I stepped into Transilvania…for on the incircled plaine, there groweth nothing but Wheate, Rye, Barley, Pease, and Beanes: and on the halfe, or lower parts of the Hills about, nothing but Wines, and infinite villages: and towards the extreame circulary heights, only Pastorage for Kine, Sheepe, Goates, and Horses, and thickets of woods.’
It was simultaneously a vista of Arcadian plenty and rural stagnation, a tension that would recur in many subsequent accounts of the region.
By 1700 the Turkish occupation was over and Hungary settled into a restive submission to Austrian rule, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu captures some of the distress in 1716:
‘Nothing can be more melancholy than travelling through Hungary, reflecting on the former flourishing state of that kingdom, and seeing such a noble spot of earth almost uninhabited’
Under successive Austrian Emperors, and the redoubtable Empress Maria Theresa, fitful improvements were made to the devastated infrastructure of the country but Hungarian national identity was generally neglected.
Many patriots, especially from Transylvania, did lead campaigns for self-determination but it was not until 1848 that they unified middle class and popular support. Though it was defeated, this moment proved the springboard for the great national renewal of the later 19th century.
Anticipating such hopes Matthew Arnold implored in his poem ‘Sonnet to the Hungarian Nation’:
‘Hungarians! Save the world! Renew the stories
Of men who against hope repell’d the chain,
And make the world’s dead spirit leap again!’
When Austria and Hungary came to an accord in 1867, an era of expansion and rediscovery began – Pest transformed itself in to a Danubian Paris and a golden generation of artists and writers set about glorifying their homeland.
Most Westerners would probably encounter the representatives of Hungary through its itinerant aristocracy, fluent and self-confident emissaries of this dynamic state. Isabel Colegate identifies this spirit and an enduring Anglophilia in her character Count Tibor Rakassyi from her novel ‘The Shooting Party’:
‘The English nation seemed to him the most prosperous and secure in the world, and the English upper class the most enviable…to be accepted by it, seemed to him one of the chief joys of the cosmopolitanism to which his membership of the European aristocracy gave him access’
Sadly such accord would not remain untroubled. In his book ‘Lost Prestige’ historian Geza Jeszenszky demonstrates the failing reputation of Hungary in the run up to the First World War.
The dividend of British support weakened:
‘It was replaced by the detrimental image of being a true anachronism in Europe: a backward land governed by a haughty, feudally-minded ruling caste, where conditions were intolerable for its people and particularly the non-Hungarians’
As Budapest consolidated its authority in the Eastern part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire it disseminated a rigorous Magyarisation policy through the smaller provinces – excluding other languages from official use. Though urbanisation and education were accelerating, politics often remained the preserve of a landed minority.
Caught in the shifting alliance systems of Edwardian diplomacy it often benefited British correspondents to magnify these problems as a manoeuvre against what would become the Axis powers in 1914.
Hugh Seton-Watson and Wickham Steed were both instrumental in this policy as correspondents for The Times; their legacy was to ensure a vindictive outcome to allied victory in 1918.
Ratified in 1920 the Treaty of Trianon stripped Hungary of two thirds of it possessions isolating hundreds of thousands of ethnic Hungarians beyond the borders of the state.
The destructiveness of such severity soon become clear to more sympathetic observers and in 1928 Esmond Harmsworth, son of press baron Lord Rothermere ventured to Budapest publicly calling for the restoration of at least some of its former possessions.
Other voices recalled the hospitality and glamour of the Carpathians and its lost Hungarian ascendancy, though published forty years after the event Patrick Liegh Fermor’s memoirs still convey a lyrical romance:
‘I had been strolling from castle to castle, sipping Tokay out of cut-glass goblets and smoking pipes a yard long with archdukes instead of halving gaspers with tramps’
Concurrently a brilliant young Hungarian scholar, Antal Szerb, was exploring the lore and poetry of Britain. Brilliantly subverted in his novel ‘The Pendragon Legend’ the gothic conventions of the murder mystery are enacted against the haunting beauty of the Welsh landscape. Even here a sense of premonition is inescapable.
Hitler’s rise had convulsed Central Europe, setting in motion irredentist dreams and ugly resentments. Tragically Hungary succumbed to the Nazis’ Faustian pact and cooperated with the Wehrmacht.
Unable to avert war Hungary fell into the dissolution wrought by fascism’s defeat and was entombed in the Soviet bloc.
British opinion aligned with a growing dread of international Communism and when Hungary defied Moscow in 1956 and set about freeing itself from dictatorship there was a huge upsurge of moral support.
Many fled Hungary after the revolution failed and Britain became a favoured refuge where many intellectuals and idealists settled to enrich and support their adopted homeland.
Today Hungary is visited again by the ghosts of former reputations – to some it presents a rising illiberalism and intolerance, to others a bastion of independence in an oppressive order.
Both visions are evanescent, the responses of 21st century crises to a half known country with a seemingly impenetrable past.
We are perhaps reverting to a premodern condition of estrangement where legends are more potent than facts.
This would be to ignore a venerable conversation in which real differences are resolved and shared outlooks celebrated. We should cherish the richness in each culture and continue to explore this fascinating relationship.
Growing up in Oxfordshire and spending time in Cambridge, Yorkshire and London, William Ritchie now lives with his family in Budapest where he works in tourism and as a freelance writer. He is interested in culture, politics and all things Central Europe. He hopes to promote the region and its fascinating heritage.