Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/357

 Rh allowed to see the document, the Tsar decided he should only be given a summary containing the political matter, and leaving out the abuse. But very soon after this he was unable to refrain from drawing up and exhibiting a reply, in which, to facilitate his retorts, he reproduced, one after the other, the most offensive passages in the letter, and employed the most unexpected arguments. If, as Batory asserted, he had not flown to the assistance of the besieged towns, it was because he felt himself prevented from so doing by the truce he had made with his adversaries. And how could the King deny the Roman descent of the reigning house of Moscow? If Prous had never existed, where did the name Prussia come from?

At the end of a whole month, in fact, the mediator was no further advanced than on the day of his arrival. As to the religious question, he had gained something—no churches, indeed, and no establishment for the Jesuits, but the Tsar was most willing to keep up constant intercourse with Rome, and offered free passage through his dominions to any envoys the Pope might desire to send into Persia. This was a beginning, and the civilities in which every refusal was enwrapped, the understandings coupled with every concession, gave the Pope's representative reason to hope for still better things once peace was established. The Jesuit was always being brought back to that primordial postulate, though what the Tsar called his 'final calculation'—which Batory had already refused—was steadily maintained. Possevino had hoped to kill two birds with one stone by reconciling Russia with his former clients, the Swedes, likewise. Out of respect for the Pope, the Tsar agreed to depart from the rule according to which negotiations with Sweden must take place at Novgorod, and consented to receive King John's Ambassadors at the Kremlin. But the Swedish King, instead of despatching an embassy, was carrying his career of personal conquest along the Baltic coast, and it was quite clear that Ivan was resolved to make him pay for them dearly, once he himself was clear of Batory, and likewise that, for getting rid of Batory, he relied on the winter season and the Pope. Very skilfully, pitting his own tactics against his adversary's, he applied himself to keeping the Legate in good humour, by pointing him to a far-distant mirage of religious union, while Bogdan Biélski, who, with Nicholas Zakharine, was employed to direct the negotiations, ventured an attempt—an unsuccessful one indeed—at corruption of a more brutal kind.

By the middle of September the Jesuit had realized he was losing his time in this quarter, and made up his mind to fall back on the Polish camp. This was just what suited