They were ready on the morning of that day, awaiting the arrival of the Tsar’s escort, but it never came.  Lord Carlisle had sent his cooks on to Moscow to prepare the dinner he expected to eat in his city-quarters.  Nightfall approached, and it was not till “half an hour before night” that the belated messengers arrived, full of excuses.  The ambassador was hungry, cold, and furious, nor did his anger abate when told he was not to be allowed to enter Moscow that night, as the Tsar and his ladies were very anxious to enjoy the spectacle.  The return of the cooks from Moscow and the preparation of dinner, though a mitigation, was no cure for wounded pride, and Lord Carlisle, calling Marvell to his side, and with his assistance, concocted a letter in Latin to the Tsar, complaining bitterly of their ill-treatment inter fumosi gurgustii sordes et angustias sine cibo aut potu, and going so far as to assert that had anything of the kind happened in England to a foreign ambassador, the King of England would never have rested until the offence had been atoned for with the blood of the criminals.  When, some forty years afterwards, Peter the Great asked Queen Anne to chop off the heads of the rude men who had arrested his ambassador for debt, he had, perhaps, Marvell’s letter before him.

On the 6th of February Lord Carlisle and his suite made their public entry into Moscow; but so long a time was occupied over the few versts they had to travel, that it was dusk before the Kremlin was reached.

The formal reception of the ambassador was on the 11th of February.  Marvell was in the ambassador’s sledge and carried his credentials upon a yard of red damask.  The titles of the Russian Potentate would, if printed here, fill half a page.  All the Russias, Great, Little, and White, emperies more than one, dukedoms by the dozen, territories, countries, and dominions—­not all easy to identify on the map, and very hard to pronounce—­were read out in a loud voice by Marvell.  At the end of them came the homely title of the Earl and his offices, “his Majesty’s Lieutenant in the Counties of Cumberland and Westmorland.”

The letters read and delivered, the Tsar and his Boyars rose in their places simultaneously, and their tissue vests made so strange, loud, and unexpected a noise as to provoke the ever too easily moved risibility of the Englishmen.[109:1] When Marvell and the rest of them had ceased from giggling, the Tsar inquired after the health of the king, but the distance between his Imperial Majesty and Lord Carlisle being too great for the question to carry, it had to be repeated by those who were nearer the ambassador, who gravely replied that when he last saw his master, namely on the 20th of July then last past, he was perfectly well.  To the same question as to the health of “the desolate widow of Charles the First,” Carlisle returned the same cautious answer.  He then read a very long speech in English, which his interpreter turned into Russian.  The same oration