The Diets of these Lands were supposed to meet once a year, while Standing Committees, composed of representatives of each Estate, assisted by small permanent staffs,44 were maintained to transact current business.
Even before the reforms described below, some of the larger Lands, notably Bohemia and Moravia, had found it convenient to divide their areas into sub-units – ‘Circles’ (Kreise) – and to keep in each an administrative representative and perhaps a judicial court of second instance. The Circle officials had, however, been only the local representatives and agents of the Estates; they had had no independent powers except in so far as the Estates authorized them to deal on the spot with questions of secondary and local importance. They had had no deliberative assemblages of their own, and no representation in the Landtag.
We may pass over the constitutions of Lombardy and the Netherlands, only remarking that the latter, in particular, allowed considerable representation to urban and middle-class interests. The basic political structure of Hungary was the same as that of the Western Lands, in so far as it, too, rested on the distinction between free and unfree, and on the manorial system. But Hungary was too big to be managed on a two-tier basis. The founder of the Kingdom, St Stephen, had himself divided it into Counties (Comitatus, Vármegyek) setting in each of them a representative of his own authority, the Comes or Ispán. Gradually the Counties had changed their character and had developed into something halfway towards a Western Land. Each still had as its titular head a representative of the Crown, now known as the Föispan, but they had become autonomous entities, possessing a legal personality distinct from that of the Kingdom, exercising their corporate rights autonomously and technically acting in virtue of that autonomy even where they were in fact only giving effect to measures enacted by the government of the Kingdom. They could not refuse to carry out such measures if they were in accordance with the law of the land, nor could they themselves enact any unlawful measure. Subject, however, to this restriction, their authority was unlimited, and they possessed a recognized right to refuse to carry out an unlawful order – and in the situation which had developed in Hungary in the eighteenth century it was in fact possible to question the legality of a surprisingly high proportion of the orders which emanated from Vienna; while the sketchy condition of such laws as existed left the field in which they could exercise their discretion an exceedingly wide one. They had the right to submit their views to the Government on national affairs, as well as local, and to exchange views with each other. They had their own Diets (Congregationes) the franchise for which was enjoyed by all the local nobles, including the very large class of small nobles which was a feature of Hungarian society.45 These electors periodically chose their own administrative staffs, the head of which was known as the Alispán (sub-Ispan).
Large Counties were divided into járasok, corresponding to the Austrian Kreise. The járas was not autonomous.
The composition of the Hungarian Diet reflected this development. It consisted of two ‘Tables’, the first of which was composed of the dignitaries of the realm, the higher Prelates, the male members of families of ‘magnate’ rank,46 i.e., Barons and upward, the Föispáns of the Counties, and two representatives from Croatia. The Lower Table was composed of Prelates not possessing their own Chapters, certain officials, two representatives from each County and from each of the four ‘Privileged Districts,47 one from the Royal Free Boroughs48 and three from Croatia. Absentee magnates, or the widows of magnates, were allowed to send proxies to the Lower Table, but they could not address it.
The King was under a legal obligation to convoke the Hungarian Diet every three years.
Croatia had its own Diet, composed of local Lords spiritual and temporal, and lesser nobles, with a large number of ex officio members.
Transylvania had a peculiar constitution, dating from the Middle Ages, although since frequently modified. Its Diet had originally been composed of representatives of the ‘Three Nations of Transylvania’, viz., the nobles of the Hungarian Counties, the Saxons and the Szekels,49 who met to deliberate together on matters of common interest, no decision being valid without the seals of all three bodies, so that in theory no measure affecting the right of any one of them could be passed without its consent. This provision was still in force, Leopold I having confirmed the Constitution in 1691, but the Diet’s numbers had been stretched to include representatives of the Royal Free Boroughs and some other towns, local great landowners and other important persons invited by the Crown in the proportions of four Hungarian nobles and two Szekels to one Saxon, and officials appointed by the Crown. It met (or should have met) annually.
The Military Frontier had no self-governing institutions.
The Government, in 1780, was in process of constructing Estates on the normal pattern for Galicia. It had already organized first and second Estates, for the magnates and lesser nobility respectively, but had been unable to build directly on existing foundations, since at the time of the annexation there had been no legal differentiations between one noble and another. Families of ‘Senatorial’ status had been authorized to apply for the title of Count and those of somewhat lesser dignity, for that of Baron. Those who did so with success (not all applied, and not all applications were accepted) became members of the Bench of Magnates, while nobles paying a minimum land tax of fifteen florins a year (three hundred zloty) were entitled to membership of the Lower Bench (here, again, many nobles did not apply, while according to rumour, a considerable number of rich peasants and even Jews were allowed in, and given patents of nobility ‘to make it so’).
Bukovinian families of boyar status were similarly being invited to apply for the higher Bench, and Mazil families50 for the lower.
Provision had been made for a third Galician Estate, but the authorities had not yet decided what, if any, places in the province were important enough to be represented.
The Estates assembled in Diets constituted, then, the ‘organs of self-government’ of each Land. As opposite number to them, and representative of his own authority, the Landesherr, or Crown, maintained in each Land a representative known in the smaller Lands as the Landeshauptmann; in Bohemia, Galicia and Transylvania, as the Governor. In Hungary, the royal authority was represented by the Palatine (Nádor), who, however, was not exclusively the King’s representative, but the official mediator between the Crown and the Hungarian nobles. As the powers which the Hungarian Constitution vested in the Palatine were too extensive for the Crown’s taste (inter alia, he was the official commander of the armed forces in Hungary) the office was often (although illegally) left unfilled, a Viceroy being appointed in his place. This was the position in 1780. The Netherlands and Milan had Viceroys, usually junior members of the Imperial House.51
These officials had their own staffs, generally known as Gubernia,52 while the link between them and the Crown was maintained through a series of ‘Court Chancelleries’, which were, in fact, the Monarchs’ secretariats for handling their transactions with the different Lands, or groups of Lands (for the Monarchs had never found it necessary to maintain a separate Chancellery for each individual Land). When Maria Theresa ascended the throne there had been four such Chancelleries, the ‘Austrian’, for the Hereditary Lands, which, until 1742, had also carried out the work which was assigned to the Haus-Hof-und Staatskanzlei when it became a separate body in that year, the Bohemian for Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia, the Hungarian, for Inner Hungary and Croatia, and the Transylvanian.53 Correspondence with Milan and the Netherlands was conducted through the Austrian Chancellery up to 1742; thereafter, through sections in the Haus-Hof-und Staatskanzlei.
All these bodies were now situated in Vienna, for whereas Ferdinand I had established the Bohemian Chancellery in Prague, Ferdinand II had transferred it to Vienna, against the strong protests of the Estates, in 1623. The Hungarian Chancellery, after various earlier peripatetics, had been definitely established in Vienna in 1690.
*
The general pattern of
the governmental machinery was thus, despite the variations in nomenclature, broadly uniform throughout the Monarchy. On the other hand, both the intimacy of the connection between central and local authority, and the degree of independence still enjoyed by the ‘organs of self-government’ varied very greatly indeed from one Land, or group of Lands, to another. The Viceroys of the Netherlands and Milan were almost completely independent – their correspondents in Vienna were in reality little more than post-boxes – and the local representative bodies enjoyed extensive autonomous powers. These will not be described here; it will only be remarked that the fact that these liberties existed, and that their beneficiaries were prepared to defend them tenaciously, was to prove of great importance for the history of the other parts of the Monarchy a few years later.
At the other extreme there now stood the Hereditary and Bohemian Lands, and Galicia. In these the regime was to a high degree autocratic, bureaucratic and centralized, the antique forms through which it was still in part exercised having become mere trappings devoid of reality.
The first of these attributes had, in a measure, always characterized the system of Government in the Hereditary Lands, where the Landesherren had from the first claimed the essential right legis ferendae, with the supreme headship of the administration and the judicature, while in Bohemia and Moravia, where the Crown’s powers had been greatly trimmed under the weak Jagiellon kings, it had, under the Vernewerte Landesordnungen, assumed the same rights as it enjoyed in the Hereditary Lands.54 Bureaucratization, on the other hand, was a relative novelty, for until the middle of the eighteenth century the lack of adequate staffs of trained administrators had forced the Crown to exercise its powers through the Estates’ own apparatus; and the Counter-Reformation – the one really important political initiative taken by any of Maria Theresa’s predecessors – once safely enforced, the Crown had left the new men to work through the old channels with little interference, not troubling greatly about methods so long as the required results were forthcoming – as they usually were up to the end of Charles VI’s reign – nor about the Land’s internal affairs. Up to the same date, centralization, too, had been carried only halfway.
Some of the Estates in both groups of Lands had, however, shown themselves conspicuously unreliable during the War of the Austrian Succession – the Estates of both Upper Austria and Bohemia had sworn fealty to the Elector of Bavaria in 1742 – and in general, the Estates had shown themselves so niggardly and obstructive over the contributio that Maria Theresa had had to break off or renounce more than one military operation for lack of money to pay the mercenary troops in her service. Besides excess of independence, there had also been too much provincial spirit: each of the Ministri and Capi, as the Empress complained bitterly, tried to protect his own Land (in which his own estates lay) to the disadvantage of the others ‘as though they were foreign Lands and not subject to the same Monarch’.55
On the advice, therefore, of Haugwitz, she had carried through a series of drastic reforms. The problem which emerged after sundry transmogrifications (Haugwitz’s original ideas having been modified later under the influence of Kaunitz) was that both groups of Lands, and also, subsequently, Galicia-Bukovina56 were put under a single administrative Ministry entitled the ‘k. und k. vereinigte böhmisch-oesterreichische Hofkanzlei’ (the head of which was known as the Oberste Kanzler), and, justice having been separated from administration, also under a single Oberste Justizstelle, which combined the functions of Ministry of Justice and Supreme Court of Appeal.57
Simultaneously, the surviving powers of the Estates had been further reduced. Their most important surviving right had been that of querying or refusing the contributio. Under Haugwitz’s reforms, the Crown’s requirements in this field were now presented to them only at decennial intervals, but their consent to their assessment was still, in theory, necessary. In practice, however, this right now became purely illusory.58 For the rest, they apportioned locally and collected the taxation imposed by the Crown, administered certain local funds, considered applications for indigenat, and carried out a few other minor duties, mostly for the benefit of their own members. Quite often, the Crown did not even trouble to convoke them for their annual session. It would do so if they were docile, as a token of appreciation and good will; thus Styria, for example, never missed a year. If, as in Hungary, they showed a tendency to be recalcitrant, they were simply not called together. All the important administrative duties formerly performed by them corporately had passed to the Gubernia, over whose workings the Estates retained only so much influence that two members of them were attached to each Gubernium in an advisory capacity. The supremacy of the Gubernia over the Estates were further assured by the provision that the office of Landeshauptmann automatically carried with it the Presidency of the Estates.59
It was not only on Land level that the reforms had swept away the old local autonomy, for another, very important, change had made the Kreisämter (the number of which had been extended until they existed, under various names, in all the large Lands) into sub-branches of the Gubernia, and their staffs into employees thereof. Although, as we have said, the manorial system, as such, had been left in being, its scope had been greatly restricted by the transference of many duties formerly performed by the lords of the manor, to the Kreisämter, which had also been especially charged with the duty of seeing that the lords did not abuse their powers over their subjects. Similarly, the Oberste Justizstelle had taken over the entire judiciary above the Patrimonial Court level, and had substantially restricted the range of cases with which those Courts could deal summarily.
The urban and communal self-governing institutions had been left in being, but subjected to close official control.
In sum, the Monarch’s powers in the Western Lands had now become so extensive as to enable serious writers60 to describe them as ‘unlimited’.
These developments had also brought with them a large amount of centralization as between these Lands. Tribute was still paid to local particularism by the rule that the Landeshauptmann had to be a landowner possessing local indigenat, and the staffs of the Gubernia in the Hereditary and Bohemian Lands had also to be composed of local men.61 But the Gubernia themselves were growing yearly less important. The real authority lay with the Hofkanzlei, which, it is true, sent out its orders separately to each Land, thus respecting their theoretical mutual independence, and the enactments sometimes contained considerable local variations,62 but the general tendency of its operations, and of those of the Oberste Justizstelle, was to turn all these Lands increasingly into a de facto administrative and judicial unity.
Maria Theresa had not attempted to bring the Lands of the Hungarian Crown into this system, although the regime in Transylvania was in practice almost as autocratic. The Three Nations nominally possessed the right to elect the Gubernium (under the Governor himself, who was designated by the Crown), but this was a dead letter. The Crown simply filled the Gubernium by appointment. Moreover, it exercised its right to appoint ex-officio members (‘Regalists’) to the Diet so lavishly that its nominees always easily outnumbered the representatives of the Three Nations.63 The Crown’s ‘postulata’ were thus almost always accepted without argument, and if ever any objections were raised, a little pressure from the local military commander sufficed to silence them.
There was, however, a real, as well as a nominal difference in the position of Inner Hungary. The corpus of laws which made up the Hungarian mediaeval constitution did not limit the Monarch’s powers much more than did the corresponding instruments in other Lands, except, indeed, in two important respects: that they made legislation dependent on agreement between the King and the ‘nation’,64 and that they allowed the latter a formally enacted jus resistendi against illegal action by the King.65 But Hungary had maintained her rights where other lands had lost theirs. Leopold I had once annulled the constitution, but the national resistance had been so vigorous that he had been obliged to restore it soon after, with the s
ole exception that the jus resistendi was abolished, and the position as regards legislation was defined by the words ‘as the King and the Estates assembled in Parliament (dietaliter) shall agree on the usage and interpretation thereof’.
After the great Rákóczi rebellion, Charles III had confirmed his promise, adding the assurance that he would never rule and administer Hungary except by its own laws, existing or to be enacted in Parliament, and customs, and not ‘after the pattern of other provinces’. None of the bodies through which it was governed (in particular, the Hungarian Chancellery) was to be in any kind of dependence on any non-Hungarian body: the only authority recognized by Hungary was that of its own king.
The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918) Page 4
