Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/274

 250 family. When, in his altercation with Philip, he spoke of the kinsfolk who had rebelled against him, he was thinking, no doubt, of his first cousin, Vladimir Andréiévitch. As early as in 1563 he had suspected him of being concerned in a plot, publicly reprimanded him, and obliged him to break with all his associates, and even with his mother Euphrosyne, who had been forced to take the veil. In 1566, he deprived him of his appanage, and only gave him very poor compensation—two small towns, Dmitrov and Zvenigorod, to replace Staritsa! In 1569, the unhappy Prince, who, according to a foreign chronicler, had offered to pass over into the King of Poland's service, disappeared, either murdered or beheaded, or poisoned, with all his family, with a poison he himself was said to have prepared for the Tsar! All the witnesses on this subject disagree. Taube and Krause, who are responsible for the last version, declare Ivan was present at the death agony of the whole family, and diverted himself, when that was over, by the sight of all the womenservants of the household, who were stripped of their garments, driven naked through the streets, beaten with whips, and finally shot or cut down, and their corpses left to be devoured by birds of prey. This story must be received with caution. Vladimir's eldest son was still alive in 1572, for Ivan mentions him in his will, which bears that date. As for Euphrosyne, Kourbski reports, and Ivan has not contradicted him, that, whether at that moment or later, she was taken out of her convent and drowned.

All these terrors are governed by a law of progression. The passions they excited and the sensations they dulled, united in a cry for constantly stronger and more startling effects. Vladimir may have given Ivan cause to suspect him of a certain guilty connivance with Poland. In the following year a whole town was to answer for a similar suspicion. A certain Peter, called Volyniéts, who came from Volhynia—a vagabond who had a crow to pick with the Novgorod authorities—denounced the inhabitants of that town, declaring they were inclined to go over to Sigismund-Augustus, and that a written agreement to that effect would be found behind the picture of the Blessed Virgin in the monastery of St. Sophia. In Russia, till far into the eighteenth century, such hiding-places remained in constant use. Peter Volyniéts was an utter miscreant, but previous events gave some colour to his accusations. Novgorod, a free town, had already gravitated in the Lithuanian-Polish orbit, and, when her independence had been threatened, had placed herself, by a formal deed, under the protection of King Casimir, and that as his dependent. The document the informer had described was found in the place he had mentioned, and bore the signatures, apparently authentic, of the Archbishop,