(Cambridge Concise Histories) Jerzy Lukowski, Hubert Zawadzki - A Concise History of Poland-Cambridge University Press (2006)

The Union was Sigismund Augustus’ greatest achievement and greatest failure. Hard experience had taught him to make compromises whenever possible, perhaps too much so. Through the Union of Luhlin he hoped to establish a realm based on partnership between the szlachta and a future monarchy. But the aftermath demonstrated what he must have alw^rays feared. To the overwhelming majority of the szlachta, ‘Executio’ was a means of securing their rights and privileges. Nothing was done to improve the workings of the Sejm. The balance between Sejm and sejmiki remained unsteady and, if anything, in favour of the latter. The Union probably made the problems worse. Magnates and szlachta may have been theoretically equal in law, but in practice the former could and did use their sheer wealth to dominate their ‘lesser brethren’; the mutual opening up of the Crown and Lithuania meant that magnates on both sides could now acquire landed estates and the influence that went with them throughout the new Rzeczpospolita. Mikolaj Radziwill ‘the Red’ complained that a ‘free’ Lithuania had been buried ‘for all time’. He need not have worried. His idea of freedom had a long career before it.

Despite formal unification and supposed closer integration of the Crown, Royal Prussia and the Grand Duchy, in practice the forces of local particularism remained strong. Regardless of Sigismund’s lifting of obstacles to Orthodox nobles’ advancement in 1563, a combination of Catholicization and polonization and the utter refusal of the Catholic Church hierarchy, increasingly gripped by the enthusiasms of the Counter-Reformation, to regard Orthodoxy as anything other than a schismatic faith, meant that its relationship with Catholicism remained as uneasy as it had been in the Grand Duchy after 1386. Lithuania bristled with resentment at its treatment at Lublin. For all the progress of cultural polonization, its nobility's sense of distinctiveness remained undiminished. Danzig remained sui generis. Right up to Sigismund’s death it continued to sabotage his plans to build a Baltic navy, which it saw as a threat to its own position. Although Royal Prussia now sent envoys to the Sejm, it retained its own regional parliament, the so-called Prussian sejmik-general.

The Lublin Sejm itself and the Sejmy of 1570 and 1572 refused to discuss machinery for the regulation of royal elections after Sigismund’s death. The szlachta feared a rapprochement between

Sigismund and the magnates and from that, a Habsburg succession. An ailing and disillusioned Sigismund may have felt that his new and fractious Commonwealth could best be preserved by the election of Ernest of Habsburg, Emperor Maximilian II’s younger son. That might secure the Commonwealth some wider support against the dangers that beset it. The Habsburgs could always count on considerable support among the senators, who felt their rule could only strengthen their own position. But among the wider masses of the szlacbta, Habsburg rule in Hungary and Bohemia had secured them a bizarre reputation, brokered largely by Habsburg opponents and demagogues, as enemies of freedom second only to the tsars of Muscovy. The Executionist leaders were content to protect the gains of 1569. Some, rewarded with royal demesne and new offices by the king, went over to the senatorial side; others shared the fears that a strengthened monarchy might ultimately pave the way to Habsburg tyranny. Rather than vote extraordinary subsidies for the Russian war, the szlacbta settled for a three-year truce with Muscovy in June 1570. Polotsk remained in Ivan IV’s hands.

Sigismund consoled his last years with a string of sexual liaisons, which did nothing to enhance his reputation. A daughter born to his mistress, Barbara Gižanka, in 1571, provoked grumbling that her mother was a whore and the king was not her father. The last Sejm of his reign had to he abandoned in May г572 because of his poor health, broken by gout, gallstones, tuberculosis and frustration. At six o’clock in the afternoon on 7 July 1572, Sigismund II Augustus, Poland’s last Jagiellonian king, died at the royal hunting-lodge at Knyszyn, where he had sequestered Gižanka, fearing his nobles might abduct her. The szlacbta were on their own.

3

The Commonwealth of the Two Nations, 1572-1795

In a field outside Warsaw on 10 May i 573, Henri, duke of Anjou, was elected king of Poland. His elder brother, King Charles IX of France, appreciated that a Valois-ruled Poland, bordering on Austria, could prove very useful. As for the szlachta, so confident were they in their constitutional defences that even Protestants were prepared to accept a ruler widely deemed responsible for the previous year’s St Bartholomew’s massacre.