Between the Woods and the Water by Patrick Leigh Fermor Read Free Book Online Page A

fences in Northamptonshire or Meath or pensively at gaze, stroking her enormous wolfhound, Shadow. She had loved Hungary and the Hungarians, learnt Magyar and rushed to Hungary’s defence in all discussions; above all, she flung herself with fearlessness and skill into all their equestrian pursuits. Her love was returned with interest and still declared, thirty-six years after her assassination, with all the ardour of Burke for Marie Antoinette.
    Now only the crown was left. It was Hungary’s most sacred object. Vicissitudes beset it and unconjecturable journeys and adventures lay ahead. Wrought in battered gold, with its culminating cross askew, it was the actual diadem Pope Sylvester II sent to St. Stephen when he was crowned first King of Hungary in ad 1000. But the later addition of enamel plaques, gold chains and pendant gems give it an unquestionably Byzantine look, fitter for a mosaic sovereign by the Bosphorus or at Ravenna, one would think, thanfor a canopied monarch of the West. No wonder: the gold-and-enamelled circlet was the gift of a Byzantine emperor to a later sovereign, who promptly clasped it round the Pope’s original gift to his ancestor, and the gleaming hybrid is an apt symbol of the early Hungarian kingdom, for blandishments from the East as well as the West had flickered over the great Hungarian Plain with the ambivalence of a mirage.
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    Except for those dank cellars on the Vár, wandering about the steep and exhilarating city unearthed scarce marks of the long sojourn of the Turks: a few Ottoman fragments, the tomb of a dervish on the Hill of Roses, some hammam-cupolas scattered about; later, a mosque here and there in the provinces. There had been two centuries and a half for the Town to recover in; long enough, perhaps, to surround the Turkish interlude with romance and to remind the Magyars that, genealogically speaking, if one goes far enough back into Asian prehistory, the races are distant cousins. But it was hard, during my explorations, to imagine the skyline—the clustering domes, the minarets and the fluttering crescents—which Charles of Lorraine and his reconquering companions must have gazed at when they laid siege to Buda in 1686.
    Foreign soldiers flocked to the Hungarian wars, and among them more than one Stuart on the wrong side of the blanket, starting with the sixteen-year-old Duke of Berwick, James II’s son with Marlborough’s sister Arabella. He astonished the besieging army by his wild valour in the assault on Buda: and two years after it fell, his first cousin St. Albans—Charles II’s eighteen-year-old son with Nell Gwyn—fought bravely at the storming of Belgrade. Little is known about them in England, but these faraway campaigns invariably assembled stirring and eccentric figures from the British Isles: every kind of adventurer, Wild Geese, clan chieftains, recusant Catholics, Jacobite exiles and soldiers of fortune trailing the puissant pike rushed to the double-eagle banner, for thesewars held all the glamour of the Crusades. Sir Philip Sidney, travelling about Hungary as an ambassador on leave, was in a different category; but otherwise the earliest English arrival I could find was Sir Richard Grenville, fighting on land against Suleiman the Magnificent twenty-five years before the Revenge . The next was Thomas Arundell—a great favourite of Elizabeth’s in spite of his religion. He won great glory in the Imperial service and at the storming of Esztergom in 1595 he forced the water-tower and captured the enemy’s banner with his own hand: a deed which prompted Rudolf II to make him a Count of the Holy Roman Empire. When he got home his joyful flaunting of the title irritated the English nobility; it put his father, Sir Matthew, a mere knight, beside himself; and it infuriated the Queen (‘...my dogs shall wear no collar but my own...’); she sent him to the Fleet prison for a spell. Perhaps it was to stop