Ludwika Sosnowska, daughter of Józef Sosnowski – Lithuanian hetman, senator, voivode, was the first youthful love of Tadeusz Kościuszko, then twenty years old. The eighteen-year-old girl was loved by Kościuszko as a cadet of the Knights’ School, and the girl reciprocated his love.
Unfortunately, Ludwika, by the will of her father, was married to Prince Józef Aleksander Lubomirski.
What led to the interruption of this love?
First of all, they were separated by a great difference in wealth and social position. She was the daughter of an almost magnate, he was a one-village nobleman. Ludwika’s father, Józef Sylwester Sosnowski of the Nałęcz coat of arms, the then Lithuanian field writer and the Brzesko-Lithuanian starost, and later the Lithuanian hetman, rejected Tadeusz’s proposal with the words: “…doves are not for sparrows, and magnate daughters are not for petty nobles…”.
However, before Tadeusz’s proposal and the lasting idyll of love took place, Ludwika’s father made a deal with the reckless and insane prince Stanisław Lubomirski in the Lubomirski palace behind the Iron Gate. The talks lasted a long time, but eventually the two fathers reached an agreement and concluded a pact under which the youngest son of the Kiev voivode, Prince Józef Lubomirski, would marry Sosnowski’s daughter, Ludwika, who was in love with Tadeusz Kościuszko. The fathers did not ask for permission from either Ludwika or Józef. In the background of this arrangement, there was the property of the Lubomirskis lost in cards by the voivode to Sosnowski, and these were the goods of the Szarogrodzki and Zwinogrodczyzna estates in Volhynia as a dowry and the Romanów eldership in Ukraine as the duke’s contribution.
“So the couple in love (Ludwika and Tadeusz – author’s note) did not know that the tragic knot of 1775 had already been tied over their love and dreams.” – summarized this arrangement by Korzon in the Great Universal Illustrated Encyclopaedia.
Marriage proposal from Tadeusz
When the voivode called his daughter and told her his will to marry Prince Lubomirski Ludwik, she burst into tears and ran away. She informed her beloved of this tragic fact, who the next day, dressed in his captain’s uniform, asked Sosnowski for his daughter’s hand. The voivode flew into a rage and, according to some reports, insulted Tadeusz and allegedly threatened him with imprisonment.
Her father ordered Ludwika locked up in her chambers and forbade her to go out. The girl did not even want to hear about the prince and stubbornly claimed that she would not marry Lubomirski but Kościuszko. Tadeusz, on the other hand, went to Warsaw seeking the protection of Prince Adam Czartoryski and the king himself. They both knew about Kościuszko’s love, but we do not know whether his efforts had any effect and whether the king or the prince interceded for him with the hetman.
The end of love
Many accounts confirm that Tadeusz, with Ludwika’s consent, planned her kidnappings and secret weddings, but nothing like that happened. Although the girl later escaped to a convent, the wedding with Prince Lubomirski finally took place and they had three children, Henryk Ludwik and Fryderyk Wilhelm, and a daughter, Helena.
Author: Karol Kwiatkowski