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.