Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (73 page)

His appeal was wasted. Catherine had made up her mind. It would be useful to have a man who loved her on the Polish throne, and it was even more convenient that this man was poor and that the Polish crown paid only a pittance. This would ensure that he would always need money and be dependent on her. Stanislaus, although wearing the robes of a king, would become a pawn on the Polish chessboard. The most powerful piece on the board would be a queen—in this case, an empress. Given her former lover’s submissive character and disinterest in the bruising business of royal politics, Catherine was certain that it
would be only a matter of time before Poland fell completely under Russian influence.

When news of the Russian-Prussian decision in favor of Stanislaus traveled to foreign capitals, it was widely assumed that the empress wanted to make her former lover king of Poland in order to marry him later and then incorporate his kingdom into her empire. Although the announcement raised the danger of antagonizing both Austria and France, neither of these states—both, like Prussia, weakened by war—was prepared to fight over the Polish succession. This did not mean that they approved of Catherine’s plan. France lodged its protest through its ally, Turkey, Poland’s southern neighbor. French diplomats in Constantinople lost no time in pointing out to the sultan and the grand vizier the danger of having a young, unmarried man on the throne of Poland, one whom the Russian empress had already had as a lover and might well choose as a husband if the marriage settlement brought her territory west of the Dnieper. Skillfully planted, these anxieties quickly took root. In June 1764, the grand vizier sent a note to St. Petersburg declaring that his country was willing to recognize the Russo-Prussian alliance, and also to approve the election of a native king to the Polish throne, but objected to the person of Stanislaus on the grounds that he was too young, too inexperienced, and, above all, unmarried.

In Poland, the Czartoryskis, Stanislaus’s family, accepted the logic of Turkey’s objections. They proposed a solution: the king-to-be would marry, preferably a Polish Catholic girl—at thirty-two, he was well past the age when most eligible young noblemen were married. They pressed their nephew to do this before election day in the Diet. All parties—Catherine, his family, the Turks, and, behind them, the French—now had a common goal: to force Poniatowski to promise that he would marry only with the approval of the Diet and that he would select a Polish Catholic wife. Stanislaus refused, declaring that no one could force him to become king on these terms and that he would rather forfeit the crown.

Ultimately, it was Catherine who forced a decision on him. Stanislaus received an official message from the Russian foreign ministry in St. Petersburg telling him that it was essential that, before the opening of the election Diet, he marry, or at least select a bride. He realized that
the message must have been approved by Catherine. Understanding, finally, that he had lost the woman he loved, he surrendered and signed a declaration that he would never marry anyone other than a Roman Catholic, and then only with the approval of the Polish Diet. He was sufficiently practical, however, to write to Catherine that if she wanted to make him a king, she must provide the money for him to live up to this position. She sent him money. His promise to marry calmed Turkish fears, and the election was allowed to proceed.

Once Stanislaus agreed, Catherine sent the Russian army to help him keep his promise. Fourteen thousand Russian troops surrounded Warsaw to “keep the peace” and “guarantee a free and tranquil election.” Some Poles talked of armed resistance and appealing for foreign assistance, but most Diet members were too pleased by the prospect of a native king to oppose Russian intervention.

The “free election” took place by voice vote on a summer day, August 26, 1764, in an open field outside Warsaw where members of the Diet, standing in the meadow grass, had a good view of the large Russian military camp nearby. Stanislaus was elected, and, as he wrote afterward, “The election was unanimous and tranquil.” He was now King Stanislaus II Augustus of Poland, and, as it turned out, he had become the last king of Poland. Catherine’s former lover, who had dreamed of becoming her husband, became her royal vassal. In St. Petersburg, a relieved empress of Russia saluted the event by sending a note to Panin: “My congratulations on
the new king we have made.”

54
The First Partition of Poland and the First Turkish War

C
ATHERINE WAS PLEASED
. Stanislaus’s election as king had been a triumph for her, if not for Poland or for Stanislaus. Her victory, however, led to an optimistic view of her ability to influence Polish affairs. Two years later, by attempting to force the Diet to alter policies on the issue of Polish “dissidents,” she opened the door to adversity and war.

The “dissident issue” was the official terminology applied to the
conflicted status of various religious minorities in predominantly Roman Catholic Poland. These minorities—the Russian Orthodox population in the eastern third of the country, and hundreds of thousands of Protestant Lutherans in the north—had been actively harassed in their religious practices and had been denied most political rights. They were not permitted to elect deputies to the Diet or to occupy high administrative and military posts. For years, their leaders had looked abroad for help: Orthodox believers to Russia; the Protestants to Prussia. Their continuing troubles and recurrent appeals for protection gave Russia and Prussia another common interest in Poland and a further pretext for interference in Polish internal affairs.

From the beginning of her reign, Catherine had heard that Orthodox believers were forbidden to build new churches and frequently barred from attending those that existed. The empress had a reason to respond. She had secularized church lands and serfs in Russia and she wished to do something to earn back the favor of the church at home. A further incentive was that any restriction of the authority of the Catholic Church would be in keeping with Enlightenment principles of religious toleration.

Three months after Stanislaus’s election to the Polish throne, the Russian ambassador, Prince Nicholas Repnin, informed the new king that the empress would not permit the reforms in Poland for which the Czartoryskis and other powerful noblemen were asking—abolition of the liberum veto, making the crown hereditary, an increase in the army—until they made concessions to religious minorities: Orthodox and Protestant believers must be allowed to worship in their own churches and to take part in the public life and government of the community. Stanislaus agreed to raise the dissident issue in the next Diet. Antidissident agitation flared immediately, fanned by ardent Catholic churchmen. Both sides were unyielding. By demanding political rights for religious minorities, Catherine was imposing demands on a fervently Catholic people who would rather fight than suffer the slightest alteration of their faith or infringement of their privileges. Religion was the overriding national issue; a threat to the Catholic faith reminded every Pole that he was a patriot. When the 1766 Diet met, it firmly refused to respond to any dissident grievance. Catherine reiterated her position: there were to be no other reforms until Poland permitted dissidents’ rights.

Stanislaus was caught in the middle. Familiar with the beliefs of his
Catholic countrymen, he begged the empress not to intrude in religious matters. To his ambassador in St. Petersburg, the king wrote, “[This demand] is
a real thunderbolt for the country and for me personally. If it is still humanly possible, try to make the empress see that the crown which she procured for me will become a shirt of Nessus. I shall be burned alive and my end will be frightful.”

Catherine ignored his plea. She felt her moral position to be unassailable; she was upholding the rights of a persecuted minority against the Catholic Church. Beyond that, she had given money to Stanislaus; she felt that she had bought and paid for his support. She instructed her ambassador to enforce her policy.

Frederick of Prussia was happy to stand aside in Catherine’s struggle with the king and the Diet, and to devote himself to fomenting discontent in the Protestant areas of northern Poland. This served to strengthen the resistance of Polish Catholics to all foreign intervention and make Catherine’s effort more difficult. With members of the Diet obdurate and sullen, with Catholic bishops thundering against the wickedness of the dissenters, with some members of the nobility arming their followers, Catherine saw no alternative except to send more Russian troops into Poland. When the next Diet met in October 1767, Warsaw was occupied by a Russian army. Repnin surrounded the Diet building with soldiers and placed some of them inside the Diet chamber to ensure that members voted as he instructed them. At first, the Diet refused to be intimidated. When bishops spoke against dissident rights, members roared approval. Repnin then arrested the two leading bishops, including the elderly bishop of Kraców, and sent them across the border to exile in Russia. Members looked to their king to protest, but Stanislaus accepted Repnin’s demands, whereupon they accused the king of betraying his country to the Russians. On November 7, 1767, the Diet, with multiple absentees, with Russian bayonets gleaming everywhere, and finding no one to rally behind, grudgingly submitted and agreed to equal rights for “dissidents.” Catherine and Repnin, however, were not finished. In February 1768, they forced the signing of a Polish-Russian treaty of alliance that confirmed the granting of liberty of worship to dissenting minorities and committed the king not to attempt any change in the Polish constitution without Russian consent.

Two days after the Diet in Warsaw dispersed, a group of conservative Catholic noblemen gathered in the southern Polish town of Bar, near the Turkish frontier, and declared themselves to be a Confederated
Diet whose purpose was to defend Polish independence and the Catholic religion. Polish patriotism led to an ill-prepared and uncoordinated uprising. Russian troops marched south and easily dispersed this group of confederates, but other anti-Russian confederations arose elsewhere in Poland, and Catherine was forced to send more troops. The confederates appealed for support from Catholic Austria and from France; both sent money and officers to advise. Catherine responded by flooding the country with even more Russian troops. She realized that she had badly underestimated the strength of Polish Catholicism and national pride, and, to her surprise, she found herself enmeshed in a serious military campaign. The Poles were fighting, she wrote to Voltaire, “in order
to prevent a quarter of their nation from enjoying civic rights.”

Catherine had succeeded in making Poland a vassal state with a puppet king, but she had also succeeded in arousing the hatred of the Poles, the alarm of Turkey, the anxiety of Austria, and even the nervousness of Prussia. Frederick had not signed a treaty with Russia in order to see the whole of Poland fall under Russian control.

Apprehension caused by events in Poland spread across Europe. Monarchs and statesmen, already astonished by the success of the former Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst in making herself an empress, now watched as she turned her lover into a king and extended Russian influence over his new kingdom. The Turks, neighbors of both Poland and Russia, were greatly alarmed by the growing increase in Russian military power in Poland, which Turkey had assumed would remain a permanently weak buffer state. Russian troops now were in a position to advance down the Dnieper, the Bug, and the Dniester and threaten the Turkish Balkan provinces of Wallachia and Moldavia. If they reached and crossed the Danube, they could threaten the city of Constantinople itself. France, Turkey’s traditional ally, was also eager to curtail Russia’s growing influence in Poland. It was, therefore, not difficult for French diplomats in Constantinople to convince the sultan and the grand vizier that Russian expansion must be checked and that the wisest course would be to declare war before the Russians were ready. French bribes made this case persuasive in Constantinople. Turkey now needed only a pretext.