Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/228

 204 and Kruse fled to Derpt, and there laid plans with the Poles for an attempt, which very nearly proved successful, against the Russian garrison.

The career of these two rogues is instructive: after intrigues, desertions, and treacheries innumerable, they were one day to find grace in the eyes of Batory himself. Taube, having been forced with a high hand on the Livonian landtag, which had refused to receive him, passed away in peace on his own country property, and Kruse was on the point of performing a mission to Prussia for the King when death overtook him. Such was the morality of those days!

During the siege of Revel, Magnus had vainly expected help from Denmark. Just at that moment, as my readers will remember (vide p. 198), the Treaty of Stettin was in course of preparation. After the signatures had been exchanged, Sigismund-Augustus once more claimed the aid of Denmark against Muscovy. On September 17, 1571, he published a manifesto, according to the terms of which he undertook to cut off the trade of Narva, blockading the town, and giving more scope and means of action to his privateers than formerly, and thus seemed on the eve of that great effort which had so long been expected from him. Taube and Kruse, no doubt, had already discounted the effect produced. But their calculations were upset, for a time, by an unexpected incident. On July 7, 1572, the last of the Jagellons died of a chill. The extinction of the dynasty and the inauguration of the system of an elective monarchy in Poland were once more to alter the conditions of the fight, and the positions of the adversaries in the long struggle.

In Livonia, as in Poland, the inheritance left by Sigismund-Augustus was not an easy one to take up. With Kettler, with the Scandinavian Powers, with the Khan, his diplomacy had been a brilliant success. But his natural indolence, alas! had conspired with the idle and anarchical tendencies of his subjects to turn his successes into mere illusions, for there never was any sufficient display of material strength to enforce them. The union with Lithuania had likewise been a triumph over Moscow, but the struggle begun in the heart of Catholic Poland at that very time against Protestantism, and incidentally against every dissident form of faith, had evoked a feeling of resistance amongst the Orthodox populations of the annexed provinces, which drove them towards Russia's outstretched arms. The eager proselytism of the Jesuits, already installed in the Bishopric of Wilna, only quickened the current, and