The last King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania in the old
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was Stanislas II August. He was born
Count Stanisław Antoni Poniatowski in 1732 in Belarus.
Politics came
naturally to him with his family connections and powerful oratory and he
was a famous member of the Chamber of Deputies by the time he was 20.
In 1755 he went to work for the British ambassador in St Petersburg. The
future Empress Catherine the Great was hopelessly smitten by him and he
made enough of an impression on the Empress Elizabeth that she made him
the Russian ambassador to the King of Saxony. When King Augustus III
died in 1763 Poland fell into the usual squabbles over who would succeed
him and following a coup and the intervention of Russia the young Count
Poniatowski was elected King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania,
taking the name Stanislaw II Augustus. He was crowned in Warsaw on
November 25, 1764.
As King of Poland he instituted several
reforms but when rebel forces rose up against him and even took him
prisoner for a time. They declared him deposed but Russian imperial
troops came to the rescue and restored Stanislas to his throne. However,
the Kingdom of Poland had effectively become a Russian protectorate.
When the first partition of Poland was enacted in 1772 there was nothing
he could do about it and his position only became further dependent on
Russia as the radical revolutionary ideas breaking out in France began
to spread across the nations of Europe, infecting Poland as well. In
1783 he married his longtime mistress by whom he already had a son. He
attempted to strengthen his position as monarch by embracing the call
for reform and encouraging a healthy sort of Polish nationalism. This
culminated in the enactment of the Constitution of 1791.
However,
although the people were deeply moved by the King's embrace of the new
constitution a great many nobles were against it and declared against
the monarch in their effort to see it abolished. Warfare erupted between
the confederation of nobles backed up by the Russians on one side and
the King and those Poles loyal to the constitution on the other. The
King's troops performed bravely with some excellent hard-fighting
generals (including Tadeusz Kosciuszko who had fought in the Continental
Army in the American War for Independence) but in the end King
Stanislas, on the advice of all of his ministers, finally gave in to the
nobles and surrendered himself to the Russians. The result was the
second partition of Poland between Russia and Prussia in 1793. Only two
years later Austria joined in the last partition of Poland which finally
divided up the last of the country between the three powers. Stanislas
II August was forced to abdicate on November 25, 1795. He was then taken
to St Petersburg where he lived out the rest of his life on a pension
granted by the Empress. He died lonely and deeply in debt in 1798 and
was buried in St Catherine's Catholic Church in St Petersburg.
Some
look with sympathy on the last King of Poland and point to the many
undeniably great contributions he made to Polish society throughout his
reign in the arts and education and so on. Yet others see him as a
monarch who danced too close to dangerous forces, who did little to
encourage the support of traditional supporters like the Church and who
was too weak to set a course and stick to it. Some view his final
capitulation to the confederation of nobles as downright treasonous and
yet given all that came after it, many could also not help to look back
on the Poland he represented as a better time when the country was at
least nominally independent and at least existed. In 1938 his remains
were moved to his birthplace in Belarus and in 1995 finally to Warsaw
where he now rests in St John's Cathedral.
