26 Chapter II
tage to the nobility is apparent. The King was restricted in the creation of new
nobles except at his coronation. It was thus assured that virtually all nobles should
be born such. A law of 1762 further prescribed that no new families should be
allowed to enter the chamber of nobles. The two parties, Hats and Caps, began in
this decade to take on a certain class character, the Hats generally favoring the
nobles, the Caps the three “unredeemed” estates, as they were called.^4
In Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary the common feature of the diets, or assem-
blies of estates, was that landowners had come to monopolize them. In Poland, the
towns had been excluded from the diet as long ago as 1505. In Bohemia about
thirty towns had formerly been represented, but since they were largely Protestant,
they were excluded during the Catholic and Hapsburg restoration in 1627; by
1755 Prague was the only town that normally sent delegates. In Hungary deputies
from the towns sat in a lower house along with elected deputies of the lesser nobil-
ity or gentry, as in England; but so many townsmen were Germans that the Mag-
yar nobility could not get along with them; all town deputies were required to vote
as a body, and their vote was counted as only one vote, equal to that of a single
squire, a rule reconfirmed in the turbulent Diet of 1764. Peasants in these eastern
kingdoms were not represented at all; most of them were serfs. Ownership of rural
land was confined to persons considered noble. In Poland and Hungary there were
many small nobles, but in all three countries the great nobles or magnates were
wealthy and influential. In Poland and Hungary these magnates sat by personal
right, together with bishops, in an upper house of a two- chamber system, like the
lords in England. In Bohemia the Hapsburgs had set up the Catholic clergy as a
First Estate, but the predominance of wealthy nobles over the lesser ones was even
greater than in the other two countries. In the 1780’s, in Bohemia, 189 noble fami-
lies owned land to the value of 600,000,000 florins; but, of these, the 15 families
rated as “princely,” such as the Schwarzenbergs, owned 465,000,000 florins’ worth,
having gained steadily throughout the century at the expense of the lesser nobles.
In Poland the diet was supreme, and the King very weak, as in Sweden until
- In Poland the noble landowners, great and little, prided themselves on their
constitutional liberties, to the point of refusing even to be bound by majority rule,
so that the diet, while supreme, could not govern, and the country in the 1760’s
faced partition by its monarchic neighbors. The kingdoms of Bohemia and Hun-
gary were parts of the Hapsburg empire. The landowners in their diets had to share
power with a strong dynasty. Restrained by the central government at Vienna in
the eighteenth century, they were to reassert themselves vigorously in a kind of
aristocratic resurgence in the 1700’s.^5 In Prussia there was no diet for the kingdom
as a whole. Provincial diets or Landtage continued to meet, but they had lost their
political powers during the century of Hohenzollern consolidation before 1740. In
Prussia as elsewhere, however, the middle of the eighteenth century saw a new
4 For Sweden see Svanstrom and Palmstierna, History of Sweden (Eng. trans., Oxford, 1934),
191–92, 245–51; B. J. Hovde, The Scandinavian Countries, 1720–1865: The Rise of the Middle Classes
(Boston, 1943), I, 177–90.
5 R. H. Lord, Second Partition of Poland (Cambridge, Mass., 1915); R. J. Kerner, Bohemia in the
Eighteenth Century (N.Y., 1932); Marczali, Hungary in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, Eng.,
1910).