On 18 May 2016, Professor Richard BUTTERWICK-PAWLIKOWSKI, Chairholder of the European Civilization Chair at the Natolin (Warsaw) campus of the College of Europe, participated in a panel discussion of Professor Robert FROST’s Oxford History of Poland-Lithuania, vol. 1, The Making of the Union, 1385-1569 (Oxford University Press, 2015).
The event was organized by the Lithuanian Embassy in London, held at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at University College London, and hosted by the Director of the School, Professor Jan KUBIK. Professor FROST reminded the packed audience, led by the Lithuanian Ambassador to the UK, Mrs Asta SKAISGIRYTE-LIAUSKIENE, that the Anglo-Scottish union of 1603 has only recently and precariously outlived the Polish-Lithuanian union inaugurated voluntarily in 1385 and destroyed by external force in 1795. Professor BUTTERWICK-PAWLIKOWSKI summed up the practical values of the union in one word – subsidiarity – which he defined as the principle that decisions should be made at the lowest possible level and at the highest necessary level (exactly contrary to the vested interest of most politicians and administrators). The other participants were Professor John ROBERTSON of the University of Cambridge, who commended the book for its examination of the values and concepts underpinning political unions, and Dr Darius BARONAS of the Lithuanian Institute of History in Vilnius, who underlined that Professor FROST had shown that almost from the start, the union was much stronger and suppler than previously thought. The event was chaired by Dr Giedrė MICKUNAITE of Oxford University.
At the Wallace Collection on 20 May 2016, the Royal Łazienki Museum in Warsaw presented the English edition of the catalogue of the gallery of pictures belonging to Poland’s last monarch. The collection of King Stanisław August reached over 2500, but most were dispersed following the third partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth by Russia, Prussia and Austria in 1795. Nevertheless, among the pictures once again housed at Łazienki and the Royal Castle are many works of note. The Director of the Wallace Collection, Dr Christoph VOGTHERR, castigated those who assume eighteenth-century European culture revolved around Paris and London and ignore the riches to be found further east. Before the co-author of the catalogue, Mrs Dorota JUSZCZAK, explained the public purposes and wide scope of Stanisław August’s picture collecting, Professor BUTTERWICK-PAWLIKOWSKI gave an illustrated talk on "An Enlightened Anglophile on the Polish Throne: Stanisław August Poniatowski (1764-1795)". He made the case that Stanisław August’s lifelong, but not uncritical anglophilia was crucial to the King’s tireless efforts to achieve political and cultural renewal in Poland.