Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/143

 Rh a comparatively superior education, Helen Glinski possessed charms which Vassili could not have found in any Muscovite. Her father, Vassili Lvovitch, had died when she was very young, and she had grown up under the guardianship of her uncle Michael, a former comrade-in-arms of Albert of Saxony and the Emperor Maximilian, a wandering knight, whose adventures had led him to Italy, where he had even become a Catholic. Thus did Western Europe find her way back into the Kremlin. According to Herberstein, Vassili went so far as to shave off his beard to please his new partner, and this in itself was almost a revolution.

This second marriage, called adulterous by the 'monks from beyond the Volga,' did not promise, however, to be more blessed by Heaven than the first. There was talk already of a son born to Salome in her convent. But at last the prayers of a more indulgent monk, Paphnucius Borovski—afterwards declared a worker of miracles and canonized, as a reward for this one—were granted. Helen brought the longed-for heir into the world. Three years later, on October 15, 1533, she bore a second son, George, and immediately afterwards she was left a widow. Ivan III. had altered the succession, according to which the throne, in former times, had passed to the dead Sovereign's brothers. The regency, at all events, should have been theirs. That Ivan left any other order seems uncertain. But Helen, the scion of a race of adventurers, energetic and ambitious, had a strong party behind her, and knew how to use it so as to grasp power, and keep it.

She made a twofold blunder by refusing to share it with her uncle, a gifted man, and giving the lion's share to her lover, Prince Telepniév-Obolenski, a mere muddler. Trouble soon began. Helen, having thrust her own uncle and one of Vassili's brothers, George, into prison, found herself in difficulties with another brother-in-law, Andrew, who had received Staritsa as his appanage, and avowed himself discontented with his share. She reached the brink of civil war, and only escaped it by laying an ambush into which the Prince fell. He departed, in his turn, into one of those Muscovite dungeons which so seldom yielded up their prey. Hunger and the weight of the chains with which he was loaded hastened his end, and his adherents, to the number of about thirty, garnished gibbets set at stated intervals along the road from Moscow to Novgorod. Novgorod had seemed inclined to send the vanquished man armed help.

Thus for several years Helen struggled on, forced, as well, to hold her own against enemies beyond the border, Tartars and Poles, who joined hands to take advantage of the weakness of her Government. In 1538, her foes at home had recourse to