Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/156

 132 not meet till at least two years after the disaster of 1547. At that moment, too, Alexis Adachev appears upon the scene, and joins hands with Sylvester. Yet during the whole course of this assembly, it is Macarius who plays the leading part. Sylvester hardly appears at all, and it is only thanks to a false and subsequent interpretation of the information at disposal that a part, which closer observation convinces us neither was capable of playing, has been ascribed to the two comrades. Round Adachev particularly a legend has grown up, so wide and full that in most historians' eyes the Terrible himself has been almost eclipsed by his own servant. Deceived by the self-interested assertions of a political ally—I refer to Kourbski—and by the Sovereign's own, they have, as it were, put the henchman in his master's place; they have made him think and act instead of his lord, and, taking him in conjunction with Sylvester, they have imagined a bicephalous government, which they suppose to have endowed Russia, for the space of ten years, with every imaginable kind of prosperity.

I shall endeavour, further on, to set forth the elements of a very different state of, matters, and give men and things their proper values. Kourbski's testimony, like that of the monarch himself, was borne after the two favourites had fallen. At that moment Kourbski, himself a voluntary exile, was endeavouring to avenge his own disappointed ambition by means of more or less ingenious inventions, and Ivan was always a proficient in that sort of fiction which enabled him to divest himself of his personal responsibility by casting it on his enemies. During the struggle into which the Sovereign's reforming policy was soon to draw him, and in which he was doomed to strive till the close of his long and stormy career, it would be difficult indeed to discover the party at the head of which the pope and his comrade put themselves, or which they even joined. Parvenus, both of them, they have been taken to represent the new blood brought in by Ivan to oppose the old boïar oligarchy. But to this oligarchy Kourbski belonged heart and soul, and he was the friend and accomplice of Sylvester and Adachev. Other contradictions, just as inexplicable, can only be avoided by taking the two partners for what they were—mere dummies. Ivan used them against the boïars, but they preferred to use the boïars, and even to make common cause with those they used. Then Ivan crushed them, and called other utility actors to his aid. Let us come to facts.