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258 István M. Szijártó those coming from recently emerging lesser noble families with no traditions at all, and those from families, like the Felsőbüki Nagy, that were traditionally loyal. Pál Felsőbüki Nagy was not only unigue when contrasted to the outstanding members of his family, all loyal to the king or the gueen from the end of the seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth, but he was also unigue in his generation in so far as he held no county office at all. He lost his wealth and the family mansion in Bük, his marriage to a non-noble bride ended in scandal and his children were born out of wedlock; still his political stance, that was sharper and clearer than those five other politicians that fell into the last sub-section, earned him a name and the reverence of a whole generation. Up to this day, he is the best-known Felsőbüki Nagy, the only one who made it into the schoolbooks. In the final chapter, written by the editor of the volume and the author of this summary, the lessons of the research done about members of the Felsőbüki Nagy family will be summed up framed into a broader investigation (Four generations and what came afterwards). It can be established that holding leading royal administrative and judicial offices in the central royal authorities of Hungary (the Chancellery, the Hungarian Chamber, the Council of Lieutenancy and the Royal Court of Justice) opened the gates of the social elite in front of certain members of the gentry — but this gate was opened only for a certain period. In contrast to earlier generations, for those professional office holders, occupying a leading office for at least 25 years, the double of the average period in these offices, who were brought up already in Maria Theresa’s reign, this gate was already closed. Members of the gentry who arrived from the counties and held leading offices in the central royal authorities were gradually replaced by ‘bureaucrats’, office holders who had no county background, were not prone to demonstrate occasional oppositional behaviours in politics, and who were loyal to the king beyond question. These more general tendencies are mirrored by both the rise of members of the Felsöbüki Nagy family in the beginning of the eighteenth century and in the mid-century, a family that was and remained integrated into the bene possessionati of Sopron county all along, and its subsequent marginalization. This volume maps the paths of the Hungarian political elite from the late seventeenth century to the early nineteenth applying a microhistorical approach and discovering aspects of family history,
