the last of Ivan’s Vremenszhiki; Nikita Romanov was important as maternal uncle of the new Tzar, and Boris Godounov, descendant of a Tartar family Christianised in the fourteenth century,175 stood nearest the throne from the fact of being brother to the Tzaritza Irena.176 The Douma, thus constituted, did not long retain its original formation. A sudden popular commotion in the capital took the form of an ugly rush towards the Kreml; the Kitai-gorod was overrun by a surging mob of many thousands, scarcely to be held back by the strielitz from forcing the gates of the citadel. Mstislavskie and Romanov, fronting this tumultuous gathering and inquiring the nature of its demands, learned from a thousand throats that the blood of Bogdan Bielskie was in request. A compromise was effected; the offending boyarin was removed from the Council to the comparatively harmless post of Governor of Nijhnie-Novgorod, and the Moskvitchi returned to their houses. Whether this was a spontaneous ebullition, a reaction from the passive endurance under Ivan, or whether it was set afoot by the Shouyskie family, who had considerable influence among the merchant class, and were not unused to such machinations, it strengthened the hands of the one man whose authority dwarfed that of Romanov, Shouyskie, and Mstislavskie alike. Godounov was a man capable of grasping to the full the advantages which his position as kinsman of a weak, easily-ruled sovereign gave him, and he was of sufficient merit to labour for the welfare of the State as well as for his own interests. The latter were by no means neglected; immense territorial possessions in the Dvina district and along the valley of the Moskva, certain State revenues and other desirable perquisites swelled his yearly income to the estimated total of 93,000 roubles,177 and he was reputed to be able to bring 100,000 men into the field.178 But the man who swayed the councils of the Tzarstvo and stood behind the puppet-monarch Thedor was far removed from the ordinary type of Vremenszhikie, and the internal and foreign affairs of the realm suffered nothing by the transfer of administration from Ivan IV. to Boris Godounov. His predominance checked, if it did not altogether repress, the boyarin struggles and intrigues which the weakness of the Tzar invited, and at the same time the man who was practically Regent had the address to govern as though with the co-operation of the whole Council. One of the first acts necessitated by the political circumstances of the Court was the removal or banishment of the Tzarevitch Dimitri, with his mother and the whole clan of the Nagois, to Ouglitch, a town some 90 verstas from Moskva. Here they remained in a state of repressed disaffection, biding their time till the day when the young Dimitri should succeed his half-brother and the Nagois should dispossess the Godounovs. This was a factor which Boris had always to reckon with, and which perhaps forced his statesmanship out of the legitimate groove of throne-serving. That his ascendancy would be accepted without a struggle by the other members of the Council was scarcely to be expected; Romanov died in 1586, and soon after Mstislavskie drifted over to the Shouyskie faction, in opposition to Godounov. That intrigues would be set on foot against his authority was extremely probable, but whether a definite plot existed or not, one was at least “discovered,” in which the two counsellors and several other boyarins were implicated. The offenders were dealt with in a spirit of moderation which had been long foreign to the Court of Moskva; Mstislavskie entered the Kirillov monastery at Bielozero, others of his party were imprisoned or banished to distant parts of the realm. The Shouyskie, enjoying the protection of the Metropolitan (Dionisie), survived the storm which swept away so many of their colleagues. Meanwhile the Regent’s diplomacy had been exerted to defer, for the time being, hostilities with any of the four states—Turk, Pole, Swede, and Tartar—which permanently threatened Russia with aggression. With Sweden a prolongation of the truce for four years was effected in December 1585; the Krimskie khanate was weakened by civil war and dynastic revolutions, and little was to be feared from that quarter. The chief danger lay with Poland, and Batory was only held back by the controlling hand of the Diet and the protests of the Lit’uanian landowners from renewing his profitable campaigns against Moskovy. Under these circumstances it was with feelings of relief that the Council of State, sitting at Moskva, heard, on the 20th December 1586, of the death of their enemy, which had taken place eighteen days earlier (13th December according to the new reckoning of the calendar, initiated by Pope Gregory and adopted throughout west continental Europe, by which Russian—and English—time was left twelve days behind). The death of this prince reversed the whole position of affairs between the two countries, and instead of living in constant apprehension of fresh inroads upon their territory, the Moskovites were able to entertain the prospect of an advantageous union with the neighbour State. For the third time Thedor had a chance of securing the Polish crown by election, and Godounov hastened to support his candidature with more vigorous measures than had been employed on the former occasions. The Russian party, both in Poland and the grand duchy, had gained strength since the last interregnum, and the Regent was able to offer terms of a nature likely to appeal to many of the electors. A perpetual peace between the two Slav powers would allow of a vigorous and hopeful opposition to Ottoman aggression, and the troops of Moskovy, including Kozaks, Tcherkess horsemen, and Tartars from Eastern Russia, would be placed, free of charges, at the disposal of the Poles. Moldavia, Bosnia, Servia, and Hungary would be wrested from the Sultan and incorporated with Poland (an arrangement to which the Kaiser might have had a word to say), and Estland would be snatched in like manner from Sweden and annexed to the Lekh kingdom, except Narva, which would be Moskovy’s modest share of the spoil. Moreover, the rights and liberties, as well as the taxes and revenues of Poland, would remain in the hands of the Senate. Neither of the alternative candidates—the Archduke Maximilian, brother of the Emperor, and Sigismund, son of King John of Sweden and of a Yagiello princess—could hold forth such tempting inducements. The imperial Habsburg family was held in cheap estimation on account of its failure either to defend its hereditary dominions against the Turks, or to exert its authority over the Protestant princes of Northern Germany, and the Emperor himself was alluded to as “great only by title, rich only in debts.” The Archbishop of Gniezno, who had at one time and another supported the Valois and Habsburg parties, on this occasion exerted his influence on behalf of the Rurikovitch. An anarchical assembly which met near Warszawa in July (1587) under the name of a Diet, but which resembled more a triple-divided camp, was reduced to some degree of order and coherence by the adoption of badges distinctive of the various candidates. The partisans of Thedor displayed a shapka (conical Russian head-gear), those of Maximilian an Austrian cap, while the sea-power of Sweden was typified by a herring—presumably salted. The shapka carried the day by a large preponderance, and nothing remained for the agents of Thedor but to satisfy the final stipulations of the Polish Senate. Besides the demand for a certain sum of money down, which would have been conceded, the obstacles to a ratification of the election were seemingly trifling; but they were insuperable. Thedor would not consent to be crowned at Krakow, to put the title King of Poland before that of Tzar of the Russias, nor to dally in any way with the Roman Catholic religion. Without these concessions the Poles refused to bestow their suffrages on the Russian prince, and their choice finally fell on Sigismund Vasa, whose election brought the crowns of Poland and Sweden, Moskva’s two hereditary enemies, into the same family. That Godounov should have declined to bargain further with the Polish electors on behalf of Thedor does credit to his foresight; for the Russian sovereign to have accepted the crown under the limitations and conditions imposed by the Senate would have been to surrender at the outset to the turbulence and independence of the western Slavs, and possibly to weaken his hold upon his own spell-bound subjects. He would have ruled over the Polish palatinates as nominally as Rudolf over the free cities of Northern Germany, and the infusion of the ideas of the western commonwealth into Moskovite minds would have been pouring new wine into old bottles with disastrous result.
The Regent, disconcerted by the submission of all the parties in the Diet to the accession of the Swedish prince, managed to avert a possible outbreak of hostilities between the countries which had so nearly been allied by compacting for a truce of fifteen years.
While dealing with the precarious foreign affairs of the country and superintending the domestic administration, Godounov had to fight hard to maintain his own position. Thedor had inherited from his father, if nothing else, a weakness for all that appertained to religion, and the greater part of his
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