the performance of a condition which might prove impossible, and which was certainly disgraceful. Besides his share of Livonia, he demanded, not a wife indeed, nor merely a woman, but the heiress of the Jagellons, a part of Poland! And on this he insisted, against all reason and against all apparent possibility, for the lady was married, and even if she became a widow, was not very likely to consent to marry the man who had carried her off. Unmoved, he followed up his idea, and this proves that the mighty crisis in which he was then involved within the borders of his Empire did not disturb his mind so much as has been supposed; but he developed and applied his idea in a way which points to a certain weakening of the intellectual faculties corresponding with a simultaneous exasperation of the worst instincts of his nature. In the case of men of robust temperament, drunkenness produces this partial derangement, and Ivan, in the fierceness of his conflict, in the constant use and abuse of his strength, and the hideous stupefaction of the sufferings inflicted under his direction, was drunk for several years—drunk with rage, with pride, with blood—though he went his way, all the same, stumbling, and contrived, in spite of some falls and many extravagances, to maintain a marvellously complete sense of what he had to do, of his interests and his duties.
Fortune, which may be said to have favoured him on this occasion, forbade the execution of the treaty of the sloboda of Alexandrov. In May, 1567, a Muscovite embassy proceeded to Upsala to claim its ratification and the surrender of Catherine's person. Ivan, meanwhile, had bethought him of asking the hand of one of Erik's sisters for his son, now eighteen years of age. The girl was sixteen, and her beauty was already renowned. But the Tsar demanded Revel with her as her dowry. This was asking too much, and, further, the Russian envoys found an Opritchnina, in Erik's country, which, as to misconduct and excesses, quite rivalled their own. Wrestling with an aristocracy which could not forgive him his origin, and was disgusted by his violence, 'the son of the crowned merchant,' as Ivan had dubbed him, was raving too, and at the Castle of Gripsholm the scenes of a distressing drama were being enacted, one by one. For some time the ex-Duke of Finland, imprisoned within its walls, had been expecting death. A verdict pronounced in 1563 had condemned him, and the King's favourite, Persson, himself doomed to a terrible end, was pressing the execution of the sentence. Erik, though blood had flowed in torrents at his command, ever since 1562, had some scruples of conscience. To satisfy Ivan, he had endeavoured to separate Catherine from her husband, but the intrepid daughter of the Jagellons, proof alike against the most
