Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/308

 284 particular science had earned him a prison cell, in which he was lying, at the time of Savine's arrival in London, by the Bishop of London’s orders. As the only terms on which he could obtain his liberty were an undertaking to leave England, he made up his mind to follow the fortunes of the Muscovite envoy, and take service with the Tsar. At Moscow he promptly amassed a large fortune and a very evil reputation, and was believed to be the person employed in the preparation of the poisons used by the Tsar upon his victims. He was also accused of corrupting Ivan's mind by his offensive remarks about religion, and by advising him to seek refuge in a foreign country.

The Tsar, as we have seen, had not waited the arrival of this adventurer before he turned his mind to England, and, it may be, even to Elizabeth. But we possess various indications of the fact that Bomel endeavoured to direct the current of his ambitions into a new channel. He was not himself destined, indeed, to play any part in the development of the intrigue he had thus prepared. Implicated in a plot discovered in 1579, the hatred and jealousy of which he was the object no doubt contributed to ensure a recognition of his guilt, and his life ended under frightful tortures. His wife, an Englishwoman of the name of Anne Richards, remained in Russia, and was only sent back, with a few of her fellow-countrymen—a physician named Richard Elmes and an apothecary named Richard Frensham—after Ivan was dead, and at a moment when all foreigners in Russia were proscribed.

It was more as a German than as an Englishman that Bomel had been hated and denounced, and though Ivan ordered the unhappy astrologer to be executed, he proved himself very ready to reopen intercourse with England.

In 1580, Jeremy Horsey, one of the Russian company's agents, was commissioned by the Tsar to induce Elizabeth to send him a certain supply of military stores—lead, copper, saltpetre, sulphur, and gunpowder. Ivan was then engaged in measuring his strength against Batory's. But Horsey's instructions, which were hidden in a flask of brandy, were not confined to this request. The Tsar, influenced by Bomel, was more than ever set on seeking something else in England. If Elizabeth persisted in refusing her own hand to all her suitors, she had kinswomen of a marriageable age.

In the spring of 1581, Horsey brought back thirteen ships laden with the supplies for which the Tsar had asked, together with a party of surgeons and apothecaries, and, to fill Bomel's place, a physician, whom Elizabeth declared she valued highly—so highly that she made a sacrifice in sending him to the Tsar. This practitioner, better known in Russia under the