God nor your Majesty will ever make him play again in this world!'
Gvozdev was dead!
Like Peter the Great in later days, Ivan gave his jesters a place and a part even in the most solemn ceremonies, and hence the religious emotion felt by those present on these serious occasions, and shared by foreign witnesses, was now and then replaced by very different impressions. Ivan the Terrible, being what we know him to have been, was not capable of keeping up that hieratic attitude in which he would first reveal himself on his throne to his admiring spectators. One day he snatched the cap off a Polish Ambassador's head, put it on that of a choute, and ordered him to bow in the Polish manner. When the man demurred, on the score of ignorance, the Tsar himself mimicked the gesture, went into fits of merriment, and raised a laugh all through the assembled gathering at the foreigner's expense. Or, again, like Napoleon I., he would startle another envoy by an outbreak of rage, a flood of abuse and threats. And it was terror, then, that bowed the backs of the courtiers gathered under the low-vaulted roof of the Kremlin.
But at the Sloboda of Alexandrov, most especially, the various aspects of the Court life, thus adapted to the character and habits of the Sovereign of that particular period, made up one of the strangest pictures ever bequeathed by history to a wondering posterity.
II.—The Sloboda of Alexandrov.
After the conflagration of 1547, by which the Kremlin was almost entirely destroyed, Ivan lived for some time in the village of Vorobiévo, while a wooden residence was being hastily constructed for his use at Moscow, and the brick-built Palace, which had been ravaged by the flames, was being restored. In 1565, when he founded the 'Opritchnina, the Sovereign thought for a moment of building himself another palace within the Kremlin. On consideration, however, he concluded it would be better to remove his new dwelling-place to some distance from that he was giving up to the Tsar Simeon, and he chose a site outside, on the Vozdvijenka, and close to the present Gate of the Holy Trinity. Here he took up his quarters in 1567, but his stay was not a long one. Moscow was always as hateful a residence to him as it was to be to Peter the Great. He preferred Kolomenskoié, his father’s favourite home, where he himself went every year to keep his fête-day. In spite of its wild and forbidding landscape, Vologda, on the river of the same name, also had its charms for him. Here, by his orders, a
