Ivan the Terrible (45 page)

and grasping a knife ‘he plunged it several times into Ivan's [Fedorov] heart’, and all the soldiers present thrust their daggers into him so that ‘his stomach and entrails poured out before the tyrant's eyes’. The body of Fedorov was then dragged around the Kremlin and the city of Moscow by the heels and exposed in the middle of the square while his
retainers and servants were drowned. In a further series of raids by the
oprichniki
on Fedorov's estates, led by Ivan himself; oxen, cattle and horses were destroyed, as were the wives and children of the men who had been killed. Even the wives of the peasants were stripped naked and driven ‘like beasts’ into the forests, where they were cut to pieces. Fedorov's wife was either forcibly shorn a nun or killed too.
¹⁹
All told between a hundred and twenty and a hundred and fifty of Fedorov's retainers, and some two hundred and ninety of their men
²⁰
perished according to the records of the
Sinodiki
. For instance, ‘in the villages of Kolomna, there died 20 people of the Orthodox Christian faith and their names are known to God’.
²¹
Many women were hanged on the gates of their houses, others cut to pieces and the bits shoved down holes in the ice whence people drew their water supplies.

The massacres of 1567 and 1568, the period of most intense terror since the beginning of the
oprichnina
, were closing in on Metropolitan Filipp, as a distinguished member of his family, M.I. Kolychev, an
okol'nichi
, and three of his sons, shared Fedorov's fate on 11 September 1568. (M.I. Kolychev had been one of the guarantors of Prince M.I. Vorotynsky, and went in person to fetch him at the monastery of Beloozero in 1566.) Meanwhile Ivan had gathered together the Church Council which was to judge Filipp on the very inadequate evidence produced by his investigators in Solovki. The Church Council, with some boyars in attendance, met on 4 November 1567 (while Ivan was still at Rzhansk on campaign) and pronounced Filipp guilty of living an indecent and improper life and ordered him to be dethroned. In fact Filipp did not wait for the verdict. He took off his vestments, surrendered his white cowl
²²
and prepared to depart, but Ivan, aware that Filipp had been able to impress his listeners, forced him to remain for the time being in Moscow.

Filipp was concerned not only with the inhumanity of Ivan but also with the political situation in the country, for he admonished the Tsar to give up the division into
oprichnina
and
zemshchina
, and to unite his people. Whereupon Ivan replied brutally, referring to the treason he thought he had detected all around him: ‘What have you to do, monk, with our Tsarist councils, do not you see that they want to devour me (
poglotiti
)’.
²³
Ivan may have been infuriated by the coincidence of support for Filipp with support for I.P. Fedorov among the boyars.

Areas incorporated into the
oprichnina

A year later, on 8 November 1568 (St Michael's Day) a major feast day, when Filipp was again taking the service before a large public, Aleksei Basmanov and Maliuta Skuratov erupted into the church followed by many
oprichniki
and read out the
ukaz
of Ivan on the
destitution of Filipp whose vestments were then torn off him. He was bundled into a sledge and taken to the Otroch monastery in Tver' where he was imprisoned in very harsh conditions. At least he was not condemned to be burnt, as he well might have been. A week later the Abbot of the Trinity monastery, Kirill, was appointed Metropolitan. Clerical and secular servants of the defrocked Metropolitan were mercilessly disposed of by the
oprichniki
.

The atmosphere at court must have been tense and grim. One need only consider the effect that the killing and dishonouring of their women, and the murder of their children was bound to have on the dense tissue of the aristocracy and the gentry, united by so many intermarriages. Moreover, Russian aristocratic women were kept in seclusion, and their virtue cherished. That they should be raped, and hanged outside the gates of their husbands' dwellings in the Kremlin must have contributed to the festering atmosphere in Moscow. Though it may well be that Schlichting fantasizes somewhat in his description of the horrors, it is nevertheless clear that Ivan was set on a career of furious destructiveness and uncontrolled barbarity, and the evidence of the
Sinodiki
does support some of Schlichting's description.

The savagery of Ivan's reaction to what he interpreted as a series of conspiracies against him by his nobles may well have been intensified by the news of events in Sweden in the course of 1568. Erik XIV, apparently restored to sanity and to the government of Sweden, did little to conciliate the Swedish aristocracy, particularly by his marriage in July 1568 to his commoner wife, intended among other things to legitimize his son, Gustav, born in January 1568. A revolt against the King began to take form soon after the wedding, led by his two brothers, John and Karl, who in Russian eyes inevitably played the part of
udel'nye kniazia
or appanage princes like Vladimir of Staritsa. By a strange irony, in August 1568 Erik renewed his appeals to Russia for asylum: he was afraid that his brother John, who was still a prisoner in Gripsholm castle, and whose wife Catherine he still planned to send to Ivan, was plotting against him, and he begged the Russian envoys arriving in Sweden to fetch Catherine Jagiellonka to obtain for him assurances that Ivan would send troops to defend him and ships and sailors to transport him. He was already loading his treasure on to a ship in Sweden when Duke Karl forestalled him and swept him off his throne on 28 September 1568, and two days later John III was proclaimed King by the nobility and the army. Only the intervention of Duke Karl saved the envoys of the Tsar from being assaulted and plundered by John's supporters, revolted by the idea that Erik was about to proclaim himself Ivan's
vassal.
²⁴
Erik was formally deposed by a Riksdag on 25 January 1569. He was afterwards kept in captivity until he died, probably by poisoning, in 1577.
²⁵
So while Ivan was negotiating for a refuge in England against his traitorous boyars, Erik was again seeking for a refuge in Russia against his.
²⁶

The overthrow of Erik was followed by a well organized propaganda campaign in Sweden blackening his reputation as a man and as a king. The effect on Ivan of this gross indignity inflicted on a man who, though of base origin in his eyes, was nevertheless a crowned king who could do no wrong, must have contributed to his own alarm at the thought of his nobles plotting against him in favour of his cousin Vladimir, and to his distrust of everyone. There is no written evidence to substantiate such an assumption but it does seem most improbable that Ivan could have been unaffected by the fate of a crowned head at the hands of his brothers and his aristocracy, and so near his own borders. If this could happen in Sweden it could also happen in Russia, and all the more would he need the assurance that Elizabeth of England would grant him asylum. To someone whose psychological make-up was so delicately balanced, someone who was so easily aroused to fear and fury, the fate of Erik was a grim warning, and parallels with his own situation only too easy to trace. He protected himself by taking more territory into the
oprichnina
notably around his refuge in Vologda, which was becoming his main base. He also extended the protection of the
oprichnina
over the activities and houses allotted to the Russia Company.
²⁷
Meanwhile he moved permanently into Aleksandrovskaia Sloboda, abandoning Moscow and his new palace there, and providing the Sloboda with guards who patrolled the roads and refused admittance to anyone without a pass. In Vologda he made use of the services of English builders and shipwrights to strengthen the fortifications and to build the ships in which he would sail, if necessary, to the Solovki monastery on the island in the White Sea with his treasure, before embarking on English seagoing ships on his way to England.

But Elizabeth had refused to take seriously his appeals for asylum. An English ambassador (as distinct from an agent of the Company), Sir Thomas Randolph, had arrived in St Nicholas on 23 July 1568, instead of Anthony Jenkinson, whom Ivan was eagerly awaiting. Randolph reached Moscow only at the end of September 1568 and was kept cooped up in his residence until 20 February 1569,
²⁸
when Ivan at last consented to see him. The really insulting delay in receiving the ambassador (probably due to Ivan's anger at Elizabeth's tergiversation over negotiations for a treaty of alliance) was explained later by Ivan by
the prevalence of plague in Moscow at the time, but others have put forward the view that the delay in granting Randolph an audience and allowing him out of his residence was caused by Ivan's desire to conceal from him the outrages of the
oprichniki
, and the executions of his nobles and retainers following one upon another.
²⁹

As Elizabeth explained to Randolph, and as he explained eventually to Ivan, Jenkinson had expounded to her ‘very secretly’ Ivan's desire

Certain that ‘thoroughe Gods goodnes allwais shewed to us we have no manner of doubt of the contynuance of our peacable gouernment without danger eyther of our subiects or of any forren ennemys’ Elizabeth had evidently found it difficult to grasp that Ivan might think himself to be in danger from his own people and ‘we doo think that our said servant [Jenkinson] hath mistaken the intencon of the said emperors speche vnto him’. But the Queen now assured Ivan that

Lord Burleigh, the author of this instruction, had ordered Randolph to pass over in silence any question of an offensive and defensive alliance, of which Jenkinson had spoken, in view of the hostile relations between Ivan and the Holy Roman Empire and other kings (Sweden and Poland–Lithuania presumably). The only object of Randolph's negotiations should be to secure privileges for English trade.
³⁰
Nevertheless, though Burleigh rejected any formal alliance, he did stress that Ivan would find support for the defence of his ‘just causes’, as though a treaty had been signed, thus creating some confusion in the mind of Ivan as to the real intentions of the English.

Ivan later explained to Elizabeth in a letter of 20 June 1569 that he had made Randolph wait for an interview because the envoy would not
speak to his officials and refused to discuss matters of moment but concentrated only on ‘merchant affaires’.
³¹
This was a definite attempt to blame Randolph for the delays which had occurred. During the next four months, Randolph complained of the intrigues against him of various English interlopers, and the interception of his letters.
³²
But when the ambassador finally ‘saw the Tsar's eyes’ on 20 February 1569 he indicated to Ivan that he was authorized to speak on those secret matters which the Tsar had discussed with Jenkinson (i.e., mutual asylum in case of need, alliance and possibly, though the evidence is scanty, the subject of marriage) and presented him with a ‘notable great cuppe of silver curiously wrought with verses graven on it’. He was ordered to follow the Tsar to Vologda where further meetings took place in which Randolph defended himself against charges of treasonable activity against the Tsar, spread about by disloyal members of the Russia Company.

Finally, on 20 June 1569 Randolph obtained from Ivan the renewal of the privileges of the Russia Company on extremely favourable terms. For instance, the English law denying the right of English subjects to trade in Russia other than through the Russia Company was accepted as enforceable in Russia.
³³
The Russia Company was not given a monopoly of foreign trade with Narva, but it was allowed a house in Moscow and the right to build houses elsewhere, and to employ a small number of Russian servants. In the Vychegda valley it was authorized to search for deposits of iron. All the Company's houses and servants were to form part of the
oprichnina
, and were placed under its jurisdiction. It is possible that Ivan was so generous because he was counting on English support in the war with Poland–Lithuania. After such concessions he must have expected that Elizabeth would give him something in return. But he must also have realized that the power to withdraw his concessions gave him a hold on England.