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
The crown owned estates all over the country which it did not administer itself. Some were granted to individuals for services to the crown, to favourites, and even to merchants in return for cash advances. Others were granted with the office of