Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/232

 208 very next day he sent for the envoy and reset the question in its real terms: No effectual union of the two countries could be insured save under his own sceptre, and it was only right the mutual advantages should be fairly balanced. Poland, therefore, should have Polotsk and Courland, but she must give up her claim to Livonia and cede Kiev. And, further, the title of 'Tsar of all the Russias' must take precedence of the title of 'King.'

He was asking too much this time, perhaps, but his cunning intelligence and sure instinct may have guessed the nature of the Polish magnates' game, and also the consequences of his own succession to the throne for which he bargained after this fashion. These petty rulers, who cared for nothing but their own privileges, were only trying to fool him, and prevent his reopening hostilities during the interregnum; and what figure would he cut, once he had passed those Caudine Forks, their pride and their pretensions? His last word, as he dismissed Haraburda, seems to betray the existence of such an inner thought. 'After weighing it all well, he thought the best thing the Poles could do was to elect the Emperor's son; and so long as their choice did not fall on a French Prince, the Sultan's friend, he should declare himself quite satisfied.' On his way home the envoy was overtaken by a courier, bearing still less acceptable conditions. Whereas the idea at Warsaw had been that Ivan would turn Catholic, he announced his intention of being crowned there by his own Metropolitan, in the absence of the Polish Bishops, who were to be excluded from the ceremony; he reserved his right to build as many Orthodox churches as he chose in the country, and himself retire into a monastery when he grew old!

Thus was the way prepared for the success of Henri de Valois. Yet on the very eve of the election, as is proved by divers witnesses belonging to the hostile camp, Ivan's name continued popular, (see the 'Memoirs' of Montluc's secretary, Choisnin, coll. Michaud et Poujoulat, p. 429; Lippomano's narrative in the Hist. Russie Monumenta,' Turgéniév's edition, i. 270; and another Italian narrative in the Manuscripts of the Bibliothèque Nationale, 15,967, fol. 21). The lesser nobles stood by their candidate, and they swayed the poll. But a speech from the Tsar's envoy, which further accentuated his master’s haughty and unyielding attitude, spoilt everything, and, the wind veering suddenly round, the French candidate obtained the advantage. 'Decidedly,' thought everybody, 'Ivan was nothing but the barbarian he had been reported to be.'

Would he have been wiser to be more conciliatory at the time, and to have shown, later, what sort of a King he must