Nagy János: Rendi ellenzék és kormánypárt az 1751. évi országgyűlésen - Disszertációk Budapest Főváros Levéltárából 7. (Budapest, 2020)
The opposition of the estates and the loyalists at the Diet of 1750 (summary)
horse of the court, while on the other hand they gladly embraced their network of contacts in the court in Vienna. As for the indigenised foreigners themselves, it can be assumed that they were linked with society of orders in Hungary through their kinship networks and they demanded indigeneity as a result of their work in military or clerical positions and their locally owned lands. A ‘political map' of the Hungarian Kingdom from 1151 The prosopographic analysis of the county deputies highlights that there wasn’t just a generation shift that occured since the previous diet of 1741, but also a shift in power structures in favour of Lower House after the old aristocratic elite had died out. All this induced more vehement debates than previously. Although one third of the county deputies had taken part in diets or concursuses earlier, it wasn’t this fact but the presence of the opinion leaders of the 1741 diet that proved decisive for the diet of 1751. Barely one third of the county deputies could land regional or country-level administrative positions, yet to do so, they had to commit themselves more and more to the government. This thin stratus mostly hailed from the northern and north-eastern part of the country. The picture outlined on the basis of who voiced their political opinions in the actual debates or in the form of pasquilles reinforces the earlier assumptions in academic discourse that the majority of opinion leaders and oppositional counties were from the north of Hungary. Apart from the two counties termed leaders of the opposition, Veszprém and Zemplén, we could identify secondary (Borsod, Győr and Zólyom) and tertiary (Bars, Nyitra, Szatmár, Ugocsa, Torna, Liptó) oppositional counties as well. Also, there seems to have been a bloc of progovernment counties in the central part of the country (mostly the southern and eastern parts of the Transdanubia region and the counties of the Great Plain). Micro-level analysis even made it possible to identify switches of allegiance, that is a mosaic of dispersed undecided or swaying counties (Moson, Vas, Pozsony, Nógrád, Arad). The most volatile, hardest to define set is that of the counties in the east of the country, along the Tisza river, whom I termed ‘silent opposition’ counties. There are no surviving speeches or addresses made by their deputies, but the diet diaries reveal them to be the heirs of the traditional oppositional mentality rooted in Protestantism. Based on the argumentation of their speeches, the ‘defenders of local interests’ and their counties can’t be lumped with either of the camps — these are the deputies whose interpellations addressed specific local grievances or supported now the government, now the opposition in their speeches.
