ABSTRACT

Anglo-Hungarian relations in the dynastic, cultural and personal sphere of course go back a good deal further than the eighteenth century. Britain exerted a growing cultural influence on Hungarians with the passage of time. In Transylvania, through Prince Gabriel Bethlen (1613-29), Prince George Rákóczi I (1630-48) and, later on, members of the Teleki family and Miklós Wesselényi, then in Hungary as a whole through István Széchenyi, English influences on political, economic and cultural life grew ever stronger. The adoption of English fashions in dress was already demonstrable during the time of Prince Mihály Apafi (1661-90): ‘[he] goes about in a jacket and britches tailored from English broadcloth, and even has his horse equipped with an English saddle’.2 A significant role in this spread of English tastes was played by English travellers who happened to pass through Hungary during the late Renaissance era. John Dee, mathematician, astrologer and ‘intelligencer’, or spy, for Queen Elizabeth I,3 visited Pozsony (Pressburg, Bratislava) in 1564; the poet Sir Philip Sidney was in Hungary in 1573, while physician Edward Browne was sent by the Royal Society of London to tour the mining towns of Upper Hungary in 1668-69. From the early nineteenth century, English teachers set off for the Upper Hungarian towns of Pozsony, Losonc (Lučenec, Slo.) and Késmárk (Kežmarok, Slo.), leaving an abiding stamp that was

more than just cultural. Through their presence, English customs, diverse forms of English social life and English manners were ever more widely adopted, the first English-style fox hunt in Hungary being organized at Nyitra (Nitra, Slo.), the first horse race at Ürmény (Mojmírovce, Slo.). By the time of Hungary’s reform era, English travellers themselves were in a position to observe the inroads being made by their country’s way of life. Edgar Quin (in 1834), John Paget (in 1835) and Joseph Andrew Blackwell (in 1836) successively toured much of Hungary, each recording diaries, travel books or impressions through which the country’s prestige was boosted considerably, not just in Britain but elsewhere as well.