Up to this time the genius of Ivan seems to have been cautiously feeling its way, and so the part of his history already sketched may be regarded as a mere preliminary to his real career. His extraordinary capacity for ruling an empire upon the principles taught him by the Prince Gluisky was now about to show itself in all its greatness. A criminal of Novgorod, feeling himself aggrieved by the authorities of that city, who had incarcerated him for a time, wrote a letter offering to place the city under Polish protection. This letter he signed, not with his own name, but with that of the archbishop, and, instead of sending it to the King of Poland, to whom it was addressed, he secreted it in the church of St. Sophia. Then, going to Alexandrovsky, he told Ivan that treason was contemplated by the Novgorodians, and that the treasonable letter would be found behind the statue of the Virgin in the church. Ivan sent a messenger to find the letter, and upon his return the czar began his march upon the doomed city. Happening to pass through the town of Khur, on his way to Novgorod, he put all its inhabitants to death, with the purpose, doubtless, of training his troops in the art of wholesale massacre, before requiring them to practise it upon the people of Novgorod. Finding this system of drill an agreeable pastime, he repeated it upon his arrival at the city of Twer, and then, in order that the other towns along his route might have no reason to complain of partiality, he bestowed upon all of them a like manifestation of his imperial regard.
It is not my purpose to describe in detail the elaborate and ingenious cruelty practised in the massacre of the Novgorodians. The story is sickening. Ivan first heard mass, and then began the butchery, which lasted for many days, was conducted with the utmost deliberation and most ingenious cruelty, and ended in the slaughter of sixty thousand people. Ivan had selected certain prominent citizens, to the number of several hundred, whom he reserved for public and particularly cruel execution at Moscow. Summoning the small and wretched remnant of the population to his presence, he besought their prayers for the continuance and prosperity of his reign, and with gracious words of farewell took his departure from the city.
The execution in Moscow of the reserved victims was a scene too horrible to be described in these pages. Indeed, the half of Ivan's enormities may not be told here at all, and even the historians content themselves with the barest outlines of many parts of his career. He thought himself in some sense a deity, and blasphemously asserted that his throne was surrounded by archangels precisely as God's is. Identifying himself with the Almighty, he claimed exemption from the observance of God's laws, and, in defiance of the fundamental principles of the Greek Church, of which he was the head, he married seven wives. Believing that he might with equal impunity insult the moral sense of other nations, he actually sought to add England's queen, Elizabeth, to the list of his spouses. And he was so far right in his estimate of his power to do as he pleased, that the Virgin Queen, head of the English Church, while she would not herself become one of his wives, consented to assist him, and selected for his eighth consort Mary Hastings, the daughter of the Earl of Huntingdon. She came near bringing about a marriage between the two, in face of the fact that the two churches of which Ivan and she were respectively the heads were agreed in condemning polygamy as a heinous crime.
For one only of all his crimes Ivan showed regret, if not remorse. His oldest and favorite son, when the city of Pskof was besieged by the Poles, asked that he might be intrusted with the command of a body of troops with which to assist the beleaguered place. Ivan was so great a coward that he dared not trust the affection and loyalty of even his own favorite child, and in a fit of mingled fear and rage he beat the young man to death with his iron staff, saying, "Rebel, you are leagued with the boyards in a conspiracy to dethrone me."
Remorse seized upon him at once, and his sufferings and his fears of retribution were terrible. Finally he determined to abandon the throne and seek peace in a convent, but the infatuated Russians entreated him not to desert them. He died at last, in 1580.
Did Scheherazade herself ever imagine a stranger story than this? And yet it is plain history, and is only a fragment of the truth.
A PRINCE WHO WOULD NOT STAY DEAD.
His name was Dmitri, and he was hereditary Grand-Prince of all the Russias, being the son of Ivan the Terrible, and only surviving brother of Feodor, the childless successor of that blood-thirsty czar. He was carefully killed in the presence of witnesses, during his boyhood, and duly buried, with honors appropriate to his station in life; so that if Dmitri had been an ordinary mortal, or even an ordinary prince, there would have been no story of his life to tell, except the brief tragedy of his taking off. He was no ordinary prince, however, and so the trifling incident of his death during childhood had as little to do with his career as had one or two other episodes of a like nature in the history of his later life. He was born to rule Russia, and was not at all disposed to excuse himself from the performance of the duty Providence had thus imposed upon him, by pleading the two or three thorough killings to which he was subjected. The story, as preserved in authentic history, is a very interesting one, and may perhaps bear repeating here. The reader may find all the facts in any reputable history of Russia, or of the houses of Rurik and Romanoff.
In his jealousy of the absolute power he wielded, Ivan the Terrible had made constant war upon his nobility—killing them, or driving them away, and in every way possible destroying whatever share of influence they possessed in the state. When he died, leaving as his successor Feodor, a weak prince, of uncertain temper and infirm intellect, the nobility—naturally enough—hoped to regain their ancient influence in the state, and might have accomplished their purpose without difficulty if their measures to that end had been taken concertedly; but, jealous as they were of the privileges of their class, they were even more tenacious of their individual and family pretensions. They quarrelled among themselves, in short, and, while they were quarrelling, a bold and ambitious man, Boris Godunof, who happened to be the czar's brother-in-law, conceived the project of becoming prime-minister and actual ruler of the empire. Indeed, his ambition extended even further than this. Not content with governing Russia in the name of Feodor, he set covetous eyes upon the purple itself, and was resolved to become czar in name as well as in fact. But this was a delicate and difficult task, and could by accomplished only at great risk and by great patience. Boris was a man of undoubted genius, extreme shrewdness, unlimited ambition, and remarkable personal courage; and difficult and dangerous as his task was, he seems never to have faltered in his purpose from the instant of its conception to the time of its execution.