Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/314

 290 The farewell audience soon took place. Pissemski was the recipient of another volley of compliments and empty protestations of friendship, and was assured the Queen would give free passage through her territories to all the Tsar's envoys to any foreign Power, the Pope alone excepted. 'Your master must not betray me to the Pope!' Elizabeth is reported to have said. Here, again, we may suppose, Roberts proved himself a faithless interpreter. By the middle of June, Mary Hastings' portrait was finished, and after witnessing a review of the British fleet—eighty ships of seventy or eighty guns, and crews of a thousand men or more apiece—Pissemski and Niéoudatcha embarked with Jeremy Bowes, Her Majesty's chosen Ambassador. Her choice, though it had fallen on a professional diplomat, was not a happy one.

Bowes had a difficult task before him. He was to talk of trade, and of nothing but trade, to a man who did not want to listen to anything but projected alliances, political and matrimonial. And these same commercial relations were passing through a very trying crisis. The English merchants, whose privileges were nominally maintained—they only had to pay half other peoples taxes, at all events—found themselves forced to pay extra imposts, arbitrarily demanded and perpetually increased. These were the result of the hostile operations the Tsar dreamt of reopening with England's help, and which had already reduced his resources to a most exhausted condition. Meanwhile, other foreign competitors were gaining ground. The Russian Treasury, hard pressed for money, was selling fresh privileges to the highest bidder, and the liberal gifts cunningly distributed by the Dutch were bribing precious support among the persons nearest to the Sovereign. Three of Ivan's chief councillors—Nikita Romanovitch Zakharine, the incorruptible hero of the popular legend, Bogdan Biélski, and Andrew Chtchelkalov—had been completely bought over. The Tsar probably recognised the competition to be a means of forcing Elizabeth's hand, and rendering her more obedient to his desires. Since the year 1575, as a matter of fact, Antwerp ships had been making regular voyages to the White Sea, and Captain Carlile, who reckoned the money sunk by the English Company in the monopolies now endangered at £80,000, had presented his Queen with a memorandum in which he proposed to turn efforts apparently likely to be wasted, for the future, in Russia, to the continent of America ('A Briefe and Summary Discourse upon the Intended Voyage to the Hithermost Parts