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.