Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/144

 120 poison, it is thought, and Ivan was orphaned. Then the power fell into the hands of the boïars, and oligarchy was soon expressed in anarchy.

Left to himself, Obolenski at once lost his footing in the tempest. Rivals whom the Regent had been able to hold in check now rushed upon an easy revenge. Above the ruins of a decimated party the Chouïski raised their heads. By their origin they stood very near the throne, and their pretensions aimed at something more than a mere temporary supremacy. They belonged, like Vassili and Ivan, to the line of Alexander Nevski, the elder branch of a family of which the reigning house was only a younger one, and the height to which their dreams of ambition soared may be conceived. Within a week they had got rid of the favourite, who disappeared into an oubliette, in which Ivan lost his natural guardian and even his foster-mother, Obolenski's sister, Agraféna, who shared her brother’s fate. But Vassili Vassilévitch Chouïski and his cousin Andrew, who came out of prison at this juncture, found themselves face to face with another apparition. The opening of the dungeons had brought a whole army of competitors into the lists, and among them Prince Ivan Biélski, who had no intention of giving way to any other person. He advanced the claims of his own ancestor, Guédymin, as against those of the descendants of Rurik. His father, Feodor, had married a Princess of Riazan, niece of Ivan III. His brother Simon, molested by Helen, had fled, and found in Poland, in the Crimea, and even at Constantinople, something better than a refuge—an alliance that enabled him to claim his hereditary possessions, Biélsk and Riazan, annexed to the Muscovite Empire.

Thus, in the struggle which, from 1538 to 1543, filled Moscow with violence and carnage, and from which Ivan's own person and the integrity of his inheritance found no protection save in the antagonism of the rival families and their eagerness to destroy each other, the whole existence of the work accomplished by the younger branch of the Rurikovitchy was threatened. But the child had to pass through cruel trials. In their triumph the Chouïski lost all moderation, sacked the Tsar's treasury, and made themselves absolute masters. Ivan Chouïski, who had become head of the family on the death of Vassili Vassilévitch, forgot all respect. 'In my presence,' wrote Ivan IV. at a later date 'he stretched out his booted feet on my father’s bed.' And he remembered, too, that the victor of the hour, who had been covered by a shabby pelisse, ended by eating