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.
[Illustration: 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.