There are plots, intrigues, a murder, political imbroglios and passionate love-affairs, and though this particular counterpoint of town and country may sound like the stock-in-trade of melodrama, with a fleeting dash of Anthony Hope; it is nothing of the kind. But it is, beyond question, dramatic. Patrick Thursfield and Kathy Bánffy-Jelen have dealt brilliantly with the enormous text; and the author’s life and thoughtful cast of mind emerges with growing clarity. The prejudices and the follies of his characters are arranged in proper perspective and only half-censoriously, for humour and a sense of the absurd, come to the rescue. His patriotic feelings are totally free of chauvinism‚ just as his instinctive promptings of tribal responsibility have not a trace of vanity. They urge him towards what he thought was right, and always with effect. (He was Minister of Foreign Affairs at a critical period in the 1920s.) If a hint of melancholy touches the pages here and there, perhaps this was inevitable in a time full of omens, recounted by such a deeply civilized man.

Chatsworth, Boxing Day‚ 1998

* John Murray‚ 1980.

‘And the first word that was written in letters of fire on the wall of the King’s palace was MENE – The Lord hath numbered thy Kingdom.

‘But none could see the writing because they were drunken with much wine, and they called out in their great drunkenness to bring out the vessels of gold and silver that their ancestors had laid up in the Temple of the House of God, and they brought forth the vessels and drank wine from them and increased in their drunkenness and madness.

‘And the Lord’s vessels were wasted among them as they abused each other and quarrelled over their own gods, each man praising his gods of gold and of silver, of brass, of iron, of wood and of clay.

‘And as they drank and quarrelled among themselves the fiery hand wrote on in flaming letters upon the plaster of the wall of the King’s palace. And the second word was TEKEL – Thou art weighed in the balance and art found wanting.’

PART ONE

Chapter One

ONE DAY IN THE AUTUMN of 1906 the Budapest Parliament was unusually well attended. In fact the Chamber was packed, with not an empty seat to be seen. On the front benches, the government was there in full force. It was, of course, an important day for that morning the Budget was to be presented and everyone knew that, for the first time since 1903, it was bound to be passed and, more important still, passed by a massive majority. For the previous three years the country’s finances had been ordered by ‘indemnities’ – unconstitutional decrees, which had mockingly become known in pig Latin as ‘exlex’ for the sake of the rhyme, and which had had a disastrous effect on the economy.

At last, and this had been the great achievement of the Coalition government, the nation had put its house in order.

Pal Hoitsy‚ the Speaker‚ ascended the podium‚ his handsome grey head and well-trimmed imperial looking well against the oak panelling behind the platform. In stilted words he commented on the importance of this blessed situation in which confidence had been restored between the nation and the King‚ the Emperor Franz-Josef in Vienna.

A few meagre ‘hurrahs’ came from a handful of enthusiastic members, though the rest of the House remained silent, stony-faced and stern. None of the political groups – not even the minorities party whose leader, the Serbian Mihaly Polit, was to propose acceptance of the Budget – gave the smallest sign of believing the Speaker’s words. The reason was that that morning, September 22nd, an article had appeared in the Viennese newspaper Fremdenblatt baldly stating that this much-vaunted harmony was nothing more than a cynical and dishonest political fiction.

The article concentrated on the resolution which had been drafted on the previous day by the legal committee of the Ministry of Justice and which, so everyone had been led to believe, would be incorporated into law at today’s session.

It was a delicate and disagreeable situation.

The difficulties had started two days before when a member of the People’s Party had proposed that the recently resigned government of General Fejervary should be impeached. The new government, much though it would have liked to do so, could not now avoid a debate on the proposal (as it had done the previous July when similar propositions had been put forward by the towns and counties at the time of the great debate on the Address)‚ especially as the proposer was a member of Rakovsky’s intimate circle. Naturally the government suspected that the latter was behind this latest move and it was believed too that the whole manoeuvre had been plotted in Ferenc Kossuth’s camp of treachery and was intended to breed such confusion and doubt that the newly achieved harmony of the Coalition would be endangered. This was indeed a direct attack just where the new administration was most vulnerable. Everyone now professed to know that one of the conditions of the recent transfer of power had been that no harm should come to members of the previous government. The leaders of the Coalition had accepted this condition since their object was to restore good relations between the nation and the ruler – and the government of General Fejervary had been appointed by the King.