Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/252

 228 to Sylvester's personal share in it is furnished by one of his letters to the Metropolitan Macarius, concerning the appointment of a prior. It proves that the Tsar commissioned the pope to look into the merits of the candidates brought to his notice. But he had to embody his conclusions in a report, and in the Sovereign's absence, the whole business remained unsettled.

From the day on which they refused to stand by Dmitri, Sylvester and Adachev ceased to be Anastasia's friends. Their destiny may have been affected by her premature end, and it is probable, likewise, that their fall was hastened by some other event, of which we know nothing. All this period of the reign is wrapped in obscurity.

The close of Sylvester's life, too, slips out of the historian's ken. Adachev died in prison at the end of two years. 'If they had not parted me from my doe,' Ivan kept saying, 'Saturn would not have had so many victims!' The confession is worth remembering. Kourbski mentions a widow of Polish origin, Mary Magdalen by name, accused of guilty relations with Adachev, and executed, with five of her sons. At the same time, several of the ex-favourite's relations—his brother Daniel, with his twelve-year-old boy, and his father-in-law, Tourov, three brothers of the name of Satine, whose sister had married Alexis Adachev, and others—are said to have been put to death. A great deal of blood was certainly spilt. Ivan was then beginning a system of wholesale executions, by families at a time, and it was to be long before the red stream was dried up. To the ferocity which marked the habits of that period—my readers will not have forgotten the bloody hecatombs of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, of Philip II. and Charles XI.—he added the fierceness of his violent nature, and the caprice of a half-Oriental despot. Kourbski mentions, at this time, a Prince Michael Repnine, invited to one of the Tsar's banquets, who refused to take his share in the general merriment, and, pulling off a mask the company had tried to force upon him, trampled it underfoot. A few days later, Ivan had him killed in church, while the Gospel was being read. A similar adventure is said to have befallen Prince George Kachine. The monarch, though he did not disclaim all the facts, denied that he had ever profaned the sacred edifices. According to Guagnino, another member of the upper aristocracy, a young Prince Dmitri Obolenski-Ovtchinine, likewise perished, about this time, in consequence of a quarrel with the Tsar's new favourite, Feodor Basmanov, whom he had offended by an insulting remark—'My ancestors and I, we have served our Sovereign like honest men. You serve him like the men of Sodom!' But on this point Kourbski contradicts the Italian