Sharing Political Space: The Royal Court and the Polish-Lithuanian Sejm in the Seventeenth Century

Abstract

In 1667, Andrzej Maksymilian Fredro, political thinker and senator of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, argued that fewer sejms should be held to prevent the royal court's corruption of the szlachta from the lower chamber. He feared that envoys, tempted by a political career in the ambit of the court, would seek royal patronage and neglect their local and military responsibilities. This article thinks Fredro's concerns through spatially, considering how the blurring of parliamentary and courtly spaces was manifest at Wawel in Kraków and the royal palace in Warsaw, the royal residences where sejms took place. Limited space necessitated improvisation to facilitate the political processes of parliamentary monarchy. There were occasions when parliamentary activity spilled over into the royal apartments, which could be used as breakout rooms for ‘private discussion’, the work of commissions or deputations, and, crucially, by the king seeking to manage parliamentary conflict away from the public forum of sejm. This was vital given that the system was based on common consent, rather than a majority vote. At the same time, parliamentary space could be used for the entertainments and displays of royal favour associated with the royal court. Furthermore, parliamentary debates were open and public, meaning that courtiers were able to come in and out of parliamentary spaces, exerting influence over parliamentarians. The Polish-Lithuanian monarchy was parliamentary, but this article shows how its sejm was monarchical. To an extent, the king could manage parliamentary processes through the use of space and tempt the szlachta to strive for his favour. Drawing on Fredro's writings and parliamentary and szlachta diaries, which include accounts of the king hosting ‘convivial sessions’ in parliament, this article provides a new perspective on the entangled nature of courtly and parliamentary cultures in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

In 1667, Andrzej Maksymilian Fredro, a prominent political thinker and senator of Poland-Lithuania, argued that fewer sejms (parliamentary assemblies) should be held to prevent the royal court's corruption of the szlachta, members of the Polish-Lithianuan noble estate who comprised the chamber of envoys, the lower parliamentary chamber. Envoys were elected in sejmiks, local political assemblies. In a letter to an unnamed friend, Fredro described the increasing frequency of sejms from the beginning of the sixteenth century, arguing that this greater frequency brought the ordinary szlachta into contact with the world of central state politics, including the royal court. ¹ Interacting with the royal court in Warsaw or Kraków gave ambitious and able politicians a way of advancing socially and politically instead of sticking to occupations Fredro deemed appropriate for the szlachta: tending to their land and warfare. Some szlachta hoped to eventually advance to the senate, the higher parliamentary chamber made up of state officers appointed by the king for life. Fredro himself rose to a senatorial office through a combination of court and parliamentary positions, like many others of his time, including Jan Sobieski, who was elected king in 1674. Nevertheless, the deep suspicion of the court's influence on the szlachta was a common rhetoric in seventeenth-century Poland-Lithuania. While his distrust of the court is unsurprising, it is significant that Fredro made such a close connection between the institutions of the court and of the sejm. In his mind, to interact with one was to interact with the other. His statements help to bring the main theme of this article to light: how seventeenth-century szlachta, senators, and kings in Poland-Lithuania's parliamentary monarchy understood and made use of the physical spaces shared between the sejm and the court at the royal palaces in Kraków and Warsaw.

The spatial connection between the royal court and political assemblies in parliamentary monarchies is an emerging area of Anglophone scholarship, with recent work examining how monarchs used royal spaces like the Painted Chamber or St Stephen's Chapel for parliamentary activity in Westminster. ² Interpreting the political role of this connection is vital, because the proximity of two dynamic institutions complicated the political space occupied by them, affecting their day-to-day functioning and function within the state. This article aims to open this line of enquiry to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the other large parliamentary monarchy in early modern Europe. It examines the circumstances in which spaces were shared during sejms and how this was vital to the functioning of the parliamentary monarchy with its consensual rather than majority parliamentary voting system. The article also analyses the perceived challenges this posed to the integrity of the sejm as an institution, as hosting sejms in the royal palaces enabled the king to exercise his powers of patronage in a manner that was highly visible to large numbers of szlachta.

We have a deep understanding of the Polish-Lithuanian sejm from the rich historiography both on the sejm as an institution and on individual sejms, including the course taken by debates and legislation passed. ³ However, the role of Poland-Lithuania's royal court in relation to the functioning of its parliamentary monarchy has been rarely interpreted. In a monograph on seventeenth-century Polish-Lithuanian kingship, Urszula Augustyniak points out that the problem is ‘the lack of a precisely specified subject of research’; historians have not been sure how to cast their net of inquiry. ⁴ The Polish-Lithuanian court has proven a misfit when trying to apply definitions or models developed for royal courts in more absolutist settings, making it difficult to interpret its political role. ⁵ In political histories, the court has been understood by historians as the king's political faction and at the same time one of many within a ‘constellation of courts’, in which the decentralized political system allowed powerful senators – members of the higher parliamentary chamber – to keep courts not dissimilar to the royal one. ⁶

The view of the court as the king's political faction has tended to shape the work of those historians who have engaged with the dynamic between the court and the sejm. In particular, there have been important analyses of how kings built their factions by using their power to appoint state offices, particularly those that came with seats in the senate. ⁷ This understanding of the court still rests in part on Władysław Czapliński's influential interpretation of the political crisis in seventeenth-century Poland-Lithuania as in essence a conflict between three social groups: the king, the magnates (i.e., senators), and the szlachta. In this reading, the king was weak and ineffective and his court a faction made up of a small number of careerists. Robert Frost's critique suggests that the ‘triangle’ of conflict model is incapable of conveying the complexities of this politics. ⁸ We now understand that political conflict hinged more on political views than social class, not least because, as Anna Grześkowiak-Krwawicz has shown, members of the same social class could understand different parts of the Commonwealth's political system in completely different ways. ⁹ Taking Jan Kazimierz Vasa as an example, Frost argued that the king was ‘more than just another magnate faction-leader, as is sometimes suggested’. ¹⁰ He demonstrated that the royal power to appoint offices of state and grant leases on crown lands was vital to magnates and szlachta alike, whether for social progression or maintaining an elite lifestyle in the context of the customary law requiring most land estates to provide an inheritance for all children. Therefore, few could afford to completely sever themselves from the king. Frost rightly points out that ‘we will not be able to understand the enormous intensity of political conflicts in the Vasa period, if we continue to think that the king, together with a small number of unstable careerists, fought with the entire szlachta and the most important magnate factions’. ¹¹ If we are to consider more seriously the importance of the king within the system as a centre of power, so the royal court must be taken more seriously as an institution of government. Indeed, Fredro's fears of a widespread ‘corruption’ of the szlachta by the court, expressed towards the end of Jan Kazimierz's reign, spoke of the appeal of being in the king's orbit, of the sejm as a point of access, and of the court as a central political institution.

More recent work, partly fuelled by approaches from historical anthropology, has regarded the court as a central institution of the Polish-Lithuanian state. Joanna Kodzik's investigation of the descriptions of Polish-Lithuanian court ceremony by German writers found that court society functioned as a social system, where the nobles fulfilled their roles led by their sense of values which were ‘the crown, access to the king, gaining titles, precedence, being appropriately treated, performance of own status and participating in the ceremonial theatrum’. ¹² This complicates three ideas deeply embedded in the historiography: that the Polish-Lithuanian court was, first, informal and largely unbound by etiquette, second, but one of a constellation of semi-royal courts of powerful senators, and, third, primarily the king's political faction. ¹³ Urszula Augustyniak argues that parliamentary acts of 1590 and 1598 indicated that the court itself might have been ‘an institution of public utility’, for these acts established a revenue stream to fund the royal court (so-called ‘goods of the king's table’) and ensured (unsuccessfully) that no foreigners were employed at the court. ¹⁴ Henry Valois’ court accounts during his time as elected king of Poland-Lithuania in 1573–1574 demonstrate that the royal court at the time of the first free elections and interregna ‘functioned as part of the Polish–Lithuanian state apparatus and was closely incorporated into its structures’. ¹⁵

The relationship between the royal court and the sejm is thus vital for understanding the functioning of both institutions and the Polish-Lithuanian parliamentary monarchy more generally. Shared physical space played a crucial part in creating and facilitating this relationship. Most sejms in the seventeenth century took place at the royal castle in Warsaw or, as was the case for coronation sejms, at the Wawel castle in Kraków. Numerous monographs and articles examine the architecture of the palaces, their continuous development through renovation and redecoration, as well as how they were used for parliamentary and courtly purposes, though these subjects are normally treated separately. Jerzy Lileyko's and Marek Wrede's work give a particularly detailed account of the architectural and decorative development of the royal castle in Warsaw, including the parliamentary chambers and the royal apartments. ¹⁶ The palaces also feature in monographs tracing the histories of the sejm and parliamentary spaces. ¹⁷ However, there has been very little analysis of how the spaces of the court and the sejm functioned within these palaces. Landmark monographs about the sejm, such as Stefania Ochman-Staniszewska and Zdzisław Staniszewski on the Vasa parliaments, and Robert Kołodziej on Sobieski's sejms, only briefly mention instances when, for example, parliamentary activity took place in the royal apartments. ¹⁸ More effort is needed to interpret such instances as a reoccurring phenomenon. The proceedings of the 1998 conference on court ceremony in Poland-Lithuania included valuable papers on both court and parliamentary ceremony, but only Jan Seredyka, the great historian of Polish-Lithuanian parliamentarism, examines the connections between these institutions. ¹⁹ Seredyka argues that the fact that the Wawel cathedral in Kraków and St John's church in Warsaw were linked to their corresponding royal palaces with covered passages meant that the masses opening each day of the sejm can be counted as court ceremonies. He observes that:

they were not connected to the royal court in a formal sense. However, there was, undoubtedly, a connection both substantive and material. It was evident in both the king, his family, and court taking part, and in the architectural integrity of the two palaces and these churches, … which the monarchs likely considered their court churches. ²⁰

Rather than this making the parliamentary mass a court ceremony, my contention is that the connection between the court and the sejm blurred the boundaries between them, so that it is sometimes difficult to clearly delineate what was ‘courtly’ from what was ‘parliamentary’ and vice versa.

This article therefore examines how the spaces of the royal castle in Warsaw and Wawel castle in Kraków were both conceptualized and used during sejms. It engages with the methodologies of the spatial turn, pioneered with regard to Anglophone early modern political history by Beat Kümin and Paul Stock, to rethink the binaries of parliamentary and courtly space. ²¹ The spatial approach has proved very productive in studying royal courts, particularly in examinations of the use and design of space within royal palaces, but some historians extended their scope beyond royal palaces to include cities and ‘territories’ or ‘landscapes’ more broadly. ²² These broad explorations discovered the adaptability of spaces within palaces to practical uses, not all of them what we might normally associate with kings and princes. ²³ By examining how space was used in the functioning of royal courts, historians have been able to nuance our understanding of the politics of access and the often complicated relationship between ‘public’ and ‘private’. ²⁴ As Beat Kümin has argued,

among other opportunities, a refined spatial methodology offers the chance to move beyond the binary models that have tended to structure discussions in the field. Inspired by anthropological studies, for example, religious historians sought to demarcate the sacred and the profane (with liminal areas in between); drawing on sociological work, students of gender relations drew firm lines between the private and the public spheres … Perceptive and highly stimulating as investigative tools, none of these polarities really stood the test of historical verification, an exercise more likely to reveal overlaps, situational differences and conflicting perceptions. ²⁵

Viewing the relationship between the court and the sejm through space allows us to better understand their complex practical entanglement and therefore the process of legislating and governing the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The article examines a variety of texts, including political treatises (particularly of Andrzej Maksymilian Fredro), parliamentary diaries, letters, and personal diaries. The texts were all written and/or published during the lifetime of Jan III Sobieski; they are part of my broader investigation of how the court was perceived and understood during that time. For issues of space, the article uses texts and refers to events from the 1650s, 1660s, and 1670s, including the political events related to the abdication of Jan II Kazimierz Vasa (1668), the Peace of Andruszów (1667), which signed away large parts of Lithuania and Ukraine to Muscovy, and the election and coronation of Michał I Korybut Wiśniowiecki and Jan III Sobieski. This also means that the article largely stays clear of Sobieski's major renovations of the Warsaw castle, which Jerzy Lileyko located in the 1680s. ²⁶

Sources suggest that the boundary between the court and the sejm was malleable in terms of activity, space, and the people who occupied it. This was considered an important political issue and some political theorists, like Fredro, spent much energy discussing the relationship of the two institutions and their mutual impact on each other. At the same time, there is evidence to suggest that these boundaries were not as rigid in the minds of seventeenth-century people as they can be in our own. Moreover, limited parliamentary space in the royal palaces, which had not been designed specifically as seats of the sejm, necessitated improvisation to facilitate the political processes of parliamentary monarchy. Parliamentary space could be used for both the entertainments and displays of royal favour associated with the royal court. Furthermore, parliamentary discussions were open and public, meaning that courtiers were able to come in and out of parliamentary spaces and interact with parliamentarians. At the same time, there were occasions in which parliamentary activity spilled over into the royal apartments, which could be used for private discussion, the work of commissions or deputations, and, crucially, by the king to manage parliamentary conflict away from the public forum of the sejm. This was a vital function within a system based on common consent, rather than a majority vote. Moreover, this article considers social occasions and notions of conviviality as oiling the wheels of parliamentary monarchy.

I

One of Fredro's most popular works, Gestorum Populi Poloni sub Henrico Valesio (Deeds of the Polish People under Henry Valois), published in 1652 and republished in four more editions before the end of the seventeenth century, provides vital insights into how close Fredro considered the link between the court and the sejm. Gestorum analyses and comments on the Polish-Lithuanian political system through a narrative of a formative period. In 1572, the last Jagiellonian king of the Commonwealth, Sigismund Augustus, died without an heir. This triggered the ‘free elections’ where any members of European royal and princely houses could be candidates. The first two interregna of 1572–1576, interspersed with the brief reign of Henry Valois in 1573–1574, were a time when many precedents were set for the later functioning of the Commonwealth, including the promulgation of the Henrician Articles, which established the tenets of parliamentary monarchy. While Fredro used some historical documents to reconstruct events and speeches made in the sejm, historians agree that he adjusted the facts to suit his own narrative and arguments. ²⁷ A closer look at Gestorum that attends to evidence of how parliamentary processes blurred the boundary between court and the sejm helps explain why a senator of the Commonwealth might think that only fewer sejms could prevent excessive mixing between the szlachta and courtiers.

In Gestorum Fredro describes the investiture of the archbishop of Gniezno, this being the most senior ecclesiastical and senatorial office:

to the Majesty of such a great title are also given these insignia: a Cross, which is carried at the front and a Marshal's staff, a sign of royal authority, which is also carried by a Senator in front of the archbishop as he walks through the streets and arrives at Court. But while the Cross has to be held straight in the Senate and everywhere else, the Marshal's staff should be lowered in the king's chamber. The king first receives him standing and taking a few steps in his direction[.] ²⁸

Fredro describes the court as the location of a senator investiture, making the link between appointments to senatorial offices, one of the king's most important prerogatives, and the court. But he also describes the ceremony as moving seamlessly between the king's chambers and the senate chamber, usually considered as parts of two separate institutions: the court and the sejm. Significantly, Fredro describes both as located at court, where the archbishop is said to arrive for the ceremony. The reason is partly that the king's palaces in Warsaw and Krakow housed the chambers of the senate and the envoys, so the sejm gathered in the building where the king and his family resided. At the Wawel castle, the Kraków residence Fredro describes in this passage, the senate chamber was located in the centre of the north wing on the second floor. Directly to the east, spread over the north-east corner of the palace were the king's apartments, including the bedchamber and various presence rooms. The chamber of envoys was located in the east wing, directly south from the king's apartments. In short, to reach the senate chamber from the envoys’ chamber and vice versa, one had to walk either through the king's apartments or use one of the covered passages which ran alongside them.

In another section of Gestorum, Fredro's understanding of the court is given expression in the description of the first free election of 1573:

with the 7th of January approaching, senators from Poland, Rus, Lithuania, Prussia, and Livonia and other nations covered by the name Commonwealth started gathering in Warsaw. As the sun rose on the appointed day, the Senate together with the envoys ceremonially walked to the church, believing that each sejm should be started with God's help according to the beautiful custom; then they processed to the Court, the senate to the senatorial chamber and the envoys to their own. ²⁹

Here Fredro describes the other royal-state residence, the royal castle in Warsaw, where the royal apartments and the chambers of the sejm were located in the same eastern wing of the palace facing the river Vistula. ³⁰

In both cases, Fredro uses the Latin word ‘curia’ to describe the place where these activities took place. During the Roman Republic, it referred to assemblies of citizens and to the buildings (such as Curia Hostilia or Curia Iulia) where the Roman Senate met. From the ninth century, in western Europe ‘curia’ was used to mean the royal court understood as both an administrative and judicial centre and the royal residence. Nigel Saul discusses how the term was used during the Middle Ages, relating it to terms like ‘palatium’ and ‘aula’ but also to emerging courtly culture of elaborate courtesies and conduct. ³¹ In Poland, similar use of the word was recorded, for example, in the early twelfth-century chronicle of Gallus Anonymous referring to the court of Bolesław the Brave (c. 967–1025), the first Polish king. ³² The use of the word by an early modern Polish speaker is further complicated by the meanings associated with it in that language. ‘Curia’ means ‘court’ or ‘dwór’ in Polish; a word which has associations with buildings and locations rather than, as in English, with the court of law. ‘Curia’ could also relate to the names of two sections of the royal castle in Warsaw after the renovations of Sigismund III Vasa which unified a complex of older buildings into a single pentagonal shape. The most important was Curia Maior or Dwór Wielki in Polish (also known as Dom Wielki or Great House, which Marek Wrede suggests was the term most often applied to it). ³³ Jerzy Lileyko locates its beginnings in the late fourteenth century, when the castle was a residence of the Piast Dukes of Masovia before the region was re-joined to the Polish crown in 1526. ³⁴ The building also served as location for Masovian assemblies, but Wrede argues that the building only became known as ‘curia’ on the ducal residence's relocation to Warsaw. ³⁵ Furthermore, Wrede argues that the term was originally applied in the context of the Warsaw castle complex to mean a larger, often fenced, self-contained administrative area, but by the mid-sixteenth century it was also used to denote particular buildings. ³⁶

Noting the development of the Warsaw castle from separate buildings used for specific purposes into a single structure is vital to understanding how courtly and parliamentary spaces later became entangled. From 1569 to 1572, the Curia Maior underwent a series of renovations aiming to adapt it for the use of the newly joined Polish and Lithuanian sejm with a chamber of envoys on the ground floor and the senate chamber above it. ³⁷ The two rooms were linked directly by a staircase which enabled efficient and informal carrying out of parliamentary business. However, following more renovations in the period 1598–1604, the senate chamber was directly connected not just to the chamber of envoys; on the opposite side to the main entrance, behind the king's throne, there was a small door leading directly to the royal apartments. ³⁸ This enabled the senate to fulfil its role in terms of advising the king and acting as the intermediaries that maintained communications between the king and the szlachta from the chamber of envoys. The renovations also extended the so-called New Royal House (Nowy Dom Królewski) to unify it with the Curia Maior on one side and another building, the Small Court (Curia Minor), on the other. Like Curia Maior, Curia Minor was built in the early fifteenth century to meet the accommodation needs of the courts of the Dukes of Masovia; it was later used in the same way by Polish kings. There was more development at the end of the seventeenth century and there is some discussion about the exact date when the envoys’ chamber was moved to the first floor of the southwest wing of the palace. Lileyko points to Michał Korybut Wiśniowiecki's reign, but Kołodziej doubts this since there was no mention of this in parliamentary diaries until at least 1695. ³⁹ In any case, sejms took place in the royal residences, and from the late sixteenth century in the very same buildings in which the king and his family resided.

Fredro, then, could be using the word ‘curia’ to mean three specific things: (1) the general residence of the monarch/prince; (2) a place of assembly of politically significant actors; or (3) the precise proper names of buildings. The third option would mean that he uses the word specifically to describe the Curia Maior as the place where the sejm sat, but this is unlikely for several reasons. The first is that he applies the word both to the election sejm taking place at the Warsaw castle (where the Curia Maior is located) and to the investiture of the archbishop at the Wawel palace in Kraków, which included no building with this specific name. The Renaissance palace was gradually constructed over the course of the early sixteenth century (c. 1504–1548) and the senate and envoys’ chambers were in place from 1524. ⁴⁰ The names of the previous buildings on site seem not to have entered the vernacular in the same way as with the Warsaw castle. When referring to the Warsaw sejm, Fredro also neglects to use an adjective to refer to the specific Curia building (Minor or Maior). All this suggests that Fredro is using the word in a more substantive sense for a combination of the first two meanings: as the monarch's residence and place of assembly of politically important actors, i.e., the sejm and the court as social and political institutions. This makes sense for both institutions were incorporated into the structures of the state, as I have argued about the royal court, and served as institutions of ‘public utility’, as Urszula Augustyniak described the royal court. ⁴¹ Fredro's use of the word ‘court’ chimes well with the meaning ascribed more broadly to the royal castles in Warsaw and Kraków by their contemporaries. Ochman-Staniszewska and Staniszewski, in their study of sejms during the reign of Jan Kazimierz Vasa, argue that

despite the fact that the Warsaw Castle was not adapted for such large gatherings [i.e., sejms] for which only two not very large chambers were assigned, a special building for housing the Polish-Lithuanian Sejm has never been designed. Royal palaces were used in this way because the szlachta considered them public buildings, property of the Commonwealth rather than private residences and the personal property of the ruling monarch. ⁴²

The phrase ‘not very large chambers’ is vital here and illustrates the practical problem which inevitably led to the mingling of the court and the sejm within the confines of the castle.

The fact that these institutions were linked closely enough for as sophisticated a political thinker as Fredro to refer to both of their locations using the word ‘court’ is significant. It suggests that we should rethink the court and the sejm as more malleable than previously thought and, on some occasions, indistinguishable. Fredro's description of an election sejm during an interregnum, when no king was in residence at the palace, suggests that the court was not necessarily attached to the monarch's person, but rather an institution central to the functioning of the state. While it should be noted that this is not a common use of the term ‘court’, its use by a very prominent politician, parliamentarian, senator, courtier, political theorist, and the king's (Jan III Sobieski's) relative says much about how a person of his station could conceptualize the court as a location that included parliamentary activity.

II

Fredro's understanding of the spatial relationship between the court and the sejm is echoed in parliamentary diaries of his time, which show that parliamentary activity and ceremony sometimes spilled over into spaces associated with the royal court. Parliamentary diaries were daily records of debates, normally commissioned by important senators who were not able to attend a particular sejm in person or wanted a detailed account of what happened in the chamber of envoys while the senate was deliberating upstairs. We often have little information on who recorded the information and who commissioned it. While parliamentary diaries rarely spend any time describing the physical surroundings of the sejm – debates and disagreements were of most interest – they allow revealing glimpses into what took place within the royal castles in Warsaw and Kraków during sejms. Warsaw sejms normally opened with a mass celebrated at St John's Cathedral, located next to the castle. The parliamentary diary of the 1668 convocation sejm, following the abdication of Jan Kazimierz, describes how ‘as soon as the archbishop of Gniezno set out, he was immediately followed by all senators and envoys via porches through the royal apartments which were opened all the way to the senate chamber where the archbishop remained with the senators and the envoys went to the envoys chamber’. ⁴³ This is reminiscent of Fredro's description of the investiture of the archbishop of Gniezno where the ceremony moved between the senate chamber and the king's chamber. Opening the door to the royal apartments explicitly incorporated the courtly spaces into a parliamentary ceremony – a particularly poignant way of emphasizing the importance of the royal principle in the political system at a time when the sejm gathered to decide how the new monarch was to be elected.

Parliamentary diaries suggest that rather than just being porous, the divide between courtly and parliamentary spaces could occasionally dissolve completely. During the same convocation sejm, the issue of political rights of religious dissidents and Orthodox Christians was brought to light through the person of Bogusław Radziwiłł, who came to the sejm as an envoy from the Podlasie region. Mieczysława Chmielewska explains that the notoriously conservative Masovian envoys objected to Radziwiłł on the grounds that he was a Calvinist. ⁴⁴ There was also a sense that the previous king had given mandates discriminating against religious dissidents. The parliamentary diary reports that on 29 November:

Circam horam nonam, lords senators both ecclesiastical and secular had a private session together with the primate of the church [Mikołaj Prażmowski] in the room of her royal highness the queen, may she rest in peace. For this session priest Pikarski and priest Ksenof were also present, because of the issue of religious dissidents, who were not present among them, but who walked in groups and debated in other rooms, quarrelling slightly with Pan Pieniążek, ⁴⁵ an envoy from the Kraków voivodeship, about opinions on the same matter of the rights of the Catholic Christian religion which was deliberated for the duration of the entire session on the previous day. Pan Fredro, castellan of Lwów argued that because we do not have the authentic, written by hand, decrees of the Grand Duke of Masovia [one of the Polish king's titles], let us support the statute which explicitly talks about them [religious dissidents] and let us not debate in private but in public, so that we can allow the dissidents, of whom there is twenty among us, to understand. To which everyone agreed, and all went to the Senate chamber at three in the afternoon. ⁴⁶

The rooms described here were the royal public and private apartments located across from the senate chamber. The two areas of the palace were separated by the ‘senators’ hallway’, which led into the king's antechambers. From there, the queen's chambers, referring here to Marie Louise Gonzaga who died in 1667, were at the end of a long succession of rooms, accessible through either the king's private apartments or through the so-called Marble Hall. ⁴⁷ The Marble Hall, in the middle of the royal apartments, was decorated by Władysław IV to demonstrate the splendour of the Vasa dynasty, including a ceiling painted with scenes from the coronation of Sigismund III, of military victories, and art which connected the Vasas to the Jagiellonian dynasty, which had ruled Poland-Lithuania from 1386 until 1572. ⁴⁸ Thus, the spaces where parliamentary deliberations about important issues of religious rights occurred were filled with dynastic propaganda that emphasized the Crown's apparent long continuities. Most importantly, these ad-hoc discussions in the royal apartments were fruitful. The issue was controversial enough that some parliamentarians, like Fredro, took the view that unless the rights of dissidents were upheld, they would refuse to sign the general confederation document, which was necessary to call the election. The convocation sejm resolved to uphold the rights of the religious dissidents and Orthodox Christians as outlined in the Warsaw Confederation of 1573. ⁴⁹

The queen's room was used again for important state business during Michał Korybut Wiśniowiecki's election sejm in May and June 1669. Jan Antoni Chrapowicki reported that on 19 June Wiśniowiecki was elected unexpectedly; he was conveyed to the church for a Te Deum, then to see his mother Princess Gryzelda Wiśniowiecka, ⁵⁰ and finally ‘to the royal palace, though the royal apartments were empty, they managed to find some sheets and furniture so that the king could sleep at the palace’. ⁵¹ Then the sejm continued towards the conclusion of its other duties such as egzorbitancje (i.e., grievances, focused on acts of the previous reign that were claimed to be unlawful), kapturowe law courts, ⁵² and preparing the pacta conventa (personal election promises of the king elect) for Wiśniowiecki to sign and swear to. Chrapowicki reports that ‘Kapturowe law courts ceased, after which we presented ourselves to the king to report their cessation. Some took part in egzorbitancje, others in pacta conventa: but nothing was concluded only proposed; egzorbitancje took place in the senate chamber at the royal palace, the pacta conventa in the queen's chamber’. ⁵³

It could be argued that these were specific situations that took place during a convocation and election sejms following the king's abdication. Senators were therefore deliberating in the empty shell of the court, as there was no king at its centre. After the abdication of Jan Kazimierz in 1668, the archbishop of Gniezno, Mikołaj Prażmowski, acted as interrex, as dictated by tradition, until Michał Korybut Wiśniowiecki was elected. The archbishop took on some of the king's responsibilities. Although the archbishop could not serve as the centre of the court in the way a king would, it is worth recalling that Fredro referred to the ‘court’ when describing the election of 1573. ⁵⁴ In the second incident described, the parliamentarians were not dissuaded from using the royal apartments for their work by the fact that the king had been elected and taken up residence in the palace. More examples from parliamentary and personal diaries, like that of Jan Antoni Chrapowicki (1612–1685), suggest that sejms also used royal rooms to conduct vital meetings while kings were alive and in residence.

Chrapowicki was a szlachcic of modest origins, who nevertheless enjoyed a career similar to that of Andrzej Maksymilian Fredro and achieved a magnate-like status by the end of his life. ⁵⁵ His life provides a good example of a portfolio career playing on the connections between the court and the sejm. Chrapowicki was a royal secretary to Władysław IV and was chosen as an envoy from the Grodno, Witebsk, and Smoleńsk districts on numerous occasions between 1639 and 1669. In 1660, Chrapowicki was appointed a chamberlain (Pl. podkomorzy, Lat. subcamerarius) of Smoleńsk, a land office with judiciary responsibilities. He also served in prestigious roles such as the sejm marshal (speaker) with royal support and on the treasury tribunal for the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, an administrative institution that oversaw military finance. In winter 1668, he was an envoy to the so-called extraordinary sejm (a two-week sejm called in an emergency) from the Soleńsk district. In the spring of the same year, Chrapowicki was a member of a commission in his own words ‘for dividing up among the exiles the monies sent by the tsar, in which I was both commissar and interested party’. ⁵⁶ This related to the Peace of Andruszów of 1667, which saw the Commonwealth relinquish to Muscovy Lithuania's Smoleńsk voivodeship and the Polish Crown's Czernihów voivodeship, as well as half of the enormous Kyiv voivodeship. ⁵⁷ In 1669, Michał Korybut Wiśniowiecki appointed Chrapowicki as the voivode of Witebsk, which made him a senator.

Chrapowicki describes how during the ordinary sejm of 1670, as the lower chamber failed to conclude their session, ‘there was a session of the Lithuanian exiles in His Royal Highness's chamber where many other things were agreed as well’. ⁵⁸ A few days later, on 9 April, ‘before midday there was a council meeting in the [king's] chamber. When they heard that the chamber of envoys was coming, the king and the senate came back and sat down in the senate chamber’. ⁵⁹ The easy access between the envoys’ chamber downstairs and the senate chamber through the staircase meant that some issues might have been better off discussed away from the prying ears of the szlachta. This was not an isolated incident either. Chrapowicki describes other examples, including when he was still in the chamber of envoys at the extraordinary sejm in 1668:

since the council sat in the king's chamber, we did not debate in the morning and only when the king took his place in the senate chamber, we all came upstairs with a draft act, which the marshal wanted to read, but the king asked for us to wait until the senators come back to their seats. ⁶⁰

The day after the sejm was officially closed, ‘the senate council took place in the king's chamber’. ⁶¹ Senate councils, which reflected how the senate blurred the boundary between the parliamentary and executive functions of the system, were an important way for the king to exercise authority in a parliamentary monarchy. These councils often dealt with managing the parliamentary processes from the calling of local sejmiks to setting dates for sejms. The council became so influential in the eighteenth century that Dariusz Makiłła argues that in some respects they substituted for the sejm itself. ⁶² Kołodziej briefly mentions other instances from later in Sobieski's reign, when sessions of Lithuanian parliamentarians, senate councils and deputations/commissions assembled to discuss specific issues, such as war with Turkey in 1690, met in the king's chambers, the queen's apartments, and the Marble Hall. ⁶³ All of these instances bear closer collective investigation.

The function of the royal apartments within the parliamentary process as rooms for discussion, deputations, commissions, and council meetings chimes well with Makiłła's broader framework for the exercise of executive power in Poland-Lithuania. He argues that since sejms were time-limited events, parliamentary commissions of various kinds ‘were the rational tools for organizing parliamentary activity’. ⁶⁴ Ochmann-Staniszewska and Staniszewski distinguish six ordinary commissions mostly associated with drafting parliamentary acts, treasury accounts, military administration, and the parliamentary law court. ⁶⁵ Makiłła distinguishes the so-called ‘independent commissions’, which worked on various matters arising from parliamentary debates. Some of these commissions were informal in character. ⁶⁶ In the absence of regular governmental bodies, such commissions ‘created during sejms and in response to problems arising through parliamentary debate’ were a ‘surrogate of government’. ⁶⁷ Spaces of the royal court provided room for these formal and informal commissions away from the parliamentary spaces crowded with envoys, senators, and spectators. Quieter, more difficult to access, and allowing for debate over sensitive issues ‘in private’ as Fredro proclaimed in 1668, they were a vital part of the processes of parliamentary government.

Both parliamentary and personal diaries record other instances when the royal apartments were used during Wiśniowiecki's and Sobieski's lifetimes as sites for the conduct of parliamentary business, suggesting that the king's presence or absence did not substantially alter the meaning of the courtly space and its role in the parliamentary process. Indeed, the spaces of the court were used by monarchs to manage difficult situations and conflicts away from the main stage of parliamentary chambers. This included a wide variety of difficult situations, including the king's illness. During the sejm of 1662, Jan Kazimierz became ill but refused to forgo attending the debates. Krzysztof Twardowski wrote in his parliamentary diary that ‘HM the King, being ill, laid down in the doorway to the Marble Hall and we stayed in the next room with the Senate’. ⁶⁸ Ochmann-Staniszewska and Staniszewski interpret this as meaning that the envoys and the senators sat together in the Senate chamber. ⁶⁹ However, since there were several rooms between the senate chamber and the Marble Hall, a more plausible explanation is that the senate and chamber of envoys sat in the antechamber or the king's audience room, which adjoined the Marble Hall on two sides. We also should not rule out that they used the queen's chamber, which was connected to the Hall by a short passage. This meant that the court space provided a practical solution to the difficult problem of managing the king's health and continuing productive parliamentary debate.

Another type of problem resolved in the royal apartments was conflict between important parliamentarians. An example is a disagreement which played out at the ordinary sejm of 1670 between two courtiers and senators, namely the archbishop of Gniezno, Mikołaj Prażmowski, and Piotr Kochanowski, castellan of Czechów. Prażmowski attained the office of archbishop through a string of courtly offices, including the royal secretary and the Crown grand secretary. ⁷⁰ During the 1669 election, Prażmowski, together with Jan Sobieski, was in the faction supporting the French candidate Louis II de Bourbon, the Grand Condé. Both magnates were members of the ‘malcontent’ faction that acted against Michał Korybut Wiśniowiecki after his election. In 1669, the faction was already plotting to depose Wiśniowiecki in favour of Condé's nephew, the Duke of Longueville. ⁷¹ Piotr Kochanowski, on the other hand, took part in the embassy sent by Wiśniowiecki to negotiate his marriage to Eleonore of Austria. The embassy signalled a pro-Habsburg turn in the king's foreign policy, unwelcome to the malcontents. Following successful marriage negotiations, Kochanowski's next task was to deliver an invitation to the wedding to archbishop Prażmowski, who dismissed him rudely. Kochanowski complained to the king and when Prażmowski found out, he sent Kochanowski a letter listing accusations against him including that as a boy he stole from chancellor Jerzy Ossoliński and that he cheated on both his wives. He also called him a ‘impostor of low birth’ and mentioned that Kochanowski's relatives ‘treat him with disgust like a dog’. Kochanowski replied denying the accusations and in turn accusing the archbishop of being on the take from the French and of having stolen a significant number of cattle from Kochanowski himself. ⁷² Both letters scandalized the sejm and the sejmiks which preceded it. The matter came to a head in the last days of the sejm when during a debate on the proposal titled ‘On the responsibility of the estates of the Commonwealth associated with the king's dignity’, someone implied that the archbishop was dishonouring the Commonwealth with his letters. A quarrel between Stanisław Warszycki (castellan of Kraków) ⁷³ and archbishop Prażmowski swiftly followed the archbishop's retort:

To such falsehood said by the archbishop about Pan Kochanowski, the castellan of Kraków burst out in the face of the three estates, accusing him of speaking like a Muscovite. The archbishop was offended and protested in front of the three estates that any remaining authority was struck first with this attack from the castellan, and he left the chamber and went to the king's chambers. He was followed on the king's command by their lordships the bishops of Kraków, Kujawy, Poznań, and Przemyśl. And the chamber was left in confusion in the absence of the archbishop for about two hours. Finally, vanquished with the entreaties of the bishops, the archbishop came back to the Senate [chamber], where he was publicly entreated by the castellan to forgive him through his sacred mercy … ⁷⁴

The royal apartments offered the injured party, the archbishop in this case, a place to storm off without leaving the building, or even worse, going home to stew. The apartments also allowed the king the opportunity to manage the situation discreetly through the other bishops, bringing the quarrel to a happy conclusion (for the time being in any case). This meant that parliamentary business could resume with only a few hours delay, rather than a protracted negotiation involving messages sent between the palace and the archbishop's accommodation.

Another example, this time from Jan Sobieski's coronation sejm in 1676 at the Wawel palace in Kraków, shows how the royal apartments could be used for informal negotiations outside of the parliamentary chambers. It is worth remembering that the Polish-Lithuanian parliamentary system was not ruled by a majority vote, but relied on unanimous consent reached through negotiations and compromise. The negotiations were related to a disagreement between the vice-chancellor of Lithuania, Michał Kazimierz Radziwiłł (Sobieski's brother-in-law), and the voivode of Vilnius, Michał Kazimierz Pac, over the competencies of the military office of the Lithuanian grand hetman, the principal military commander responsible for army administration. Radziwiłł, as the field hetman responsible for leading smaller army units and patrolling the borders, argued that the Lithuanian army should be divided into two equal units commanded by two different men, and Pac, as the grand hetman, heartily disagreed. ⁷⁵ Sobieski was conflicted because Radziwiłł was his kinsman and a central figure of the anti-Pac faction; the Pac family were becoming too powerful in Lithuania. However, Sobieski expected further war with the Ottomans to swiftly follow the parliamentary session, so he needed to placate Pac. On 21 March, ‘the king took his seat in the Senate late because the deputies of the Senate wanted to put together an agreement between the leaders of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the king's ante-chamber’. ⁷⁶ They failed to reach an agreement, and further meetings took place on 23 March when

the deputies of the Senate, wanting to finalize the agreement between the lords of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania at the instigation of His Majesty the King, led the two parties – the vice-chancellor of Lithuania with his friends to the king's ante-chamber and the voivode of Vilnius to a chamber next to the Bird Chamber through which various points and propositions were communicated by the deputies through secretaries, hopeful for a resolution. Then they all gathered in the Bird Chamber and having been unable to satisfy all differences, they had to postpone this work until a later time. ⁷⁷

Finally, a compromise was achieved – the grand hetman retained control over the entire army, but some of his judicial and administrative prerogatives were taken away. ⁷⁸ The Bird Room was next to the king's bedchamber, meaning that the attempts to resolve a parliamentary conflict and find consensus between two important senators took place away from the senate chamber in the part of the palace associated with the institution of court not parliament. It is difficult to know with absolute certainty how often the royal apartments were used in this way, but evidence from Sobieski's time as both courtier and king suggests that this use was material to the smooth running of the parliamentary system based on common consent, allowing the management of moments which threatened the delicate balance of opinion in the parliamentary chamber away from prying ears.

III

If royal spaces were used to facilitate the process of parliamentary governance, spaces of the sejm were also where the favour politics and entertainments associated with the royal court played out. Even though Poland-Lithuania was a parliamentary monarchy, and the republican ethos was strong among its nobility, the king had significant powers to dispense favour in the form of state offices and leases on Crown lands, which brought prestige and wealth to individuals. Łukasz Opaliński (1612–1662), a political theorist and Jan Kazimierz's marshal of the court, wrote in response to John Barclay's critique of the Commonwealth's political system that the king's office-giving was ‘an enormous and extraordinary privilege’ which brought ‘multiple benefits for elevation and standing as well as significant advantages’ to members of the szlachta. Other monarchs, he concluded, ‘are much less powerful [than our king] given his extensive and unrestrained ability to dispense favours’. ⁷⁹

The malleable boundary between the sejm and the court resulted in the blend of parliamentary, social and ceremonial activities, some of which mixed parliamentary procedure with sociable gatherings, again putting the king's powers of patronage centre stage. When the sejm was not sitting, parliamentary chambers were used for court ceremonies and entertainments. The senate chamber was used, for example, for a feast to celebrate the Prussian homage ⁸⁰ of 1641 and Michał Korybut Wiśniowiecki's coronation feast on 29 September 1669 (the coronation sejm started on 1 October). ⁸¹ More importantly, both the parliamentary chambers and the royal apartments were used for hosting sociable events during sejms. This included important elite society events like betrothals and weddings, using the opportunity that a large parliamentary gathering provided. These ceremonial events were vital in the lives of the elites in any European monarchy. Normally, they had less to do with political assemblies and more with the king's prerogative to approve marriages among the establishment, which meant they were associated with the royal court.

Chrapowicki describes how during the ordinary sejm of 1670, on 15 April,

in the chancellor's [Krzysztof Zygmunt Pac] chamber Pan [Piotr] Korciński, starosta of Rumsztyn asked for the hand of Panna [Zuzanna] Zenowiczówna, daughter of the marshal of Oszmiana. I, as a cousin, was asked to attend, and so the betrothal took place in the queen's [Eleanora of Austria] room. The rings were produced by the chamberlain of Łęczyca [Stefan Sarnowski] on behalf of Pan Korciński and by the voivode of Lublin [Władysław Rej, the queen's secretary] on behalf of the bride’. ⁸²

This ceremony included two important senators (the chancellor and the voivode), both at this point royal supporters performing various services for King Michał and Queen Eleanore. Pac had welcomed Queen Eleonore at the border and assisted with the marriage ceremony in Częstochowa in February and the queen's entry into Warsaw in March 1670. ⁸³ Stefan Sarnowski, who held the rings, was an envoy to the sejm from Łęczyckie voivodeship and also a regalist at the time. ⁸⁴ He was considered an able parliamentarian just like the father of the bride, Jan Władysław Zenowicz, one of the most active parliamentarians of his time, who served as envoy to numerous sejms and on many parliamentary commissions/deputations. ⁸⁵ The presence of the groom seems the most mysterious because he does not appear on the list of envoys, though names of several envoys are unknown, so he might conceivably have been one of them. Regardless of whether he was an envoy or came especially for the betrothal, this example suggests that the sejm provided an important occasion for social events necessary for the functioning of the Polish-Lithuanian elites. The Commonwealth's enormous size meant that families were often separated from each other by distance, which increased the importance of the sejm for completing non-parliamentary business too.

Jan Sobieski's coronation sejm at the Wawel castle in Kraków in 1676 provides further examples. On Sunday 9 February, when the sejm was not sitting, ‘the wedding of [Rafał] Leszczyński, starosta of Wschów and the daughter [Anna Jabłonowska] of the voivode of Ruś [Stanisław Jabłonowski] took place at the royal palace hosted by Their Royal Highnesses. From which senators and other dignitaries only returned to their residences three hours after midnight’. ⁸⁶ Both the father of the bride and the groom were active in this sejm, Jabłonowski as a senator and Leszczyński as an envoy from the Środa sejmik. ⁸⁷ A historian would be hard pressed to decide whether his parliamentary activity or gaining a powerful father-in-law respected by the king was more important to the career of Rafał Leszczyński, future father of the Polish-Lithuanian king, Stanisław Leszczyński, and great-great-grandfather to Louis XVI of France. The sejm provided an opportunity for the royal couple to host important social events associated with the royal court, reflecting the realities of politics and political careers in a parliamentary monarchy. Although there is not the space to explore this further in this article, noble marriages were more broadly associated with the sejm. ⁸⁸ Caches of senatorial speeches, for example at the Raczyński Library in Poznań, thanking the king for various state offices, are peppered with speeches expressing gratitude for the arrangement of marriages. ⁸⁹

Even if the szlachta considered royal palaces buildings of public utility, access to social events hosted by the king during sejms could be limited to a chosen group of people. Thus, the king acted in two capacities during parliamentary sessions: as an integral estate of the sejm and as a royal patron issuing such invitations as a means of bestowing personal favours in a courtly manner. The parliamentary diary of Sobieski's coronation sejm in Kraków describes how on 18 February,

because yesterday the envoys could not achieve unanimity for today's session, it did not take place. However, after fulfilling their obligations to God, there was a convivial session for the senators and some envoys hosted by His Royal Highness, where there was even a comedy for the distraction of tempers in-between sessions. ⁹⁰

By calling it a ‘convivial session’, the diary uses the language of the sejm, linking parliamentary procedure with an entertainment hosted by the king for senators and a limited number of envoys from the lower chamber. Bearing in mind the consensual nature of the Polish-Lithuanian parliamentary system, the use of the word ‘convivial’ is also interesting. In this context, creating a convivial atmosphere for parliamentary debates was a tool to achieve political goals. It is worth noting that this ‘convivial session’ followed a failure by the envoys to agree and conclude their session on the previous day – a ‘distraction of tempers’ might have been a means to a political end. Nevertheless, this was also an opportunity to catch the king's eye and gain favour which could eventually lead to an office, or perhaps to an advantageous marriage, and thus to social and political advancement. Indeed, the very fact of an invitation was an indication that an envoy had caught the King's eye, whether directly or through the recommendation of another. This event took place in the Sejm (though in a room Fredro would call the court), but bears characteristics of court entertainments, particularly in selective attendance and the possibility for currying royal favour.

This parliamentary diary refers to the Wawel palace in Kraków, where the performance was more than likely to have been staged in the Senate chamber as the largest room in the palace. However, from the time of Władysław IV Vasa (1632), theatre performances were commonplace during sejms held at the royal castle in Warsaw. From at least 1637, there was a dedicated theatre room, which took over much of the second floor of the south wing of the castle. Interestingly, it was accessed not through the so-called ‘Great Staircase’, but via a much smaller staircase leading up from the ‘senators’ vestibule’ located directly outside of the Senate chamber. Lileyko argues that this was ‘for convenience of the parliamentary audiences’. ⁹¹ One such theatrical performance was put on at the extraordinary sejm of 1662. Jan Andrzej Morsztyn's translation of Pierre Corneille's Le Cid was shown on Sunday 26 February. Ochmann-Staniszewska argues that this pro-monarchical play was meant to help sway the parliamentarians towards a vivente rege election. ⁹² The king, the queen with her ladies, senators, and envoys were in attendance. Clearly, the king was able to use court-style entertainments performed either in parliamentary chambers or in spaces architecturally closely integrated with them to influence parliamentary debate, which gave him an advantage in relation to the other parliamentary estates. This meant that parliamentary sessions and court-style entertainments were so entangled that it can be hard for a historian to distinguish between them.

In some ways, a more serious problem for political thinkers like Fredro than the exposure of the szlachta to the seductions of the court, was the direct access courtiers and people associated with the royal court had to parliamentary spaces. One example was the balcony located in the senate chamber from at least 1635. Its main purpose was for the queen to be able to watch the debates in the senate, but it was used by other courtiers. In 1654, Pierre Des Noyers, secretary of Queen Marie Louise Gonzaga (consort of Jan Kazimierz) led some Visitation Sisters to the balcony where ‘having drawn back the curtains a little bit, we were able to see a gathering of the most powerful people in the Commonwealth’. ⁹³ The Catholic order was brought to Warsaw from France by the queen in 1649. Jan Chryzostom Pasek, a self-confessed nobleman of modest means, who enjoyed a parliamentary and military career, also commented on how the queen ‘undermined her health by these stressful activities, sitting all day and night behind a screen in the Senate chamber to see and hear how decisions were made by the people who rented their mouths to promoting various factions’. ⁹⁴

It is not without reason that one of Fredro's concerns, expressed in his Scriptorum published in 1660, was the access of courtiers to the sitting sejm. He writes,

the danger is this: around a small number of people entitled to parliamentary discussion swirls a large crowd of friends and strangers, curious, critical, chatty, mean, treacherous. Venomous words are spread by sycophants and parasites, helpful confidants of court officers, slaves of the court, ready to whisper information into various ears … either to provoke jealousy or gain favour. ⁹⁵

In contrast to England, the Polish-Lithuanian parliamentary discussions were public, meaning that, except in some very specific circumstances, the public had access to parliamentary chambers and could listen in on debates. This passage certainly gives us a flavour of the vibrant atmosphere created by a mix of people chasing their political (parliamentary and courtly) interests at the royal palace during sejms. However, the issue with courtiers being able to access and potentially influence parliamentary discussions both directly and indirectly was that this could make parliamentarians change their behaviour in the hopes of being noticed and perhaps mentioned to the king. Catching the king's eye was the main way to securing state offices and leases on crown lands. These were the ultimate way to advance politically and socially all the way up to one of the ministerial, ecclesiastical, or top territorial government offices which came with a seat in the senate.

Fredro expressed his worries about parliamentarians seeking opportunities to expand their careers in the letter cited at the beginning of this article:

[The szlachta] used to think more of horses and weapons than about vying for the king's favour. So, they were passionate about military simplicity and only capable of bringing a country squire's simplicity to the camp and only able to deliberate about freedom not private ambitions. This is why our greatest privileges are those of freedom, not those given from the palace. Senators used to counsel according to virtue, law, and their zeal, or motivated by their fear of backlash from the szlachta … Now we see the opposite, because parliamentary orators have multiplied with sejms becoming more frequent, they talk in a new way, they diffuse the odour of stinging nettles, they speak so suavely and rarely truthfully, rarely speak of knightly deeds … the szlachta became politicians who think more of how to fish for an office than … how to defeat the Tatars. ⁹⁶

Fredro's solution to the problem would be to ‘secure the Chamber of Envoys in some more secluded place’. ⁹⁷ He thought that the relationality of royal court and the sejm, partly caused by their close spatial relationship, had the potential to undermine the Polish-Lithuanian parliamentary system. The reason was that the parliamentarians, conscious of being observed either by the king himself or other important members of the royal court, would cease to debate and vote on matters as landholders and soldiers and instead in a way more suited to professional politicians. Most importantly for this article, Fredro's statements indicate the close spatial relationship was between the royal court and the sejm had a significant impact on the governance of Poland-Lithuania.

Fredro's fears that the sejm's proximity to court made it a forum for private ambition and the site of favour politics were far from unsubstantiated. Royal favour was not only to be sought but also shown off during sejms. One example from the extraordinary sejm of 1662 was described by Jan Chryzostom Pasek. At the time Poland-Lithuania was seeking diplomatic solutions to the long Polish-Lithuanian-Muscovite war which started in 1654 and ended with the Treaty of Andruszów in 1667. ⁹⁸ He arrived in Warsaw with news from Lithuania and brought with him a Muscovite embassy which included Ofanazy Iwanowicz Nestorow, the Grand Imperial Stolnik (Pantler), his son Michajło, and Iwan Polikarpowicz (the secretary for the embassy). ⁹⁹

Pasek writes that the king ‘recognised me straight away and kindly received me …. The king was about to leave for a [parliamentary] session when I entered. There were many senators and envoys in the room, some my acquaintances and some not’. An exchange followed, during which the king laughed and embraced Pasek's head saying to the senators ‘I have to turn back for a bit, but you may sit down in the meantime’. ¹⁰⁰ Then he led Pasek to a bedroom where they talked for about an hour about the Muscovite embassy before the king returned to the senate chamber. The king also ‘called the Crown chamberlain [Teodor Denhoff] and told him “Consult with Szeling [a courtier] about where to put the Muscovites”’. Then, Pasek narrates, ‘having left the room, I was besieged by my envoys from Rawka and Łęczyca. They asked “How did you come to be in such confidence with the king? What is it? How come?” I told them. Then [they said] many congratulations’. He continues

I left the Senate chamber, went to see Szeling and dined with him; in the meantime, the embassy reached Praga, ¹⁰¹ but there were no vacancies. I came into the Senate chamber again and stood where the king could see me. “What is it?” he asked. I told him that the embassy could not get rooms. Then he sent Scipio [Andrzej Scipio del Campo, chorąży wendeński, a military officer] with me to clear some rooms. ¹⁰²

The ambassadors were received by the king and senate on 19 March and the final meeting took place on 24 March; nothing was achieved in the negotiations. Pasek enjoyed himself very much at the sejm, ‘often having fun with the courtiers [Pl. dworscy], as one does in Warsaw’. ¹⁰³ The entertainment included a drunken brawl with a courtier, Ivan Mazepa, within the close vicinity of the king, who felt so invigorated that he punched the attendant who came to inform him of the altercation for ‘telling tales’. ¹⁰⁴

The diary vividly represents the blend of activities which took place during sejms and in parliamentary spaces. Most importantly for us, Pasek was able to access both the king's apartments (in the first instance) and then the senate chamber during debates to attract the king's attention, interrupting the parliamentary discussion. Secondly, it tells us about the potentially important issue of various people: parliamentarians, courtiers, and others milling about waiting for sessions to begin or between daily sejm sessions as chances for encounters. Thirdly, Pasek being ‘besieged’ immediately after exiting the bedchamber by envoys from the lower chamber suggests that news had spread that the king was showing great favour to someone upstairs and parliamentarians, as excited by the rumour as they were keen to catch the king's eye, rushed to see what was happening.

IV

Fredro knew what he was talking about. His own rise from a middling szlachta family from the Ruthenian voivodeship to a senatorial chair in 1654 as castellan of Lwów was predicated on a mix of parliamentary and courtly positions as envoy from 1646 and royal secretary from 1650. ¹⁰⁵ This article has shown how Fredro's fear that szlachta more generally would be tempted by the world of central state politics is explicable in terms of space. The problem, which Fredo grasped, was less the frequency of parliamentary gatherings and more the lack of firm boundaries between the royal court and the sejm. At the time, this spatial ambiguity was perceived as corrosive of the Polish-Lithuanian parliamentary system because it was thought to lead ordinary szlachta to vote and speak with the view of securing the king's favour. Whereas Fredro saw the absence of clear spatial boundaries between the court and the sejm as a risk to the integrity of the individual noble, the fluidity of these boundaries might be better understood as a function of a political system with strong parliamentary and monarchical elements.

The Polish-Lithuanian monarchy was parliamentary, but this article has shown that there were also ways in which its sejm was monarchical. The king was to an extent able to manage parliamentary processes through the use of space and tempt the szlachta to strive for his favour. At the same time, the blurring of boundaries was a function of a republican ethos in which the szlachta believed royal palaces to be state buildings for the use of the sejm. These buildings were not well adapted to large gatherings and therefore improvised spatial arrangements were often at play. There were instances when the activities we would normally associate with political assembly took place in the heart of the royal apartments, normally the preserve of the royal court. The queen's apartments, the king's apartments, the Marble Hall decorated with dynastic propaganda, all could be used for senate council meetings or to manage situations which required privacy such as conflicts between influential senators. They could also be used for discussion of sensitive issues, like the Commonwealth's religious politics or the consequences of foreign war or diplomacy, or as space for meetings of parliamentary commissions dealing with specific issues, such as the pacta conventa.

Fredro might have decried the corruption of the sejm, but the sociability enabled by these settings also helped get parliamentary business done. Small group conversations or court-type entertainments provided by the king during sejms, such as theatre performances and elite weddings, were opportunities to build conviviality and consensus. These functions were crucial to a parliamentary system that required unanimous consent, often built on painstaking effort and careful management of conflicts between key political players. With the exception of the election sejms, the king managed these conflicts, enabling agreement to be reached in the debating chamber. The king's apartments were vital to this process and very much a part of the king-in-sejm phenomenon. During sejms, the king in his apartments was as important as the king in the Senate chamber.