Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/286

 262 witnesses, at Moscow, whither he had been recalled by Michael Feodorovitch in 1616,

But why was the farce played?

Horsey has ascribed it to financial reasons. Ivan, he thinks, devised this expedient to bring about a sort of bankruptcy, by casting certain engagements he himself was unable to meet on Simeon. Fletcher has referred, in a similar sense, to a general confiscation of ecclesiastical properties to which Simeon is said to have proceeded, and after which Ivan, taking up the reins of power once more, hastened to reinstate the churches and monasteries in possession of their wealth, retaining a portion, however, and exacting a heavy sum of money in return for the favour of his restoration of the rest. But, according to the same authority, the Tsar's object was to combat the existing evil opinion of his government by the substitution of something worse!

These are mere fanciful conjectures, partly contradicted by the facts. Simeon, indeed, never ruled Russia, either well or ill. He never ruled at all. He probably replaced Mstislavski and Biélski at the head of the Ziémchtchina, and Ivan, when he adorned him with the title of which he pretended to strip himself, may have endeavoured to make this selection more generally acceptable. But some other secret motives may also have existed, as, for instance, the idea of imparting a semblance of reality to the exile which, as he declared, his 'selfish boïars' had forced upon him, and of thus better justifying his own anger and the punishment he inflicted. And, further, let my readers think of Peter the Great, who withdrew to his little wooden house and left all the cares and show connected with his official position to Menschikov in his palace hard by, and who, the day after Poltava, handed in his 'colonel's' report to Romodanovski, set upon a throne and dressed up to represent Cæsar. The generally accepted opinion is that the great man desired thus to give his subjects a striking example of the obedience due to the universal law of service. Now, was not Ivan the first to impose this law? And this fashion of enduing the Sovereign with two personalities, in a way, by subjecting him to the general rule of discipline, was not unexampled, even in Western countries. Look at Louis XV. on the eve of Fontenoy. Of course, the similarity between the young King who placed himself under the orders of his own General, and the improbable masquerade in which it pleased Ivan to figure with his Tartar Prince, is not quite absolute, and in any other country such a game, carried to so extreme a point, would have been too risky, whatever the secret intention that inspired it. But the ancestor of Peter the Great seems to have been predestined to