Читать книгу Poland: A history - Adam Zamoyski - Страница 13

As the heirless Zygmunt Augustus paced the galleries of the Royal Castle on Kraków’s Wawel hill dressed in mourning for Barbara Radziwiłł, his subjects thought uneasily of the future. The realm of the Jagiellons was an assemblage of territories with disparate populations, differing customs and varying forms of government coexisting within one state. They were held together by no feudal bond, administration, constitution or military hegemony, but by a consensus whose only embodiment was the dynasty itself. Its possible extinction raised the question not just of who would rule the country, but whether it would even continue to exist in its current form.

The only thing which could prevent the realm from falling apart was a constitutional expression of the consensus which had created it. But who was to formulate this? Who represented the population of this mongrel conglomerate? The answer, as they were not slow to make clear, was the szlachta.

By the mid-sixteenth century the szlachta included Lithuanian nobles and Ruthene boyars, Prussian and Baltic gentry of German origin, as well as Tatars and smaller numbers of Moldavians, Armenians, Italians, Magyars and Bohemians, and was diluted by intermarriage with wealthy merchants and peasants. The szlachta made up around 7 per cent of the population. Since they extended from the top to the bottom of the economic scale, and right across the board in religion and culture, they represented a wider crosssection as well as a greater percentage of the population than any enfranchised class in any European country. To be a member of the szlachta was like being a Roman citizen. The szlachta were the nation, the Populus Polonus, while the rest of the people inhabiting the area were the plebs, who did not count politically.

While the score of patrician families and the princes of the Church attempted to establish an oligarchy, the mass of the ‘noble people’ fought for control of what they felt to be their common weal. It was they who pressed for the execution of the laws, for a clearly defined constitution, and for a closer relationship with the throne. They met with little support from Zygmunt the Old or Zygmunt Augustus, both of whom tended to seek support in the magnates. While the executionists struggled with increasing desperation to arrive at a definition of the powers of the Sejm and the role of the monarch and his ministers, the magnates stalled, meaning to take matters into their own hands when the time came.

A complicating factor was Lithuania, whose dynastic bond with Poland would have to be replaced with a constitutional one. In spite of being granted a senate of their own (Rada) at the beginning of the century, and a sejm in 1559, the szlachta of the Grand Duchy were politically immature and dominated by their magnates. One Lithuanian family, the Radziwiłł, had shot to prominence at the beginning of the century. They accumulated wealth by means of marriages with Polish heiresses, and held most of the important offices in the Grand Duchy.

In 1547, Mikołaj Radziwiłł ‘the Black’ (to distinguish him from his cousin and brother of Barbara, Mikołaj ‘the Red’) had obtained from the Habsburgs the title of Prince of the Holy Roman Empire, and as the extinction of the Jagiellons approached he dreamed of detaching the Grand Duchy from Poland and turning it into his own fief. But this was not likely to survive on its own: in 1547 the ruler of Muscovy, Ivan IV ‘the Terrible’, took the title of Tsar and made it clear that he meant to realise his forebears’ mission of gathering all the Russias under one crown, and his methods, ranging from boiling people in oil to putting cities to the sword, amply demonstrated the firmness of his resolve. Without Polish support, Lithuania, which had already lost Smolensk to Muscovy, would sooner or later experience them too.

While the Lithuanian magnates and szlachta hesitated, the Poles forced the issue, by the administrative sleight of hand of transferring Lithuania’s Ukrainian lands from the Grand Duchy and annexing them to Poland. The Senate and Sejm of Lithuania and those of Poland met at Lublin on the border between the two states, and on 1 July 1569 unanimously swore a new act of union. At the practical level, the Union of Lublin was hardly revolutionary. It stipulated that henceforth the Sejms of both countries should meet as one, at Warsaw, a small town conveniently placed for the purpose. The combined upper house would contain 149 senators and the lower 168 deputies. Poland and Lithuania would share one monarch, not, as had been the case hitherto, de facto (because the Jagiellon elected to the Kraków throne was already the hereditary Grand Duke of Lithuania) but de jure. The Grand Duchy was to keep its old laws, codified in the Statutes of Lithuania in 1529, a separate treasury, and its own army, to be commanded by a Grand Hetman and a Field-Hetman of Lithuania. The ministers of the crown (marshal, chancellor, vice chancellor, treasurer and marshal of the court) were joined by identical officers for Lithuania. The Union was a marriage of two partners, with the dominant position of Poland diplomatically effaced. It was the expression of the wishes of the szlachta, the embodiment of their vision of a republic in which every citizen held an equal stake. The combined kingdom now formally became ‘the Most Serene Commonwealth of the Two Nations’, ‘Serenissima Respublica Poloniae’ to foreigners.

There was an obvious paradox in the co-existence of monarchy and republic, yet the Poles made a virtue out of the seeming contradiction. The political writer Stanisław Orzechowski claimed that the Polish system was superior to all others, since it combined the beneficent qualities of monarchy, oligarchy and democracy. That it might combine their faults as well was not considered. In spite of continuous efforts by the executionists, the relationship between these three elements was never precisely defined. In principle, the Sejm was the embodiment of the will of the people, and therefore the fount of legislative power; the Senate were the custodians of the laws; the king was both a political unit in his own right and the mouthpiece of the Sejm. While the Sejm had curtailed the monarch’s personal power, it meant to invest its own in his person, thereby turning him into its executive. The would-be oligarchs in the Senate resisted this aim, while the uncertainties attendant on the Reformation and the impending interregnum made the deputies hesitate before placing too much of their power in the hands of the king.

There was never any question of doing without a king. The Sejm had debated what to do on the death of Zygmunt Augustus as early as 1558. Because of the stalling tactics of the Senate, nothing had been formally agreed when, on 7 July 1572, the last of the Jagiellons died. The burning issue thus became how his successor should be chosen, and by whom. Early suggestions on procedure envisaged an enlarged Sejm, where each member would have one vote. The eleven major towns were to be represented, but not the bishops, since they were agents of a foreign power.

When the time came, the Senate demanded the exclusive right to elect the new king, which brought an angry response from the szlachta. A suggestion that the entire political nation should have an equal vote was seized on by the bishops, who realised that an overwhelming majority were Catholic and therefore likely to support a Catholic candidate. The cry for universal suffrage was taken up by an ambitious young deputy to the Sejm, Jan Zamoyski, who captivated the szlachta with his rhetoric and became their tribune. With their support, he forced the proposal through the Convocation Sejm which met after the king’s death, in 1573. From now on every single member of the szlachta, however poor, was a king-maker. More than that: each one carried a royal crown in his saddlebag, for it was stipulated that only a Polish nobleman or member of a ruling foreign dynasty could be a candidate to the throne of the Commonwealth.

The procedure for choosing the king was improvised at the first election of 1573. On the death of the sovereign, the Primate of Poland assumed the title of interrex, provisionally taking over the functions of the monarch, and summoned the Convocation Sejm to Warsaw. This fixed the date of the election, restated the rules, and vetted all the proposed candidates. It also set down the terms on which the king elect was to be invited to take the throne. Then came the Election Sejm, which met at Wola outside Warsaw, and to which every member of the szlachta was entitled to come. Since tens of thousands of voters might turn out, along with their servants and horses, this was often a remarkable gathering. The representatives of the various candidates set up ‘hospitality tents’ in which they plied the voters with food, drink and even money in the hope of gaining their vote. Rich magnates fraternised with the poorest members of the szlachta in order to gain their support for a favoured candidate.

The centre of the Election Field was taken up by a fenced rectangular enclosure. At one end of this there was a wooden shed for the clerks and senior dignitaries, including the Marshal of the Sejm, who supervised the voting and policed the whole gathering. The electors remained outside the enclosure, on horseback and fully armed, drawn up in formation according to the palatinate in which they lived. This symbolised the levée en masse, the obligation to fight for the country which was the basis of all the szlachta’s privileges. It says a great deal for the restraint of the proverbially quarrelsome szlachta that the occasion did not degenerate into a pitched battle. Each palatinate sent ten deputies into the enclosure, where they and the assembled senators listened to the representatives of the various candidates make an election address on behalf of their man, extolling his virtues and making glittering election pledges. The deputies would then go back to their comrades outside the enclosure and impart what they had heard. When this had been mulled over, the voting began. Every unit was given sheets of paper, each with the name of a candidate at the top, and the assembled voters signed and sealed on the sheet bearing the name of the candidate of their choice. The papers were then taken back into the enclosure, the votes counted, and the result officially proclaimed by the interrex. The whole procedure took four days at the first election, in 1573, which was attended by 40,000 szlachta, but subsequent elections were often less well attended and could be over in a day or two.

The king thus chosen could hardly entertain any illusions about Divine Right. To make sure that all remnants of any such idea should be banished from his mind, his prospective subjects made him swear an oath of loyalty to them and their constitution, as well as to a set of other conditions laid down in two documents: one, the Acta Henriciana, immutable; the other, the Pacta Conventa, drawn up specifically by the Convocation Sejm before every new election. In swearing to these, the king abdicated all right to a say in the election of his successor and agreed not to marry or divorce without the approval of the Sejm. He undertook not to declare war, raise an army, or levy taxes without its consent, and to govern through a council of senators chosen by it, which he had to summon at least once in every two years. If he defaulted on any of these points, his subjects were automatically released from their oath of loyalty to him—in other words, he could forfeit his throne if he did not abide by the terms of his employment.

The king was, in effect, a functionary, the chief executive of the Commonwealth. He was not by any means a mere figurehead, but his power was not arbitrary, and he was not above the law. Although he had no aura of divinity surrounding him, the king could, and many did, build up a strong position and elicit unbounded respect and devotion from his subjects. And no elected King of Poland would suffer the fate of a Charles I or Louis XVI, however bad his behaviour.

Like all others affected by the new learning of the Renaissance, the Poles had been fascinated by the rediscovery of the artistic and political culture of the Hellenic world and ancient Rome. The apparent similarities between some of their own institutions and those of the republics of antiquity tickled the national vanity. Without looking too closely at the pitfalls that led to the demise of the Roman Republic, the Senatus Populusque Polonus drew further on this model. The Polish political vocabulary bristled with terms such as ‘liberty’, ‘equality’, ‘brotherhood’, ‘nation’, ‘citizen’, ‘senate’, ‘tribune’, and ‘republic’. Like the makers of the French Revolution of 1789, the Poles increasingly borrowed the style, the symbolism and the concepts of the Roman Republic.

The difference between the Poles of the sixteenth century and the French revolutionary leaders, however, was that the Polish system was based almost entirely on precedent. The notion of electing a monarch had evolved with Poland’s twelfth-century subdivision into duchies, and had attended every royal accession since. At the very beginning of the fifteenth century, Paweł Włodkowic had put forward the thesis that the king was merely an administrator ruling the country on behalf of and by consent of his subjects, while his colleague Stanisław of Skarbimierz (d. 1431) had added that he had no right to infringe their rights. The thesis put forward by Buonaccorsi that the ruler should have absolute power and that nothing should stand in his way of acting for the greater good was confounded by the Polish constitutional jurists. After the death of Kazimierz IV in 1492, his sons and all subsequent kings of the house of Jagiello were subjected to a regular election.

Nor was the idea of choosing a foreign prince new—it was based on the precedent of the Kraków Lords approving the accession of Louis of Anjou, and their subsequent choice of Jagiello. Virtually every clause in the Acta Henriciana and most of those in the Pacta Conventa were a repetition of older privileges. This deference to precedent is reflected in the fact that there was no written constitution, merely a great body of legislation written into the statute books, swelling gradually by accretion over the centuries.

Yet if the Polish constitution evolved out of practical rather than theoretical motives, it was fashioned by a mentality which was idealistic rather than pragmatic. The parliamentary system relied to an inordinate extent on the integrity of the individual deputy and senator, and lacked procedures for ensuring correct behaviour. The Marshal of the Sejm (not to be confused with the Marshals of Poland and of Lithuania, who were the king’s ministers) was elected at the beginning of each session by the deputies, and it was his duty to keep order. Since he had no authority to silence a deputy or expel him from the chamber, the orderly conduct of debates depended in large measure on his skill in easing tensions and steering attention back to the point at issue. His job was made no easier by the ambiguities inherent in the mandate given to the deputies by the sejmiks which elected them.

In principle, the deputies were the representatives not merely of the provincial sejmiks which had returned them, but of the corporate electorate of the whole Commonwealth, and they were supposed to cast their votes as such. At the same time, each deputy was given a set of written instructions before he left for Warsaw to take up his seat. These instructions varied from general guidelines to specific orders on how to vote on certain issues. The electorate’s participation in government did not end with the election of a deputy, and he could ill afford to disregard the injunctions of his electors, since he had to face a debriefing in his constituency at the end of the parliamentary session. Sometimes deputies were instructed not to vote on any unforeseen issues without consulting their electors.

This practice tied the hands of the deputies and reduced the value of parliamentary debate, but an intelligent and experienced deputy could still vote according to his conscience and answer for it successfully to his electors. It was not until the beginning of the next century, when the electorate began to grow suspicious of central government, that the instructions became binding.

The Polish parliamentary system was more vulnerable than most, because of a principle whose perverted form, the liberum veto, was to become notorious: the principle that no legislation could be enacted without mutual consent. Some such convention originally existed in virtually every parliamentary body in Europe. It did not mean that everyone had to vote for a measure unanimously, but expressed the twin convictions that any measure not freely assented to by all lacked full authority and that no sincere dissenting opinion should be disregarded by the majority. Dissenting minorities were listened to, argued with and persuaded, and only when broad agreement had been reached (the word used was the Latin consensus) was a measure passed. In theory, a small minority, even a minority of one, could block legislation. In practice, minorities were ultimately ignored if they proved intractable.

Another curious feature of the constitution was the szlachta’s right to confederate in an emergency such as the death of the monarch, foreign invasion, or some other extremity. They would form a confederation, elect a marshal, publish their aims and invite others to join. It was a form of plebiscite, and could take place within a Sejm where deadlock had been reached; it was the one political assembly in which, for obvious reasons, strict majority voting was observed and dissent ignored.

A fundamental weakness of the Polish parliamentary system was the under-representation of the towns, and therefore of trading interests, in the Sejm. This was not so much a flaw in the constitution as a reflection of the country’s social structure. In the fifteenth century the towns, with their predominantly foreign populations enjoying a favourable administrative status, did not join in the scramble for power and thereby missed an opportunity for integrating their rights into the constitution. They had always dealt directly with the crown, which guaranteed their status, but when the crown began to abdicate its responsibilities to the Sejm, the towns were left without a champion. This was compounded by social barriers. A law passed in 1550 (mainly at the insistence of the merchants) barred members of the szlachta from indulging in trade, and soon the szlachta began to regulate admissions to its own ranks. In 1578 the Sejm passed a law taking away from the crown and arrogating to itself the exclusive right to ennoble people (except for battlefield grants of arms by the king). A law of 1497 preventing plebeians from buying noble estates closed a back door to noble status. This sort of legislation was impossible to enforce given the absence of any heraldic institution or register, but lines were being drawn. A merchant might join the szlachta by some means and thereby acquire voting rights, but when he did, he would find himself banned from practising anything except agriculture, politics and war.

A number of cities, including Kraków, Lublin, Lwów, Poznań, Wilno, Gdańsk and Toruń, were represented in the Sejm, and other towns were on occasion invited to send deputies. In theory, these had the same debating and voting rights as others, but the reality was often different. As the writer Sebastian Petrycy put it: ‘Once upon a time a donkey was asked to a wedding feast; he marvelled and licked his chops at the thought of the new unfamiliar delicacies he would be tasting, but when the day came the donkey found he was only there to carry water and kindling to the kitchen.’ The city deputies were usually intimidated by their noble colleagues and feared to say anything—with some reason, since it appears that in 1537 the Kraków deputies were physically assaulted. They often found it easier to stay away and put up with whatever taxes might be imposed, or employ the local palatine to look after their interests.

The peasants, who had also enjoyed a direct relationship with the crown, were similarly sidelined. As the judge of the supreme court of appeal, the king had been the final arbiter in all their disputes with landowners. In 1518 Zygmunt the Old was persuaded to give up his right of arbitration, and in 1578 the Sejm itself assumed the function. Since it represented almost exclusively landed interests, the peasants were unlikely to find justice here. It is worth nothing that the principles of Polish democracy were not exclusive to the Sejm, and every village had its elected communal council and officers. The squire’s functions within this, usually as local magistrate, were not feudal or proprietary, but elective.

Not all the drawbacks of the Polish constitution were specific to it. All democracy breeds its own problems, and one of these is the impossibility of carrying on a successful foreign policy when decision-making is hamstrung by the devolution of power and the force of public opinion. The element of secrecy was impossible to sustain since all Sejm debates were open to the public and all its resolutions immediately printed. Defence suffered from the same problems. No democracy likes an army, because nobody likes paying for one. In the late sixteenth century about two-thirds of the entire revenue of most European states was spent on armament, almost 70 per cent in the case of Spain. In Poland, the figure was nearer 20 per cent. In the 1480s a ‘Current Defence Force’ of 2,000 was set up to parry Tatar raiding, and in 1520 the Sejm increased the numbers slightly. In 1563 a new system of ‘Quarter Troops’ was introduced, paid for out of a quarter of all revenues from starosties, but the number of men under arms remained tiny in relation to the vast area of the Commonwealth.

It was not just that the Poles did not like paying for the troops. The szlachta also wished to perpetuate the idea of the levée en masse, which would become unnecessary if there were an adequate standing army. More important than either of these considerations was the deep-rooted conviction that a standing army was sooner or later bound to be used by the crown to enforce absolutist government. This fear of authoritarian rule was responsible for all that is most striking about the political edifice of the Commonwealth.

The salient features of this edifice were the oath of loyalty made by the incoming monarch to his subjects, and the clause which stipulated that if he defaulted on his obligations his subjects were automatically released from their obligations to him. The latter was an obvious recipe for disaster. It amounted to a right to mutiny if the king overstepped his powers—a question open to highly subjective interpretation. But this right was never carried through to its logical end. Mutinies would take place in the spirit of this clause in 1606 and 1665, but neither of them led to the dethronement of the monarch. They were intended as a final rap on the royal knuckles to make the king desist from his plans.

The release clause was only the ultimate recourse in the whole scheme of checks and balances erected in order to make sure that power was never concentrated in too few hands. It also proclaimed the basis of the relationship between king and subject. Ruler and ruled were bound by a bilateral contract which placed obligations on both and had to be respected by both. This notion of a contract between the throne and the people, the cornerstone of the constitution, was almost entirely unknown in Europe at the time—only in England were the germs of such ideas in evidence.

While the Habsburgs of Austria, the Bourbons of France, the Tudors of England, and every other ruling house of Europe strove to impose centralised government, ideological unity and increasing control of the individual through a growing administration, Poland alone of all the major states took the opposite course. The Poles had made an article of faith of the principle that all government is undesirable, and strong government is strongly undesirable. This was based on the conviction that one man had no right to tell another what to do, and that the quality of life was impaired by unnecessary administrative superstructure. That such ideals should be held by people who simultaneously oppressed their own subjects, the peasants, is neither novel nor exceptional: the Greek founders of modern political thought no less than the Fathers of the American Revolution applied a similar double standard which cannot be equated with hypocrisy.