370 SOBIESKI
Edward married well. His son, also Charles Edward Stuart (1824-81), and his
grandson, Alfred Edward Charles von Platt, became high-ranking officers in the
Royal-Imperial cavalry. His granddaughter, Clementina Sobieska von Platt died
as a Passionist nun at a convent in Bolton, Lancashire, in 1894.^12 It was a far cry
from the boy-child born in a Tartar raid at Olesko in Red Ruthenia in 1629.
In later days, the memory of Sobieski's victories gradually effaced all recollec-
tion of his political failures. In the dark decades of defeat and national humilia-
tion of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, all Poles have looked with pride
to a Polish King whose deeds reverberated to their credit throughout Europe.
Anyone who has seen the glittering Turkish trophies from Vienna still exhibited
in Cracow is bound to reflect with wonderment at the man who dared to hum-
ble an enemy possessed of such wealth and power. As a result, historical judge-
ments have been lenient. It is true that Sobieski did not possess much freedom
of manoeuvre. He was constrained by the egoism of the magnates, whose stran-
glehold on political life could not have been easily released, and by the obstinacy
of the Porte, which in this one period insisted on regarding the Republic as its
enemy. But that is merely to enunciate the central political dilemma of
Sobieski's career. It does not excuse seventeen years of ruinous warfare which
banished all chance of repairing the Republic's structural weaknesses. Sobieski
entered the Holy League from his own free will. He must be held responsible for
the consequences. Almost two hundred years after Sobieski's birth, in 1828,
Tsar Nicholas I of Russia came to Warsaw for his coronation as King of Poland,
and was taken to see Sobieski's statue in Lazienki Park. Thinking of his own
costly Turkish wars, he looked up at Sobieski and said, There is the other fool
who wasted his time fighting the Turks.'^13 The Tsar of Russia was in a position
to know. He was one of the few beneficiaries.