"...Elisabeth was known by friends and admirers alike to always be highly reluctant to travel to Budapest; while she had not accompanied her parents on their fateful June 1898 trip where they had perished, there was something about the city that unnerved her, as if she could feel the weight there of the split seconds of that terrible day, twenty years later, that had rendered her an orphan at the age of only fourteen.
Hers was a life of contradictions, though, an Archduchess of the Austrian Imperial family who sympathized and socialized with socialists, a doting mother who carried on torrid affairs with the consent and indeed approval of her equally-libertine husband, who went by the diminutive "Erszi" despite a Magyar anarchist having taken her parents' lives. She had escaped the prison of Emperor Franz Josef's strict control into a loveless morganatic marriage [1] that granted her what she had always wanted: the freedom to chart her own course, and never had that seemed more dangerous, daring and necessary than the end of 1918.
She had arrived in Budapest on October 19, 1918, to attend a birthday celebration for a friend, but the true purpose was to thereafter make her way to the Alcsut Palace, the home of Archduke Joseph August, a distant cousin by blood and a direct marriage by relative as his wife's mother, Princess Gisela of Bavaria, was Elisabeth's aunt. [2] Joseph August was in many ways the opposite of Emperor Ferdinand; he was kind and patient, a devoted husband, and most crucially enormously popular with Hungarian citizens, in part through his service in the House of Magnates but also by virtue of having lived most of his life in Hungary, speaking both Magyar and Slovak fluently in addition to German, French and English, and his silence in the face of the two years of frequent political crises gripping the Crownlands of Saint Stephen had been interpreted not as neglect of Hungary or tacit support of Ferdinand, but rather a courteous quiet out of respect - sympathy, in other words.
But Joseph August was not any mere Habsburg Archduke; he was the titular Palatine of Hungary, a position which had lost all temporal relevance in the aftermath of 1848 but which had once held a power equivalent to a viceregal representative of the Habsburg Crown. As 1918 drew of a close and the dubious seventy-year anniversary of the Spring of Nations went noticed by just about everyone in the Habsburg realms, a number of moderates in Vienna and Budapest alike had begun discussing, secretly of course, a potential solution out of the seemingly endless stalemate between the intransigent Magyarphobes around Ferdinand and the delusional '48ers now ensconced in Swiss exile and accusing the Hofburg of trying to have them murdered. Dubbed in English-speaking scholarship and contemporary press as the "Palatine Plot" - a silly name but which got the thrust of the matter across - it was a discussion that had gotten surprisingly close to Ferdinand himself, close enough that its chief advocates had taken the remarkable step of recruiting "Erszi," the Emperor's own cousin once removed, as an unexpected go-between.
Elisabeth was skeptical, to say the least, and cared little for Hungarian politics either way, but for a brief moment, considered it her patriotic and familial duty - especially as Ferdinand had always, personally at least, been quite kind to her, helping shield her somewhat from the eccentricities and expectations of her domineering grandparents in the wake of her parents' assassination in June 1898 - to try to help however she could. As such, on October 23, having made her appearances at a grand gala of Hungary's aristocracy at the Royal Opera House on Budapest's Andrassy Avenue, the Magyar answer to the Champs d'Elysees, she surreptitiously arranged for a motor transport to "visit family" at Alcsut [3], a request nobody would think second of.
Elisabeth did not know Joseph August well, what with him spending the vast majority of his time in Hungary and rarely visiting court in Vienna, and her taking wide leave of Viennese court intrigues as it was. At Alcsut, however, he welcomed her as he would a younger sister that he had not seen in a fortnight, and that night they had a lovely dinner with outstanding tokaji as his son Matthias regaled her with poetry he had learned from his tutor and his wife - Elisabeth's cousin, Auguste Maria - described the preparations they were making for a grand 25th wedding anniversary celebration on the grounds of Alcsut for a month later. It was a brief glance for Elisabeth at something she had been denied and unable to form on her own, that of a happy, functional family, even within the claustrophobic and asphyxiating confines and regulations of Der Haus von Habsburg.
After Auguste Maria and the children had retired, however, Joseph August invited her to a drawing room at the other end of the palace, where there was more tokaji on offing along with an excellent brandy, and though his demeanor remained affable, he quickly got down to brass tacks. He noted that while he appreciated and enjoyed her visit, she knew as well as he did that Elisabeth Marie, Archduchess of Austria and daughter of the slain Crown Prince Rudolf, did not make social calls to family ofter and certainly not on a whim, especially not within the borders of Hungary. He asked, politely but pointedly, what had really inspired her to drop in on him.
It was here that Elisabeth laid it all out on the table, what she had been approached in Vienna even by men close to the Emperor - members of the so-called "Prague Circle" - to convey, more as a trial balloon than anything else. Though the protests in Budapest and industrial towns nearby had subsided considerably since the suspension of the Diet, and a booming economy with rapidly rising wages had sated a great many, there was still a sense that the crisis was just waiting to erupt again, especially with Karolyi's accusation that the Hofburg had tried to have him killed in Zurich. Influential members at Court in Vienna and in the Reichsrat, and important military figures such as the well-regarded and usually sober-minded new Chief of the General Staff Viktor Dankl von Krasnik, were all deeply unsure what was to come next if the legislature in either half of the Dual Monarchy were reconvened. With Hungary for good reason being considered the more imminent issue, this group of Austrian kingmakers were starting to think of potential face-saving solutions for both sides, and had arrived at one that was not particularly novel: the restoration of the temporal authority of the Palatine of Hungary. This would give the Hungarians a sovereign partially their own, who would only be overruled by the "head of the family" in extraordinary circumstances, while retaining their economic ties to Vienna. This would placate those who regarded the Compromise of 1867 a betrayal of Hungarian vital interests without abrogating Hungary's ancient constitution that placed genuine checks upon the monarch and restore the Crown of St. Stephen to fully co-equal as part of a personal union, with the Palatine a hereditary representative of God and Crown in Budapest, permanently.
Joseph August listened politely, not interrupting her, and she concluded by pointing out that by birthright, the title of Palatine was his; all he needed was to accede to fulfilling its powers and duties within an Austrian Empire revised to reflect a more pre-1848 status, before the failed revolution, the nineteen years of military dictatorship, and the well-intentioned but flawed Compromise. Once she was done, Joseph August concurred that on paper, it was a straightforward solution, and he noted that the Hungarian political dynamic was much more nuanced and complex than just Greens and Whites (he ignored the Reds, knowing where her sympathies lay by reputation, sympathies he vehemently did not share). He also concluded that the Habsburgs were not necessarily unpopular in Hungary - the legacy of Mohacs meant something yet - but that the Compromise and Ferdinand's behavior since taking the throne were, and had done real damage to the Empire's prestige amongst, at least, the Hungarian intelligentsia. While his comment that "this is a Hungarian problem, and it will take a Hungarian solution" at first suggested to her that he perhaps did not think the crisis as severe as it really was, his intention was more to convey that he did not think that the Viennese understood what they were talking about, which he quickly elaborated on.
The problem, however, was twofold. While Karolyi might accede to such a solution, the bigger problem was Ferdinand's White allies, who would probably correctly presume that without the safeguards of Vienna's support, their social and economic position would rapidly collapse, and Hungary pivoting to a personal union without the Compromise's careful splits on military funding (which Hungary regularly abrogated or filibustered) and economics would immediately become an issue. The second problem was that Ferdinand would never, ever agree to such a solution; even in a case where more local autonomy was granted to Slavic regions, it was all part of a design that would shift the Empire in a more absolutist, anti-democratic direction and make the Hungarians co-equal not with Vienna as an administrative entity but with the Germans, Czechs, Croats, Romanians, and Poles. Appointing a Palatine thus flew directly in the face of Ferdinand's dark worldview that saw Magyarism in all its forms as the locus of all of the Dual Monarchy's many issues.
Joseph August admitted that the thought of a renewed Palatinate as being well-meaning if a little naive and underestimating the deep antipathy Ferdinand held towards the Magyars and how the seventy years since 1848 had made the Hungarians feel even more like a conquered people than they had before, and then cut to the meat of it - he was not entirely opposed to the idea, but the move would require a crisis so existential it would end in Ferdinand's abdication and a "more reasonable soul" in Vienna, and he was totally unwilling to partake in any set of events that promulgated such a crisis, for it would be a gamble on whether the Empire emerged from it looking anything like the one that currently existed. In that comment, the Palatine also betrayed that his sympathies fairly clearly lay with the Hungarian people as a legalistic matter and that he found the perpetuation of the Compromise as it existed as unworkable, but also felt a deep personal loyalty to the family that he would never betray.
Elisabeth was unsure what exactly to say to continue the conversation; Joseph August had managed to be vague even when he tried to be direct, open-minded as he acted dismissive. So she retired to bed, pondering one of the more grim implications of her conversation, where Joseph August had suggested that Ferdinand specifically was the problem. She never had much of a chance to take that line of thought to one of its numerous logical conclusions, as shortly before she was to rejoin her hosts for dinner after Joseph August had been attending to business during the day, they received an urgent telegram from Vienna, one that would quickly make the oblique proffer of the night before moot, and reshape the Austria and Hungary they had both known their entire lives..."
- The Arson of Austria: Understanding Central Europe's Conflagration
[1] I lack the bandwidth these days to plot out who Archduchess Elisabeth Marie, daughter of Rudolf and Stephanie, exactly married; its unlikely to be the same suitor as OTL. So the lack of mention of her husband's name is by design.
[2] That good ol' Habsburg incest, baby!
[3] Weird coincidence, this just so happens to be Viktor Orban's hometown.
