Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/61

 Rh cross-bearer in some solemn procession, or carry the dishes sent from the Sovereign's table to some distinguished personage. And after all that, going back to his Council sittings, he might have to decide a lawsuit for which the Council had resolved itself into a Court of Appeal. It would seem, at all events, that an article of the Code of 1497 mentions a jurisdiction of this nature conferred on the Douma.

To get through all this work, the Council must have found the two daily sittings mentioned by the chroniclers all too short. It sat, in summertime, from seven in the morning till one or two o'clock in the afternoon; and then again, after an obligatory attendance on the Sovereign at Mass, dinner, and a siesta, from sunset till late at night. But, in practice, this heavy work only fell on a certain number of councillors at a time, and their intervals of service were widely spaced. As a general rule, the institution did no work at all. And was it really so much as a regular institution? It was the fiction, rather, of a division of power which, from the sixteenth century onwards, especially, had but a shadowy and deceptive appearance of reality. Whether they really acted together or separately, the fiction still united every act of the Sovereign and his Douma. The master, even if absent, was supposed to be invariably present at the deliberations of the assembly, and even if he acted independently, he was held to be acting in concert with it. Monsieur Serguiéiévitch is wrong, as it appears to me, when he pronounces against the theory of this mystic union; it survived the Douma, and was perpetuated in Peter the Great's relations with his Senate. But it was an idea, and nothing more. The fact—from the sixteenth century onward, more especially—is the existence of a personal and absolute power, exercised by the Sovereign assisted by another deliberative assembly, the composition of which was still more arbitrarily settled, while its more restricted membership left a yet wider margin for absolutism; a private council, generally held in the Sovereign's bedroom, and only consisting of two or three boïars or confidential men of any rank—a reproduction of the commune consilium noticed, concurrently with the magnum consilium, in the organization of all the European monarchies, but vaguer and more uncertain in its nature, in this particular place, and more completely subject to the master's will or caprice.

And in certain provinces the master's authority is undivided, even in appearance. In certain districts, as we shall presently see, jurisdiction, either as a special right belonging to the Sovereign or as a privilege claimed by those amenable to justice, by virtue of special charters (tarkhany), is in the hands of his direct agents. In similar fashion, he alone has the right to consider the petitions addressed, by ancient usage, to the Prince,