Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/207

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All over Europe, in truth, the impression produced was very deep. From the very outset of the war, the Protestant writers, always ready to denounce Spanish intrigue, had asserted that Philip II., who, as a Catholic monarch and as King of England, had a double interest in taking advantage of the quarrel, would strike at Protestantism in Livonia, and gain a footing on the Baltic seaboard. The Pope, no doubt, was playing this game with him. The Emperor was called on to act. But Ferdinand I. was Emperor now—a bureaucratic Sovereign, eager to apply quietism to politics. He called for reports, opened a correspondence with Ivan, exchanged views with the Kings of Denmark, Sweden, and Poland, and did not budge an inch.

Ivan, indeed, took pains to humour this high authority. The relations between the House of Hapsburg and the Moscow Government, which had begun in the fifteenth century, could only be kept up, on the Russian side, by dint of a constant and deliberate sacrifice of the susceptibilities and pretensions it reserved for its other neighbours. This time, therefore, with many an evasion and recantation, the Tsar went so far as to impute the misfortunes of Livonia to her having forsaken the Catholic faith!

The seaboard towns and the German Electoral Princes offered a better hope, for all of them expressed a desire to come to their Livonian brothers' assistance, and recognised the urgency of the necessity. Yet at the Augsburg Reichstag in 1559, this fine zeal ended in a vote of 100,000 florins yaree! The Deputationstag of Spire took the matter more seriously, declared the whole of Germany threatened and Mecklenburg in imminent peril; but here, too, the result was trivial—another subsidy of 400,000 florins, an interdict on Russian trade, and some talk of a solemn embassy to Moscow. The prohibition, simultaneously imposed, of any intercourse between Livonia and Poland, or other neighbouring Powers, betrayed the real anxieties of the gathering, and none of its decisions were carried into effect. As Droysen puts it, all the Germany of those days knew how to do was queruliren, protestiren, dupliciren, und tripliciren. Ferdinand did something on November 26, 1561, by publishing the celebrated manifesto which forbade the navigation of the Narova. This amounted to forbidding the introduction of Western merchandise, and especially of war material, into Russia. But England had already discovered other roads, and was using them, in spite of the denials which fell from the lips of the astute Elizabeth, who had just (1558) succeeded her sister Mary Tudor. And,