THE NOBLEMAN'S PARADISE 183Yet if you should ask a Polander what he is he would tell you he is a gentleman of
Poland; and so much so they value themselves upon the name, that they think they are
abov being tyed to the rules of honour which are the onely constituting laws of gentle-
men. Nay they support themselves in doing the foulest and blackest things ... and expect
allowance even from Heaven itself on account of their birth and quallity: an eminent
instance of which we have in an infamous wretch, a Captain Vratz, a Polander, who in
cold blood assassinated an English gentlemen, Thomas Thynne Esqre, shooting him into
the body in his coach with a musqueteer loaded with 7 bullets; and who, the day before
he was to be hanged for it, when he was spoken with by the minister to prepare himself
for death, answered that he did not doubt but God would have some respect to him as a
gentleman.^27
To be fair, Defoe added that these 'ill quallityes' were matched by virtues, espe-
cially in the field of education. He was specially impressed by the currency of
Latin culture in Poland. 'A man who can speak Latin', he reported, 'may travel
from one end of Poland to another as familiarly as if he was born in the coun-
try. Bless us! What would a gentleman do that was to travel through England
and could speak nothing but Latin ... I must lament his condition.'
Once the szlachta had become a closed, hereditary estate, all means of access
to it were jealously guarded. Although during the Republic the King retained the
prerogative of ennoblement, the Sejm insisted on ever closer controls. In 1578,
it ruled that the King could not create knighthoods except when the Sejm was in
session, or when prowess was rewarded on the battlefield. In 1601, it ruled that
no ennoblement was valid without the Sejm's ratification, or, in the case of a
peasant, without the consent of his lord. In 1641, it extended its competence to
grants of nobility to foreigners, in the so-called 'indygenat', and it revived the
semi-noble category of 'scartahellus', whose family could only obtain full polit-
ical rights in the third generation. In 1775 the possession of land was made a
prior condition for all new entrants to the noble estate.
The incidence of ennoblement, in consequence, was not very great. The num-
ber of royal creations recorded between 1569 and 1696 did not exceed two
thousand - which is far less than the number of families which adopted noble
status by illegal means. Only in the eighteenth century, when Saxon clients,
magnatial servants, and Jewish converts were received into the nobility en
masse, was the Nobility legally enlarged on a substantial scale.
Grants of indygenat or 'naturalization' were equally limited. The candidates
were required to submit proof of their service to the Republic, together with a
certificate of nobility issued by a foreign court, also to swear an oath of alle-
giance, and to buy land. Most of them were connected in some way with the
Court - as the King's officers, doctors, apothecaries, tutors, architects, secre-
taries, interpreters, cooks, bastards, or even, in the case of Joachim Pastorius
von Hirtenberg, as the King's historian. Under the Jagiellons they were mainly
Italian; under Stefan Batory, they included a number of Magyars and
Transylvanians; under the Vasas, Swedes and Livonians; under Augustus II and
III a wave of Saxons; and under Stanislaw-August, a flood of Russians. There