Fearful Majesty

by Benson Bobrick

  Hastily Ivan was tonsured (according to his wish) and posthumously re-christened Jonah. Dressed in a monk’s robe and cowl, with Calvary depicted on the shawl, a few days later he was laid to rest among his ancestors in the Cathedral of St. Michael the Archangel, in the place of honor near the altar, beside his eldest son. At the head of his white-stone sarcophagus was set a blue and yellow goblet of enameled Venetian glass containing the sacramental ointment that had purged him of sin in an instant and transformed him into a monk. The sarcophagus, in turn, was placed in a brass-covered casket embossed with the eight-pointed cross.

  “Though garded daye and night,” wrote Horsey, “he remained a fearfull spectacle to the memorie of such as pass by or heer his name who ar contented to cross and bless themselves from his resurrection againe.”11

  NO SOONER HAD Ivan expired than Godunov, as lord protector, acted to prevent a coup. He went onto the Kremlin terrace, “cried owt to the captaines and gunners to kepe their gard stronge and the gaetts shure, with their peces and matches lighted,” and when Horsey offered to place his own men, powder, and pistols at his disposal, cheerfully replied, “Be faithfull and fear not.”12 Within six or seven hours the treasuries had been sealed, new officers of the guard appointed, military governors with fresh garrisons dispatched to the chief border strongholds of Kazan, Novgorod, Pskov, and Smolensk, and 12,000 gunners assigned to strategic locations along the walls of the capital. “To see what speede and policie here was used,” wrote Horsey, “was a thing worth beholding.”13 Meanwhile, the high clergy and nobility flocked to the Kremlin to swear allegiance to Fyodor.

  Ivan’s demise put Jerome Bowes, still in Moscow, in mortal danger. The powerful officials who had suffered so much for his arrogance were the very men at whose mercy he now stood. “Thy English Tsar is dead,”14 he was informed by Andrey Shchelkalov, his deadliest enemy; and for nine weeks he remained under house arrest as the nobles debated whether or not to kill him.

  Horsey was summoned for his opinion. He personally disliked Bowes, but as a servant of the queen eloquently pleaded for his life. That night Godunov took him aside, warned him not to say too much on Bowes’ behalf – “the lords take it ill” – but promised to do what he could to save him.15

  At length, Bowes was brought to the palace and told that as an example to others who might “so much forgett themselves” he deserved to be dismembered.16 Mercifully, however, they merely stripped him of his cloak, dagger, and sword and “in verie short garments,”17 to his great humiliation, hustled him into the presence of Fyodor. Denied an interpreter and (perhaps for his own good) refused an opportunity to speak, Bowes was given curt letters for the queen rejecting his embassy. “Lett him thank God: God was his gud God,” Shchelkalov told Dr. Robert Jacob the next day, for he had otherwise “bene torne in peeces and throwne over the walls.”18

  Horsey helped Bowes pack up his belongings, and on May 29 accompanied him to the outskirts of Moscow where Bowes swore his everlasting gratitude. Despite fears of an ambush, he made it unmolested to St. Nicholas, but once safely on board an English ship, began to shout obscenities at the Russians on shore and in full view actually tore up Fyodor’s letters to the queen. The chief agent of the Russia Company wrote home: “Wolde he had never come here!”19

  Back in England, Bowes put the best face on things at court, but one year later when Horsey returned and was debriefed, his damaging testimony combined with other evidence to confirm that the embassy had been a disaster. Called to account, Bowes tried to discredit Horsey by inducing one Finch, who had been in Russia with them, to charge that he had almost been roasted by Ivan as a spy because Horsey had betrayed him. Horsey’s star plunged; but when Finch was examined by the Privy Council, he proved “so faint, faultering and fearfull, ever loking upon Bowes what he should saye,” that after a few stern glances from the mighty ministers he broke down and confessed to the frameup.20 Horsey was rehabilitated; Bowes was permanently banished from court; and Finch was clapped into irons and told by Lord Burghley: “Though you wear not rosted, sirra, yt was pittie you had not ben a littell scorched.”21

  FYODOR WAS CROWNED tsar on June 10, 1584. Cannon thundered in salute on the outskirts of Moscow, and thousands of musketeers in silk and velvet, standing eight ranks deep for a length of two miles, discharged their weapons twice in orderly succession. At the head of a huge body of cavalry, he rode through the city to the Kremlin.

  Despite his warrior pose, the new tsar had almost nothing in common with his father except for a Mediterranean nose and weirdly late dentition. Variously described as a simpleton, an idiot, or a “fool in Christ,” he doted on the antics of dwarfs and jesters, and above all loved to run to church, “hang firmly from the bells, and ring them himself.”22 Even as heir apparent after 1582, he had been an embarrassment to his father who, except on rare occasions, had kept him out of sight. Giles Fletcher the Elder, Elizabeth’s brilliant choice to repair Russian-English relations, fills his portrait out:

  For his person of a meane stature, somewhat lowe and grosse, of a sallowe complexion, and inclining to the dropsie, hawke nosed, unsteady in his pase by reason of some weakenes of his lims, heavie and unactive, yet commonly smiling almost to a laughter. For qualitie otherwise, simple and slowe witted, but verie gentle, and of an easie nature, quiet, mercifull, of no martial disposition, nor greatly apt for matter of pollicie, very superstitious, and infinite that way. Besides his private devotions at home, he goeth every weeke commonly on pilgrimage to some monasterie or other that is nearest hand.

  Possevino thought Fyodor “quite unguilty” and hoped he might even prove tolerant toward Catholics; a knowledgeable Polish diplomat suggested that he was, perhaps, “not unlike the Emperor Claudius, pretending to be an idiot to escape a worse fate.”23

  Be that as it may, the people adored him, preferring to be ruled by a gentle bellringer manipulated by able advisers than chastised by an arbitrary tyrant who would save their souls through fear. Everyone, says Horsey, held Fyodor’s accession “for their redemption – as a day of jubilee.”24 Corrupt officials were dismissed, many taxes canceled or reduced, due process restored to the law, the prisons opened – “all peaceably as bred great assurance and honor to the kingdom.”25

  That promise, however, was not to be fulfilled. Ivan’s tormented regime had “so troubled the country, and filled it full of grudge and mortall hatred” that no wise policy in the short term could mend it, nor even a long season of goodwill. “God hath a plage in store for this people,” wrote Horsey. “What shall we say?”26 Fletcher had the answer: civil war. In the Time of Troubles, which loomed just over the horizon, Russia would again be ripped asunder, the Swedes would occupy Novgorod, and the Poles the capital itself, where they would install a Polish tsar.

  THOUGH IVAN WAS “utterly tragic in his inward struggle with self waged concurrently with his struggle against the enemies of his country,”27 he was most deeply tragic as a monarch who came to see his own people as the foe. Whatever the early accomplishments of his reign, or the historical trends to which he may have been attuned, calamities substantially of his own creation overwhelmed them, and the scourge of his epithet remains.

  What shall we say? Though grozny, rendered “terrible,” originally meant “dread” or “awesome,” denoting majesty, the same mistranslation occurs in every language – Ivan der Schrecklich in German, for example, and Jean le Terrible in French. On the one hand, Ivan was “dread” as all contemporary monarchs were automatically dread by virtue of their office – even the young and gentle King Edward VI, “our most dread and soveraigne Lord” – and “terrible” as Pope Julius II was il Papa Terribile,28 the fearsome pope. But in Russia the idea of majesty in the word was uniquely reinforced by both pagan and Christian tradition. As a cognate of groza (storm), it recalled Perun, the Thunder Lord, the supreme pagan deity of pre-Christian Slavs. Perun’s Christian counterpart was Christ Pantocrator, the Lord Omnipotent enthroned, who in the typical Byzantine-Russian icon of Christ lo
oked severely down upon the congregation from the cathedral dome. This was the Christ who judged, who saved through fear. The Last Judgment was called the “Terrible Judgment” by the Greek and Russian Orthodox, and Christ the “just and terrible heavenly tsar,” as one court pamphlet, for example, had put it in 1551. Ivan rather self-consciously assumed the role. “It was no wise prince who trusted his people,” he once remarked, “who had betrayed the Redeemer of the world.”29 For Ivan, Judas was the prototypical traitor, and the Biblical story of the Crucifixion seems to have stood in his mind as the eternal example of what a divinely ordained monarch could expect from his subjects. It is not impossible (speaking psychiatrically) that Ivan’s extreme identification with divinity worked obscurely within him toward the sacrifice of his own son, even as he dedicated his reign, in imitation of Christ, to separating out the damned from the redeemed.

  Though folklore stubbornly sustained his early reputation as a hero against the infidels and his self-projected image as an ally of the poor against the oppressions of the rich, even sympathetic anecdotes of his life tend to be ambiguous, while “terrible” in its colloquial sense became indelibly attached to his name.

  What began as a mistranslation can be called a verdict of history. Ivan’s case recalls that of Selim I, the Ottoman sultan and bigoted Sunni who (among his other atrocities) killed or imprisoned 40,000 Shiites in Anatolia in 1513. Among his own “orthodox” subjects this massacre won him the name of “the Just.” History justly remembers him as “the Grim.”

  AS IVAN WAS entombed, so was he found and resurrected 369 years later on earth, when a “blue ribbon commission of Soviet archaeologists, historians, and specialists in forensic medicine” opened his sarcophagus on April 23, 1953.30 His remains were analyzed, his skull reconstructed. A residue of the sacramental chrism unaccountably remained in the goblet of enameled glass.

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