Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/307

 Rh not half as heavy, indeed, as those other foreigners had to pay, but an infringement, none the less, of the privileges granted to them. And the ci-devant interpreter was convinced that this recrudescence of hostility arose from the Tsar's disappointment concerning the alliance he had planned. Elizabeth then made up her mind to entrust a fresh mission to Sylvester himself. She agreed to treat with Ivan as secretly as the Russian Sovereign desired; but she could not allow her subjects to think she was in any danger among them without placing herself in a really perilous position. Sylvester must try to make the Tsar understand this fact.

He found him, in November, 1575, in the new dwelling he had built for himself in the Kremlin, and which he claimed to inhabit as a private individual, having given up the Kremlin itself and the throne to Simeon. 'You see,' said he to the English envoy, 'I was right when I appealed to your mistress, and she did not act wisely when she refused my proposals!' Sylvester was still pondering over the meaning of this new state of things, which had not been foreseen in London, and considering how he could best accommodate himself to it, when Ivan, leaving him to his own reflections, quitted his capital to meet the Ambassadors of the Emperor, then just about to arrive. When the Sovereign returned, his language had completely altered. 'If Elizabeth did not give him full and complete satisfaction, the whole commerce of his Empire should be made over to the Venetians and the Germans.'

The envoy was fain to carry this ultimatum back to London. We know nothing of the reply Elizabeth charged him to deliver, for he was killed by lightning at Kholmogory on his return journey, and all his papers were burnt in the house in which he had been living. Did Elizabeth yield? The fact is admitted by the Russian historian who has devoted the most profound study to this chapter of history (Tolstoï, 'The Relations between England and Russia,' p. 31). Yet such a fact seems very improbable, for during the three following years, diplomatic intercourse between the two countries appears to have been entirely broken off. Before it could be renewed, Ivan was to allow himself to be bewitched by another chimera, inspired, as it would seem, by one of the foreigners who had formed part of the Tsar's personal circle since the period of Savine's mission to England.

His name was Elysius Bomel or Bomelius. Born at Wesel, in Westphalia, he had studied medicine at Cambridge, but his chief interest was in astrology, and his reputation as to this