278 ANARCHIA
danger not so much for the king as for the electors themselves, and recommended
that the king's successor should be elected vivente rege. His harshest comments
were reserved not for constitutional practice, but for the failings of Polish justice,
and for the Head-Money system in particular. At the end of the next century,
Pufendorf, in his Introduction to the History of the Main European Countries
(1686) bemoaned the interminable disputes between Sejm and king, and the
paralysis of the legislative machine, but, in the afterglow of Sobieski's victory at
Vienna, gave no indication that the Republic's internal failings might endanger
its international standing. Bernard O'Connor noted with regret that 'no one in
Poland is willing to be a subject'; and he underlined the harmful effects of
the Liberum Veto, and of the life-tenure of offices of state. With the insight of a
medical practitioner, he expressed astonishment that a body politic with such
obvious maladies should have survived so long. He explained the Republic's sur-
vival partly to the solidarity of a free people, who postpone their differences in
moments of supreme crisis, partly to the disunity of neighbouring states, and
partly to military factors. In O'Connor's view, a country which possessed no
modern fortresses could neither be defended by its citizens nor suppressed by its
invaders. Each of these writers formed their criticisms without malice, and stand
in sharp contrast to the unashamed polemicists such as Guillaume Barclay whose
Satyricon (1614) was composed for the amusement of the French court, or
Herman Conring, whose tract De iustitia armorum Suecorum in Polonos (On the
Justice of Swedish Arms against the Poles, 1655), was written to order for
Charles X. Jean Barclay, son of Guillaume, pronounced the Poles to be barbar-
ians—'a nation born in violence and licence, which they call Freedom, who
oblige their King at the point of the sword to uphold the laws of their forefathers,
and who, being possessed of self-awarded privileges, are able to injure each other
with impunity.' Conring, with a political end in view, went further. The
Republic, he wrote, was unloved by its inhabitants, was ruined by noble excess,
and was not worth saving.
The admirers of the Republic were first found among theorists of the Right of
Resistance. In France, both Catholics and Huguenots were apt to condemn the
Republic's reputation for religious toleration: but each, from their opposite
points of view, were led to appreciate the Republic's elaborate safeguards
against tyranny. Jean Boucher of Paris, whose tract De justa abdicatione (On
Rightful Abdication, 1589) expressed the views of the Catholic opposition to
Henry III, wrote a glowing account of the way that the tyrant had been driven
from Poland. Theodore Beza, Calvin's successor at Geneva, praised the institu-
tion of the Facta Conventa, Most sensational, however, were the views of the
anonymous Huguenot, whose famous Vindiciae contra tyrannos (1579), com-
posed under the pseudonym of 'Junius Brutus', is often taken to be the first clear
formulation in modern times of the concept of a political contract between
rulers and the ruled. According to him, the Polish Republic and the Holy Roman
Empire were the only two states of Europe where ancient virtue had withstood
the onslaught of tyrannical monarchs. In his description of his ideal of a consti-