Hosius and Skarga pinpointed the principal arguments for returning to the fold, letting time do the rest. And time was on the side of Rome. In 1570 Mikołaj Sierotka Radziwiłł, son of the man who had introduced Calvinism to Lithuania and been one of its greatest financial and political supports, went back to the Church of Rome. Others followed suit, for a variety of reasons. Even the mixed marriages which the hierarchy had fulminated against worked in favour of Catholicism, since women had been largely left out of the religious debate and their conditioning led them to stand by their old faith. Jan Firlej, Marshal of Poland, had become a Calvinist, but his wife, Zofia Boner, had not. She covertly brought his sons up to love the Catholic faith, and three of the four became Catholics when they grew up. After her death, Firlej married Barbara Mniszech, another fervent Catholic. Although their son was ostensibly brought up a Calvinist, the mother’s influence prevailed, and he later became Primate of Poland. As Piotr Skarga foresaw, the country would be reconquered for Rome, ‘not by force or with steel, but by virtuous example, teaching, discussion, gentle intercourse and persuasion’.
As Calvin grew more strident and Protestants in various European countries began to execute not only Catholics but other Protestants, the Polish prelates showed forbearance. They pointed out that Protestantism could be more repressive than Catholicism. They explained that it was not only divisive, but irresponsible, and in this they were helped by the example of the Arians.
Under the influence of Fausto Sozzini, the Arian movement displayed a tendency to splinter while attracting all manner of dissenters and schismatics migrating from other countries. But what made the Arians really unpopular with the szlachta were the starkly political implications of their faith. ‘You should not eat bread made by the sweat of a subject’s brow, but make your own,’ they would hector. ‘Nor should you live on estates which were granted to your forebears for spilling the blood of enemies. You must sell those estates and give the money to the poor.’ Since the status of the szlachta was based on their readiness to bear arms, the Arians’ pacifism was downright subversive. (In an attempt to square the circle, their synod of 1604 allowed them to bear arms provided they did not use them.)
With the impending extinction of the Jagiellon dynasty, Poland and Lithuania needed unity of purpose rather than dissent and refusal to take responsibility. Nevertheless, the constitutional and legal aspects of the issue were still paramount. After the death of Zygmunt Augustus the Sejm which met in 1573 under the name of the Confederation of Warsaw to shape Poland’s future passed an act whose most memorable clause ran as follows:
Whereas in our Common Wealth there is no small disagreement in the matter of the Christian faith, and in order to prevent that any harmful contention should arise from this, as we see clearly taking place in other kingdoms, we swear to each other, in our name and in that of our descendants for ever more, on our honour, our faith, our love and our consciences, that albeit we are
The freedom to practise any religion without suffering discrimination or penalty was henceforth enshrined in the constitution. This law would be observed rigorously by Catholic kings and an increasingly Catholic population. Some illegal executions did take place, but they were few. When no criminal offence had been committed, even acts of extreme provocation went unpunished. In 1580 the Calvinist Marcin Kreza snatched the host from a priest, spat on it, trampled it, and then fed it to a passing mongrel, for which he was reprimanded by the king and told not to do it again.
The Calvinist writer who chronicled the course of the Counter-Reformation in Poland, listing every execution or sectarian killing of a Protestant between 1550 and 1650, came up with a total no higher than twelve. During the same period, over five hundred people were legally executed for religious reasons in England, and nearly nine hundred were burnt in the Netherlands, while hundreds more suffered confiscations and attainders. This unique absence of violence stemmed partly from the Polish attitude to religion, partly from an obsession with legality and the principle of personal liberty, and partly from the fact that throughout this period Polish society concentrated on an attempt to build utopia on earth.
FIVE