Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/218

 194 hostile camp. The agents it employed at Warsaw soon calmed the agitation. 'The King had the gout in his right arm and his left leg, and that was the greater part of his equipment.' The campaign, indeed, turned out a miserable failure. The royal army, reckoned beforehand at 200,000 Poles and 170,000 Lithuanians, did not bring a tenth part of these numbers into the field. Nevertheless the Russians, after an unsuccessful engagement with some of these troops at Runnafer, manifested a desire to treat. Ivan's home difficulties were heavy on him; the Opritchnina was beginning. In Poland, the union with Lithuania, which, though an accomplished fact, had still to be finally organized, the strained relations with the Prussian towns, and internecine quarrels, combined to make peace earnestly desired. But Ivan laid claim to Revel and Riga, and began an epistolary argument with the Lithuanian nobles, which was not calculated to prepare the ground for pacific agreement.

Kourbski, after fighting bravely and winning brilliant successes with the Tsar's armies in Livonia, had allowed himself to be surprised under the walls of Nevel in 1562—an event apparently prepared, to some extent, by his previous and dubious relations with Poland. Since that time he had been kept in a sort of semi-disgrace, and the irascible boïar, thus all the more incited to rebel against his master's despotic tendencies, had ended by raising the standard of revolt after the Russian fashion—i.e., by crossing the frontier. The conclusion drawn in Poland was that the Opritchnina would shortly furnish more rebels of the same kidney, with whom it would be well to enter into relations, and thus Ivan became aware of a number of letters addressed to certain of his subjects by Gregory Chodkiewicz, Grand Hetman of Lithuania, by some other Lithuanian noblemen, and by the King himself. An and disturbed, his first idea was to convoke, in the year 1566, the assembly to which I have already referred (p. 136), and which unanimously pronounced against any concessions at all in Livonia, while the landed proprietors on the Lithuanian frontier declared themselves ready to die rather than give up an inch of ground. The Tsar, thus comforted and strengthened, undertook to dictate answers to the Polish correspondents. It would have been better, perhaps, to treat them with silent scorn; but Ivan was always sorely afflicted with the letter-writing itch. Wherefore Sigismund-Augustus, who had offered the Prince Ivan Dmitriévitch Biélski a splendid appanage in Lithuania, learnt what it meant to propose such bargains to the Tsar's subjects. 'I am fairly well provided,' wrote the Prince to the King, and addressing him as his brother, 'but you might do a wiser thing—give up Lithuania to my