Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/271

 Rh reports of the violence which certainly soiled and jeopardized it at the time, and which in the eyes of posterity, has veiled and warped its real character and genuine aims. These reports, generally emanating from interested witnesses, like Kourbski, or deliberately hostile ones, such as most foreigners were, cannot be unquestioningly accepted. Means of verification are, unhappily, almost entirely non-existent. I will endeavour, however, to get as near the truth as possible, even if I fail to reach it altogether.

Ivan had reserved himself the right of chastising certain of his boïars; nobody could imagine he would relinquish it. Kourbski having escaped him, the Tsar fell on the fugitive's accomplices, real or supposed. Under this accusation, Prince Alexander Borissovitch Chouïski, with his young son Peter and several of his kinsmen, including two members of the Khovryne family—Prince Ivan Soukhoï Kachine, Prince Dmitri Chevirev, and others—were put to death. Other poor wretches—Prince Ivan Kourakine, and Prince Dmitri Niémogo—paid with their heads for misdeeds as to which we have no information. Sentences of banishment and confiscation followed, and it was not till the Terrible had thus satisfied his rage and begun his dreaded work that he consented to return to his captialcapital [sic]. One chronicler tells us the inhabitants could hardly recognise their Sovereign; his face was distorted, and he had lost all his hair. This feature may be noted as a premonitory symptom of what a lively imagination has been able to add to the realities of the drama, already sufficiently gloomy. As the Tsar, like all the men of his period, was in the habit of shaving his head, his sudden baldness can hardly have struck his observers, and soon, indeed, he was.to give only too certain proofs of his health and strength.

My readers will recollect the episode of the Polish letters intercepted by Ivan. Some of the persons for whom these missives had been intended, and on whom suspicion now fell—old Ivan Petrovitch Tcheliadnine and his wife, Prince Ivan Kourakine-Boulgakov, three Princes Rostovski, and others—were whirled into the tempest, handed over to the executioner, tortured horribly, and put to death. Even the Church had her turn. Apart from the solidarity of interest which bound her to the victims of the new system, she here found a more pressing opportunity than ever for claiming that right of intercession which was her most precious privilege and her noblest claim to glory. In the person of one of Macarius's successors as Metropolitan of Moscow, she was to draw down the thunder-