Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/294

 270 Persson has gone too far, wherefore, on the new King's command, he is first of all hung, but so as not to strangle him completely, then his arms and legs are broken, and, as he still continues to breathe, his chest is riddled with knife-thrusts. You must not overlook the Low Countries. The sacking of Liège, which I have already mentioned, took place a century earlier, I know; but was not Ivan taking lessons in civilization from Europe? Even at that distance he may well have drawn his inspiration from the lord of Hagenbach, that Governor of Alsace after the style of Charles the Bold, whose exploits are already known to you. He may, perhaps, have heard the story of the celebrated entertainment at which, by the Governor's order, each male guest was expected to recognise the person of his own wife, every lady having previously been stripped perfectly naked, except for the veil which hid her face. Those who made mistakes were thrown from the top of the staircase. But I might just as well have evoked the memory of the capitulation of Mons, violated in 1572 by Alva's lieutenant, Noircarmes, and followed by eleven months of bloody excess, in the course of which the 20,000 citizens of Haarlem were all put to the sword by the Duke in person, while Philip IL., in an official letter, offered a reward to anybody who would murder William of Orange! And, seeing we are on Spanish ground, you will not forget the Inquisition and the forty Protestants burnt alive at Valladolid on March 12, 1559. Then, if you leave the hot cinders of the auto-da-fé and pass over into France, your foot will slip in the blood of the massacre of St. Bartholomew. Cross the sea, and you come on Henry VIII., the dungeons of Charterhouse and Sion, the gibbets of Tyburn and Newgate; the head of Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, rots in the pillory on London Bridge, and behold the gay sight presented by the King, all dressed in white silk, leading Jane Seymour to the altar on the very morrow of the day which has seen Anne Boleyn's head fall at his command!

On the scene of history whereon it thus performs, the spectre becomes a living body, and, due allowance being made for distances and for difference of culture, its flesh and blood do not appear far removed from those of the Christian, civilized, European world of the period.

I have spoken of a moral complicity. If Europe's has been proved, that of Russia is no less certain. Kourbski, who gave the tone to the Tsar's detractors, was a party to this suit; and he represented a refractory minority. The Russian masses expressed their feelings in their popular poetry, and the sense of that is already known to my readers. The Russian people not only submitted to Ivan—it admired, applauded, loved him. Of all the crowd of comrades about him, it has retained two