Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/213

 Rh wider area. The negotiations, perpetually renewed, had ended by constituting a sort of protocol, in virtue of which every fresh parley began with the claim, on one side, not to Smolensk only, but also to Novgorod and Pskov, as the ancient patrimony of the Lithuanian Princes, and, on the other, with a demand for the cession of those three towns, and also of Kiev and all the Russian territories then under Polish rule, after which the parties separated, the envoys, Russian and Polish, declared the negotiations broken off, and took their leave, departing, in some cases, without further ceremony, but always allowed themselves to be brought back, and always, failing some final understanding, accepted a provisional arrangement of some kind. The question of the patrimonies was left to stand over; Poland would not recognise the Tsar's new title, and the Tsar, by way of reprisal, refused to give Sigismund-Augustus the title of King, so the difficulty was eluded by drawing up the terms agreed on in duplicate—one Russian copy and the other Polish—and signing a truce.

Into relations already most difficult Livonia had introduced a fresh subject of dispute, and one which seemed to admit of no compromise whatever. Yet in 1560, at the very moment when the treaty imposed on Kettler had imparted a decisive form to the King of Poland's intervention, Ivan took upon himself to despatch an important Ambassador, bearing very conciliatory proposals, to Warsaw. An event had occurred, the consequences of which have been exaggerated, but the influence of which on the Sovereign's mind, on the development of his character, and, to a certain extent, on the trend of his policy,cannot be denied. The Tsar had just lost his wife, that Anastasia whose beneficent influence as his guardian angel forms part and parcel of a legend I am sincerely sorry to weaken. Ivan loved the mother of his elder children dearly, and the delights of home life, which she alone seems to have taught him to enjoy, probably did something to soften his fierce and violent instincts, just as the grief the loss of his companion caused him may have produced a contrary effect. More than this cannot be asserted with any certainty. And neither his love nor his sorrow, indeed, can have been so very deep, for the monarch's first care, on the morrow of the disaster, was to seek another bride.

Sigismund had two unmarried sisters, and the chief object of the mission confided to Ivan's Ambassador, Vokolnitchyï Feodor Ivanovitch Soukine, was to obtain the hand of one of these ladies for his master. Somewhat ungraciously, and after much delay, the King allowed the Ambassador a sight of the two Princesses at church. Whether by accident or on purpose, the younger of the two, Catherine, turned round, and