Ivan the Terrible (44 page)

It is also possible that Sigismund was waiting on events in Russia, that he was counting on an uprising against Ivan led by Russian boyars, that he hoped for a response to the letters which he had perhaps sent to them in summer 1567, in spite of the negative tone of the replies dictated by Ivan in July and August, which he had, of course, never, as far as we know, received.
²

Meanwhile Ivan, with an army led by the Princes Mikhail Cherkassky and Afanasii Viazemsky, arrived on 24 October at the western border, and on 12 November he summoned a military council in his camp at Rzhansk, including his son, Ivan, and his nephew Vladimir, as well as the leading boyars and
voevody
. The evidence of what then happened is extremely exiguous and has to be woven together, often disregarding the dates in the sources, in order to produce a coherent story. Almost all of the evidence moreover is of foreign origin.
³
At the Council the Tsar proposed abandoning the campaign because the siege artillery had fallen behind. The Council supported him and the Tsar and the royal family returned to Moscow. It is possible that Ivan called off his campaign in autumn 1567 for military reasons, or possibly he called it off because he had received fresh reports of a plot by the nobles of the
zemshchina
to dethrone him in favour of his cousin Vladimir of Staritsa.
⁴
He had after all lived for some weeks in the summer obsessively countering Sigismund's alleged efforts to seduce his boyars. No doubt a constant stream of denunciations convinced a man so fearful and apprehensive of treason and betrayal that he was surrounded by traitors. Moreover, there is no doubt that Bel'sky, Mstislavsky, Vorotynsky and Fedorov were cooperating closely in a number of political and military fields at the time, and if not plotting together, were certainly acting together, knew each other well and some were related.

The alleged letters of the Russian princes and boyars to Sigismund,
expressing their continuing loyalty to Ivan, were certainly written at Ivan's instigation – that is if the boyars ever actually wrote them. But one cannot take for granted that the four were planning treason. There does not seem much solid evidence that either Bel'sky or Mstislavsky (both were related to Ivan), who were the highest ranking Russian Lithuanians, entitled to be treated as princes of the blood, were planning to flee, and Ivan evidently thought it worth while to keep their services for the time being. Even M.I. Vorotynsky, who had been in disgrace for three years, was kept on, possibly for his military talents. All three of them figure prominently in the negotiations with the Lithuanians recorded in the Russian Office of Foreign Affairs, so that they evidently had ample opportunity to converse with Lithuanian delegates.

The most mature and experienced, and probably the oldest in the group was I.P. Fedorov, or Fedorov Cheliadnin, as he is often known. He had been
konyushii
, Master of the Horse, an office which had been hereditary in the Cheliadnin family for some decades, and was a member of an ancient Muscovite boyar family of great distinction and vast wealth. He was only a Cheliadnin by marriage, for the family died out in the male line and he had married the heiress. During Grand Prince Ivan's childhood I.I. Cheliadnin, the last of the line, who was Master of the Horse until 1541, had acted as the Grand Prince's tutor, and the boy was brought up in his household. His wife Agrafena had been trusted by Vasily III, and had been Ivan's
mamka
or nanny, before the death of Elena Glinskaia. Ivan Petrovich Fedorov had a chequered career, and became
koniushii
by 1549. Later he was active on military service in Livonia, and in foreign affairs and diplomacy in the 1560s. In 1564 he was one of those who signed and put up money guaranteeing the good behaviour of Prince M.I. Vorotynsky. During the first two years of the
oprichnina
, he was close to Ivan and he was also the senior boyar in charge of the
zemshchina
, in Moscow, when the Tsar was absent.
⁵
On the other hand, at the time of the plot, he was the
voevoda
of Russian-occupied Polotsk, only some twenty to thirty versts from the Russo-Lithuanian border, and would have been able to assist the envoy Kozlov on the way to Moscow to meet M.I. Vorotynsky and the two Lithuanian magnates in Russian service.

The accounts given by the two Germans, Staden and Schlichting, roughly coincide and they implicate the trusted commandant of Moscow. Tsar Ivan must have known of Fedorov's letter to Sigismund, even if he did not write it or see it. Was there a plot at all, and was it led by Fedorov, or was there only some ill-considered and incautious grumbling? Or was there merely Polish gossip about what would happen
when Sigismund died? Or was the whole plot, including the letters, engineered by Ivan himself?
⁶
Schlichting suggests that something had been planned to take place in 1567, when Sigismund was on campaign. In the first draft of his account of Muscovy, he wrote to the King of Poland that

According to the German
oprichnik
Staden, a plot had developed in the
zemshchina
to replace Ivan as Tsar by his cousin of Staritsa, and it was Vladimir Andreevich himself who betrayed the plot to Ivan, whereupon Ivan cancelled the campaign and returned to Aleksandrovskaia Sloboda.
⁸

Thus both in Russia and in Poland the much heralded military campaign of 1567 melted away. Ivan clearly seemed more and more convinced of the existence of a deep-rooted plot but, as so often, bided his time. Fedorov may have been the prime mover in the conspiracy as Schlichting suggests; but it is also possible that he, whose reply to Sigismund was so much more restrained than those of the princes, had no desire to side with Sigismund; he may well have been the reason why the whole plot failed, indeed he may well have been the prime cause for the arrest of Kozlov who had after all originally gone to him in Polotsk. It must be remembered that in 1553 Fedorov was one of the most loyal supporters of the baby Dmitri during Ivan's illness. At any rate his behaviour seems inconsistent.

Indeed, once before, Fedorov had been the target of written approaches from Chodkewicz in Lithuania, when he was governor of Dorpat in Livonia in 1562, and he was then rebuked by Ivan and ordered not to communicate directly with the Lithuanians but to send any communication to the Tsar.
⁹
And he was reputed to have been one of the leaders of the protest made by the service gentry after the
Zemskii sobor
of 1566. But the boyars may have feared for themselves and given up their plans when Sigismund cut short the campaign against Russia in
autumn 1567. Whereupon the plot unravelled, the boyars, the Prince of Staritsa and Duke Magnus of Denmark who was already being enmeshed in Ivan's plans for Livonia, fearing mutual betrayal, gave the Tsar the names of the conspirators.
¹⁰

Fedorov's disgrace became manifest when Ivan started to harass his retainers and confiscate his lands in autumn 1567 without any arrest or trial. He entrusted two of the principal
oprichniki
, Grigory Lovchikov and Maliuta Skuratov, with leading punitive detachments through Fedorov's estates in Kolomna (to which Fedorov had recently been banished) killing large numbers of his retainers and their families.
¹¹
Schlichting charges the
oprichniki
with carting away an enormous quantity of Fedorov's treasure in gold, silver and household goods.
¹²

Kurbsky singles out the treatment of Fedorov by Ivan in his
History
:

Kurbsky later adds that he had heard from an eyewitness that Ivan ordered several people in one of Fedorov's estates to be bound and held in the rooms of a number of houses under which barrels of gunpowder were placed and blown up, flinging corpses into the air, to the Tsar's delight. Whereupon, adds Kurbsky, ‘he and all his children of darkness [the
oprichniki
], verily like a madman surrounded by raving madmen … galloped at full rein to gaze upon the mangled corpses of Christians’,
¹³
doubtless shouting
hoyda! hoyda!
a war cry of the wild cavalry of the steppes often used by Ivan.

The persecution of Fedorov and his people was carried out throughout 1567 and early 1568, against a background of increasing tension between the Tsar and the Metropolitan, Filipp. From the beginning Filipp had set himself against the barbarities of the
oprichnina
, though he had sworn an oath not to interfere in its affairs, and at first he tried to persuade Ivan in private, threatening him with the Last Judgment. But in a Church Council, probably in late 1567 or early 1568, he attempted to gather support for the abolition of the
oprichnina
. Filipp was unable to win the backing of all the hierarchy, and he was
denounced to Ivan by one of the members of the Church Council, probably Pimen, Archbishop of Novgorod.
¹⁴
Ivan, determined to bring him to trial, though many, even in the
oprichnina
, thought that trying a metropolitan was beyond the powers of a secular tribunal. The Tsar sent a deputation to the Solovki monastery to collect evidence against the Metropolitan of misbehaviour in his private, as well as in his ecclesiastical life. The monks do not seem to have been very cooperative and when the deputation departed for Moscow, they – the monks – locked up all the documents and the treasury.

But now there was no holding Filipp back. On 22 and again on 24 March 1568, during the church service in the Cathedral of the Dormition in the Kremlin, the Metropolitan openly attacked the
oprichnina
, just when the Tsar happened to have arrived in the capital with a large military escort. The ‘Life of Filipp’ (a hagiographic work, written many years later) describes the dramatic scene of the courageous priest challenging the men-at-arms with their naked swords, clothed in the black cloaks of the
oprichniki
.
¹⁵
‘Gracious tsar and Grand Prince’ proclaimed Filipp,

Ivan was so furious that he replied ‘I have been too merciful to you, Metropolitan, and to your fellows in my land; I will give you something to complain about.’

Ivan then summoned the hierarchy to defrock the Metropolitan, and execute him. He always prided himself on the serious way in which he approached his responsibilities for the spiritual welfare of his land. The Boyar Council was unable to act, according to Skrynnikov, because it had been weakened by the execution of many of its members and by its division between the
oprichnina
and the
zemshchina
. In any case as the Tsar's council it had no real standing to act on its own. Filipp, without giving up his rank, now withdrew from the palace of the Metropolitan in the Kremlin to the small Greek monastery of St Nicholas outside its
walls. On 28 July 1568 a further incident took place at a religious service in the Novodevichi convent when Filipp loudly rebuked members of the
oprichnina
– possibly Moslem Tatars – who, in contravention of the rules laid down in the
Stoglav
, had not removed their skullcaps in the church.

The wave of persecutions which engulfed Moscow touched Filipp closely since the Kolychevs, a Novgorod family, many of whom had been executed, had been followers of the house of Staritsa for many years. Ivan continued to treat his Metropolitan with grudging meanness, and it was Vladimir of Staritsa who gave the Metropolitan lands to support him.
¹⁶
He began to be seen as the spokesman for the whole of the
zemshchina
, protesting, if Taube and Kruse and Schlichting are to be believed, against the really outrageously sadistic treatment of men, women and children, and the sodomitical orgies indulged in by Ivan and his
oprichniki
.
¹⁷
After Filipp's denunciations in the Cathedral of the Dormition, many of his ecclesiastical followers and servants were arrested; four church elders were beaten to death through the streets – a fact later confirmed in the
Sinodiki
. The followers and men-at-arms of Fedorov were sought out and massacred as were those who had taken part in the
sobor
of 1566 and even many of those who had once been exiled to Kazan' and then allowed to return. The repressions were completely arbitrary, families were arrested regardless of status and dispatched without any form of trial, in some cases by Ivan himself.
¹⁸

When, sometime in September 1568, Fedorov was summoned to Ivan's presence the last gruesome scene was enacted. Ivan ordered Fedorov to don royal garments such as the Tsar himself wore, and forced him against his will to