Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/280

 256 common to the men of his time, whose imagination was probably inspired and excited in this direction by the very books of piety they read. In this respect some of these menologies, full of highly-coloured imagery—a curious specimen of which has been lately published under the name of St. Basil by the brothers Ouspiénski (1902)—were singularly and cruelly suggestive. Guagnino dwells complacently on the tortures inflicted, in the course of this hideous day, on Viskovatyi the Chancellor, who was hung up by his feet and cut into pieces like a butcher's carcass; and Founikov the Treasurer, who was sprinkled, turn about, with ice-cold and with boiling water, 'till his skin came off him like an eel's.'

Before he went home to the new palace in which he was now living—the Kremlin had been given up to the Ziémchtchina—Ivan is said to have gone to Founikov's house, and carried off the Treasurer's wife, a young and beautiful woman, sister of Prince Athanasius Viaziémski. As she either could not or would not tell where her husband had hidden his treasures, the Tsar had her stripped in the presence of her daughter, a girl of fifteen, set astride on a cord stretched between two walls, and dragged backwards and forwards from one end to the other. The unhappy woman was then thrown into a convent, where she soon died of the hideous treatment she had received. For some years her brother had been one of the Tsar's confidential men, and the Sovereign would never take medicine from any other hand. He, too, was handed over to the executioner. Basmanov, the prime favourite, met the same fate. He was killed by the Tsar's order, and, according to some witnesses, by the hand of the heir to the throne, Feodor. Pimenius was taken to the Sloboda at Alexandrov, was the butt of the Opritchniki there for some time, and was finally sent into exile at Venev, in the province of Riazan.

Guagnino, an Italian and a Catholic, who collected the materials for his gossiping chronicle in Poland, is an altogether unreliable witness; but Horsey, an Englishman, gives quite as hideous details of the executions he claims to have seen. He saw one man—Prince Boris Telepniév, whom he calls Teloupa—impaled, and lingering on the stake for fifteen hours, while his own mother was violated before his eyes by a hundred Striéltsy, until she died. But this same Horsey speaks of 700,000 men as having been massacred at Novgorod! I shall have something to say, later, about these foreign witnesses whose testimony we are forced to turn to account, seeing we possess no other. Believing these people too easily, most historians have ended by admitting that Nero and Caligula were both surpassed at Moscow, and by supposing Ivan to have lived, at this period, in a state of mental disorder which, if it