The Last Crusaders: Ivan the Terrible (28 page)
‘Hand it here.’
She examined it. ‘This brand within. This came from the Russian Imperial Wardrobe? A gift from Ivan himself ?’
‘Not, not exactly, Your Majesty.’
‘Well, let us enquire no more. Things that take place outside England are of no concern to us, and no doubt barbarous. It is a fine piece. No doubt one of my Court fops and popinjays will give you a good price. The Earl of Leicester, perhaps, or Southampton. We shall see to it.’
There was then an awkward silence while she stared at them. ‘Well?’ she snapped. ‘Be off, be off with you, that is all! We have greater business of State to attend to than fixing up your marriages and selling your cast-off clothes for you!’
Nicholas and Rebecca were married in the parish church of the village by a priest with a tongue too big for his mouth, so that most of Cranmer’s wedding service was lost. But they did hear the bit about not satisfying carnal lusts, and Nicholas glanced sidelong at her, but she refused to glance back.
They kissed on the church steps and he shouted for joy, he couldn’t help himself.
Rebecca and Hodge both wept.
‘No matter,’ said Rebecca gently to Hodge. ‘You know I have a lovely cousin over near Worcester. She is but seventeen, a lass who loves the fields and the woods, and she would love to hear about your travels.’
‘I’ll not marry,’ said Hodge. ‘Not my game at all. I’ve got my new estate to look after.’
Nicholas and Rebecca hardly left their bedchamber for a week.
And Hodge was married to Rebecca’s cousin Sarah by Whitsun.
Ivan the Terrible grew steadily worse after the events of this story, ever more inventive and savage in his cruelties, while fantasizing more and more about leading a crusade against the Muslim world. He even sent an emissary to Rome to ask for Papal support, but none was forthcoming.
In 1577, always jealous of Prince Michael Vorotinsky, who had captured Kazan and saved Moscow, he decided the illustrious nobleman and great commander was guilty of practising black magic. The Czar had him tortured by being tied to a stake between two blazing fires and slowly burned. Ivan himself joined in the proceedings, as was his custom, using his iron-tipped staff to brand Vorotinsky’s flesh. At last the prince, horribly burned but still alive, was placed in a litter to be taken to the Monastery of Belozersk, but he died on the way.
The renegade Prince Kurbsky, one of Ivan’s greatest enemies, wrote from the safety of exile of how Vorotinsky had suffered ‘in his innocence at the hands of that drinker of blood’, and praised the dead hero for having fought ‘from your youth up to your sixtieth year for Christ our God, defending His sheep against the Mohammedan wolf ’.
At last, in 1581, in a rage at what he considered her indecent dress, Ivan struck his pregnant daughter-in-law Elena so violently, he caused her to miscarry. Ivan’s son, the Czarevich Ivan, confronted him. Furious at being questioned like this, and already harbouring deep suspicions that his son was plotting against him for the throne, Ivan beat the Czarevich to the ground with his spear. Moments later he fell on the youth, who was bleeding profusely from a deep wound to the skull, crying, ‘I have killed my son! I have killed my son!’ And so he had. The Czarevich Ivan died four days later.
Ivan lamented extravagantly, gave lavish gifts to the monasteries, prayed for forgiveness – but in his own tortuous theology, he also argued that God too had killed his own Son, Jesus Christ, on the Cross, and therefore he himself was only the more Godlike for what he had done. He died, sickly and half deranged, on March 18, 1584. There were rumours of poisoning.
Devlet Giray, great Khan of the Crimea Tatars, died in 1577, finally relieving Ivan of endlessly having to defend his southern border.
In 1581, having pushed eastwards across the Urals, the Cossacks captured the city of Sibir, and by 1607 they had reached the River Yenisey, already halfway across the vast land of Siberia. Russia was no longer a grand duchy, nor even a kingdom. It was an empire.
Queen Elizabeth I of England had many more marriage proposals, but accepted none of them. Some said that she could not, because she was already married to England.
As well as the prickly correspondence with the Russian Czar, Elizabeth also exchanged several cordial letters with the Sultan Murad, and his wife Safiye. Murad once wrote that he believed Islam and Protestantism had ‘much more in common than either did with Roman Catholicism, as both rejected the worship of idols’, and suggested an alliance between England and the Ottoman Empire. Elizabeth was never going to ally England with anyone if she could help it, but she continued to permit exports of tin and lead for munitions to the Ottoman Empire, and seriously discussed joint military operations with Murad III during the outbreak of war with Spain in 1585.
When Murad died in 1595, the Sultana Safiye made sure her son Mehmed became Sultan, and from then until her death in 1603, she was effectively joint sultan with him.
As for those two battle-scarred old Knights of St John, Sir John Smith and Sir Edward Stanley, who can say? It seems unlikely that they would ever have settled down to a peaceful old age, dozing in the Maltese sunshine …
Author’s Note and Further Reading
The major events in this account are all correct, but for some compression of dates to form a narrative, the crucial ones being the attack on Moscow by the Tatars, its defence by the gallant Prince Vorotinsky, its devastating firestorm, and the subsequent ‘Revenge Battle’ of the Oka.
Most of the main characters were real historical figures, from Sultana Safiye and her maidservant, Esperanza Malachi, to Devlet Giray, Khan of the Crimean Tatars, to those sinister figures in the court of Muscovy such as Elysius Bomelius and Maliuta Skuratov. But at the heart of it all was Ivan himself: the Terrible. The actual Russian word,
Grozny
, has a more complex meaning than merely ‘terrible’. It also suggests awesome, powerful, even magnificent. But I have certainly not exaggerated Ivan’s character, and even some of the smallest details in the novel – his conducting a cathedral choir with a spear, for instance, or his torturing small animals as a boy – are taken from history. One only has to skim through the index of one of the most sober and scholarly recent biographies, by Isabel de Madariaga, to get a true sense of the man:
ill-treatment of … justification for cruelty … Bible, Antichrist … and magic, witchcraft … Kills his son Ivan … debauchery … death of …
De Madariaga’s portrait is the most detailed and up-to-date; also highly entertaining, and lighter reading, are the biography by Henri Troyat, and the racy, colourful account by Harold Lamb,
The March of Muscovy: Ivan the Terrible and the Growth of the Russian Empire, 1400-1648.
Other books I used included
The Virgin Queen
by Christopher Hibbert;
Elizabeth’s London
by Liza Picard, and
The Time Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England
by Ian Mortimer, all highly recommended;
The Elizabethan Secret Services
by Alan Haynes; the wonderful
Lords of the Golden Horn
by Noel Barber;
Subjects of the Sultan
by Suraiya Faroqhi; and
The Ottoman Empire
by Lord Kinross.
There remains some uncertainty among historians as to whether Ivan really did make that infamous proposal of marriage –
whilst already married
– to Elizabeth I. Certainly he proposed marriage to Elizabeth’s grand-niece, Lady Mary Hastings, a proposal which the Queen herself rather coldly rejected on the grounds that Lady Mary would not please any man who was ‘a lover of beauty’, since ‘she has just had the smallpox’. But other letters in the National Archive at Kew imply strongly that Ivan also proposed marriage to the Queen directly, and was rejected, to his great indignation.
And besides, it makes a much better story.
Julia
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