His grievances were real.  His boyars were desperate and determined, and even with their foreheads in the dust were conspiring against him.  They were no less terrible than he toward their inferiors.  There never could be anything but anarchy in Russia so long as this aristocracy of cruel slave-masters existed.  Ivan (like Louis XI.) was girding himself for the destruction of the power of his nobility, and, as one conspiracy after another was revealed, faster and faster flowed the torrent of his rage.

In 1571 he devoutly asked the prayers of the Church for 3470 of his victims, 986 of whom he mentioned by name; many of these being followed by the sinister addition:  “With his wife and children”; “with his sons”; “with his daughters.”  A gentle, kindly Prince had been converted into a monster of cruelty, who is called, by the historians of his own country, the Nero of Russia.

He was a pious Prince, like all of the Muscovite line.  Not one of his subjects was more faithful in religious observances than was this “torch of orthodoxy”—­who frequently called up his household in the middle of the night for prayers.  Added to the above pious petition for mercy to his victims, is this reference to Novgorod:  “Remember, Lord, the souls of thy servants to the number of 1505 persons—­Novgorodians, whose names, Almighty, thou knowest.”

That Republic had made its last break for liberty.  Under the leadership of Marfa, the widow of a wealthy and powerful noble, it had thrown itself in despair into the arms of Catholic Poland.  This was treason to the Tsar and to the Church, and its punishment was awful.  The desperate woman who had instigated the act was carried in chains to Moscow, there to behold her two sons with the rest of the conspirators beheaded.  The bell which for centuries had summoned her citizens to the Vetche, that sacred symbol of the liberty of the Republic, is now in the Museum at Moscow.  If its tongue should speak, if its clarion call should ring out once more, perhaps there might come from the shades a countless host of her martyred dead—­“Whose names, Almighty, thou knowest.”  Ivan then proceeded to wreck the prosperity of the richest commercial city in his empire.  Its trade was enormous with the East and the West.  It had joined the Hanseatic League, and its wealth was largely due to the German merchants who had flocked there.  With singular lack of wisdom, the Tsar had confiscated the property of these men, and now the ruin of the city was complete.

While Germany, and Poland, and Sweden,—­resolved to shut up Russia in her barbaric isolation,—­were locking the front door on the Baltic and the Gulf, England had found a side door by which to enter.  With great satisfaction Ivan saw English traders coming in by way of the White Sea, and he extended the rough hand of his friendship to Queen Elizabeth, who made with him a commercial treaty, which was countersigned by Francis Bacon.  Then, as his friendship warmed,