“Gentlemen, my very worthy Friends,—Being this day taking barge for Gravesend, there to embark for Archangel, so to Muscow, thence for Sweden, and last of all Denmarke; all of which I hope, by God’s blessing, to finish within twelve moneths time: I do hereby, with my last and seriousest thoughts, salute you, rendring you all hearty thanks for your great kindnesse and friendship to me upon all occasions, and ardently beseeching God to keep you all in His gracious protection, to your own honour, and the welfare and flourishing of your Corporation, to which I am and shall ever continue a most affectionate and devoted servant. I undertake this voyage with the order and good liking of his Majesty, and by leave given me from the House and enterd in the Journal; and having received moreover your approbation, I go therefore with more ease and satisfaction of mind, and augurate to myselfe the happier successe in all my proceedings....”
It was Marvell’s good fortune to be in Lord Carlisle’s frigate which made the voyage to Archangel in less than a month, sailing from Gravesend on the 22nd of July and arriving at the bar of Archangel on the 19th of August. The companion frigate took seven weeks to compass the same distance.
Nothing of any importance attaches to this Russian embassy. It cost a great deal of money, took up a great deal of time, exposed the ambassador and his suite to much rudeness and discomfort, and failed to effect its main object, which was to secure a renewal of the privileges formerly enjoyed in Muscovy by British merchants.
One of the attendants upon the ambassador made a small book out of his travels, which did not get printed till 1669, when it attracted little notice. Mr. Grosart was the first of Marvell’s many biographers to discover the existence of this narrative.[1] He found it in the first instance, to use his own language, “in one of good trusty John Harris’ folios of Travels and Voyages” (two vols. folio, 1705); but later on he made the sad discovery that this “good trusty John Harris” had uplifted what he called his “true and particular account” from the book of 1669 without any acknowledgment. “For ways that are dark” the old compiler of travels was not easily excelled, but why should Mr. Grosart have gone out of his way to call an eighteenth-century book-maker, about whom he evidently knew nothing, “good and trusty”? Harris was never either the one or the other, and died a pauper!
A journey to Moscow in 1663-64 was no joke. Lord Carlisle, who was accompanied by his wife and eldest son, although ready to start from Archangel by the end of September, was doomed to spend both the 5th of November and Christmas Day in the gloomy town of Vologda, which they had reached, travelling by water, on the 17th of October. Some of this time was spent in quarrelling as to who was to supply the sledges that were required to convey the ambassador and all his impedimenta along the now ice-bound roads to Moscow. It was one of Marvell’s many duties to remonstrate with the authorities for their cruel and disrespectful indifference; he did so with great freedom, but with no effect, and at last the ambassador was obliged to hire two hundred sledges at his own charges. Sixty he sent on ahead, following with one hundred and forty on the 15th of January 1664. It was an intensely cold journey, and the accommodation at night, with one happy exception, proved quite infamous. On the 3rd of February Lord Carlisle and his cortége found themselves five versts from Moscow. The 5th of February was fixed for their entry into the city in all their finery. They were ready on the morning of that day, awaiting the arrival of the Tsar’s escort, but it never came. Lord Carlisle had sent his cooks on to Moscow to prepare the dinner he expected to eat in his city-quarters. Nightfall approached, and it was not till “half an hour before night” that the belated messengers arrived, full of excuses. The ambassador was hungry, cold, and furious, nor did his anger abate when told he was not to be allowed to enter Moscow that night, as the Tsar and his ladies were very anxious to enjoy the spectacle. The return of the cooks from Moscow and the preparation of dinner, though a mitigation, was no cure for wounded pride, and Lord Carlisle, calling Marvell to his side, and with his assistance, concocted a letter in Latin to the Tsar, complaining bitterly of their ill-treatment inter fumosi gurgustii sordes et angustias sine cibo aut potu, and going so far as to assert that had anything of the kind happened in England to a foreign ambassador, the King of England would never have rested until the offence had been atoned for with the blood of the criminals. When, some forty years afterwards, Peter the Great asked Queen Anne to chop off the heads of the rude men who had arrested his ambassador for debt, he had, perhaps, Marvell’s letter before him.
On the 6th of February Lord Carlisle and his suite made their public entry into Moscow; but so long a time was occupied over the few versts they had to travel, that it was dusk before the Kremlin was reached.
The formal reception of the ambassador was on the 11th of February. Marvell was in the ambassador’s sledge and carried his credentials upon a yard of red damask. The titles of the Russian Potentate would, if printed here, fill half a page. All the Russias, Great, Little, and White, emperies more than one, dukedoms by the dozen, territories, countries, and dominions—not all easy to identify on the map, and very hard to pronounce—were read out in a loud voice by Marvell. At the end of them came the homely title of the Earl and his offices, “his Majesty’s Lieutenant in the Counties of Cumberland and Westmorland.”
The letters read and delivered, the Tsar and his Boyars rose in their places simultaneously, and their tissue vests made so strange, loud, and unexpected a noise as to provoke the ever too easily moved risibility of the Englishmen.[1] When Marvell and the rest of them had ceased from giggling, the Tsar inquired after the health of the king, but the distance between his Imperial Majesty and Lord Carlisle being too great for the question to carry, it had to be repeated by those who were nearer the ambassador, who gravely replied that when he last saw his master, namely on the 20th of July then last past, he was perfectly well. To the same question as to the health of “the desolate widow of Charles the First,” Carlisle returned the same cautious answer. He then read a very long speech in English, which his interpreter turned into Russian. The same oration was rendered into Latin by Marvell, and presented. Over Marvell’s Latin trouble arose, for the Russians were bent on taking and giving offence. Marvell had styled the Tsar Illustrissimus when he ought, so it was alleged, to have called him Serenissimus. Marvell was not a schoolmaster’s son, an old scholar of Trinity, and Milton’s assistant as Latin Secretary for nothing. He prepared a reply which, as it does not lack humour, has a distinct literary flavour, and is all that came of the embassy, may here be given at length:—
“I reply, saith he, that I sent no such paper into the Embassy-office, but upon the desire of his Tzarskoy Majesty’s Councellor Evan Offonassy Pronchissof, I delivered it to him, not being a paper of State, nor written in the English Language wherein I treat, nor put into the hands of the near Boyars and Councellors of his Tzarskoy majesty, nor subscribed by my self, nor translated into Russe by my Interpreter, but only as a piece of curiosity, which is now restored me, and I am possessed of it; so that herein his Tzarskoy majestie’s near Boyars and Councellors are doubtless ill grounded. But again I say concerning the value of the words Illustrissimus and Serenissimus compared together, seeing we must here from affaires of State, fall into Grammatical contests concerning the Latin tongue; that the word Serenus signifieth nothing but still and calm; and, therefore, though of late times adopted into the Titles of great Princes by reason of that benigne tranquility which properly dwells in the majestick countenance of great Princes, and that venerable stillness of all the Attendants that surround them, of which I have seen an excellent example when I was in the presence of his Tzarskoy majesty, yet is more properly used concerning the calmness of the weather, or season. So that even the night is elegantly called Serena by the best Authors, Cicero in Arato 12, Lucretius i. l. 29. ‘Serena nox’; and upon perusing again what I have writ in this paper, I finde that I have out of the customariness of that expression my self near the beginning said, And that most serene night, &c. Whereas on the contrary Illustris in its proper derivation and signification expresseth that which is all resplendent, lightsome, and glorious, as well without as within, and that not with a secondary but with a primitive and original light. For if the Sun be, as he is, the first fountain of light, and Poets in their expressions (as is well known) are higher by much than those that write in Prose, what else is it when Ovid in the 2. of the Metamorphoses saith of Phœbus speaking with Phaëthon, Qui terque quaterque concutiens Illustre caput, and the Latin Orators, as Pliny, Ep. 139, when they would say the highest thing that can be exprest upon any subject, word it thus, Nihil Illustrius dicere possum. So that hereby may appear to his Tzarskoy Majestie’s near Boyars and Counsellors what diminution there is to his Tzarskoy Majesty (which farr be it from my thoughts) if I appropriate Serenissimus to my Master and Illustrissimus to Him than which nihil dici potest Illustrius. But because this was in the time of the purity of the Latin tongue, when the word Serenus was never used in the Title of any Prince or Person, I shall go on to deale with the utmost candor, forasmuch as in this Nation the nicety of that most eloquent language is not so perfectly understood, which gives occasion to these mistakes. I confess therefore that indeed in the declination of the Latin tongue, and when there scarce could be found out words enough to supply the modern ambition of Titles, Serenissimus as several other words hath grown in fashion for a compellation of lesser as well as greater Princes, and yet befits both the one and the other. So there is Serenissima Respublica Veneta, Serenitates Electoriæ, Serenitates Regiæ, even as the word Highness or Celsitudo befits a Duke, a Prince, a King, or an Emperour, adjoyning to it the respective quality, and so the word Illustris. But suppose it were by modern use (which I deny) depressed from the undoubted superiority that it had of Serenus in the purest antiquity, yet being added in the transcendent degree to the word Emperour, the highest denomination that a Prince is capable of, it becomes of the same value. So that to interpret Illustrissimus unto diminution is to find a positive in a superlative, and in the most orient light to seek for darkness. And I would, seeing the near Boyars and Counsellors of his Tzarskoy Majesty are pleased to mention the Title given to his Tzarskoy Majesty by his Cesarian Majesty, gladly be satisfied by them, whether ever any Cesarian Majesty writ formerly hither in High-Dutch, and whether then they styled his Tzarskoy Majesty Durchluchtigste which is the same with Illustrissimus, and which I believe the Cæsar hath kept for Himself. But to cut short, his Royal Majesty hath used the word to his Tzarskoy Majesty in his Letter, not out of imitation of others, although even in the Dutch Letter to his Tzarskoy Majesty of 16 June 1663, I finde Durchlauchtigste the same (as I said) with Illustrissimus, but out of the constant use of his own Court, further joyning before it Most High, Most Potent, and adding after it Great Lord Emperour, which is an higher Title than any Prince in the World gives his Tzarskoy Majesty, and as high a Title of honour as can be given to any thing under the Divinity. For the King my Master who possesses as considerable Dominions, and by as high and self-dependent a right as any Prince in the Universe, yet contenting Himself with the easiest Titles, and satisfying Himself in the essence of things, doth most willingly give to other Princes the Titles which are appropriated to them, but to the Tzarskoy Majesties of Russia his Royal Ancestors, and to his present Tzarskoy Majesty his Royal Majesty himself, have usually and do gladly pay Titles even to superfluity out of meer kindness. And upon that reason He added the word most Illustrious, and so did I use it in the Latin of my speech. Yet, that You may find I did not out of any criticisme of honor, but for distinction sake use it as I did, You may see in one place of the same speech Serenitas, speaking of his Tzarskoy Majesty: and I would have used Serenissimus an hundred times concerning his Tzarskoy Majesty, had I thought it would have pleased Him better. And I dare promise You that his Majesty will upon the first information from me stile him Serenissimus, and I (notwithstanding what I have said) shall make little difficulty of altering the word in that speech, and of delivering it so to You, with that protestation that I have not in using that word Illustrissimus erred nor used any diminution (which God forbid) to his Tzarskoy Majesty, but on the contrary after the example of the King my Master intended and shewed him all possible honor. And so God grant all happiness to His most high, most Potent, most Illustrious, and most Serene Tzarskoy Majesty, and that the friendship may daily increase betwixt His said Majesty and his most Serene Majesty my Master.”
On the 19th of February the Tsar invited Lord Carlisle and his suite to a dinner, which, beginning at two o’clock, lasted till eleven, when it was prematurely broken up by the Tsar’s nose beginning to bleed. Five hundred dishes were served, but there were no napkins, and the table-cloths only just covered the boards. There were Spanish wines, white and red mead, Puaz and strong waters. The English ambassador was not properly placed at table, not being anywhere near the Tsar, and his faithful suite shared his resentment. Time went on, but no diplomatic progress was made. The Tsar would not renew the privileges of the British merchants; Easter was spent in Moscow, May also—and still nothing was done. Carlisle, in a huff, determined to go away, and, somewhat to the distress of his followers, refused to accept the costly sables sent by the Tzar, not only to the ambassador, Lady Carlisle, and Lord Morpeth, but to the secretaries and others. The Tzar thereupon returned the plate which our king had sent him, which plate Lord Carlisle seems to have appropriated, no doubt with diplomatic correctness, as his perquisite in lieu of the sables; but the suite got nothing.