Miklós Bánffy - They Were Found Wanting

It was not often that the newsboys had such a good day. In a few moments they were surrounded by people and every paper sold. As it happened, business had been exceptionally good ever since April when the Wekerle government had resigned for the first time. Since then there had been several important royal audiences, and ‘official sources’ declared first that there would be an independent Hungarian State Bank and then that there wouldn’t; there were rumours of secret intrigues with Vienna; and then, by the influence of the left-wing Independence Party, Parliament had been adjourned it — was all splendid fodder for the hungry newspapers! Then came revolution in Turkey and sensational developments, the army revolt in Istanbul (one minister dead, two wounded!), street fights with troops brought in from across the Bosphorus and general mobilization in Salonika. Pera rang with detailed rumours of the massacres in Armenia (women raped, children impaled!). Always there was some new sensation. One day the papers declared that troops from Salonika had marched on the capital and were camped round the walls; then they had marched in, besieged the Jildiz Palace and captured the Sultan Abdul Hamid. Sultan murdered! Sultan not murdered! Abdul Hamid escapes! He didn’t escape but was torn from his throne and cast into prison! Then there was a new sultan, Mehmet V, who was brought out of obscure captivity and thrust onto the throne — and then there was a dictator, the Pasha Mehmet Sefket, who commanded the army at Salonika.

In May there were more juicy items to follow: a real Japanese prince visited Budapest. That sold a few more papers; then the Austrian Minister-President Bienerth attacked Burian openly in the Vienna Parliament, which completely put in the shade the pan-Slav conference in St Petersburg at which the Czech, Croatian, Serb and Slovak delegates were hailed as suffering brothers in a speech by the Tsar himself.

Then came June and still the news did not dry up. More audiences were held in Vienna as government crisis followed government crisis. Then a new development. Sensation! For the first time ever the Hungarian leaders Wekerle and Andrassy were received by the Heir, the Archduke Franz-Ferdinand, who was well known to hate Hungary. Although the leader-writers dared to produce only a watered-down version of what they knew about this historic encounter, it was clear to anyone who read between the lines that Franz-Ferdinand had received the men from Budapest with arrogant frigidity. At home there were more demonstrations calling for an independent banking system and noisy meetings were held in the great courtyard of the Town Hall and also in the country. Kossuth and Justh had a vitriolic argument at an important meeting of the Independence Party and it took, or so it was made to appear, three days of backroom negotiations before the two leaders could be induced at least to go through the motions of being friends again.

It was all very exciting; and it was very good for sales.

Now came the real bombshell. Laszlo Lukacs, once finance minister in the Tisza government, was rumoured to be bringing a royal decree from Vienna. Ignoring both the Minister-President Wekerle and the Independence Party leader Kossuth, he had consulted only Gyula Justh. Not until his appointment as Homo Regius — the King’s personal representative charged with forming a new government and standing apart from all party loyalty — had been publicly announced did he visit Kossuth; and even then he held aloof from all the other Coalition leaders.

This was the greatest sensation of them all.

In front of the National Casino the news-vendors were doing a roaring trade. Balint bought some papers and started to read them as he walked towards the staircase. Then, bored with their exaggerated tone, he threw them away and went calmly up to the first floor.

There he found a mass of angry politicians, mostly from the Coalition and People’s Parties, and with them some of the followers of Apponyi. From inside the Coalition it seemed as if the arch-enemy was Gyula Justh and he it was who everywhere was being attacked by these noisy groups in which it seemed that everyone was explaining everything to everyone else, and that they were all doing it simultaneously. It was the same in the great glazed-in terrace of the dining-room where Abady went next. At every table he heard the same complaints.

Loudest of all was Lubiansky, whose patent of nobility had been on the point of being gazetted; and now, because of the change of government, all those years of planning and plotting had gone for nothing! Poor Lubiansky had been so eager to have his daughters transformed into Comtessen , which would have been a help in finding them husbands, and his sons given just that extra fillip in their search for willing heiresses, but now he would still have to endure being addressed as ‘your Lordship’ merely out of courtesy and not because he had a right to it.

But even angrier than Lubiansky was Fredi Wuelffenstein who, as usual, was laying down the law on constitutional precedent in terms of what was and what was not gentlemanly behaviour. This, for him, was the only criterion of proper conduct.

‘No gentleman would have done what this Lukacs has!’ he roared. ‘By-passing the Coalition leaders! Going behind the back of the government to consult that awful busybody, that demagogue Justh! You just don’t do that sort of thing! Of course I know what it’s all about; they want to sabotage the new suffrage laws and undermine our legitimate demands for the army, just as in Kristoffy’s time. All that creature Justh wants is to chuck away our national aspirations! Into the dustbin with Hungarian sword tassels and our thousand-year-old national language. My Hungarian blood boils at the thought of it!’ he shouted, and wiped his forehead which was covered with beads of sweat brought out by his self-induced passion.

Antal Szent-Gyorgyi, who was sitting with icy calm at the next table, now said to Fredi, with disdainful irony, ‘These demands — were they in the Constitution Party’s programme too? I hadn’t realized.’

Wuelffenstein swallowed the bait, not noticing that Szent-Gyorgyi was making fun of him.

‘Oh no! We only accepted them at the time of the elections so as to keep those ’48-ers quiet!’

He answered with extra politeness in the hope that the owner of Jablanka would again invite him to one of those much envied shooting parties. He went on, ‘And so it would not be at all the right thing to do not to support those demands wholeheartedly, even though Kossuth and Independence members, and even more so Justh himself, seem to have dropped the matter and now only talk about the banking question, so naturally we have to go on with it. After all a gentleman’s word is his bond, ain’t it?’

And so it turned out that this volte-face on the part of the Constitution Party provoked yet another government crisis. While the men of 1848, for whom the army demands had been a banner and a rallying cry, now dropped the matter, the leaders of the Constitution Party, Wekerle and Andrassy, who had only accepted this distasteful policy so as to cement the Coalition, now found themselves its only supporters. There were those who declared, from the height of their political acumen, that the change was due merely to the Constitution Party’s desire to hinder the establishment of an independent banking system, which they thought would harm the economy, and that the best way to achieve this would be cynically to offer the chauvinists an unimportant tit-bit in its place. This at least had a certain logic. Nevertheless the switch in policies did seem rather strange and independent observers watched with astonishment as both leading parties ignored their own traditional programmes and worked hard to promote those of their opponents! As it happened, though the crisis lasted many months and the fight was most bitterly fought, it all came to nothing for in the end the King refused both demands.