35
At some point between 28 July and the end of the first week of August 1547 Sigismund August underwent a clandestine marriage ceremony in Vilnius. His bride was Barbara Radziwiłłówna, widow of Stanislovas, the last of the Goštautai, who died unlamented in 1542. Sigismund August had already benefited from this stroke of fortune. The Lithuanian council, thanks to Bona’s influence, was now dominated by her clients, who were hostile to the Goštautas and Radvila families. They were led by Jan Hlebowicz, palatine of Vilnius since 1542, and the Orthodox treasurer, Ivan Hornostai, who had administered the chancery since Albertas Goštautas’s death, but whom Sigismund had not dared appoint chancellor after the fuss generated over Ostrozky twenty years earlier. The council insisted on applying the full rigour of Lithuanian law, by which the vast Goštautas estates were escheated to the crown on the family’s extinction in the male line. Stanislovas left no testament; although under the 1529 statute Barbara could be granted up to a third of her husband’s property, her father Mikołaj Radziwiłł Rudy (the Red), had to write to Bona asking that Barbara’s rights be respected; while he received assurances that royal favour would be extended to the young widow, Bona’s appointment of Hlebowicz and Hornostai as commissioners suggested that it was unlikely to be extensive. Barbara retained the lands assigned to her in her dowry, but Rudy had to fight even to secure this, and his daughter was effectively living at the grand duke’s pleasure.1
In more ways than one, as it turned out. At some point after the autumn of 1543 Sigismund August fell for Barbara and began a relationship that had considerable political ramifications. He had come to Vilnius to escape his new wife and the cloying attention of his mother. In May he had married Elizabeth Habsburg, daughter of Ferdinand I, king of Bohemia and Hungary, and Anna Jagiellonka, daughter of Sigismund August’s uncle Władysław. The couple had been engaged since 1538, but the marriage did not prosper. The sexually experienced Sigismund August did not take to his timid cousin, who—although she was by all accounts good-looking—was six years his junior and not yet fully matured. After she froze with fright on their wedding night he largely ignored her. Her anxiety was not thereby diminished, and the epileptic seizures that plagued her from childhood grew more frequent. Her doting father expressed his concern at her treatment, and it was no doubt with some relief that Sigismund August left for Lithuania in the autumn for an extended stay, during which he hunted with conspicuous enthusiasm.
Quite when he fell for Barbara is unclear. Five months younger than the twenty-three-year-old grand duke she was very different from Elizabeth. Renowned for her beauty she was already attracting gossip. She showed little grief for Stanislovas, did not long wear mourning, and took pleasure in male company, although not as much as was subsequently insinuated. It is unlikely that—as tradition maintains—the affair began in the autumn of 1543, when Sigismund August visited Podlasie to take possession of the Goštautas estates, despite Kuchowicz’s willingness to present Barbara, on the basis of scurrilous material that circulated after the marriage became public, as a sexually liberated woman who seduced Sigismund August during a romantic visit to Gieraniony castle.2 By the summer of 1544 Elizabeth was herself in Vilnius, sent by Sigismund and Habsburg supporters on the Polish council, alarmed at the damage being done to relations with Ferdinand. Sigismund August was urged to treat her with more respect and he responded, displaying a little more grace and even some affection for his nervous cousin. By this time he had resumed his acquaintance with Barbara, who was living with her mother in Rudy’s palace adjacent to the royal castle, and while it is possible that he had already fallen under her spell, the chronicles that touch on the matter—apart from a poisonous account by Stanisław Górski—suggest that the affair only began after Elizabeth’s unexpected death in 1545.3 For the Radziwiłłs the installation of Barbara as a royal mistress could only have harmed the family’s reputation; far from encouraging an affair, they probably supported the idea of bringing Elizabeth to Vilnius to ensure that Sigismund August took up residence there.4
For the Radziwiłłs saw in the young monarch, already king and grand duke, the ideal means of breaking Bona’s influence, which had shattered the Radziwiłł and Goštautas dominance of the council after the deaths of Albertas Goštautas (1539), Czarny’s father Jonas Radvila (1522), Rudy’s father Jurgis Radvila (1541), and Mikalojus Radvila’s son Jonas, starosta of Samogitia (1542). With Jonas’s death, the Goniądz and Rajgród Radziwiłłs died out in the male line, although it was not to be until the death of his daughter Anna in 1571 that their estates were escheated to Sigismund August.5 With the Goštautas removed from the scene, Bona could mould a new council and freeze out the next generation of Radziwiłłs. In 1543 neither Rudy nor Czarny held any significant office, they had not been granted any starosties, and the council was dominated by their opponents, the Chodkiewicz, Zasławski, and Wirszyłła, led by Hlebowicz and Hornostai. While both men were only sons who had been bequeathed substantial property by their fathers—Rudy, Jurgis’s son, inherited twenty-six separate estates—their economic position was by no means secure, especially in the light of Bona’s drive to restore the grand ducal domain. Excluded from favour, the cousins would have no access to grants of grand ducal land that would enable them to stabilize their fortunes. The reality of their position, in which Rudy was forced to raise loans to keep financially afloat while he settled his father’s debts, brought a brief rapprochement with Bona in 1541, in which he and his mother ceded several properties, or parts of properties, but no advancement was secured, and Radziwiłł resentment at her political dominance festered deep.6
Czarny and Rudy saw their chance to outflank Bona through the formation of a reversionary interest The orphaned Czarny, five years older than Sigismund August, had been brought up at the Cracow court between 1529 and 1533, where he formed a friendly relationship with the child-king. When Sigismund August took up residence in Vilnius in 1543 he had every intention of moving out of his mother’s shadow, and favoured the Radziwiłłs, and families associated with them: the Kishkas, the Dowojnas, the Holshanskys, and the Kęsgailas.
The time was right for striking a blow against Bona’s influence. At a sejm hastily assembled in Brest in the summer of 1544, when Sigismund proved too ill to travel to Vilnius—though Bona came—the Lithuanian estates presented Sigismund August with a document containing twenty-five articles complaining at the terrible state of affairs, the way in which taxation registers had been compiled, and the injustice of decisions over estate boundaries made during Bona’s reforms. The Radziwiłłs launched a bitter attack on Hlebowicz’s conduct of the government, proposing that Sigismund August should take over, which Bona passionately opposed. The plan was acclaimed by the sejm and confirmed by Sigismund on 6 October. Sigismund August was to use the title grand duke, while Sigismund revived the title of supreme duke. Bona blocked the Radziwiłł suggestion that Sigismund August should inherit the grand ducal estates in her possession, and he had to content himself with the revenues from the extensive complex of estates round Hrodna purchased by Bona from Jurgis Radvila ten years earlier. Sigismund retained control of the treasury, but Sigismund August was to receive 18,000 kop groszy per annum.7
Bona’s attempts to limit the damage could not prevent a significant change of direction in Lithuanian politics, not least because the split with her son proved irrevocable. The restoration of the Radziwiłłs to the centre of power began immediately, with Czarny’s appointment as marshal of the land during the sejm. The cousins were then presented with an unexpected opportunity. The sickly Elizabeth fell seriously ill in April 1545; in May she seemed to have recovered, and Sigismund August set off for Cracow to collect her dowry, which had finally arrived from Vienna. In his absence Elizabeth’s condition rapidly deteriorated: on 11 June she suffered fifteen epileptic fits; four days later she was dead, twenty days short of her nineteenth birthday.8
The Radziwiłłs were now in a position to exploit Sigismund August’s attraction to Barbara. Czarny had no high opinion of his niece, complaining to Rudy that she had the manners of a peasant and criticizing the morals of her entourage, but he appreciated her political value once Sigismund August’s roving eye settled upon her.9 Rudy now had regular access to Sigismund August, having been appointed Lithuanian cupbearer in 1544, and even more so when he was created master of the hunt in 1546, a significant position given Sigismund August’s passion for the chase. Exactly when Sigismund August’s relationship with Barbara became physical is unknown, but by early 1547 the affair, which he took no pains to hide, was common knowledge, with rumours circulating that a special staircase and entrance to Rudy’s palace had been constructed for discreet nocturnal trysts. While tales that the Radziwiłłs forced his hand by catching the couple in flagrante with a priest conveniently in tow are fanciful, there is no doubt that the seriousness of Sigismund August’s attachment gave them the opportunity to insist that he save the family’s reputation by legitimizing the relationship.10
The marriage was bound to be controversial. The dynasty’s status had risen considerably since Jagiełło had married two commoners in succession (see Fig. 13). After Elizabeth’s death there was talk of another prestigious dynastic marriage and the advantages such a match would bring. Sigismund August delayed informing his parents of his new status until December 1547, when he travelled to the Polish sejm at Piotrków. They did not take the news well. Bona’s fury was spectacular, if it had to be reined in to preserve decorum and to limit the political damage when the senate was officially informed in January 1548.11
Bona’s influence was substantially weakened, however, by the death of her 81-year-old husband on 1 April 1548. Sigismund August immediately made clear that he was not disposed to indulge his mother’s taste for power. Bona departed, raging at filial ingratitude, to take up residence in Warsaw, whence she stirred up her clients and carped biliously from the sidelines. Her umbrage was so great that she established an alliance with her old enemy Albrecht von Hohenzollern, who had hoped that his daughter Anna Sophia might marry Sigismund August after Elizabeth’s death.12 Bona’s day was past, however. Frustrated by the failure to reestablish cordial relations with her son she left Poland in early 1556, returning to her duchy of Bari, where she died on 19 November 1557, only at the last minute restoring Sigismund August to her testament. He thus secured the return of her estates in Poland and Lithuania, although her death opened a legal struggle with Charles V over the revenues from her extensive Italian lands—the ‘Neapolitan sums’—that lasted generations.13
Fig. 13. Tapestry showing the arms of the Kingdom of Poland (white eagle) and of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (the rider known as Vytis in Lithuanian, Pogoń in Polish, and Погоня in Ruthenian). By kind permission of the Zamek Królewski na Wawelu, Cracow.
Her ill-starred daughter-in-law was already dead. Sigismund August’s idyll did not last long. Around the time of the wedding Barbara began to show the first symptoms of an illness that sources refer to as ‘internal stones’. In November 1547 she had what was seen as a miscarriage, but which was almost certainly bleeding from a ruptured abscess. By February 1549 the disease, despite periods of remission, had taken hold. Rumours that she was poisoned by Bona’s agents can be dismissed, while the claim that she was suffering from syphilis—anxiously addressed by Rudy—owe more to her lurid reputation than medical evidence. The most likely explanation is that she developed cervical or ovarian cancer.14 Whatever the cause, she suffered severely. By December 1550 she was largely bedridden, plagued by internal abscesses. At the climax of the tragedy, before her agonizing death on 8 May 1551, the stench of putrefaction was so strong that she dismissed her attendants and only her devoted husband could bear to spend long at her side.
Barbara may not have been queen long, but the consequences of the marriage were considerable. In Lithuania it drew Sigismund August firmly into the Radziwiłł camp, as Czarny and Rudy had planned. With his father dead and Bona safely—if noisily—sidelined, Sigismund August placed considerable power in their hands. Czarny, already marshal, was nominated hetman in December 1549, but refused the offer; instead the post was granted to Rudy in March 1550. Czarny had his eyes on political, not military authority, and in December 1550 he was appointed chancellor in succession to Hlebowicz, who had died in April. Perhaps with an eye to propriety, Sigismund August did not immediately make him palatine of Vilnius, instead appointing the Orthodox Hornostai as administrator; it was only in June 1551 that he felt confident enough to nominate Czarny. Apart from the hetmanship, Rudy was appointed administrator of the Trakai palatinate in 1549, and made palatine a year later, once the storm over the marriage had abated.15
Never had one family enjoyed such dominance over the Lithuanian government. Barbara’s death made little difference to Sigismund August’s relationship with the cousins, with whom he corresponded regularly.16 Lithuanian politics were defined by the Radziwiłłs for a generation. The reformist currents that Bona had encouraged were stemmed or diverted to ensure that change did not affect the interests of the Radziwiłłs or their associates, while Czarny used the unique concentration of power in his hands and his closeness to the king to ensure that his clients were appointed to offices across Lithuania.17 The council returned to the model of politics approved by the Radziwiłłs and Goštautas since 1501, in which the inner council played the leading role, and demands from the Lithuanian nobility for greater freedoms on the Polish model were brushed aside. The change was symbolized by Czarny’s direction of the commission preparing the 1557 hide reform. The restructuring of the Lithuanian countryside that followed was not allowed to challenge the interests of the great council families. There was, nonetheless, much resentment at their dominance, and their pretentions, especially after Czarny secured the grant of imperial titles from Charles V during a 1547 mission to Augsburg. Following the extinction of the Radziwiłł line of Goniądz and Rajgród, Charles created the titles of duke of Nieśwież and Ołyka for Czarny and his descendants, and duke of Birże and Dubinki for Rudy’s line.18 The titles were recognized by Sigismund August in January 1549, but raised serious concern in both Poland and Lithuania.
With Sigismund August backing the Radziwiłłs so strongly there was little their opponents could achieve for the moment, although it remained to be seen if the political dissatisfaction that had grown steadily during Sigismund’s reign could long be contained. In Poland Radziwiłł influence over the king was regarded with deep suspicion, and strengthened the clamour for fundamental political reform. Initially, reaction to the marriage in Poland did not seem particularly alarming. There was little time for the 1547–8 Piotrków sejm to absorb the news and formulate a response, but over the spring and summer many among the szlachta, already nervous at the accession of a king who had already been crowned, began to voice their outrage. In Wielkopolska the opposition was led by Andrzej Górka, castellan of Poznań who, as starosta general, had considerable influence over the provincial sejmik. In Małopolska, the leader was Bona’s associate Piotr Kmita, now grand marshal and starosta and palatine of Cracow. With Bona and Albrecht von Hohenzollern whipping up their supporters, the opposition was determined to prevent Barbara’s coronation, since it would render more difficult their aim of securing the king’s renunciation of the marriage, or a papal annulment.
The frenzy dominated the first year of the new reign. Sigismund August planned to hold his first sejm in August, but the Wielkopolskans, pleading various excuses, secured its postponement until October, to give opposition time to coalesce. Feelings ran high. There were calls for a rokosz and dethronement from the hotter heads. Sigismund August won the support of Samuel Maciejowski, chancellor and bishop of Cracow, and Jan Tarnowski, hetman and castellan of Cracow, who was on friendly terms with the Radziwiłłs, and for whom Czarny had astutely secured an imperial title from Charles V in 1547, but felt it necessary to send 3,000 troops to ensure their safety at the sejmik of the Cracow palatinate in Proszowice.19 When the sejm assembled in Piotrków on 31 October, a tidal wave of attacks on the marriage threatened to overwhelm all other business. Most bishops backed the king, except for the primate, Bona’s client Mikołaj Dzierzgowski, but Sigismund August was forced to listen to speech after speech that would have earned their makers a short trip to the scaffold in other realms. He complained bitterly to Albrecht von Hohenzollern at how his ‘subjects’ believed that they could say anything they liked.20 His subjects, however, believed themselves to be citizens, and that they had a perfect right to criticize royal actions in breach of the law.21 Never had Stanisław Orzechowski’s observation that ‘we speak freely with our king, as with any other man’ seemed so apt.22 Andrzej Górka, speaking on behalf of the two chambers on 22 November, reminded Sigismund August that he was an elected monarch who was the servant of freedom, not its master, and was therefore subject to the laws and the dignity of the estates of the realm. He could not, in consequence, choose a wife without senate advice. Górka recalled that Casimir IV had not wished to marry another Elizabeth Habsburg on the grounds that she was ugly, but that he had accepted senate advice. The marriage had therefore been blessed by God, producing four kings and a cardinal.23
Sigismund August bore the attacks with some equanimity, publicly at least, defending Barbara’s honour where he could and successfully resisting calls to renounce her. His patience paid off. After the flurry of angry opposition in 1548, tempers began to cool. Barbara sat out the Radom sejm, and Sigismund August installed her in Cracow, where his obstinate refusal to break his marriage vows gradually brought a level of grudging acceptance that was sufficient for him to secure his aim of having her crowned queen in December 1550, five months before her death.
The episode scarred the king deeply and drove him into even greater dependence upon the Radziwiłłs, who were only too happy to indulge his outrage at his treatment. Thereafter he performed his dynastic obligations, if with a conspicuous lack of enthusiasm. In 1553 he married Catherine Habsburg, Elizabeth’s younger sister. The match proved wildly popular, but the couple were never close. Catherine was a widow after a four-month marriage to Francesco III Gonzaga of Mantua. She was thirteen years younger than Sigismund August, but unlike Elizabeth was not blessed with good looks. As the king later confessed, he had never particularly wanted the marriage, and there was no ‘attraction of the blood’. Catherine knew of her sister’s difficulties; fear that history would repeat itself made her nervous. She suffered fainting fits, which Sigismund claimed were due to epilepsy, although this was fiercely denied by her family. Relations cooled significantly after Catherine, in her only pregnancy, suffered a miscarriage in 1554; thereafter it was public knowledge that the king had abandoned physical relations with her. He was still relatively young, and had several mistresses, but Catherine, spared the dangers of pregnancy, showed no inclination to die. Packed off to her family by her ungracious spouse, she lived on until 1572.24
Sigismund August’s closeness to the Radziwiłłs ensured that the question of the succession and therefore of the union was a matter for concern long before it became clear he was likely to be the last of the Jagiellons. It was implicit in the storm over Barbara, which strengthened concern among the szlachta over his 1529 election. His accession had been eagerly anticipated during his father’s decline into senescence, since it would remove the widely hated Bona from the power she had exercised for so long, and would bring a new, energetic monarch to the throne who might, so it was hoped, listen more sympathetically to the calls for reform that echoed through the sejms of his father’s declining years.
His four years in Vilnius, however, raised suspicions that he would not be the monarch for whom the reformers had hoped. Górka’s speech at the 1548 sejm, while ostensibly designed to persuade the king to renounce Barbara, was a clear statement of the nature of the Polish system, and the monarchy’s place within it. He recalled the shredding of the 1425 agreement on the succession at the 1426 Łęczyca sejm, stating that whatever the king was able to do in ‘another of his realms’, where he was hereditary lord, and where he could, in consequence, command his unfortunate and unfree people as he saw fit, in this republican kingdom matters were different. A free people could not be ruled by absolute power.25
Górka’s speech reveals that more lay behind the opposition to the royal marriage than might at first meet the eye. His veiled remarks indicate that the Poles had not forgotten that once again in 1529 they had been forced to accept a royal election in breach of the law after unilateral action by the Lithuanian oligarchs; it is revealing that Kmita’s first demand in his votum at the start of the 1548 sejm was not for the annulment of the marriage, but for the calling of a common sejm to effect closer union with Lithuania.26
Thus if the storm over the wedding blew itself out, the 1550s were a turbulent decade, in which Sigismund August’s reliance upon the Radziwiłłs and his attachment to Lithuania did little to allay Polish concerns. For, unlike his predecessors, Sigismund August demonstrated his preference for life in the grand duchy. Between 1548 and 1555 he spent just over half his time in Lithuania; the figure rose to 68.5 per cent between 1556 and 1558, and to 81 per cent between 1559 and 1562.27 He returned to Vilnius as soon as he could after the end of the Polish sejms which he called reluctantly, and which he endured with barely disguised distaste.
His behaviour seemed to confirm Górka’s suspicion that patrimonial kingship might appeal more to him than rule over free citizens, a suspicion reinforced by Czarny’s role as eminence grise. Czarny may have been a fierce opponent of the closer union called for by Kmita, but he defended what he took to be Lithuania’s interests through direct engagement in Polish politics. Although—unlike Rudy—Czarny’s mother was a Lithuanian, Anna Kiszka, the early death of his parents and his upbringing in Poland meant that he had established links with many leading Polish politicians at an early age. His native language was Polish. His father had written his testament in Latin rather than Ruthenian, but Czarny’s grasp of Latin was poor, and although he knew enough Ruthenian to carry out his duties as chancellor, he did not use the language in his correspondence. He had no knowledge of Lithuanian.28 He persuaded Tarnowski and Maciejowski to support Sigismund August’s marriage to Barbara, and in February 1547 he married Elżbieta Szydłowiecka, youngest daughter of Krzysztof, chancellor until 1532. Between August 1547 and December 1550, he spent half his time in Poland. He was present throughout the 1548 sejm; returning to Lithuania in early 1549 once Barbara was installed in Cracow. In 1550 he attended the Piotrków sejm, and Barbara’s coronation. He was pro-Habsburg, and after Barbara’s death he led the embassy to Vienna to negotiate the marriage with Catherine.29
The king’s dependence on Czarny, and his consultations with the Radziwiłłs over Polish appointments did not go unnoticed.30 Neither did his propensity for ignoring the statutes that bound his actions. Between 1548 and 1550 he distributed, without permission from council or sejm, leases on the domain in Prussia on a large scale and on generous terms: assignations of lifetime leases were common, and rents were low. Between 1549 and 1562 Sigismund August raised nearly half a million złoties in loans by mortgaging royal estates in blatant disregard of the law: the treasury lost direct control of 58 towns and 661 villages, almost half the royal domain.31 Nothing could be more provocative, or demonstrate more effectively that the problem lay not in the law itself, but in its enforcement. If the supreme judge himself—supported by senators and councillors who stood to lose most if the law were to be applied—showed such open contempt for the law, it is hardly surprising that he experienced turbulence in the sejms he had to call regularly to raise taxes to supplement his dwindling income.
The battle over execution of the laws therefore dominated Polish politics throughout the 1550s. At its heart was a struggle between two different political concepts. For the executionists, the king, while accorded respect, and while seen as the fount of justice, was subordinate to the law, and was charged with ensuring that it was upheld and enforced after it had been enacted by the sejm. For Sigismund August, whose sole experience of government had been in Lithuania, where the royal prerogative was far more extensive, the call for execution of the law, and in particular the demands for control over disposal of the domain, represented an intolerable challenge to his authority. He regarded the domain as his patrimony, which he was entitled to distribute as he saw fit. To admit that he was unable to issue privileges setting aside the demands of the law would be to surrender a crucial component of his prerogative. Yet he faced an increasingly confident political class that considered that its rights and liberties were natural and rested not on royal privileges, but on the bedrock of statute law, agreed by the citizens in the sejm.
The turmoil engendered by the clash of these opposing visions was complicated by the rapid spread of the Reformation after 1545. Sigismund I’s swift action in Danzig in 1526 had failed to stem the Lutheran tide for long in the Prussian cities, but in the absence of support from the prince, Lutheranism was unable to establish itself in Poland apart from among a few German-speaking communities in cities like Poznań and Cracow. In 1548 there were relatively few Lutheran congregations outside Prussia. There was a lively interest in the new religious ideas in Polish intellectual circles, however, and the position changed suddenly and dramatically from the mid 1540s. The tradition among the szlachta of challenging the special privileges of the clergy meant that many were receptive to Calvinism and other forms of Protestantism whose congregationalist ecclesiology meant that churches could be established without the prince’s sanction. Calvinism spread rapidly among the szlachta, while expulsions of Protestants by Ferdinand I in 1548 saw the establishment of congregations of Bohemian Brethren in Małopolska and Wielkopolska. Calls for reform of the Polish church grew stronger. Sigismund August issued a sharply worded edict against heresy in December 1550, but it was too late. By the late 1550s there were 265 Protestant congregations in Małopolska and 120 in Wielkopolska. By 1567, of 73 lay senators, 38 were Protestant.32
Many leading executionists were Protestant. Andrzej Górka, encouraged by Albrecht von Hohenzollern, protected Lutherans and propagated Lutheran ideas from the mid 1540s, while Jan Łaski the younger, his namesake’s nephew, was one of the earliest Polish intellectuals openly to espouse Protestantism when he resigned his office as provost of Gniezno in 1542. Rafał Leszczyński (c.1526–92), an early Protestant sympathizer, secured his popularity among the szlachta by flamboyantly resigning his office as palatine of Brześć in 1550 since it was incompatible with the starosty of Radziejów under the Nieszawa privileges. He abandoned the senate for the chamber, where he openly embraced Protestantism and put his sense of theatre and oratorical talent to good effect: at the mass opening the 1552 sejm he ostentatiously remained standing and failed to remove his hat at the elevation of the host.33 Other prominent Protestant executionists included Marcin Zborowski and Mikołaj Sienicki, marshal of the chamber in 1555.
Between 1550 and the conclusion of the council of Trent in 1563 Sigismund August refused to commit himself. He had shown an interest in reformed ideas in his youth, while the adoption of a harsh line was difficult when the Polish clergy itself was divided: the energetic polemicist Stanisław Orzechowski, grandson of an Orthodox priest and a canon of Przemyśl who became a powerful opponent of the executionists, studied briefly in Wittenberg and strongly advocated the abolition of clerical celibacy. In 1551 he plunged the Przemyśl diocese into a scandalous controversy when he married in a Calvinist church. He challenged the inevitable sentence of the episcopal court in the 1552 sejm, where he attracted much support, ensuring that he was eventually allowed to remain a Catholic priest under special dispensation. This was enough to secure his loyalty; after 1563 he vigorously defended the post-Tridentine church.34 Sigismund August’s strongest supporters were not immune to Geneva’s siren call: Czarny, after long sympathizing with Calvinism, publicly converted in 1553. Rudy was more circumspect, but by 1562 did not hide his sympathies.
Protestantism’s spread strengthened the anti-clerical elements of the reformist programme. These had concentrated on two issues: the jurisdiction of ecclesiastical courts, and the demand that the clergy should share the burden of defence. At the 1536–7 Cracow sejm envoys demanded the abolition of annates and the secularization of all land donated to the church since Louis of Anjou’s reign. The articles presented to the king at the 1550 sejm called for a national synod to settle differences between the clergy and the laity, and to outlaw the summoning of nobles before church courts, which had caused protests at the sejms of 1510, 1519, and 1532.35
All these demands could be subsumed under the general call for execution of the law. By the 1540s attention was concentrating ever more on the royal domain. At Sigismund I’s last sejm in 1547–8, two of the chamber’s fifty-three demands requested that the domain should only be distributed in accordance with the law.36 The slogan ‘execution’ covered a multitude of royal sins, but although only one of twenty-three demands put by the chamber to the king at the 1552 sejm mentioned the domain, Sigismund Augustus’s flagrant disregard for the law in the distribution of his favours raised the political temperature.37 For the ordinary nobility, the issue encapsulated much of their concern about the royal government. It was wealthy nobles, senators, and royal officials who gained from the king’s flouting of the law; it was these men who were responsible for the administration of justice in the castle courts and as judges in the senate, which heard appeals with the king during sejms. They enjoyed their illegal rewards for running a system in which ordinary nobles were losing faith: at the 1556–7 sejm it was claimed that 12,000 murderers were still at large.38
As the executionist demands grew more insistent there was no shortage of opposition to them among senators and wealthy nobles, many of whom stood to lose a great deal if the programme in its most radical form were to be implemented. Few were prepared to tread the populist path followed by Rafał Leszczyński. Some made gestures to appease the demands, but they were limited. Samuel Maciejowski resigned as chancellor in 1550, shortly before his death, and Jan Tarnowski surrendered his life tenure on the starosty of Sandomierz to demonstrate respect for the principle of incompatibility, but few followed their lead, and Tarnowski’s resignation meant little: although he surrendered his life tenure, he continued to hold the starosty, and even managed to pass it on to his son.39
There were perfectly respectable arguments to be made against the executionists, or at least against the comprehensive revindication of the royal domain. Salaries for office-holders were minimal or non-existent, and were in no way commensurable with the burdens of office, or with the expenses that office-holders incurred in the course of their duties. The many who had lent money to the crown protested that contracts should be honoured. Yet the executionists, as Sienicki made clear, were not opposed to donations to those who served the realm per se, recognizing that state service should be rewarded and loans repaid. Such arrangements, however, were subject to the law, which required that mortgages should only be issued with proper extenuation and amortization of the loan, so that royal creditors were not rewarded by revenues that vastly exceeded the value of the original loan.40
By the mid 1550s the executionists were calling for inspection of all documents relating to elements of the royal domain in private hands to ensure that they were held in accordance with the law. Matters came to a head at the 1558–9 sejm. The 1555 sejm had broken up without achieving anything, but the envoys backed a proposal that execution with regard to the royal domain should be achieved according to the statutes of 1440, 1454, and 1504.41 At the 1556–7 sejm Sigismund August assuaged anger at his failure to honour the promise he had made in 1555 to call a common sejm with the Lithuanians and Prussians to discuss closer union by agreeing to call one to enact execution. When the sejm gathered on 5 December 1558, however, neither the Lithuanians nor the Prussians were present. Sigismund August promised to support ‘root and branch execution’, but it became clear that he was again lining up behind the senators, who called for execution but argued that nobody should actually have to surrender any land. On 3 February, after interminable debates, Jan Kietliński, a Sandomierz envoy, dramatically sought to break the deadlock by tossing at the king’s feet his own lease on a royal estate that was contrary to the law. His example was followed by others. As documents piled up up on benches and tables, and overflowed onto the floor around the throne, the treasurer and castellan of Zawichost, Stanisław Tarnowski—who came under heavy attack—urged senators to follow suit. When they did not, Sigismund August optimistically suggested that now that trust had been restored, the sejm could move on to vote taxes, and execution could be postponed to the next sejm. A committee was established under Jan Tarnowski to scrutinize the relevant legislation, but it reached no conclusions, and the sejm broke up in acrimony.42
Sigismund August spent the next three and a half years in Lithuania avoiding the issue. Nevertheless, despite its failure, the 1558–9 sejm marked a watershed. The executionists had turned their vague slogans into a concrete programme of action, and Kietliński’s coup de théatre had demonstrated that the only way in which reform could be achieved was through audits of all royal donations, not through pointless committee discussions on the nature of the law. When Sigismund August returned from Lithuania to open the next sejm on 30 November 1562, the executionists were ready to push their case with renewed determination. The outcome was not what they had expected. This time, much to their surprise, the king was on their side.
1 Ferenc, Rudy, 42, 56–8; Zbigniew Kuchowicz, Barbara Radziwiłłówna (Łódź, 1976), 77–8. Jerzy Besala, Barbara Radziwiłłówna i Zygmunt August (Warsaw, 2007), 50–1.
2 For example Kuchowicz, Barbara, 80–98; Besala, Barbara, 50–5.
3 Pamiętniki o królowej Barbarze żonie Zygmunta Augusta, in Michał Baliński (ed.), Pisma historyczne, i (Warsaw, 1843), 21.
4 Sucheni-Grabowska, Zygmunt August, 98–101; Ferenc, Rudy, 45–6.
5 PSB, xxx, 195.
6 Ferenc, Rudy, 34–5; Sucheni-Grabowska, Zygmunt August, 92; Raimonda Ragauskienė, Lietuvos Didžiosius Kunigaikštystės kancleris Mikalojus Radvila Rudasis (apie 1515–1584) (Vilnius, 2002), 203–44.
7 Sucheni-Grabowska, Zygmunt August, 93, 106–19; Ferenc, Rudy, 47–8; PSB, xxx, 336.
8 PSB, vi, 257.
9 Ewa Dubas-Urwanowicz, ‘Dwaj ostatni Jagiellonowie i Radziwiłłowie: między współpracą a opozycją’, in Markiewicz and Skowroń (eds), Faworyci, 144.
10 Pamiętniki o królowej, 23–4; Ferenc, Rudy, 56–8.
11 Ferenc, Rudy, 66–7.
12 Sucheni-Grabowska, Zygmunt August, 174.
13 Bogucka, Bona, 250–2.
14 Witołd Ziembicki, ‘Barbara Radziwiłłówna w oświetleniu lekarskim’, Pamiętnik VI Powszechnego Zjazdu, i (Lwów, 1935), 144–62, but cf. Ferenc, Rudy, 67, and Sucheni-Grabowska, Zygmunt August, 341–4, 356–7.
15 The hetmanship was not yet a permanent position: Rudy served in 1550 and 1553. He was reappointed in 1556, as the stormclouds gathered in Livonia, serving until 1566; he was hetman again in 1577 and between 1584 and his death in 1589: PSB, xxx, 321–35.
16 Listy origynalne Zygmunta Augusta do Mikołaja Radziwiłła Czarnego, ed. S.A. Łachowicz (Vilnius, 1842).
17 Józef Jasnowski, Mikołaj Czarny Radziwiłł (1515–1565) (Warsaw, 1939), 343.
18 Ferenc, Rudy, 65.
19 Sucheni-Grabowska, Zygmunt August, 178; PSB, i, 296.
20 Sucheni-Grabowska, Zygmunt August, 174–5, 184.
21 Stanisław Orzechowski, Annales Stanislai Orichovii, ed. Theodor Działyński (Poznań, 1844), 20–2.
22 Stanisław Orzechowski, ‘Rozmowa albo dyjalog pierwszy około egzekucyjej polskiej korony’, in Stanisława Orzechowskiego polskie dialogi polityczne, ed. Jan Łos (Cracow, 1919), 78.
23 Dyariusze sejmów koronnych 1548, 1553 i 1570 r., ed. Józef Szujski, SRP, i (Cracow, 1872), 217–23.
24 Sucheni-Grabowska, Zygmunt August, 416–27.
25 Dyariusze, 221.
26 Dyariusze, 168–9.
27 Sucheni-Grabowska, Zygmunt August, 387.
28 Jasnowski, Czarny, 376, 379, 403.
29 Calculation based on the itinerary in Jasnowski, Czarny, 405–6.
30 Jasnowski, Czarny, 343; Miller, ‘Execution’, 83.
31 Sucheni-Grabowska, Monarchia, 64, Sucheni-Grabowska, Zygmunt August, 454–5.
32 Gottfried Schramm, Der polnische Adel und die Reformation 1548–1607 (Wiesbaden, 1965), 27; Christoph Schmidt, Auf Felsen gesät: Die Reformation in Polen und Livland (Göttingen, 2000), 54; Wojciech Kriegseisen, Stosunki wyznaniowe w relacjach państwo-kościół między reformacją a oświeceniem (Warsaw, 2010), 443–52. The impact of the Reformation in Poland-Lithuania will be fully analysed in volume 2 of this study.
33 PSB, xvii, 132–3.
34 PSB, xxiv, 287–90.
35 Dyariusze, 41; Kreigseisen, Stosunki, 445–8.
36 Szulc, Z badań, 37–9.
37 ‘Articuli od wszego rycerstwa KJMci podane koronne’, Dyariusze, 38–43; Szulc, Z badań, 42.
38 Miller, ‘Execution’, i, 86.
39 Szulc, Z badań, 45.
40 Szulc, Z badań, 53.
41 VC, ii/i, 67–71; Szulc, Z badań, 55–69.
42 Szulc, Z badań, 72–8; Sucheni-Grabowska, Zygmunt August, 470; Miller, ‘Execution’, i, 87.