The Romance of the Romanoffs. Joseph McCabe

fell upon his neck and identified him. Her relatives were, of course, promoted to wealth and honour, and even the Romanoffs returned from the monastic shades to the sunlight of prosperity. Monk Philaret was made a Metropolitan, or Archbishop.

      But the rise to power was not so speedy as the fall from it, and both give us some measure of the ignorance and barbarism of the times. Otrepieff was a clever and accomplished man, but he either lacked, or disdained to use in so credulous a world, the art of tact. He brought a Polish wife whose suite laughed at the uncouth ways of the Russians. He himself too openly railed at the backwardness of the country, surrounded himself with foreigners, and acted with scandalous independence. He was plainly, as his adventures would indicate, a sceptic, and he snapped his fingers at the Pope and the Jesuits the moment they had secured the throne for him; but he was no more respectful to the clergy and religious forms of Russia. He disdained monks and ikons, asked no blessing on his table, and refused to follow any of the court-traditions. And within a month of his entrance into the Kreml the adventurer lay dead upon the stones of its courtyard. People, amazed at their own credulity, now exclaimed that he was a sorcerer, and the spell had to be broken by blowing the ashes of his burned corpse from the mouth of a cannon.

      The succession to the throne had now been interrupted, and a ruler had to be chosen. Vassili Chuiski, a military noble of distinguished family, a bald myopic man of little energy, secured the suffrages of Moscow and mounted the throne. But while the sluggishness of communication enabled Moscow thus to choose a sovereign for the entire country, it left the provinces in such a state of confusion and unsettlement that any rebel could find support there. Another Dmitri arose, and was accepted. People recollected that the real Dmitri had, like a true Russian, worn a beard, while Otrepieff had had none. The new claimant had a beard. A regiment of nobles in one province, an army of disaffected peasants and brigands in another, raised the standard of the new adventurer and united their forces within sight of Moscow. There the nobles quarrelled with and deserted their baser comrades, and the new claimant ended on a gallows.

      But the name “Dmitri” was now a phrase under which any kind of rebellion might find shelter. A number of men who claimed that they were sons or grandsons of Ivan the Terrible appeared, and the known morals of that monarch did not make the number implausible. A “third false Dmitri,” a very poor type of adventurer, was fabricated, and before long the rebels again set up within sight of Moscow the court of “the real monarch.” The new impostor went so far as to claim that he was not merely the Prince, but the first “false Dmitri” also, having escaped assassination, and he sent tender messages to his “wife” Maryna (who had married Otrepieff) and her father. In later years they maintained that the impostor had, after killing their servants, torn them from their home and brought them to Moscow, but such trickery was common. Maryna’s father, still thirsting for a crown for his daughter and a share of its magnificence for himself, brought his daughter to Moscow and bade her open her arms to her recovered “husband.” “I would die first,” she said, after seeing the worthless adventurer; but the father persisted, and soon the “genuine” Tsar and Tsarina held court outside Moscow, while Chuiski and his friends nervously kept the city.