Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/302

 278 and ensuring in them the privileges already given to his own country in Moscow, he was fighting a stiff battle with his Italian and Flemish competitors. Raphael Barberini, an Italian agent, contrived to overreach Queen Elizabeth, and induce her to give him a patent, which he used to spread a belief that the English were mere middlemen, bringing Dutch and French merchandise into the Russian markets. Jenkinson's rejoinder took the form of a new charter, granted to the Russian company by the Tsar, which confirmed it in all its monopolies, and extended them from the mouths of the Northern Dvina to the banks of the Ob, including Kholmogory, Kola, Mezen, Petchora, and Soloviétsk; gave it the sole right to a trading-house (dvor) at Moscow, and depots on the Dvina, at Vologda, Iaroslavl, Kostroma, Nijni-Novgorod, Pskov, Narva, and Iouriév, and granted free passage to all its merchandise sent to Bokhara and Samarkand.

These concessions—unhoped for, no doubt, and undeniably excessive, from the Muscovite point of view—were probably connected with overtures of a different order, which were being made to Jenkinson at this time, and which mark a new phase in Anglo-Russian relations.

Ivan could not fail to be deeply impressed by all his English guests had shown him, or allowed him to guess, in the course of several years, concerning the genius and the greatness of their nation. And the struggle in which the Sovereign was engaged, both within and without the borders of his own country, had inspired him with a painful sense of his own isolation. In his eager, masterful, and obstinate mind, this twofold impression naturally became a fixed idea, which he was to carry with him to his grave. Against his external foes, their armies, their fleets, and their treasuries, he would make an alliance with a Power whose fleet, whose commerce, whose credit, were beginning to rule the whole world; against his foes at home he would thus ensure himself a support, perchance a refuge, that nothing would be able to shake. A glorious dream! Thanks to his imaginative powers, Ivan no doubt saw himself really driven into exile, and, backed by his formidable ally, able to return in triumph at his own time. Perhaps, indeed, but this point is less clear, he mingled a more romantic project with this plan. Elizabeth was fated to be the object of perpetual proposals of a more or less flattering nature, in which politics and gallantry both had their share. In spite of the fact that his youth had faded, in spite of his infirmities, which he exaggerated, but which were genuine, of his unsociable nature, and his