eated
it upon his arrival at the city of Twer, and then, in order that the
other towns along his route might have no reason to complain of
partiality, he bestowed upon all of them a like manifestation of his
imperial regard.

It is not my purpose to describe in detail the elaborate and ingenious
cruelty practised in the massacre of the Novgorodians. The story is
sickening. Ivan first heard mass, and then began the butchery, which
lasted for many days, was conducted with the utmost deliberation and
most ingenious cruelty, and ended in the slaughter of sixty thousand
people. Ivan had selected certain prominent citizens, to the number of
several hundred, whom he reserved for public and particularly cruel
execution at Moscow. Summoning the small and wretched remnant of the
population to his presence, he besought their prayers for the
continuance and prosperity of his reign, and with gracious words of
farewell took his departure from the city.

The execution in Moscow of the reserved victims was a scene too horrible
to be described in these pages. Indeed, the half of Ivan's enormities
may not be told here at all, and even the historians content themselves
with the barest outlines of many parts of his career. He thought himself
in some sense a deity, and blasphemously asserted that his throne was
surrounded by archangels precisely as God's is. Identifying himself
with the Almighty, he claimed exemption from the observance of God's
laws, and, in defiance of the fundamental principles of the Greek
Church, of which he was the head, he married seven wives. Believing that
he might with equal impunity insult the moral sense of other nations, he
actually sought to add England's queen, Elizabeth, to the list of his
spouses. And he was so far right in his estimate of his power to do as
he pleased, that the Virgin Queen, head of the English Church, while she
would not herself become one of his wives, consented to assist him, and
selected for his eighth consort Mary Hastings, the daughter of the Earl
of Huntingdon. She came near bringing about a marriage between the two,
in face of the fact that the two churches of which Ivan and she were
respectively the heads were agreed in condemning polygamy as a heinous
crime.

For one only of all his crimes Ivan showed regret, if not remorse. His
oldest and favorite son, when the city of Pskof was besieged by the
Poles, asked that he might be intrusted with the command of a body of
troops with