THE CONGRESS KINGDOM 231made no pretence of his con tempt for constitutional government. An autocrat
alike by temperament and by conviction, the 'Nebuchadnezzar of the North'
regarded the Kingdom of Poland as a boil on the body of Holy Russia, ripe for
cauterization. He did not overlook the Decembrists' Polish connections, and
was specially incensed by reports of the supposedly seditious disposition of his
Polish army. Having flooded the Kingdom with the agents of his newly formed
Third Department, and finding an eager servant in a reinvigorated
Novosiltsov, he promptly set a Commission of Inquiry to review the problem
of the secret clubs. By so doing, he provoked the cause celebre of the decade.
In 1828, the ring-leaders of the Patriotic Society were brought before a tribunal
of the Sejm, and charged with the capital offence of treason. The prosecution
demanded a harsh verdict, and expected the Senators to comply. Surprisingly,
perhaps, they did not. With the one dissenting voice of General Krasinski, the
Senators ruled that membership of an unapproved society did not in itself con-
stitute a treasonable act. The chief defendant, Lt.-Col. Seweryn Krzyzanowski
(1787-1839), who was charged with conducting negotiations with the
Decembrists, was awarded only three years detention. The Grand Duke
Constantine exploded in anger. He interned the offending Senators of the tri-
bunal in the Royal Castle, and forbade publication of their verdict. After the
Tsar had intervened from St. Petersburg, the sentences were unceremoniously
quashed. The competence of the tribunal was retrospectively revoked.
Eventually, however, the verdict was confirmed by Nicholas I and publicly
read in March 1829. The prisoners suffered different fates - some had already
been taken to St. Petersburg in 1828, others were imprisoned in Warsaw. Some
had been released in June and July, others (including Krzyzanowski) were sent
to Siberia by order of the Tsar. When the Sejm reassembled in 1830 to review
its legislative programme, its members were duly chastened. The conservative
element was jubilant. In the prevailing atmosphere of fear and suspicion, there
was little chance that the constitutional process could be resumed in a system-
atic way.
For the time being, however, any thoughts of active sedition were confined to
the lower ranks of the officer corps. A series of timely military reforms, includ-
ing the suspension of public floggings and the improvement of pay structures,
had failed to stem the sense of injustice created by the repression of the associ-
ates of the Decembrists and by the constant harass-ments of the Third
Department. At the time of the Sejm tribunal, all Polish officers had been
required to renew their oath of allegiance to the Tsar. Their sharp sense of hon-
our was touched to the quick. Already in 1829, a group of cadets at the Infantry
School had discussed the possibility of assassinating the Tsar at his forthcoming
Polish coronation. In 1830, an instructor at the same School, Second-Lieutenant
Piotr Wysocki (1794-1857), began to conspire with a young Colonel, Jozef
Zaliwski (1797-1855). Together they hatched an armed rebellion. In the sum-
mer of that year, they met up with a band of civilian plotters who were devising
a scheme for killing the Grand Duke Constantine.^9