In calm retrospect, it seems beyond the shadow of any doubt that one major contributing factor in the demise of the First Polish Republic was the influence—mainly among the Protestant enemies of Poland, but eventually, and to an important degree, within Poland as well—of the now humanist Freemasons.
In the era of Accepted Masonry, membership in the Lodge spread throughout the governing and academic classes in Protestant countries. The great universities of Europe in Germany, Austria, France, Holland and England, as well as the scientific establishments, all provided recruits to the Lodge. European Masonry became, in fact, primarily an organization of aristocrats, large landowners and realtors, bankers and brokers. Princes of the royal blood joined the Lodge in important numbers—George IV of England, Oscar II and Gustav V of Sweden, Frederick the Great of Germany, Christian X of Denmark, to name but a few.
The aim of the cabalist humanists had always been sociopolitical change. But with such a membership as it attracted, European Masonry wanted no social revolution. The main aim of European Freemasons was political: to ensure the balance of power in Europe for England, Prussia, Holland and Scandinavia.
The nub of the matter was, however, that any strategic reckoning of these countries, which had been newly reborn as Protestant powers, had to envisage the removal of the First Polish Republic, if their dream of the great northern Protestant alliance was ever to take flesh.
In the 1500s, Poland’s eyes for culture, learning, art, thought and philosophy were on Paris. Its sabers were directed to the nascent duchy of Moscow in the east, and to the European Ottoman power to the south. Its heart remained fixed on Rome. Within its own borders, it was a federation of five or six ethnic groups within a republic based on constitutional freedom of religion and worship, which fostered Catholicism, lived at peace with the Protestants in its midst, and provided Jews with legal, religious and civil autonomy in a homeland away from their homeland. The country had become militarily strong, economically prosperous, politically mature, culturally advanced.
Most important for the dream of the northern Protestant alliance, however, was that in two respects Poland remained what it had always been.
Geopolitically, it was still the strategic plaque tournante of Central Europe. Out of Europe’s total population of 97 million, only France, with a population of 15.5 million, exceeded Poland’s 11.5 million. Poland’s borders ran from the river Oder, in the west, to 200 kilometers beyond the riverine land of the Dnieper, in the east; and from the Baltic Sea in the north to the river Dniester in the south.
Religiously, meanwhile, Poland was still thoroughly Romanist and papal in its heart, its mind and its allegiance.
As a people, as a unitary nation and as a strategic linchpin, Poland therefore was the one major power standing in the way of a Northern European hegemony for the Protestant powers.
The basic plan for the final liquidation of the Polish Republic began as early as the latter half of the 1500s, as a strictly military undertaking. First, it seems to have taken the form of a classic and unremitting pincers movement: the Ottoman Turks attacking from the south, the Swedes from the north and the war flotilla of Protestant Holland acting in coordination with the Turkish and Swedish attacks by harassing Polish beachheads in the Baltic.
Sweden’s Gustavus II Adolphus had an added impetus for his involvement in this effort against Poland. As a brilliant strategist, he surely appreciated the importance of liquidating Poland for the sake of establishing the desired Protestant hegemony. But in a world where royal bloodlines crossed every border and were part of every international initiative, whether friendly or hostile, he had his own dynastic quarrel—an ill-fated one for him, as it turned out—with Poland’s King Zygmunt II, who was in fact King of Sweden from 1597 to 1604.
Bloody as they were, these early efforts against Poland came to ruin with the Turkish defeat of 1571 at the naval battle of Lepanto, the second Turkish defeat, at the hands of the Poles, in 1621, and the sudden death of Gustavus II Adolphus in battle, in 1632.
When war alone failed to achieve the aim of the Protestant powers to deliver Poland’s territory into the hands of the Protestant allies and eliminate her from the scene as a power, the effort shifted toward a carving up of the territory of the First Republic on the apparently legitimate score of dynastic succession.
While there is no doubt at all that constant wars weakened Poland seriously, it was this “diplomatic” effort—long and complex and with many players involved—that was to prove Poland’s undoing. And into the bargain, finally it would set a new pattern for international dealings that would reach well into the twentieth century.
Among the many and complex factors in this new assault on Poland were the wide-ranging plans of Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector of the English Republic from 1653 to 1658. Cromwell’s foreign policy aimed at a weakening of imperial Spain and at the creation of a grand Protestant alliance between England, Germany, Denmark, Sweden and a Holland freed from Spanish domination.
A second, closely related factor was perhaps the oldest of the secret associations that arose in Germany in the 1600s: the Order of the Palm. The order recruited its members in Germany, Scandinavia and Ottoman Turkey; all three had long since understood that the presence of Poland constituted the gravest obstacle to their mercantile and trading plans. The historical researches of the Polish scholar Jan Konapczynski have rightly pointed to the importance of Cromwell’s attempted cooperation with the Order of the Palm. But with or without Cromwell, by the closing years of the 1600s, the order concerned itself seriously with the choice of who would become Poland’s elected king.
Given those complex royal bloodlines of Europe, such an idea was far from frivolous or unattainable. For the Order of the Palm included such active and powerful leaders as Swedish Chancellor Axel Gustafsson Oxenstierna, Swedish King Gustavus II Adolphus, and Friedrich Wilhelm, Grand Elector of Brandenburg. Moravian bishop Jan Amos Komensky acted as agent for the order between the Swedes and the Germans. And German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, as secretary of the Alchemist Society of Nuremberg—an affiliate of the Order of the Palm—employed his undoubted talents in favor of getting Palatine Philip Wilhelm elected as King of Poland in 1668–69, when the Polish crown did in fact fall vacant. The Leibniz effort failed; but it was a portentous stab at the legalistic dismemberment of Poland.
As the 1600s drew to a close, another effort to take Poland from within, as it were, came much closer to success. Friedrich Augustus I of Saxony was elected King of Poland in 1697. Like the first Piast King, Mieszko I, in 966, and like Jagiello in 1386, Friedrich converted to Roman Catholicism. But in his case, it was no more than a drill to pass muster; for he was and remained a devotee of the “reconstructed” Kabbala, and indulged in so-called cabalistic experiments.
Friedrich’s German prime minister, Baron Manteufel, was clearly of the same stripe. A few years later, in fact, in 1728, he created the Masonic Court Lodge in Dresden, with an affiliate Lodge in Berlin. The seal of this Court Lodge was the Rosy Cross—the cross surmounted by a rose; and it counted among its members Friedrich Augustus I himself, and two Prussian kings, Friedrich Wilhelm I and Friedrich Wilhelm II.
Unlike Mieszko and Jagiello, Friedrich Augustus I did not last long as King of Poland. But during his seven-year reign, his foreign policy was directed toward the eventual partitioning of Poland’s lands among her neighbors—an effort he continued even after he was deposed, in 1704.
It did not help Poland’s position in this new political onslaught from within that she had been continuously at war since 1648. At one stage, she had sustained what contemporary Polish historians called the “Deluge”—a combined invasion of her territory by Swedes, Brandenburger Germans, Transylvanian Hungarians and Muscovites, all of whom were banking on the support of Cromwell’s England and on an internal revolt of Protestants and pro-Protestant Catholics within Poland.
Poland survived the “Deluge,” just as she had survived so many wars. But by the opening
of the 1700s, she had sustained over a century of nearly continuous armed conflict. Now an abuse of constitutional privileges by Poles themselves, and a succession of weak and unacceptable rulers—Friedrich Augustus I was but one—brought the country to the condition of the “Sick Man of Europe.”
The first half of the 1700s was, as well, a time that witnessed the great efflorescence of European Masonic Lodges—the true dawning of Accepted Masonry; and Poland by no means escaped its impact. Undoubtedly, in fact, Masonry had been introduced as an important dimension among Poland’s ruling classes by Friedrich Augustus I; and the influence of Prime Minister Manteufel doubtless accounts for the Prussophile character of Polish Masonry underlined by some historians.
This was also the Enlightenment era. Inevitably, therefore, philosophy and science entered the fray; for many brilliant exponents of the new disciplines were also adherents of the principles of Masonry. Human intelligence, as a reflection of and participation in the wisdom of the Great Architect of the occultist humanists, was now seen as the infallible element in man’s progress.
While the notion of the Great Architect was maintained, the alchemist element of the old humanist associations fell into disrepute and disuse with the onrush of scientific discoveries. The energies of the new initiates were channeled into more practical ways of attaining their sociopolitical goals.
Much of the symbolism and ceremonial that had been evolved in that earlier prescientific cabalism survived. But Masonic humanism as a living force now relied on uninhibited human inquiry, free from any adjudication—especially on the part of the Church and of religion; for that bedrock anti-Church ideology inherited from the thirteenth-century Italian dissidents remained intact—as the only foundation of human civilization. Catholic beliefs were seen as retrograde, as the great inhibitors of human happiness.
Predictably, such political and philosophical elements involved in Masonry as ideological foundation blocks exacerbated the already virulent hatred of the Roman papacy. And this was true especially in the Catholic heartland countries of France, Belgium, Italy and Spain.
The most powerful and all-directive Masonic Lodge in Europe, for example, was the Grand Orient of France. The anti-Roman and anti-Christian hostility in the Grand Orient became almost legendary. With true Gallic logic, in fact, its participants abolished even the old Masonic obligation to believe in the Great Architect of the Universe. In this step—bold even for Accepted Masons of the Enlightenment era—the French Masons were being very French: ahead of everybody else, and discomfiting in their frankness. Still, it was the Grand Orient type of Masonry that took hold in Catholic countries such as Portugal, Spain and Austria, and in Italy itself.
As early as 1738, Pope Clement XII could see the full georeligious and geopolitical implications of Accepted Masonry, whose Lodges included not only the new and deeply influential intellectual leaders, but the most powerful political personages of the day. Clement condemned Masonry as incompatible with Catholic belief—as indeed it was. And he condemned its secrecy as an unlawful practice that would make possible the subversion of nations and governments.
By then, however, it would appear that the die was all but cast. And Poland was to become the classic fulfillment of Pope Clement’s warning concerning the subversion of nations and governments.
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During the first half of the 1700s, Masonic Lodges—many modeled on the Grand Orient and on English-Teutonic Masonry—proliferated in Poland like eggs in a henhouse. According to historians of the stature of Stanislaw Zaleski, Jedrzej Giertych and Stanislaw Malachowski-Lipicki, some 316 Lodges dotted Poland in the seventy-seven years between 1738, when Pope Clement issued his condemnation, and 1815, when the Great Powers of the world agreed at the Congress of Vienna to ratify, under international law, the then accomplished fact of the obliteration of Poland from the face of the geopolitical world.
As in every other country, it was not the number of Lodges in Poland, or the size of their membership—reported by historians as 5,748—that was the determining factor in their influence over Poland’s fate. Rather, it was as always the fact that Masonry successfully recruited leading and influential intellectuals and the politically powerful members of royalty and the aristocracy—the “superstructure” of society that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels would point to, within a mere thirty-three years after the Congress of Vienna, as the oppressors of the “working masses.”
The historical track of the founding of important humanist Masonic Lodges in Poland, and that of the three successive land grabs—partitions, they were called—of Polish territory, are compelling in the way that they seem to intertwine.
One of the more important Lodges, Wisniowiec, was founded in 1742 at Volhynia. In Warsaw, four major Lodges—Three Brothers, Dukla, Good Shepherd and Virtuous Sarmatian—were founded in 1744, 1755, 1758 and 1769, respectively. The Grand Polish Lodge dated from 1769, as well; its doctrinal authority was the Scottish Chapter of St. Andrew, and the Rosicrucian chapter founded in Germany by Poland’s former prime minister Manteufel.
Within this stunningly fertile period for Masonry, Poland saw the election of three monarchs—her last as a republic—who ranked among the most ardent promoters of Polish Masonry. Augustus III died in 1763. He was succeeded by Stanislaw Leszczynski, who died in 1766. He in turn was succeeded by Stanislaw Poniatowski, who outlived the Republic by about three years.
Within that period, as well, Poland was subjected to unremitting invasion, to commercial harassment, to an increasing international isolation, and to what was probably the most crippling influence of all—internal subversion on a wide scale.
Recent studies by scholars demonstrate that during the first two thirds of the eighteenth century, large numbers of the Polish political and intellectual elite were won over to the humanist ideals of Masonry. As a consequence, they willingly collaborated in producing a numbing constitutional paralysis in the First Polish Republic. For clearly, in all their breadth and implications, the Three Pacts of Polishness—the Piast Pact with the Holy See of Rome, the Pact with the Primate Bishop as Interrex, and the Pact with Mary as the Queen of the Kingdom of Poland—were irreconcilable with the secularizing intent of Masonry. As it happened, sweetly enough for Masonry, the political fortunes of the Holy See were in visible decline all over Europe by this time.
It is more than merely ironic that the first great model of modern democratic government was also the first to fall victim to all the pitfalls that have lately become familiar all over again.
Poland’s legislature began to use its oversight powers to encroach on the powers of the elected head of state. The supreme court followed suit, encroaching onto the domain of the legislature. Representatives began to resort to political ruses to ensure their constant reelection. Democratic liberty was cited as the basis to undermine the moral foundations on which that liberty had been based, and to paralyze government along doctrinaire lines of ideological humanism.
All of these embittering and inhibiting conditions had contributed their generous share to Poland’s political decadence and to its internal weakness by the time Stanislaw Poniatowski took power in 1766 as the third in the line of Polish Masonic kings.
By 1772, Poland was so weakened by wars and international intrigues and corrupt government, that the first partial dismemberment of her territory—the First Partition of Poland—became possible. Russia and Prussia, in alliance with Austria, were the beneficiaries, carving up the first spoils three ways.
At about this time also, there started in Russia and Prussia that process that was to become so familiar: the slandering of everything Polish and the poisoning of the European mind with a dislike that amounted to contempt for Poles, and what remained of Poland.
On the Masonic front in Poland, an intra-Masonic rivalry broke out for predominance in Polish Masonry. After much contention between the English, French and German Masonic authorities, the Royal York Lodge of Berlin won the day. In 1780, it organized a new Polish Lodge, Cath
erine of the Polish Star, and obtained for it from English authorities a patent as a Grand Provincial Lodge. In 1784, it became the Polish Grand Orient.
By 1790, on the political front, the First Polish Republic had deteriorated into such a helpless condition that it was successfully forced into an unnatural and ultimately deadly alliance with its mortal enemy, Prussia. The Polish-Prussian Pact of 1790 was signed. Its chief architect, Ignacy Potocki, was Grand Master of Polish Masonry. And the conditions of the Pact were such that the succeeding and final two partitionings of Poland were inevitable, in the circumstances.
The final blows fell quickly upon Poland. In 1793, the Second Partition reduced Poland from its original population of 11.5 million to about 3.5 million. In effect, however, it was merely a prelude to the Third Partition. By the end of 1795, the long struggle to take Poland from the Poles was over. The last freely elected chief executive of the First Polish Republic, King Stanislaw, was forced to abdicate by Russia, Prussia and Austria. Triumphant at last, the Three Powers proceeded to divide the cadaver of Poland between them.
In a great foreshadowing of things to come in the twentieth century, Russia grabbed all of Lithuania and the Ukraine, with a combined population of some 1.5 million people. Prussia seized Mazovia, with Warsaw as its center—a million people more. And Austria made off with the Krakow region and its one million people.
With Poland’s extinction complete, all that remained to accomplish was the eradication of the name of Poland from the map of Europe; and the obliteration of the memory of the Polish presence in Europe. It was precisely to that declared and openly pursued policy that the Three Powers made a joint commitment.
Among the ordinary Polish people, now forcibly parceled out among other populations, hope lingered that the tripartite decision to liquidate their country would be reversed. That hope was given an enormous boost by the sudden and stunning military successes of France’s Napoleon Bonaparte. Beginning in 1796—only a year after the Third Partition of Poland—his resounding victories against all comers threw all the powers of Europe into violent flux; and, in geopolitical terms, it made sense for Poles to take hope.
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