In 1848, the American author John Stevens Cabot Abbott wrote the following of him: [In Hungary,] the feudal system still exists in all its ancient barbaric splendor.

This was literally true, for Esterhazy has two thousand five hundred shepherds.Despite his great wealth, Paul managed to spend beyond his means, getting into financial trouble just as his father had.

According to the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, "the last years of his life were spent in comparative poverty and isolation, as even the Esterházy-Forchtenstein estates were unequal to the burden of supporting his fabulous extravagance and had to be placed in the hands of curators.

In 1810 he was accredited to the court of Dresden, where he tried in vain to detach Saxony from Napoleon, and in 1814 he accompanied his father on a secret mission to Rome.

His wife Maria Theresia became extremely popular in London, and was a patroness of Almack's club, the centre of fashionable society.

In 1824 he represented Austria as ambassador extraordinary at the coronation of Charles X of France, and was the premier Austrian commissioner at the London conferences of 1830–1836.

[2] In 1842 Paul returned to Hungary and became a member of the Conservative Party, which supported the Habsburg supremacy and did not favour the reform experiments.