Ivan the Terrible (64 page)

The treaty specified that there would be a ten-year truce between Russia and the Commonwealth, and that Ivan ceded the whole of Livonia in his possession, Polotsk and a neighbouring fort on the left bank of the Dvina, Velizh; Bathory returned to Russia all the other Russian forts conquered by the Commonwealth and did not ask for an indemnity. Ivan was given the title of ‘Tsar’ in the Russian text of the treaty but not in the Polish copy. Other outstanding minor problems were left for later consideration. There was no mention of Russian relations with the Papacy, or of the Ottoman Empire.

This was the end of Ivan's great dream of a Baltic empire and access to a usable port, which had cost so much blood and treasure. Russian efforts to hold on to the coast were hampered by the need to send troops to Kazan' to defend it against a Tatar attack, and the Tsar was now
reduced to a mere toehold on the Baltic, around the mouths of the Neva, possession of which was eventually confirmed to him in the Russo-Swedish truce of August 1583.
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But the Tsar knew only too well that Livonia in Polish hands would cut him off from contact with the West and confine him to the northern sea route again, and the building of Archangel as Russia's northern port was set in hand at once. The land route, passing through Commonwealth territory, was at the mercy of the King of Poland–Lithuania.

Possevino intended to go back to Moscow to report to Ivan, and left Kiverova Gora on 14 February. But in the meantime a tragedy of major proportions had overwhelmed Ivan. He had been made to feel in his own flesh what he had so often inflicted on others. His son, Ivan Ivanovich had died in Aleksandrovskaia Sloboda, in November 1581, and what is worse, had died at Ivan's own hand. This may well have hastened his acceptance of a humiliating peace, his feeling that there was nothing worth fighting for any longer. A brief flash of rage at some obstacle to his will, and he had lashed out with his staff at the head of his son, and within a few days Ivan Ivanovich was dead and his pregnant wife had miscarried.

Ivan Ivanovich was reputedly a handsome, well made young man. Horsey describes him as a ‘wise, mild, and most worthy prince of heroical condition, of comely presence … beloved and lamented of all men’.
¹²
Elsewhere, Ivan Ivanovich is described as ‘shining with wise sense’.
¹³
Not only was he literate but he is reputed to have written a Life of St Antony of Siisk in 1578 and a eulogy of the same saint in 1580.
¹⁴
Antony had apparently been a friend of his mother the Tsaritsa Anastasia. But most of the foreign writers about Russia regarded him as a chip off the old block; Ivan Ivanovich had only too often been present in the torture chamber with his father, at the boisterous festivities in Aleksandrovskaia Sloboda, even at the terrible executions of July 1570. One of the least reliable foreign writers, who was never in Russia and plagiarized others, Guagnini, records that Ivan Ivanovich, ‘filius truculentissimis moribus’, used to trample on the bodies of the executed, ‘piercing their heads with the sharp point of his staff’.
¹⁵
He was now married to Elena Sheremeteva, and Ivan did not like the Sheremetev family. It will be remembered that Ivan Sheremetev major had been arrested, tortured, and finally took refuge in the monastery of Beloozero as the monk Iona, and it is to him that Ivan's letter of 1573 to the monks refers.
¹⁶
Another brother, Nikita, had been executed. I.V. Sheremetev minor was suspected by Ivan of treasonable relations with the Crimean Tatars, but he had restored his reputation by dying under the walls of
Reval in 1577. There remained the youngest brother, Fedor, the father of Elena, the wife of the Tsarevich Ivan Ivanovich, who had been captured by the Lithuanians in 1579, in itself a possible disguise for desertion, and who was reputed to have sworn allegiance to Bathory.
¹⁷

Karamzin quotes many different versions of a serious quarrel between Tsar Ivan and his son Ivan when the latter reproached his father with pusillanimity, and asked for the command of an army to drive the Polish-Lithuanian forces away from Pskov. In another version, a gathering of service gentry in Vladimir demanded that Ivan Ivanovich should be put in charge of the armed forces in place of his father, to drive the enemy out. Ivan began to quake, thinking that his son and his subjects were rising against him, went out to the people, threw off his crown and the purple, proclaimed that he did not want to rule over a rebellious people, spelled out all the great deeds he had done for them, and shouted out to the people: ‘Choose another tsar for yourselves, who will be able to rule you!’
¹⁸
But there is really no evidence to support these stories, and it seems most improbable that Ivan would have killed his son in an outburst of rage at his demand to be put in charge of reviving his father's failing military fortunes.
¹⁹

By far the most probable cause of the quarrel is the one given by Possevino, who had access to many people at court and to much court gossip, whose interpreter had been in the service of Ivan Ivanovich, who knew his doctor, and who arrived back in Moscow only two months after the death of the Tsarevich, when news was still fresh. According to Possevino, the Tsar came upon his pregnant daughter-in-law resting upon a bench in her private apartments, clad in only one garment instead of the three which were
de rigueur
with Muscovite ladies of good family. He rebuked her and boxed her ears, whereupon Ivan Ivanovich, on hearing the clamour, rushed in to his wife and attempted to defend her, calling out to his father: ‘You thrust my first wife into a nunnery for no good reason; you did the same thing with my second, and now you strike my third, causing the son in her womb to perish’ (clearly a report dating from after the event). Elena then miscarried and was delivered of a stillborn baby. It is of course also perfectly possible that the Tsarevich was deeply opposed to his father's irresolution over the war with the Commonwealth, but it is impossible to tell whether this really caused his death. The Tsar's physician, Dr Johann Eyloff, a Fleming and said to be an Anabaptist, was sent for to attend the injured man, and Possevino's evidence, dating from so soon after the event, is more convincing, particularly as he was acquainted with the physician and could communicate with him in Latin.
²⁰
In a later letter to her envoy in Russia
Queen Elizabeth inquired how it had come about that the physician she had sent to Russia ‘had not been admitted to the Tsarevich and been given the chance to save him’. She might have been worried for his fate, but in fact he had not arrived in time.
²¹

Ivan sent for his one time brother-in-law, Nikita Romanovich Iur'ev Zakhar'in, in a letter of 12 November 1581 in which he stated that his son had fallen ill and was now at death's door.
²²
At the funeral, Ivan followed the bier of his son on foot, wearing the Russian form of mourning, black and ragged clothes, with hair growing wild, and without the skull cap normally worn by nobles. Ivan put off his crowns and jewels and fine clothes. The Tsar was overwhelmed with grief; he could not sleep and got up at night, scratching the walls of his chamber with his nails.
²³
Apart from the enormity of the sin he had committed in murdering his son, he was appalled at the succession problem he had created. Ivan Ivanovich had left no heir, Fedor Ivanovich was incompetent to rule, and there seemed to be no likelihood of his wife Irina successfully carrying children to full term.
²⁴
No doubt this disaster, caused by himself, weighed terribly on Ivan's spirits from now on, and it must have affected his willingness to make peace.
²⁵

It was also around this time that rumours of Ivan's plan to seek asylum in England, which could not be kept secret and was true, began to circulate again, arousing much adverse feeling against the Tsar. But since the dramatic death of Daniel Sylvester and the adventurous journey of Horsey, Ivan had been too busy with the war against Stephen Bathory to concern himself with his relations with England, and no letters survive for the next five years. However, the Russian loss of Narva in May 1582 rendered the northern sea route more important to the Russia Company as well as to Ivan, and after achieving the truce with Poland–Lithuania, he may have considered it advisable to reopen negotiations with England in order to provide himself with an ally and an escape route should war break out again.

In England too there was more willingness to negotiate, though Elizabeth herself might not be willing to conclude. She had become more involved in the Dutch revolt in the Netherlands, and had no wish to be entangled in any military complications elsewhere in Europe. Denmark was however raising difficulties with Russia by insisting that English ships trading with St Nicholas, though they did not pass through the Sound, should nevertheless pay the Sound dues imposed by Denmark, which controlled both shores of the entrance to the Baltic Sea. Either that, or Denmark would assert her sovereignty over the open North Sea and demand payment and saluting by dipping the flag when sailing in
the waters which separated the coast of Norway from the sea of Iceland, thus again controlling the trade of the Russia Company and the export trade from Russia.
²⁶
Not only was Elizabeth concerned by Danish pretensions, but she was also anxious to recover for the Russia Company the monopoly of trade with Russia which she had previously enjoyed, which was regarded in England as a reward for having discovered the northern route to Russia, and which was now being breached by the Dutch, who were being allowed to trade to the north with the full consent of Ivan.

F. Pisemsky was appointed Russian ambassador to Elizabeth, togetherwith a
d'iak
, and ordered on 19 May 1581 to open negotiations to create an alliance against the King of Poland–Lithuania, to procure money and military supplies to continue the war (at the time of writing it was not yet over) and to find out if there was a widow or maid, of princely descent, who could make the Tsar a suitable bride. Pisemsky was to inquire about her height, complexion and measurements, to procure a portrait of her, on wood and on paper, and to discover the degree of her relationship to the Queen and the extent of her family. Should the Queen ask why, Pisemsky was to reply that the Tsar was thinking of marrying, that at present he was only inquiring and that if Elizabeth sent an ambassador to Russia the affair could be concluded there. And should the English ask how could Ivan marry if he were already married, Pisemsky was to reply: ‘Our Lord sent to many countries when he wanted a wife, but it did not work out, so he took to himself a boyar's daughter.’ But if the Queen's relative was of good birth, and stately appearance (
dorodna
) and worthy of such a great affair, ‘He would put away his wife and he would engage himself to her and explain that a proper wooing (
svatovstvo
) was not necessary between crowned heads.’ The bride must be christened (meaning that she would have to be rebaptized into the Orthodox religion), together with all her attendants ‘if they wanted to live at court’. If the English asked about the relation of any possible children to Tsarevich Fedor and his descendants, Pisemsky was to explain that it was not possible to disregard the latters' claims, and if they asked whether appanages would be granted to the lady he was to reply ‘what appanages?’ If Pisemsky was not allowed to see the lady, or was refused a portrait, or if the lady were reluctant, he was to return home. Pisemsky's instructions were given to him by Bogdan Bel'sky, the Tsar's then favourite and, odd though it may seem, by Afanasii Nagoi, the uncle of the Tsar's present wife, Maria, as well as by the
d'iak
Andrei Shchelkalov.

The physician sent by Elizabeth, Dr Atkins, known in Russia as Dr
Roman Elizarov,
²⁷
served as the channel through which Ivan made inquiries as to the availability of a widow or a young woman, who might make him a suitable bride, closely related to the Queen, belonging as he put it to an ‘appanage’ family, which was interpreted as being descended from an Earl. The good doctor came up with the name of Lady Mary Hastings (‘Khantis’, or ‘Astis’), who was the Queen's niece on the mother's side and daughter of an ‘appanage prince’, the Earl of Huntington (‘Khuntintinsky’).
²⁸
Pisemsky arrived in England in September 1581, and was received by Elizabeth, at her most charming, in Windsor in November. But the Queen was in no hurry, and was not perhaps quite sure about the stability of Ivan's government. ‘Is your country in its usual state,’ she asked, ‘or is there some agitation among your people?’ Pisemsky replied that those who had been unsteady in their loyalty were now firmly in the Tsar's hand and were serving him properly.
²⁹
Still Elizabeth failed to embark on any discussions, possibly waiting for news of the outcome of the peace negotiations being conducted by Possevino. Pisemsky was urged to entertain himself by hunting deer, but explained rather crossly, that it was the middle of one of the great fasts of Russia and there was little point in killing deer when you could not eat it.

Finally, in mid-December, formal talks began, and again it was clear that Elizabeth would not move from her previous stance: she would not agree to an unconditional alliance, but reserved to herself the right to decide whether Ivan's cause was just, and nevertheless insisted on the concession of a monopoly of the northern trade, and the repayment of what the English traders considered unwarranted taxation (the 1,500 rubles raised for the war). The Queen's tone reflected a perception that Ivan's need was greater than hers, and that therefore she could make demands: ‘That if this may be perfourmed her ma——ty … can lett passe all that is past … and be again Ivan's firm friend.’
³⁰
Ivan refused outright to grant exclusive English access to the port of St Nicholas on the grounds that he was free to welcome all foreign ships to his ports; he did not accept that this was a concession due to England for having discovered the northern route, but thought that the exclusive reduction to a 50 per cent tax on imports served the purpose.