Abstract
In 1580 Tsar Ivan IV summoned an English clerk of the Muscovy Company named Jerome Horsey to his presence and informed him that he had “a message of honour, weight and secresie” to convey to the English queen. Russia was being attacked on two fronts—by Poland and Sweden to the west and by Crimean Tartars to the south—and lacked saltpeter, lead, and other crucial military supplies. The last English ambassador to Russia, Daniel Sylvester, had been killed by lightning in 1576 en route to Moscow, and no other ambassador had arrived to replace him.2 Horsey watched as the tsar and his chief secretary of state closed up a packet of letters and instructions “in one of the fals sieds of a wodden bottle fild full with aqua-vita [i.e., vodka, or “Russe wine,” as Horsey termed it], to hang vnder my horss maine.”
[W]ee have thought good in some secreite manner to send yo[ur] highnes for a manifest and certaine token of our good will to yo[ur] highnes estate and suertye: this our secrit l[ett]re, whereunto none are privie besides our selfe, but our most secreite councell, wee doe so regard the suertie of yow the Emperour and great Duke…
—Elizabeth I to Ivan IV, May 18, 15701
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Notes
Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts, Moscow, fund 35, opis’ 2, no. 3; facsimile printed in Olga Dmitrieva and Natalya Abramova (eds.), Britannia & Muscovy: English Silver at the Court of the Tsars (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 209. Henceforth Dmitrieva and Abramova, Britannia & Muscovy.
Sir Jerome Horsey, “Relacion or memoriall abstracted owt of Sir Jerome Horsey his travells, imploiments, services and negociacions, observed and written with his owne hand,” printed (from the original MS) in Edward A. Bond, Russia at the Close of the Sixteenth Century (London: Hakluyt Society, 1861), pp. 184, 146. Henceforth Horsey, “Travels.” Horsey probably wrote this account between mid-November 1589 and late March 1590, shortly before returning to Russia as an official ambassador. Richard Hellie, “Horsey, Sir Jerome (d. 1626),” ODNB. Extracts were published as an addendum to the fourth edition of Samuel Purchas’s Purchas his Pilgrimage (London: W. Stansby, 1626), pp. 973ff.
Re letters, 18 originals from Elizabeth to the tsars are to be found in the Russian State Archives of Ancient Records in Moscow, while 17 Russian translations of Elizabeth’s letters are in the Collection of the Imperial Historical Society, Petrograd, vol. 38 (printed from the “English Books” in the collection of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Moscow). Several letters from later tsars to Elizabeth are in Bodleian, MS Ashmole, 1538–40. For additional material on Anglo-Russian relations see Janet M. Hartley (ed.), Guide to Documents and Manuscripts in the United Kingdom Relating to Russia and the Soviet Union (London; New York: Mansell, 1987). Inna Lubimenko, “A Suggestion for the Publication of the Correspondence of Queen Elizabeth with the Russian Czars,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 3rd Series, ix (1915), p. 115. Henceforth Lubimenko, “A Suggestion for Publication.”
Robert M. Croskey “Hakluyt’s Accounts of Sir Jerome Bowes’ Embassy to Ivan IV,” The Slavonic and East European Review, 61:4 (1983), pp. 546–564.
Subsequent studies have revealed that Tolstoi’s dating is not always reliable: see for example Henry R. Huttenbach, “New Archival Material on the Anglo-Russian Treaty of Queen Elizabeth I and Tsar Ivan IV,” The Slavonic and East European Review, 49:117 (1971), pp. 535–549;
Morgan and Coote (eds.), Early Voyages and Travels to Russia and Persia by Anthony Jenkinson and other Englishmen (2 vols., London: Hakluyt Society, 1886). Henceforth Morgan and Coote, Early Voyages and Travels.
Horsey, “Travels,” p. 233. Horsey’s enthusiasm was evidently shared by Mark Ridley (sent by Elizabeth to act as a personal physician to Ivan’s successor, Feodor), who compiled the first bilingual “dic-tionarie of the vulgar Russe tongue” in 1599. A Dictionarie of the Vulgar Russe Tongue, ed. Gerald Stone (Köln: Böhlau, 1996).
Horsey also noted that he was able to learn Russian “havinge some smake [smack, i.e., experience] in the Graek.” Horsey, “Travels,” pp. 233, 156. See also H. Leeming, “Russian Words in Sixteenth-Century English Sources,” The Slavonic and East European Review, 46:106 (1968), p. 6.
Gustave Alef, “The Adoption of the Muscovite Two-Headed Eagle: A Discordant View,” Speculum, 41:1 (1966), pp. 1–21. For an example of this seal see NA SP 102/49 fol. 1.
Anna Riehl Bertolet, “The Tsar and the Queen: ‘You Speak a Language that I Understand Not,’” in Charles Beem (ed), The Foreign Relations of Elizabeth I (New York: Palgrave, 2011), p. 105.
Ivan to Elizabeth, 24/28 October 1570, NA SP 102/49 fol. 1; Ivan to Elizabeth, May 1582, NA SP 102/49 fol. 2. For an unornamented letter see Ivan to Elizabeth, 20 June 1569, BL Cotton MS Nero B xi fols. 316–17 (a facsimile of this letter is in Felix Pryor, Elizabeth I: Her Life in Letters (London: University of California Press, 2003). pp. 54. For descriptions of other Russian royal letters see Lubimenko “Correspondence of Queen Elizabeth with the Russian Czars,” p. 527; Lubimenko, “The Correspondence of the First Stuarts with the First Romanovs,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th Series, vol. 1(1918), p. 79.
The Russian year began on 1 September and ended 31 August, which further complicates letter dating (Russia did not adopt the Gregorian calendar until after the October Revolution on 1917). Lloyd E. Berry and Robert O. Crummey (eds.), Rude & Barbarous Kingdom: Russia in the Accounts of Sixteenth-Century English Voyagers (Madison; London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), p. xxi.
Evans Principal Secretary of State, p. 160, n. 1. The Stuarts also wrote letters to the tsar in English: see Inna Lubimenko, “Letters Illustrating the Relations of England and Russia in the Seventeenth Century,” The English Historical Review, 32:125 (1917), p. 92. My thanks to Sergei Bogatyrev for confirming this point.
T. S. Willan, Early History of the Russia Company, 1553–1603 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1956), pp. 109–110.
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© 2012 Rayne Allinson
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Allinson, R. (2012). Inward and Secret Letters: Tsar Ivan IV of Russia, 1561–1583. In: A Monarchy of Letters. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137008367_7
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