At a time when torture and death awaited anyone caught reading the wrong book in most European countries, such dispassionate adherence to the notion of the primacy of individual rights over all other considerations was extraordinary. But neither the Catholic nor the Protestant leaders were happy with this state of affairs. There was a general desire to reach consensus and to decide on a state religion. At the Sejm of 1555 a majority of deputies demanded the establishment of a Church of Poland with rites in the vernacular, the right of priests to marry and communion under both kinds, to be administered by a Polish Synod independently of Rome. The prospect of a break with Rome loomed, but the King of Poland was no Henry VIII.
Zygmunt Augustus, the only son of Zygmunt the Old, was a melancholy figure. Painstakingly educated—some say debauched—by his mother Bona Sforza, he was dubbed ‘Augustus’ by her and brought up to rule accordingly. She was a forbidding creature. The first cousin of Francis I and a close relative of Charles V, she had been brought up at the court of her father the Duke of Milan, which had an evil reputation for intrigue and poison. In an unprecedented move, she arranged for Zygmunt to be elected and crowned heir to the throne during his father’s lifetime. But she did not contribute to his happiness, and he did not live up to her ambitions.
In 1543 he married Elizabeth of Habsburg, daughter of the Emperor Ferdinand I, who died only two years later, allegedly poisoned by Queen Bona. He then fell in love and eloped with Barbara Radziwiłł, the sister of a Lithuanian magnate. Only four years after this marriage, which was opposed by virtually everyone in Poland for a variety of reasons, Barbara Radziwiłł died, and again the Queen Mother was suspected of using her Milanese skills. After considering at length the possibility of marrying Mary Tudor, in 1553 Zygmunt married his first wife’s sister, Katherine of Habsburg, widow of the Duke of Mantua. It was a disastrous marriage. The epileptic Queen physically repelled him and, unlike the others, she did not die—perhaps because Queen Bona, feeling more unpopular than ever, had loaded herself up with gold and jewels and fled to Bari in Italy where, appropriately enough, she was herself eventually poisoned.
Since neither of his first two wives had borne him any children, the fact that Zygmunt Augustus refused to touch his third was a matter of some concern to his subjects. The extinction of a dynasty is always cause for alarm, and in this instance the alarm was all the greater as the Jagiellons were still the only real link between Poland and Lithuania. The Sejm begged the King to attend to his wife, repulsive or not, and the Primate actually went down on his knees in the chamber to beseech him either to possess her or to cast her off, breaking with Rome if need be.
The King’s behaviour at this point was critical to both the religious and the political future of Poland, yet he remained undecided. His attitude to the Reformation was ambivalent. He never showed much sympathy for the Protestant movement, but took a great interest in it, avidly reading all the dissenting tracts and treatises and accepting the dedication of works by Luther and Calvin. In 1550 he issued an anti-Protestant decree in the hope of winning support from the bishops for his marriage to Barbara Radziwiłł, but this remained a dead letter. A few years later he rebuked the Papal Nuncio for urging a firmer line towards the Protestants, and in effect forced him to leave Poland. When asked by his subjects which way they should lean in the religious debate, he replied: ‘I am not the king of your consciences.’
Unlike Henry VIII of England, Zygmunt Augustus did not want a divorce. His love for Barbara Radziwiłł had been a great passion, and her death robbed him of the will to live. He continued to carry out his duties without enthusiasm, dressed in black, and showed no desire to mould the future or perpetuate the dynasty. When pressed by the Sejm of 1555, he took the characteristically noncommittal and quite extraordinary step of referring the proposal for a national Church to Rome. He sent Stanisław Maciejewski to Pope Paul IV with the four demands of the Sejm. The Pope listened to them ‘with great sorrow and bitterness of heart’, and then rebuked Zygmunt for allowing his subjects to formulate such heretical ideas. The matter of the national Church rested there, and the reformers were, for once, unaided by provocative behaviour on the part of the Pope.
The principal weakness of the Protestant movement in Poland was its lack of unity, and the only candidate for its leadership spent most of his active life in England. Jan Łaski, nephew of the archbishop of the same name and a member of what was briefly a rich and powerful family, became a Protestant while studying abroad. He stayed in Geneva with Calvin, who praised his ‘erudition, integrity and other virtues’. In Rotterdam he drew close to Erasmus, helping him out of financial difficulties by buying his library and leaving it with him for life. He was then invited to England by Thomas Cranmer and given a pension by Edward VI, who appointed him chaplain to the foreign Protestants who had taken refuge in England. Known in England as John a Lasco, he collaborated with Cranmer on the Book of Common Prayer of 1552, but with the accession of Queen Mary he was forced to leave the country.
He reached Poland in time for the first Calvinist synod in 1554, at which he urged greater unity and a closing of ranks by all dissenters against the Catholic hierarchy. But his pleas were drowned out by disputes over minor theological and administrative questions. Łaski died in 1560, and it was not until 1570 that any kind of agreement was reached, in the Consensus of Sandomierz, but this failed to produce the sort of Protestant front he had hoped for.
The Protestant movement enjoyed the patronage of the foremost magnates, but failed to gain the support of wider sections of the population. It never touched the peasants to any significant extent, never seriously affected those towns such as Przemyśl or Lwów, which had no large German population, and left much of the szlachta indifferent, particularly in poor, populous Mazovia. Even in cases where their master went over to Calvinism the peasants clung to their old faith with surly tenacity, sometimes walking miles to the nearest Catholic church.
The Reformation in Poland was not in essence a spiritual movement; it was part of a process of intellectual and political emancipation which had started long before. The szlachta, which had done everything to curtail the power of the crown, seized eagerly on the possibilities offered by it to break the power of the Church. Straightforward anticlericalism was easily confused with a desire for a return to true Christian principles, and so was another movement in Polish politics which reached a climax in the 1550s.
A purely political reformist movement had come into existence at the beginning of the century. In spirit it was very close to the Reformation, since it placed the accent not on innovation but on stricter observance of the law, on weeding out malpractice and corruption. It was known as ‘the movement for the execution of the laws’, or simply the ‘executionist’ movement. One of its first preoccupations was that the law itself should be codified and published in clear form, and as a result much groundwork was done in the first half of the century, culminating in a number of legal reforms passed in 1578 which fixed the legal system for the next two hundred years.
The executionists waged a war of attrition on the temporal position of the Church. It was they who gave the impetus to abolish the medieval anomaly of the diocesan courts in 1562. The Sejm of the following year saw another victory, when the Church, which had always enjoyed exemption from taxation, was forced to contribute financially to the defence of the state. Much of the executionists’ support stemmed from the ordinary person’s revulsion at having to contribute to the treasury through taxation, and they were therefore keen to see that such resources as the crown possessed were properly adminstered. This led them into direct conflict with the magnates, over the thorny subject of royal lands and starosties.