CHAPTER VII.

POLAND UNDER THE SAXON KINGS.

OF the eighteen competitors for the throne of Poland vacant in 1696 by the death of John III, Sobieski, the most notable were the Austrian candidate, the Krdlewicz, or Crown Prince, James Sobieski ; the Prussian candidate, Margrave Lewis William of Baden-Baden ; Frederick Augustus, Elector of Saxony ; and Prince Henri of Condé and Prince Louis of Conti, successively supported by France. The chances of James Sobieski, on the whole the most suitable candidate, were ruined by the hostile intrigues of his own mother the Queen Dowager, Maria Casimiria, and the jealousy of all the other native candidates. The Margrave of Baden, ill supported, retired betimes from the contest which finally resolved itself into a duel between the Elector of Saxony and the Prince of Conti. At first the Elector was regarded by nobody as a serious candidate ; but his prospects brightened after he had publicly abjured Protestantism for Catholicism at the crisis of the struggle. He also had a longer and better administered purse than that of the French Minister in Poland, Abbé de Polignac ; but his chief advantage lay in the fact that all the neighbouring Powers preferred to see a German rather than a Frenchman or a Pole on the Polish throne. Tsar Peter even went so far as to threaten the Polish Senate with an invasion if they dared to choose a Frenchman. Nevertheless, the Prince of Conti was elected King of Poland by a considerable majority. It was only as the nominee of a minority, and consequently without possessing any legal status, that Frederick Augustus, at the head of a well-disciplined Saxon army which had been patiently awaiting the issue of events close to the Polish frontier, drove out the lawful sovereign. On September 16 he was crowned at Cracow as Augustus II ; but his title was not generally recognised in Poland till nearly two years later.

During the last years of the reign of John III Lithuania had suffered from chronic anarchy, due mainly to the tyranny and violence of the great House of Sapieha which preyed upon its neighbours, lay and clerical. Casimir Sapieha, Grand Hetman of Lithuania, in a private quarrel with the Bishop of Vilna, had devastated the whole diocese and burnt dozens of churches and hundreds of manor houses. Twice, in 1693 and 1695, John III had been forced to summon Sapieha to answer for his misdeeds before the one tribunal he could not ignore-the sovereign Diet. On both occasions the partisans of Sapieha had succeeded in " exploding1 " the Diet before it had time to consider the case. In other words, that palladium of individual liberty, the liberum veto, had sunk so low that its principal use was to shelter high-placed felons from the pursuit of justice. In 1700 the insupportable misrule of the Sapiehas provoked an insurrection of all the other Lithuanian nobles against them, and, with the assistance of the Saxon troops, they were finally subdued, deprived of all their honours and dignities and expelled the country. A few months later, however, they were back again in the track of the victorious armies of Charles XII. Subsequently they became the chief supporters of the new King, Stanislaus Leszczynski, whom Charles placed upon the Polish throne.

The protest of Russia and Austria had been bold and resolute ; but they were hampered at the outset by a peculiar difficulty : they had no alternative candidate of their own to offer. Stanislaus Leszczynski was the only native Pole who had the slightest chance of being elected King. It was therefore necessary to look abroad for a candidate. The Infant Emmanuel of Portugal, who had visited Russia in 1731, as a suitor for the hand of the Empress Anne, was at first proposed by the Court of Vienna; but his father would not consent to his nomination, and, ultimately, both Russia and Austria agreed to support the pretensions of the Elector of Saxony, the late King's son. Hitherto, indeed, Frederick Augustus had been regarded at Vienna with no friendly eye. He was suspected of leaning too much upon France as his father had done before him, and he had always steadily opposed the Pragmatic Sanction ; but, when it became evident that none other but the Saxon faction was strong enough to oppose Stanislaus, all objections on the part of the two Courts ceased, and Löwenwolde concluded a treaty with the Elector (August 14,1733), whereby he acceded to the Pragmatic Sanction, contracted a treaty of mutual defence and guarantee with Russia and Austria, and promised to keep inviolate the Constitution of the Polish Republic. Eighteen regiments of Russian infantry and ten of cavalry were then sent to the frontier, to be ready, at a moment's notice, to enter Poland.

Thus Stanislaus had been elected King of Poland for the second time ; but his tenure of that perilous office was to be even briefer than it had been before. Immediately after his election, he issued a proclamation ordering a levée en masse of the gentry ; but, having no forces ready at hand to support him (the Polish regular army existing only on paper), he was obliged, twelve days after his election, to leave the defenceless capital, and shut himself up in Danzig with the Primate, Poniatowski, the Czartoryskis, and the French and Swedish envoys. A week later (September 30), General Peter Lacy, at the head of a Russian army, appeared on the right bank of the Vistula.

At one time an actual rupture with Prussia was feared. Miinnich is said to have threatened that he would pay a visit to Berlin when he had done with Danzig. He actually wrote to the Empress that Stanislaus had bought over Frederick William and that the latter was about "to mediate " at the head of an army corps. At last the arrival of some mortars from Saxony enabled Miinnich to capture Fort Sommerschanz which cut Danzig off from Weichselmünde, its port at the mouth of the Vistula (May 6-7) ; but a subsequent attempt to storm the strong redoubt Hagelburg, the key of the whole position, was repulsed with the loss of 120 officers and 2000 men (May 9-10). On May 20, the long-expected French fleet appeared, in the roads and disembarked 2400 men under the command of Brigadier La Motte Pérouse. A week later, they made a gallant attempt to force the Russian entrenchments, but were repulsed and forced to take refuge behind the cannon of Weichselmünde. This encounter is memorable as being the first occasion on which French and Russians crossed swords. On June 10, the Russian fleet, under Admiral Gordon, brought Münnich the siege artillery, the want of which had so seriously hampered his operations, and at the same time vigorously bombarded La Motte's little army till it was forced to surrender and was conveyed to St Petersburg on board the Russian fleet. Two days after the capture of the French army, the fortress of Weichselmünde also surrendered. The loss of its port decided the fate of Danzig. On June 30 the city capitulated unconditionally after sustaining a siege of 135 days, which cost the besiegers 8000 men. The Primate, Monti, and Poniatowski were arrested. King Stanislaus, disguised as a peasant, had contrived to escape two days before.

The new King was, in every respect, the antithesis of his alert, jovial and dissolute father. His character has been admirably symbolised in the famous picture which represents the portly Prince, enveloped in a luxurious dressing-gown, reclining in an easy chair and holding in his lap a tea-cup and saucer. Pious, pacific, and thoroughly domesticated, nothing but his one passion, a love of the chase, was ever able to tear him from the seclusion of his family circle, while a constitutional sluggishness compelled him to leave everything in the nature of business to Ministers who virtually ruled in his name. Thus, in Saxony, during the greater part of this thirty years' reign, Count Heinrich von Brühl held absolute sway, while in Poland the Czartoryski family-"the Family" as, from its immense influence and political predominance, it was generally called by contemporaries-endeavoured to rally round it the most enlightened and progressive elements of the nation.

The Czartoryskis were of very ancient lineage. They had held princely rank as early as the fifteenth century and were akin to the royal House of Jagello which had ruled Poland from 1384 to 1572. It was only in the middle of the seventeenth century, however, that they had risen to political eminence in the person of Florian Czartoryski, who became Primate of Poland during the brief and troubled reign of Michael Wisniowiecki (1669-73). At the beginning of the eighteenth century the fortunes of the family were completely reestablished, partly by the patronage of Augustus II, who exalted them at the expense of the wealthier aristocracy, but principally through the ability of two brothers, Prince Michael, who became Grand Chancellor of Lithuania, and was henceforth known as " the Prince Chancellor," and his brother Prince Augustus, Palatine of Russia (i.e. the Polish province of "Red Russia"), generally called " the Prince Palatine." These two brothers agreed with each other in all things, politics included, so absolutely that they must be regarded as a single personality rather than two separate individuals. The eminently capable Prince Chancellor was the statesman of "the Family," and as such was always deferred to without question, while his brother the Prince Palatine, who had served with distinction in the Turkish wars of the close of the seventeenth century, and been decorated for valour by Prince Eugene on the smoking bastions of Belgrade, was its military celebrity. The marriage in early life of the latter with the fabulously wealthy Pani Sieniawska, the last survivor and sole heiress of the united possessions of the Sieniawski and Denhof families, finally placed the Czartoryskis on a level with the mightiest magnates in Poland.

The real aim and explanation, however, of all the eiforhs of the Czartoryskis was the reform of the Polish Constitution, which they rightly regarded as the indispensable preliminary of any permanent improvement in the condition of the country. To educate, and thereby transform, public opinion, was the first step towards the realisation of this noble ambition. It was not enough that the new, saving ideas should be introduced by books and pamphlets-a new social atmosphere was to be created in which these ideas might expand and multiply. A new generation, full of courage and free from prejudice, was to be trained up to furnish the protagonists of the new ideas.