Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/396

 372 the husband of three or four cast-off wives; and after Anastasia died there was certainly nothing edifying about the life Ivan led. Yet the very fact of his otherwise inexplicable obstinacy in seeking to enter into fresh bonds of matrimony would seem—so far as the Sovereign himself is concerned, at all events—to weaken the authority of the legend concerning the troops of women conveyed into the suburb, and the harem said to have accompanied the Tsar wherever he went. Ivan was a man addicted to women, but his religious scruples made him a man addicted to wives, and who cared so much about marrying them that he would play at being honestly wedded just as he played at living in a monastery.

The Tsar's second wife, the wild Circassian called Temrioukovna, baptized under the name of Maria, whom he married in 1561, and who died in 1569, bears the reputation of having possessed morals as loose as her instincts were fierce. Two years after her death, Ivan's choice fell on the daughter of a plain Novgorod merchant, called Marfa Vasiliévna Sobakine. She only lived a fortnight after her wedding-day, and the Tsar declared she had been poisoned before she had really become his wife, and died a maid. Thus, at least, he strove to justify the fourth union, to which he at once turned his mind, and which the rules of his Church forbade. He pleaded necessity, pointed out that three of his wives had been poisoned, one after the other; that when the second died he had felt a strong inclination to enter a monastery; that the cares of his children's education and of his Empire—his exact words were 'of the defence of the Christian faith'—had kept him in the world, and still retained him there, and that therefore, 'to avoid falling into sin,' he must take him a wife. The Church gave in, though she imposed a penance on this obstinate espouser of wives, and in 1572 he led the daughter of one of his dvorniks, Anne Koltovski, to the altar. Three years afterwards he sent her to a monastery, accused, so it seems, of being mixed up in a plot, and in the massacres consequent on this accusation the whole of the wretched woman's family appears to have perished. Under the name of Daria, this ex-Tsarina lived on at Tihkvine till the year 1626.

The Tsar then took two mistresses, one after the other, named Anne Vassiltchikov and Vassilissa Meletiév. They passed as his wives, though the Sovereign never went beyond asking his confessor's leave to live with them, and no doubt this dignitary felt the confessional must not deal too strictly with a man of Ivan's kidney. About both these favourites a