History of the Russian State, Vol. 9

A.D. 1560 — 1561. New favorites.

Among the new favorites of the Sovereign, the Boyar high-ranking aristocrat Alexey Basmanov, his son, the Carver Fyodor, Prince Afanasy Vyazemsky, Vasily Gryaznoy, and Malyuta Skuratov-Belsky stood out, all ready for anything to satisfy their ambition. Previously, they had hidden under a mask of propriety in the crowd of ordinary courtiers, but now they stepped forward and, by the sympathy of evil, crept into the soul of Ivan. They pleased him with a certain lightness of mind, artificial gaiety, and boastful zeal to fulfill and anticipate his will as divine, without any consideration for other rules that restrain both good Sovereigns and good servants of the Tsar—the former in their desires, the latter in the fulfillment thereof. Ivan’s old friends expressed love for the Sovereign and for virtue: the new ones only for the Sovereign, and they seemed the more endearing for it. They conspired with two or three monks who had earned Ivan’s trust—cunning, wily people who were meant to encourage the Tsar’s timid conscience with indulgent teaching and, by their presence, as it were, justify the disorder of his noisy feasts. Kurbsky in particular names here the Archimandrite Levky of the Chudov Monastery, the chief court sycophant. Vice leads to vice: Ivan, a lover of women, inflamed by wine, forgot