Regency Council is appointed

On 15 October 1917, the hundredth anniversary of the death of Tadeusz Kościuszko, a telegram from Emperor Wilhelm II arrived in Warsaw. In it the emperor approved the three candidates for the Regency Council whom the Transitional Commission (PL) had named almost a month earlier: the Archbishop of Warsaw Aleksander Kakowski, Prince Zdzisław Lubomirski and the landowner Józef Ostrowski. According to the memoirs of the landowner and politician Stanisław Dzierzbicki, the telegram instructed the Governor-General of Warsaw, Hans Hartwig von Beseler, to put the regency into effect together with the Austro-Hungarian Governor-General in Lublin, Stanisław Szeptycki. In Polish matters Berlin and Vienna acted jointly, which is why historians take 15 October as the day on which both powers agreed to the composition of the Council. On the same day the Transitional Commission announced the names of the regents.

Some accounts, especially foreign-language ones, write that on 15 October the Council was “installed in office”. This is inaccurate. On that day the regents were approved and appointed. They had not yet taken office, and the patent of 12 September was to come into force only once the Council had been established. The Polish historian of the Regency Council, Zdzisław Julian Winnicki, points out that no formal monarchical acts approving the regents have survived in Polish archives. The emperors’ part was probably limited to their governments’ consent to the names and to the ceremony, which the Poles themselves had already prepared.

A month of waiting

The Transitional Commission chose the candidates unanimously on 18 September, when Kakowski and Lubomirski finally agreed, Count Adam Tarnowski declined, and Ostrowski accepted the offer. The two governments’ commissioners to the Commission promised to send the resolution to Berlin and Vienna “without delay”. The consent arrived after four weeks. Berlin was suspicious of anyone who might strengthen Austrian influence in Warsaw, and according to Polish historians the very candidacy of Tarnowski, an Austro-Hungarian diplomat, had already delayed the issuing of the patent itself.

The future regents also set conditions. On 8 September Kakowski wrote to Wacław Niemojowski (PL) that if the powers of the Council and the government turned out to be “not a real government but a fiction of a government”, he would withdraw his candidacy out of love for his country. Lubomirski’s wife noted in her diary that the prince would join the Council only if the Germans proclaimed a political amnesty and Beseler ordered the authorities to treat the population kindly. A further, though not unconditional, demand was the return of the Legions and the building of a Polish army.

The three regents

At the head of the list stood the 55-year-old Aleksander Kakowski, born in Dębiny near Przasnysz into a prosperous farming family of minor gentry origin. He studied canon law in Rome, hiding from the Russian authorities under an assumed name. For 12 years he was rector of the Warsaw seminary. From 1913 he was Archbishop of Warsaw. He received the Act of 5 November with reserve, and politically he was close to the passivists of the Inter-Party Political Circle (PL). He joined the Council at the urging of the bishops, among them the Bishop of Płock, Antoni Julian Nowowiejski. His presence recalled the old Polish tradition of the primate as interrex, that is, the king’s stand-in during an interregnum.

Zdzisław Lubomirski, born in 1865, was born in Nizhny Novgorod into a family exiled after the January Uprising. Before the war he headed the Warsaw Charitable Society. From August 1914 he led the Warsaw Citizens’ Committee, and on 4 August 1915 the retreating Russians handed the administration of the city over to him. From 1916 he was president of Warsaw and enjoyed great authority throughout the country. Beseler wrote of him to the emperor that the prince was as far from full loyalty to Germany as from sincere support for cooperation with the Central Powers, but that “the force of facts” would eventually steer him onto the path of activism. According to Winnicki, Lubomirski joined the Council reluctantly and doubted a German victory. What tipped the balance were his fears about what was happening in Russia and the conviction that a Polish state had to be built.

The third regent was a compromise choice. His candidacy was put forward by Lubomirski at a confidential meeting with former members of the Provisional Council of State on 2 September. The 67-year-old Józef Ostrowski, owner of a model estate at Maluszyn, had studied in Warsaw and Berlin, and agriculture in Halle and Hohenheim. In 1905 he co-founded the conservative Party of Real Politics (PL), and in 1906–1910 he sat in the Russian State Council, where he chaired the group of members from the Kingdom. The passivists, who had earlier rejected Niemojowski and pushed their own candidates, agreed to Ostrowski on 11 September. None of the three regents belonged to the Provisional Council of State and none came from the activist camp. They were, however, nominated by the activists’ institutions and accepted both by the occupiers and by the main parties of the Kingdom.

An evening at the Grand Theatre

That same day the imperial telegram was read out publicly by the chairman of the Transitional Commission, Józef Mikułowski-Pomorski. He did so in the auditorium of the Grand Theatre before the performance began. Lubomirski and Ostrowski were in the audience, and the public greeted them with an ovation. According to Dzierzbicki, after the performance scouts and legionaries unharnessed the horses from the two regents’ cab and pulled it themselves.

On the same day the Supreme National Committee met in Kraków. Since 1914 it had been the political base of the Legions and the representative of the Galician supporters of the Austro-Polish solution. In view of the establishment of a supreme authority in the Kingdom, the Committee decided to dissolve itself. Its liquidation, however, lasted until 1920.

Before taking power

The appointment opened the way to a Polish authority that was formally to exercise supreme state power in the Kingdom. Its limits, however, were set by the patent: the occupiers kept control of legislation, foreign policy and the army, and Beseler remained commander-in-chief of the Polish Armed Force. In the West, where France had recognised in September the Polish National Committee in Paris, the regents were regarded as a creation of the occupiers. The formal assumption of office was prepared by a special committee appointed by the Transitional Commission and made up exclusively of Poles. It was set for 27 October: the regents were to take the oath in Warsaw Cathedral and take up residence in the Royal Castle.