he proposed that they should sign a reciprocal engagement to furnish each other with an asylum in the event of the rebellion of their subjects.  Elizabeth declined the asylum he kindly offered her, “finding, by the grace of God, no dangers of the sort in her kingdom.”  Then he did her the honor to offer an alliance of a different kind.  He proposed that she should send him her cousin Lady Mary Hastings to take the place left vacant by his eighth wife—­to become his Tsaritsa.  The proposition was considered, but when the English maiden heard about his brutalities and about his seven wives, so terrified was she that she refused to leave England, and the affair had to be abandoned.  Elizabeth’s rejection of his proposals, and also of his plan for an alliance offensive and defensive against Poland and Sweden, so infuriated Ivan that he confiscated the goods of the English merchants, and this friendship was temporarily ruptured.  But amicable relations were soon restored between Elizabeth and her barbarian admirer.  If she had heard of his awful vengeance in 1571, she had also heard of the massacre of St. Bartholomew in Paris in 1572!

Russia had now opened diplomatic relations with the Western kingdoms.  The foreign ambassadors were received with great pomp in a sumptuous hall hung with tapestries and blazing with gold and silver.  The Tsar, with crown and scepter, sat upon his throne, supported by the roaring lions, and carefully studied the new ambassador as he suavely asked him about his master.  A police inspector from that moment never lost sight of him, making sure that he obtained no interviews with the natives nor information about the state of the country.  Although the Tsar was reputed to be learned and was probably the most learned man in his nation, and had always about him a coterie of distinguished scholars, still there was no intellectual life in Russia, and owing to the Oriental seclusion of the women there was no society.  The men were heavily bearded, and the ideal of beauty with the women, as they looked furtively out from behind veils and curtains, was to be fat, with red, white, and black paint laid on like a mask.  It must have been a dreary post for gay European diplomats, and in marked contrast to gay, witty, gallant Poland, at that time thoroughly Europeanized.

Next to the consolidation of the imperial authority, the event in this reign most affecting the future of Russia was the acquisition of Siberia.  A Cossack brigand under sentence of death escaped with his followers into the land beyond the Urals, and conquered a part of the territory, then returned and offered it to Ivan (1580) in exchange for a pardon.  The incident is the subject of a bilina, a form of historical poem, in which Yermak says: 

  “I am the robber Hetman of the Don. 
  And now—­oh—­orthodox Tsar,
  I bring you my traitorous head,
  And with it I bring the Empire of Siberia!