His last campaign, in 1691.Next year the king took the field for the last time, nominally to chastise the Tartars for an invasion in the winter, but really perhaps to escape the miseries of his court. He took with him for the first time his son Alexander, and this so exasperated Prince James that he threatened to leave the country. The king told him that if he went he would take with him a father’s curse, and he was persuaded to repent and ask pardon for his violence. His father said openly that in the ensuing campaign he should more easily get the better of the enemy than of his own sons. He gained a victory at Pererita (August 6), and took a few places in Moldavia, and then returned to his kingdom never to leave it more.
His love of retirement.He spent his last years in retirement, and seldom appeared in public except in the Diet. His palace of Willanow was his favourite residence, and from thence in the summer he would roam from castle to castle, sometimes pitching his tent, like his nomad forefathers, wherever a picturesque spot or a noble landscape attracted his fancy. The queen would have preferred the gaieties of Warsaw; but she followed him into his solitude, and took care that balls, operas, and the other amusements of a court should be going on around him.
His literary tastes.His chief recreation now, as in his most difficult campaigns, was the study of the sciences. He complains to the queen, after the battle of Vienna, that with all his love of reading he has not had a book in his hand for more than three weeks.[132] When he read he always had a pencil in his hand, and his marginal notes displayed uncommon powers of mind. Dr. South—no mean judge—pronounces him to be “very opulently stored with all polite and scholastical learning.” He was fond of writing Polish poetry, and when his daughter Theresa married the Elector of Bavaria he presented her with a copy of verses on the event.[133] Like many others of the Slav race, he was an accomplished linguist. He could converse with ease in six languages, including Latin,[134] and learnt Spanish when he was past fifty. His delight was to assemble around him cultivated men like Father Vota, the French Ambassador Cardinal Polignac, and his physicians, Connor and Jonas, and to “set them very artfully by the ears”[135] on some question of philosophy or natural science.[136] Nor was theology forgotten. He used to give audiences to the schismatic bishops, and listen patiently to their arguments for their respective creeds.
Patron of learning.Such a prince was of course an ardent patron of learning. During his reign more books issued from the Polish press than in the two centuries preceding; and his liberal views led him to reprimand the Catholic clergy for not admitting into their schools the philosophy of Descartes. Spite of the nobles.The great nobles, many of them wholly unlettered, could not sympathise with these literary tastes, and they showed their spite towards the king in various ways. On one occasion, when illness kept him away from the Diet, the Sapiehas demanded that he should be summoned to attend; and when their motion was lost, they broke up the assembly with the veto. A Jew named Bethsal, who collected his revenues, was condemned to death by the Diet on an unproved charge of sacrilege,[137] and John could hardly prevail to save his life. Charge of covetousness unproved.Many imputed his love of retirement to covetousness, and asserted that he laid up £100,000 a year for the benefit of his sons.[138] The accusation has been often repeated, although his life abounds in instances of his draining his private[139] coffers to serve a pressing public need.
The disorders of the kingdom grew more frightful as John became less able to restrain them. Street brawls between political parties had always been of common occurrence, but the rioters now began to use firearms,[140] and the king had to publish an edict prohibiting the shedding of blood on pain of death. He often sent for the chief nobles, and adjured them by the love of their country to aid him in restoring order.[141] In 1695 the Tartars, tempted by Polish anarchy and by a report of the king’s death, invaded Russia, and besieged Leopol; but they disappeared as quickly as they had come on the approach of Sobieski.
His feeble health.Reports of his death were common in Europe, partly from his feeble health and partly from the interest which many sovereigns felt in the event.[142] He had long been afflicted with dropsy; and a wound in his head, which he had received long before in the Cossack war, now caused serious alarm.
Schemes of the queen.The queen was most anxious that he should make his will, and she deputed her Chancellor, Bishop Zaluski, to make the proposal. The king received it with disfavour. “I am surprised,” he said, “that a man of your sense and worth should thus waste your time. Can you expect anything good of the times in which we live? Look at the inundation of vice, the contagion of folly; and should we believe in the execution of our last wishes? In life we command and are not obeyed. Would it be otherwise in death?” Soon after the queen entered, and read in the face of the bishop the failure of her plan. Zaluski tells us that the next day the king complained bitterly to him of the bodily sufferings brought on by a dose of mercury which she had given him. His frame was shaken by convulsive sobs, and he exclaimed wildly, “Will there be no one to avenge my death?” This was probably only the raving of a distempered brain; but the queen has never been exempt from suspicion, and her conduct after his death only served to confirm it.
His illness,On the 17th of June, 1696, his seventy-second birthday,[143] he lay at Willanow in a state of dreadful weakness. He asked the news from Warsaw, and was told that multitudes were flocking to the churches to pray for his recovery. The intelligence affected him deeply, and he passed the day in cheerful conversation; but towards evening he was seized with an attack of apoplexy.[144] The chief officers hastened to his chamber, and when he awoke to a short interval of consciousness he showed how eager he was to depart by pronouncing the words “Stava bene.” And death.Soon afterwards, about sunset, he breathed his last, and his death, like his birth, was followed by a sudden and frightful storm.
Sorrow of the nation.Only a few of the nobles welcomed his decease; the mass of the nation remembered his glory, and sincerely mourned his loss. The Chancellor Zaluski thus expresses the general sorrow: “With this Atlas has fallen, in my eyes at least (may I prove a false prophet!), the republic itself. We seem not so much to have lost him as to have descended with him into the tomb. At least I have but too much cause to fear that it is all over with our power. At this news the grief is universal. In the streets men accost each other with tears, and those who do not weep are yet terrified at the fate which is in store for us. Terror apart, what grief was ever more natural? He is, perhaps, the first king in whose reign not one drop of blood has been shed in reparation of his own wrongs. He had but one single fault—he was not immortal.”
Quarrels of his family.Amidst such heartfelt sorrow the behaviour of his family alienated from them all public sympathy. Prince James at first refused to admit the queen with the royal corpse to the castle of Warsaw, and when at length he yielded, he hurried away to Zolkiew to seize his father’s treasures. The queen hastened after him to put in her claim, but he turned the cannon of that fortress against her. Burning with indignation, she exerted all her influence before she left the country[145] to destroy his chances of the crown. Such was the magic of his father’s name that at first there was a large party in his favour; but the family quarrels weakened and dispersed it. The Austrian party elected Augustus of Saxony; and the French party thought it necessary to protest by seizing the remains of the late king. The Elector, resolved not to be out-manœuvred, erected a cenotaph to the memory of John III.; and it was not till the next reign, thirty-six years later, that his body received interment.[146]