The First Russian Students in England
Cathi Szulinski
Introduction
This extraordinary story was brought to my attention by an intriguing
footnote. It told me only that four young Russian men had been
sent to England by Tsar Boris to learn English, but that the Time
of Troubles had prevented their return.
What initially intrigued me about this remarkable early foreign-exchange
project were the individual stories. If the young men had not
returned to Russia, then what had become of them? I decided to
try to find out. The quest has led to some surprising places.
Three of the four have obligingly revealed their life histories,
all instructive in their own way. Two led adventurous lives which
might have come straight from the pages of an historical novel.
Both fought and died for the interests of their adopted country.
A third disclosed some strikingly modern issues in international
relations. Meanwhile, the fourth as yet remains vague and obscure
- though I have far from given up looking for him.
Please feel free to copy and distribute any of this material.
I would also be very grateful for any response - comments, corrections,
criticism, pointers to new leads? - to this account of three-and-a-half
lives.
Cathi Szulinski email: elpenora@yahoo.co.uk
On the same subject
an article of Kuznetsov, 2000, in Russian___
Part One: The Four Young Russians
In England in the year 1668, an elderly clergyman made his will
and died. Since his wife had long predeceased him, he left the
bulk of his possessions to his eldest son, whilst small amounts
went to his other remaining children. The will was short, to the
point, and unremarkable. Nothing about this very ordinary document
indicated that this man, the Anglican rector of a rural Huntingdonshire
parish, had an extraordinary life story to tell.
The man who on his deathbed called himself Mekepher Alphery had
started life thousands of miles from the gently-rolling countryside
of England's Eastern Midlands. Mekepher Alpheriev syn Grigoriev
was born into a Russian lesser gentry family, and the story of
how he came to end his life an Anglican clergyman has intrigued
the historically curious for over three centuries.
Mekepher was one of four young men sent to England by Tsar Boris
in the year 1602. His early life is a blank to history, but it
is possible his family included Tsar Ivan Grozny's 'pechatnik'
or official printer (1). Of the other three young men - Sofon
Mikhailov syn Kozhukhov, Kazarin Davydov, and Fyodor Semyonov
syn Kostomarov - even less is known. Perhaps the most we can say
is that all four belonged to the 'deti boyarski', that class of
service gentry who provided the Russian state's military leaders
and administrators, and could have looked forward to lives spent
in battle or in official service. In fact, life had something
quite other in store for these young men. The only other thing
we know for certain is that all were between 18 and 20 years old
when they were selected by the Tsar to make a journey to England.
Mekepher seems to have been the youngest of the four.
To understand the outcome of Tsar Boris' bold experiment, it
will help to look back still further, to the year 1553. In that
year, three ships had set sail from London in search of the fabled
North-East Passage to China and the Indies. It was to be an epic
voyage of trade and exploration, carrying English cloth to be
bartered for the spices and silks of Cathay, but it was destined
never to reach the mystic east. The North-East Passage was to
resist discovery for a further three centuries. Instead, the ships
became separated in a storm off the Northern cape of Norway. Two
of them stumbled upon Novaya Zemlya before veering wildly back
towards Lapland, where they were trapped off Arzina by the ice.
No-one saw them - alive - again. They were discovered by Russian
fishermen in the Spring, each man frozen solid. The Russians,
it seems, preserved their goods until they could be reclaimed.
The third ship, meanwhile, had avoided the treacherous weather
and sailed into the comparative calm of the White Sea. Her Captain,
Richard Chancellor, was astonished to learn that all this vast
land belonged to the Great Lord Ivan Vasilyevich, and once in
Moscow, he was even more overwhelmed by the magnificence of this
unknown sovereign's court. He presented his letters of introduction
from Queen Mary I, which, fortunately enough, included a Greek
translation. When he returned to England, Chancellor had to admit
that although he hadn't found the North-East Passage, he did have
a document signed by the hand of Tsar Ivan 'the Terrible' granting
generous trade privileges to English merchants throughout the
whole of Russia. It was the start of the English Muscovy Company,
the first of the great trading companies that were - with somewhat
mixed results - to help shape British history over the next four
centuries.
By the time of Tsar Boris, English trade was a well-established
fact in Russia. Each year, a number of English ships would arrive
at the mouth of the Dvina, close to what would soon become the
thriving port of Archangel. There, they unloaded their goods for
distribution and loaded up with Russian cargo for the return voyage.
The single most important item of Anglo-Russian trade was naval
cordage. Russian cable and rope supplied the ships that defeated
the Armada, and the great voyages of the East India Company -
of which, much more later - couldn't have taken place without
them.
In the fifty years since the trade began, there had grown up
in Moscow, Archangel, Vologda and other places a generation of
Russified Englishmen, sons of the Company's agents, bred to follow
their fathers into trade. These men spoke good Russian, had a
deeper understanding of the society and its customs, and were
able to avoid many of the cultural misunderstandings that had
dogged their fathers' generation.
One such man was John Merrick. Merrick is ubiquitous in the literature;
it is impossible to read anything about Anglo-Russian trade and
diplomatic relations in the early seventeenth century without
tripping over his name. In Russian documents he appears, thinly
disguised, as Ivan Ulyanov, the name and patronymic he himself
used in Russia. William Merrick had been a well-known Company
Agent in Russia for many years, but his son now eclipsed even
his reputation. John Merrick not only enjoyed an excellent relationship
with the Tsar - some of his letters even betray an unsuspected
degree of intimacy - but everyone who has left written record
of him seems to have liked him.
Besides acting as Senior Agent of the Muscovy Company, the personable
and intelligent Merrick wore many other hats: he translated for
Queen Elizabeth and acted as her ambassador; he escorted home
to Europe two foreign youths who had been studying Russian in
Moscow, and once even signed himself Tsar Boris' 'hollope' - kholop,
or bonded man. In 1617 he reached the pinnacle of his diplomatic
career when, as Sir John Merrick, Knight, he helped to negotiate
the Treaty of Stolbovo between 'the two proud princes' Tsar Mikhail
Romanov and King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden. Meanwhile, he made
his personal fortune in trade, not only in Russia, but also in
the Levant and in the East Indies.
It is often said in the West that Tsar Boris wished to found
a University in Moscow. That much is far from certain, but what
is certain is that in the early years of the seventeenth century
he sent a number of young men abroad to learn foreign languages.
Even the number is obscure - there may have been eighteen in total.
Some may have gone to France, although nothing more seems to be
known about them. Certainly five went to the Hanseatic town of
Lubeck, where they annoyed the Burgomeister by behaving badly
and refusing to learn. They had been somewhat reluctantly taken
on board at the last minute by the Hanse ambassador, who reports
that since his embassy to Moscow had gone well, he didn't feel
he could 'properly' refuse. Perhaps this goes some way to account
for their apparent ill-demeanour abroad. But despite the efforts
of the Lubeck Burgomeister and Councillors to repatriate them,
none of these young men ever returned to their homes.
About the four young men in England, more is known. They were
the first to leave Russia, departing from Archangel on 30 July,
1602 in the English ships. The object of their visit was to learn
English and Latin, and although we don't know how long the Tsar
imagined their education would take, it is clear they are expected
to return within some reasonable period.
Given the omnipresence of Merrick, it seems almost natural to
find him in charge of the youths' education and welfare in England.
The whole project was to be conducted at the expense of the Muscovy
Company, which was already accustomed to pay the costs of the
Queen's embassies to Moscow and to find the living expenses of
Russian ambassadors in London. Yet there is no note of reluctance
about Merrick's acceptance of the task, and in fact, he seems
to have taken the long view about English influence in Moscow.
The youths arrived off Tilbury in early September and came upriver
with Merrick to London. By the end of September they had been
presented to Queen Elizabeth at Oatlands, her Surrey palace, where
they caused enough of a stir to merit mention in a newsgatherer's
letter. Russians were something of an exotic, and slightly scary,
novelty to the English, as the plays of Shakespeare and Thomas
Lodge reveal. Londoners had been in awe of them since the first
Muscovite Ambassador, Osep Napea, arrived in their city in 1557,
with a dramatic tale to tell of shipwreck and loss of life off
the Aberdeenshire coast. Even the London apprentices, notorious
for their ill-treatment of the hapless foreigner, might have hesitated
to hurl their clods of London clay at such daunting 'strangers'.
At their audience with the Queen, it appears she promised the
youths that she would attend personally to finding schools for
them. All the same, it wasn't long before John Merrick was writing
to her Secretary, Robert Cecil, and tactfully enquiring whether
he shouldn't go ahead and make some arrangement himself.
There, unfortunately, the trail goes cold for a while. There
is one reference to their being dispersed to Eton, Winchester,
Oxford and Cambridge, but, with the exception of Mekepher, I have
found no record of their being enrolled in any of the schools
there. However, school admission records for the period are scant,
where they exist at all. Some of them, in those class-conscious
times, list only pupils of a particular social class. Some have
been put together piecemeal - and with painstaking effort - from
a dizzying medley of bursars' accounts, punishment books, donation
lists, matriculation records and the entrance lists of university
colleges to which the schools were attached. Some have even been
supplemented by collecting the names traditionally carved into
the fabric of the building by pupils about to leave school! Given
all this, it is by no means necessary to conclude that three of
our four youths were not there.
It isn't until 1609 that the next trace of the Russian students
appears in English records, and then, it comes from a very unexpected
source. In the next part of this essay, we shall be following
Sofon Kozhukhov, and his fellow Kazarin Davydov, to the Spice
Islands of Indonesia.
___________________________________
(1) A Huntingdonshire local historian and his Russian wife, Ian
and Marina Burrell, are currently looking into this possibility.
I have regularly compared notes and exchanged information about
Alphery with Mr & Mrs Burrell, and should like to acknowledge
their contribution to my knowledge and understanding of his story.
________________________________________________________________________________
Part Two: Sofony Cozucke and Cassarian David
In the record books of the English East India Company of March
1609 there appears the curious note that one 'Sophony, the Russe,'
has been given the sum of ?20. On further examination, this proves
to be none other than Sofon Mikhailov syn Kozhukhov, who has been
taken on as part of the Company's Fifth Voyage. To the Company,
he is Sofony Cozucke, hired as Purser's Mate on board the great
ship The Expedition bound for Bantam in Java. Once there, he is
contracted to stay in the Indies for a further seven years, acting
as a Company 'factor'.
It was seven years since the first ships of the East India Company
had anchored off Bantam, and though business had at first been
a little shaky, it was now booming. There was no shortage of applicants
for the job Sofon had been given, for the very words 'East Indies'
conjured up in the minds of ambitious young men a heady blend
of adventure, exploration and untold riches. To the timeless lure
of diamonds and gold were added the scented charms of nutmeg and
cloves, the exotic luxury items of the day. If the reality of
a job in the Indies often proved to mean near-death from scurvy
after eight months at sea or malarial fever in the pestilential
swamps of Indonesia, the prospect of vast fortunes to be made
continued to attract the enterprising. The intense competition
for places enabled the Company to choose its employees with care:
they had to be able to demonstrate a relevant aptitude and be
'of blameless character'. Most had previous experience with one
of the other trading companies or the Merchant Adventurers. Above
all else, it was almost impossible to gain employment without
being recommended by a patron connected with the Company.
So how had Sofon Kozhukhov come to be there? To answer this question,
we shall have to return from the East Indies and turn direct our
attention once more to Russia.
While Sofon and the three other young men pored over Cicero and
baffled themselves with English grammar, their homeland was entering
upon the undisputed darkest period of its history. Scholars disagree
about the exact point at which the Time of Troubles began, but
by 1609, it was certainly well under way. I don't propose here
to outline the chaotic catalogue of pretenders, revolts, dynastic
strife and foreign invasion that dogged these dark years, although
it contains some fascinating history. It is enough for our purposes
to say that the death of Tsar Boris in 1605 had left the four
young men he had sent abroad in an invidious position. Boris had
continued the policy of his predecessors in encouraging contact
with the West, but many in Russia had found this policy hard to
stomach. His tolerance towards Protestant ideas had shocked some;
for others, there were commercial motives for wanting the much-favoured
foreigners gone from the Kitaigorod. Now, with the country engaged
in a struggle for its very survival, the return of four young
men from hundreds of miles away in a foreign land must have been
very far from the forefront of anyone's mind.
Anyone, that was, except for John Merrick, who we must remember
had been charged with the welfare of the young men. Unlike most
of his compatriots, Merrick had remained in Russia long enough
to write an account of Bolotnikov's revolt, which reached its
height in 1606. He negotiated trade charters with both the first
False Dmitri and Tsar Vasily Shuisky who replaced him. He was
well-aware of the situation in Russia. When he returned to England
shortly afterwards, he must have been wondering what to do with
his four young charges until they could return in safety to their
country.
For two of them, it seems he found his answer in the East India
Company. Mercantile London was a small world in the early seventeenth
century, even more than it is today. A complex network of kinship,
marriage-ties, common interests and friendship held together a
small band of elite merchants, like Merrick, mostly living in
and around the Leadenhall Street area of the City - the Square
Mile, as it is now known. They - or their fathers - had banded
together to invest in ventures, forming overlapping networks of
investors in the various trading companies: the Muscovy, East
India, Levant and Turkey Companies to name only the most famous.
These were the fantastically-wealthy men who ran English overseas
trade.
Like many other Muscovy Company investors, Merrick was also a
member of the East India Company. He was certainly in England
in 1609. There is no direct evidence, so far as I know, that he
was the patron who introduced Sofon Kozhukhov to the Company,
but as we shall see, the hypothesis does receive some confirmation
a little later in our story.
However it had come about, 'Sofony' was on his way to Java. Bantam
was the hub of East India trade, standing as it did at the nexus
of many local trade routes. It had three miles of bustling waterfront,
teeming with junks, prahus and other local craft, and no less
than three long-established markets. Long before the Europeans
- the English and the Dutch - arrived in their great ships, Indian,
Javanese and Chinese merchants were meeting there to exchange
goods: silks, indigo and diamonds, spices, sandalwood and opium.
It also had a climate which Europeans found intolerable, and a
mortality rate that made overcrowded London look like a health
spa. Within six months, of three young men left in Bantam as factors
by the Expedition, only Sofony remained alive.
This scale of mortality meant one thing: if you survived, promotion
prospects were good. After three years in Bantam, Sofony was not
only surviving, but embarking upon an illustrious career. It had
been decided to send him out to Sukudan in Borneo, where a plentiful
supply of diamonds had been found, to open up a new 'factory'
(trading house) there. Before he could leave, however, there was
a ripple of fresh excitement in Bantam: the ships of the Company's
Eighth Voyage had been sighted off the coast. Among the newcomers
was a man known by the name of Cassarian David.
It was Sofony's Russian countryman, Kazarin. When had they last
set eyes upon each other? Was it when they parted for their separate
schools a decade before? Or had there been contact between them
since? We don't know, but there are strong hints that John Merrick
was behind at least this arrival. In the first of his letters
home, 'Cassarian' acknowledges Merrick's favours to him and promises
his best endeavours for the Company. Clearly, Merrick has done
something akin to providing him with a reference. Just as we suspected
in the case of Sofony, he is the patron who has found Kazarin
a job.
Unfortunately, this account would blossom into a full-scale book,
were I to recount all that is known about Sofony and Cassarian's
time in Indonesia. At times, we have almost a day-to-day account
of their movements in the letters of the East India factors to
their employers in London. The story, therefore, has had to be
greatly condensed - at the expense of some lively detail, which
I greatly regret. Someday, I hope perhaps to be able to cover
the subject more fully.
We had better content ourselves with saying that both had eventful
lives. Sofony, in Sukudan, found himself navigating the creeks
and rapids of Borneo in search of trading partners, and coming
to blows with the head-hunting Dyak people of the uncharted interior.
Faced with hundreds of these fearsome warriors armed with deadly
poison blowpipes and long knives, he seems to have kept his head
long enough to seize up, prime and fire a musket - no split-second
process. Sofony Cozucke seems to have been a dynamic, energetic
man whose name was known all over the Indies - in a variety of
creative spellings. Kazarin, or Cassarian, on the other hand,
is more contemplative - if his letters are anything to go by.
Where Sofony seems to crave adventure, Cassarian seeks peace.
Unfortunately for him, the East Indies was the last place on earth
he should have chosen for that.
Before the joint-stock voyages which came later, each Company
voyage was treated as a separate investment. What this meant was
that between the men of the various Voyages, there was often intense
rivalry. Instead of trading in concert as agents of a single company,
factors from different voyages bid against each other, lowering
profits instead of maximising them. By 1614, this rivalry had
become personal - and bitter.
The English factories in Bantam were in a parlous state. Various
rival contenders squabbled over the title of Chief Factor, a distinction
which in any case no longer carried any authority. Half mad with
fever, they attacked each other with drawn swords. Instead of
working, they spent their time in drinking- dens downing arrack,
a local rice spirit of fearsome strength, and consorting with
native prostitutes. Amid all this chaos, Cassarian stood aloof.
He ploughed a lonely furrow in a factory of his own and denounced
the chief culprits to the Company by letter.
Cassarian's letters are interesting. They are florid, over-written,
and wordy - even for the seventeenth century. His images are often
Biblical, and in an age when men routinely speak of God, real
religious conviction comes across in them. It is interesting to
note that one of the things of which he accuses his quarrelsome
colleagues is vanity - not, at that time, a mere unfortunate character
defect, but a sin. He is pious, in the best sense of the word.
It seems that Cassarian, at least, has made a serious religious
conversion. He is no longer Orthodox, but Protestant. Returning
to Russia, if it ever becomes a possibility, may present problems
for him.
Meanwhile, there was adventure in store for him, too. Finding
himself at Sukudan at around the same time as Sofony was becoming
embroiled with the Dyak, he assembled a native crew and went exploring
along the southern coast of Borneo in search of new markets. At
first, all went well at Sambas, but as time went on, he became
convinced that the local King was trying to poison him. After
having turned down no less than three dinner invitations, he had
all his goods packed up in the dead of night and fled with the
first light. After a hair- raising voyage he returned to Sukudan,
collected six English colleagues and set out once more to do business.
His next port of call was Banjarmassin, where he at last found
something of that peace he craved.
Banjarmassin is built on water. It is picturesque in the extreme
even today, with its houses on stilts and its floating markets.
It is easy to see why Cassarian might have found it so utterly
charming. Waxing lyrical, he declares it 'as like as may be' to
the Land of Canaan, flowing with milk and honey. Food is plentiful
and cheap, the people are hospitable, and there are trade goods
in abundance. Cassarian sent away his six colleagues for supplies
and stayed there alone, making arrangements. As was the case in
all of coastal Borneo, the goods Englishmen desired were diamonds
- plucked from the river beds when the water was at its lowest,
in much the same perilous way as in other parts of the world men
dived for pearls - alluvial gold, and perhaps the weirdest commodity
ever to be traded between peoples: bezoar stones. Bezoar stones
are concretions found in the entrails of goats, much prized in
Europe as an antidote to various poisons.
Modern Indonesia consists of 13,677 islands, of which around
6000 are inhabited. The ones which are going to concern us now
are tiny. Around one thousand miles east of Banjarmassin lie the
South Mollucas: Ceram, and its smaller neighbour, Ambon. A hundred
miles to the south of these are the Banda Islands. Lonthor, the
largest of the six main Bandas, is barely eight miles long, and
Pulo Run ('Run Island'), one of the smallest, only two. Nevertheless,
in the early seventeenth century, these pocket-handkerchief scraps
of islands exercised an influence way out of proportion to their
size. Vast fortunes were to be made there, and a great many lives
were lost in pursuit of its riches. For nowhere else in the world
did the nutmeg tree flourish so abundantly as in the Bandas, and
more to the point, nutmegs and mace - the dried membrane surrounding
the fruit - could be bought cheaply, shipped back to London in
vast quantities, and traded at a staggering profit running into
thousands per cent.
The Banda nutmeg trade was at that time almost exclusively in
the hands of the Dutch. This was nothing new; English merchants
had been beaten to Bantam by their great trade rivals, whose own
East India Company, the VOC, had a five year head start on them.
All the same, competition up until this point had been reasonably
friendly. The men drank together in Bantam, occasionally getting
into drunken brawls in the streets, but generally sticking together
as Europeans a long way from home. Indeed, the Javans found it
hard to distinguish between them. Any serious rivalry in the Indies
had always fallen out along religious lines, between the two Protestant
nations and the Catholic Spaniards and Portuguese. The English
traded where they chose, and so did the Dutch, competing much
as they did in other parts of the world - in Russia, for one example.
All that was about to change, and in part, the change was fuelled
by the animosity between two men: John Jourdain, Chief Factor
for the English in Bantam, and Jan Pieterzoon Coen, the future
Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies. Even Dutch historians
agree that Coen was no teddy-bear, and he shocked the more moderate
of his colleagues at the time. His philosophy of commerce was
simple: there could be, he said, no trade without war, nor war
without trade. As for Jourdain, he was stubborn and a good hater.
The two had first met in the Moluccas, when Coen had refused Jourdain
permission to land at Ambon, and from there, things had gone from
bad to worse. From then on, Jourdain hated Dutchmen. When the
Company's factor on Butung, a staging post on the way to the Moluccas,
reported back to him that the Bandanese were finding Dutch war-and-
trade policy unpalatable, Jourdain had personal reasons for listening
to his suggestions. No Dutchman was going to tell John Jourdain
where he could and couldn't trade.
Jourdain looked around for a man with a cool head to be the English
presence in the Bandas. His eye fell upon the adventurous Sofony
Cozucke. It was the start of 'a hellish life' for the young Russian
and the few men who went with him to the Banda Islands. They helped
the islanders of Pulo Ay, one of the westernmost of the Banda
islands, to repel a Dutch invasion force which outnumbered them
by two to one. Their little stockaded factory on Ay was continually
harrassed by the Dutchmen, who drew their swords in the house
and repeatedly ordered them to leave the island.
Towards the end of the year, Sofony returned to Bantam with six
of the 'Oran Kayas' or chief citizens of Ay Island. They knew
only too well that their amazing victory against the Dutchmen
was merely a temporary reprieve, and had come up with a plan they
hoped would save their island from conquest. Sofony had translated
into English a letter written by the Oran Kayas to John Jourdain.
They now wished to go to Bantam in person to discuss it.
The letter offered the English merchants a monopoly of trade
with Ay Island, in return for munitions and military aid against
their enemies. But Jourdain, much as he might have loved to, could
not by himself declare war on the Dutch. He agreed to provide
ships and men to defend the English factory, and sent Sofony and
the chiefs back again to Ay. It was a predictable response, from
a European point of view, but all the same, the Oran Kayas must
have been disappointed. Still worse was yet to come.
Just as the little fleet was about to sail, two more English
ships appeared in Bantam road. Jourdain happily added them to
the expedition, but as things turned out, it was a fateful addition.
Samuel Castleton, who commanded the two newly-arrived ships, was
put in charge of the fleet over Sofony while it was at sea - on
land, Sofony was back in charge. Castleton's past was about to
alter the history of the Banda Islands.
When the little fleet reached the Bandas, almost the first things
they saw in Neira harbour were nine Dutch galleys and a very warlike
sloop. In any engagement there might be, the English were hopelessly
outnumbered and outgunned. Castleton prepared to go aboard and
parley with the Dutch commander. Hostages were arranged, and a
ship's boat brought him to the Dutch flagship. But when the two
men came face to face, something astonishing happened. Admiral
Jan Dirckszoon van Lam was as surprised to see Sam Castleton as
Castleton was to see him.
Some four years earlier, Castleton had been watering at St Helena
when he was attacked by two Portuguese ships. He was forced to
cut his cables and put to sea, leaving half his men on the little
rocky island. They must have thought he had abandoned them - but
Castleton knew that two Dutch vessels had just left port, and
he had gone to enlist their aid. Sure enough, the Dutch captain
turned back and came to Castleton's rescue, saving his life and
those of his stranded men. The Dutchman, of course, was Jan Dirckszoon
van Lam.
These two old friends now sat down and settled the matter of
Ay Island like gentlemen. Van Lam called off the invasion for
the time being, while Castleton promised not to interfere with
any future invasion plan. The English factory was to be left alone
so long as its men remained neutral. It was a sell-out for the
Ay Islanders. Sofony went ashore to communicate the agreement
to his assistant Richard Hunt, who all this time had been bravely
remaining on Ay. Both he and Hunt must have known exactly how
the islanders would react. Sofony then left, as he had been directed,
with the ships for Bantam.
To his credit, Richard Hunt broke this charming gentlemen's agreement
almost as soon as the ink was dry. Within days, he had met the
Oran Kayas of Ay and of neighbouring Pulo Run. When the Dutch
invaded, he fled to Bantam bearing a remarkable document. The
Oran Kayas of Ay and Run had voluntarily granted sovereignty over
their land to King James I of England. These pocket- handkerchief
islands were some of the first far-flung corners of the globe
to call themselves 'English soil', and it had been done to prevent,
rather than as a result of, bloodshed.
Unfortunately, the Bandanese surrender counted for little with
van Lam. He went ahead and invaded all the same. The vanquished
Ay islanders fled to Run, to which the Dutch, as yet, had paid
little attention.
At this point, a man named Nathaniel Courthope must enter our
story. Courthope was the man charged with the defence of Run from
the Dutch, and there was no possibility whatsoever of his entering
into a gentlemen's agreement with Admiral van Lam. His incredible
story reads like a Boys' Own adventure - and it is also the story
of Sofon Kozhukhov and Kazarin Davydov.
Sofony Cozucke was among the men who sailed with Courthope for
Pulo Run. He was Chief Factor, in charge of trade matters, while
Courthope commanded the two ships - the mighty Swan, and a smaller
vessel, the Defence.
Pulo Run is a small, rocky island some two miles long and three
quarters of a mile across at its widest point. Midway between
its two precipitous extremities lies a small natural harbour,
but apart from this, its steep cliffs and dangerous reefs make
it an easy place to defend. Its great demerit, however, was that
there was no fresh water and no food grown on the island - apart,
that is, from seven hundred acres of nutmeg. Without supplies,
no defence would be possible. The island, with its sole safe landing-spot,
was extremely ill- equipped to withstand a blockade.
The Oran Kayas of Run and Ay came out in small boats to meet
the English ships. Sitting down with Courthope, Sofony, and a
third man, they repeated their former surrender. On board the
Swan, they once more presented a letter stating that they freely
gave their land, its people, and their produce to the English
king. "And as it hath beene done heeretofore," read
the closing lines of the translation, "so at this time we
doe renew it with Nathaniel Courthop, Sophon Cozocke, and Thomas
Spurway." For the Russian youth sent abroad to learn his
Latin, it is quite a leap to be named in one of the earliest colonial
documents of his adopted country.
Meanwhile, there was work to be done on Pulo Run. The men dug
in, fortifying their positions and building look-out posts. They
hauled some of the heavy guns from the ships and mounted them
on the cliffs overlooking the harbour. Barely had they finished
when right on cue, the Dutch arrived to see what they were doing.
After a hasty Council of War consisting of five men, including
Sofony, they met the commander, Cornelius Dedel. Courthope showed
him the islanders' surrender and gave him a midnight deadline
to remove his three ships from Run's tiny harbour. Dedel chose
to concede the point, for the time being.
Some three weeks later, water supplies were running low. Courthope
and the Swan's master, John Davis, argued about how more was to
be brought in. Courthope favoured asking the islanders to bring
it from Lonthor, but Davis disagreed. He said they would bring
collected rainwater, which would make them all sick. Instead,
he proposed taking the Swan to a watering-place on Lonthor. Davis,
despite a fondness for drink and a querulous nature, was a formidable
veteran seaman whose sailors respected him. Fifty-two of them
volunteered to go with him. Courthope, who was sick and in no
mood to argue, relented.
Just as the Swan was about to sail, word reached Run that the
inhabitants of Rosengin, the remotest of the Banda Islands, had
also given their surrender. Now it was arranged that the Swan
should first call at Rosengin, taking Sofony to receive the necessary
documents.
Why this plan wasn't carried out is a mystery. No explanation
appears in the records. Davis sailed as arranged for Rosengin,
and Sofony even conducted some trade there. But instead of then
setting a course for Lonthor to water, he steered the Swan instead
towards Ceram, a day's sail away from the Bandas. It was a fatal
error. Leaving Gulagula on Ceram on February 2, 1617, the Swan
encountered the warlike Morgensterre, under the command of Cornelius
Dedel. In little over an hour and a half, she and her crew had
been taken. Five men had been killed, three were maimed and unlikely
to survive, and eight less seriously hurt.
The stout-hearted Sofony Cozucke was on deck when the action
began. Of the first three shots fired by the Dutch cannon, one
came straight at the Russian. He was the first man to die in defence
of English territory in the East Indies, 'torne in pieces by a
great shot'.
Word of Sofony's death spread through the Indies like a shock
wave. For months after that day in February 1617, the letters
of factors dotted all over the region repeat again and again the
news. The same two facts recur and recur: the mighty Swan captured
by the Dutchmen, and Sofony Cozucke 'slain with a great shot'.
Four other men died that day, but always it is 'Sophonie', 'Mr
Suffone', and even 'your servant signor Shophie Cossicke' who
is mentioned in tones of outrage and horror. This last came from
a factor who spent his days in the distant factory at Yedo, in
Japan. Evidently the Russian was extremely well- known and liked
among his colleagues.
We are not, however, done yet with the extraordinary story of
Pulo Run. The next disaster to hit Courthope and his men was the
loss of their remaining ship, the Defence. Nine disaffected sailors
cut her loose in the night and turned themselves over to the Dutch.
The men on Run were now entirely dependent on small native craft
and on supplies from Bantam, which were due to arrive any day.
But the supplies from Bantam never arrived. John Jourdain had
gone home at the end of his contract, and the new Chief Factor,
George Ball, cared more for lining his own pockets than for the
defence of Run. He neglected to send any ships for the Bandas
until it was too late. The monsoon turned, and another six months
would have to elapse before any ships could sail - for half the
year, the prevailing winds blew in the wrong direction for the
journey. Meanwhile the stubborn Courthope continued to hold the
island with his company of thirty-nine men, despite being offered
terms by the new Dutch Governor-General. For food, they survived
on credit extended to them by the islanders, and sold their own
personal possessions.
By mid-March 1618, they must have been close to desperation.
Another year had drifted by, the monsoon had turned, and soon
it would turn once again. Mere days of westerly wind remained
to bring their much-needed supplies. It wasn't until the morning
of March 25 that the lookout raised the alarm: two English ships,
flying in their maintops the cross of St George, had appeared
with the very last of the westerly monsoon. Courthope and his
men lined the cliffs and cheered for joy.
The vessels were the Solomon and the Attendance, and the man
in command of them was none other than Cassarian David. They were
not having an easy journey. Already, they had lost contact with
the third vessel of their fleet, the Thomas, in a storm. Both
were heavily-laden with rice and other essentials, and the Solomon
rode so low in the water that the lower tier of her ordnance couldn't
be used. Cassarian and his sailors must have been as pleased to
see the cliffs of Run as the men lining them were to see them.
But there was still some way to go to reach harbour. Five leagues
off, they waited for the wind to bring them in. One more day of
favourable weather would be enough. Both the men on the cliff
and those on board would have seen the four great Dutch vessels
to the east of them. They were some distance off, and posed no
danger while the winds remained from the west.
The winds, however, didn't remain from the west. The monsoon
chose that very day to change its direction. That afternoon, a
good strong gale arose, delaying the English ships and bringing
the Dutch bearing down upon them with alarming speed. Three leagues
off Run, in full view of Courthope and his men, they came within
range of Cassarian's two ships. This time, the battle lasted for
some seven hours.
Outgunned and surrounded by enemy ships, with three men dead
and fourteen wounded, Cassarian saw little point in continuing
the fight. When the Dutch ship the Trow came alongside, he agreed
to strike his flags and go aboard for a parley. He never returned.
By nightfall, the men of the Solomon and the Attendance were stripped
of their clothes and valuables, dispersed in irons between the
four Dutch vessels. Cassarian, with one English boy to serve him,
had been taken to the grim Castle Revenge - as the Dutch had named
their newly-built fort - on Ay. Though a prisoner, he was well-treated
- for Laurens Reaal, the Dutch Governor-General, had high hopes
of his captured commander. He was to be used to persuade that
mulish Englishman on Run to abandon his stubborn resistance.
The same could not be said for the other prisoners. Graphic complaints
emerge about their treatment: they were kept in a dank, dark dungeon
under Castle Revenge with nothing to eat but dirty rice and stinking
water. The only light came from a grating, which if it let in
the sun's rays, also let in much worse things. Down through it,
the Dutch soldiers - said one Bartholomew Churchman in rather
riper language - defecated on them 'until we were broken out like
lepers'.
But Reaal had misjudged the mulish Englishman completely. Cassarian
wrote to him often from his honourable prison, urging him to come
to terms. Courthope merely commented mildly that his words showed
what hard imprisonment and fair words could do to impatient men.
He hadn't always been so tolerant, for on first hearing how Cassarian
had struck his flags, he had reacted furiously. He himself, he
declared, would have sunk before he surrendered. This was harsh,
considering that the Solomon and the Attendance - which was, in
fact, a mere pinnace - had held out for some seven hours against
a greatly superior force. The difference of temperament between
the two men is evident. Men like Courthope are rare, and his sailors
judged him when they ran away with the Defence. Cassarian, a practical
man, saved the lives of his men when he surrendered his ships.
They may have lain in a stinking hole in the ground, but at least
some of them were to live long enough to see their homes and families
again.
Incredibly, the deadlock on Run was destined to persist for a
further two and a half years - until, in fact, the death of Courthope.
His death was certainly in character. He was shot by the Dutch
while rowing back to Run in a small boat, but rather than surrender,
leapt into the sea and swam for it. He never reached land.
After Courthope's death, the Bandaneses' surrender of their land
to King James was a dead letter. Run remained, in theory, English
territory until in 1674, it was ceded in exchange for Manhattan,
under the terms of the Treaty of Breda.
Laurens Reaal's successor, meanwhile, was the bellicose Jan Pieterzoon
Coen, who at the ripe old age of 31 had finally arrived at the
top job at he'd been aiming. At what point he realised that Cassarian's
letters would have no effect on Courthope isn't clear, but at
some time before March 1619, the Russian was removed from his
relatively comfortable position. The last we hear of him is in
a heart-rending complaint from Monawoka, one of three tiny islands
comprising the Gorong Islands, east of Ceram. There, say he and
two other captives, they have been kept starving and chained up,
in the open air, receiving worse treatment than Coen's pigs. Their
complaint did them little good.
What became of Cassarian after that, we do not know. Eighteen
months later, his fellow-captives were released as a result of
the peace signed in London. Both ultimately came home to tell
their story - and to claim their arrears of pay. But of Cassarian
David, there is no further mention in the records of the East
India Company.
_______________________________________________________________________________
Part Three: Mekepher Alphery
What, meanwhile, has become of Mekepher Alpheriev syn Grigori?
We last saw him departing for one of the four top schools of seventeenth-century
England, and it was said then that he was the only one of the
four young men whose whereabouts were known during those years.
Historically speaking, more has been known about Mekepher Alphery
than about any of his three compatriots. He achieved a degree
of posthumous fame when his story appeared in a book, snappily
entitled 'An Attempt towards Recovering an Account of the Numbers
and Sufferings of the Clergy of the Church of England who were
Sequester'd, Harass'd, &c in the Great Rebellion' - Walker's
'Sufferings of the Clergy', for short - published in 1710. It
is from this book that all other accounts, down to the nineteenth
century, derive, and we shall have to examine its claims in some
detail.
Mekepher's story, as told by John Walker half a century after
his death, has fired a surprising number of imaginations. He appears
in the eighteenth-century Biographica Britannia, in the Biographical
Dictionary compiled by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful
Knowledge, and again in the Dictionary of National Biography.
In Craik's 'The Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties', he is
somewhat tenuously compared with Marcus Aurelius. References to
and questions about him abound in nineteenth-century periodicals,
English and Russian - the Russians have been no less fascinated
than the English. One exchange from 'Notes and Queries' is worth
quoting. In response to a query in the preceding issue, a scornful
correspondent writes, 'How could this young Russian, sent... to
England for his education, hold a living in Cambridgeshire?...
Is he supposed to have changed his name and religion and to have
remained in England, or what?' Amazingly, that is exactly what
did happen. Meanwhile a few avid parish-record searchers of the
same period were busy attempting to trace his story through their
local registers.
Mekepher even appears in a 1930s novel set in Wellingborough,
Northants - miles from his Huntingdonshire parish and in the neighbouring
county. Nor is it over yet. I have already acknowledged a debt
to Ian and Marina Burrell, who as I write are engaged in drawing
up a comprehensive family tree of his descendents, not to mention
searching for his ancestors.(1) In looking for Mekepher Alphery,
I feel I have uncovered a hive of Mekepher Alphery industry.
One of Walker's details has particularly fascinated people. That
is his claim that Mekepher was the descendant of (an unspecified)
Russian royal dynasty. Unfortunately, nothing about this romantic
claim adds up, whether we imagine him to be of the dynasty of
Rurik, of Godunov, or even of Romanov. Even the form in which
the four youths' names are given in the Russian documents argues
against it. A member of the royal house would surely have been
given the patronymic 'Grigorievich' rather than 'syn Grigori'.
Quite where the story originated is not clear, but it seems to
have had currency as a local legend. As late as 1764 - almost
a century after the death of Mekepher - a cutler's wife from Huntingdon
was being treated with special respect by her neighbours, on account
of her supposed descent from the Tsars of Russia.
So much for romance. It is the records of St John's College,
Cambridge which provide our first trace of Mekepher - not those
of Oxford, as Walker leads us to expect. In 1609 he matriculated
from St John's and transferred to Clare College to study for the
degree of Bachelor of Arts. It isn't clear where the money for
all this expensive education is coming from - surely, not still
from the Muscovy Company - but there are some clues. As we shall
see, Mekepher is connected with a man by the name of John Bedell
- the younger son of a Huntingdonshire squire and, at least by
the time of his death, himself a wealthy Muscovy merchant.
The exact details of their connection are obscure. They are near-
contemporaries, Bedell being slightly the elder. The two young
men may well have been friends. At the time that the young Russians
were being brought to England, Bedell would have been of about
the right age to be finishing his apprenticeship, which he would
have spent under the supervision of John Merrick in Moscow. It
may be that they were acquainted in Russia, or even that they
met on the voyage. On the other hand, they may only have been
introduced in London - nothing about this question is certain.
In most accounts of Mekepher's life, derived from Walker, John
Bedell plays a prominent role. He is credited with having brought
Mekepher to England, together with his two brothers, with the
aim of preserving his life from a powerful faction at the Russian
court. The brothers, according to the story, later died in a smallpox
epidemic while all three were at Oxford.
This is another nail in the coffin of royal dynasty theory, for
we know the true nature and reason for his appearance in England.
In the two brothers, it is easy to see the distorted shadow of
Sofon and Kazarin, dead in the East Indies. Many of Walker's details,
whilst not being entirely accurate, do ultimately prove to bear
a certain relationship to what can be established. He may yet
be correct in asserting that it was John Bedell who 'sent' him
to the University - if by 'sent' we understand 'supported him
whilst he was there'.
Early in 1612, Mekepher graduated from Clare. At what point he
decided that his future lay in the Anglican church is hard to
determine, but certainly he must have formed the idea by this
time, for he now went on to study for the degree of Master of
Arts. At the time, this was a more or less cast-iron statement
of the intention to become a clergyman - the MA was almost a professional
qualification for the church. It seems highly unlikely that he
was merely filling in time, awaiting an opportunity to return
to his homeland. Very clearly, Mekepher was already at this date
an English Protestant.
The opportunity to return, however, was looming. In Russia, the
darkest hour had proved to be the one before the dawn. A remarkable
national recovery, under the able direction of the Patriarch,
Hermogen, was drawing the country slowly back from the very brink
of disaster. As part of that recovery, a new young Tsar was soon
elected. There were high hopes of Tsar Mikhail, the son of Fyodor
Romanov. No-one then knew how durable the Romanov dynasty was
to prove, but at least an end to the Troubles seemed in sight.
What brought the four young men to the attention of Tsar Mikhail
is unknown to me. It may merely have been the recovery of old
records as Russian society gradually returned to normality. John
Merrick certainly returned to Moscow at around that time, but
it seems unlikely that he would have raised the issue - knowing,
as he must have, that two of the young men were then contracted
for seven years' employment with the East India Company.
In October, 1613, the first Russian ambassador for over a decade
set foot on English soil at Gravesend. He was Aleksei Ivanovich
Zyuzin, described as a young man, accompanied by his secretary,
Aleksei Vitovtov. Their main task was formally to introduce the
new Tsar to King James, but somewhere low down their agenda came
a friendly request for the return of four young men sent over
to England eleven years previously. It appears that, with what
must by then have been a very broad knowledge of English, they
were wanted as interpreters in Mikhail's 'Foreign Office' (Posolski
Prikaz).
The English Privy Council considered the ambassador's request.
He had spoken movingly of the youths' parents, who had parted
from their sons with great reluctance and now feared that, staying
away so long, they would lose their religion. No doubt the Lords
of the Privy Council were moved, as devout men and as fathers,
but they had bad news for the ambassador. They informed him that
three of the four young men had since left the country, two for
the East Indies, and one for Ireland. One, however, remained,
and would be brought to London to speak to him. John Merrick undertook
to 'seek him out', and seems also to have agreed to bring Fyodor
Kostomarov from Ireland before the ambassador left. For the other
two, they were eight months' journey away on the other side of
the globe; Merrick told the ambassador that even if a message
could be got to them, Zyuzin would have long returned to Russia
before any word of them could reach England.
Some time in early 1614, Zyuzin interviewed Mekepher Alphery.
The young man clearly had no intention of going home. For three
days they argued about the matter. Zyuzin wasn't prepared for
this. His instructions were to assure the young men that their
plight had not gone unnoticed in Moscow, and that all possible
efforts were being made to secure their release. Clearly, the
Russians suspected the English of detaining the Tsar's subjects
against their will.
We have, in this encounter, our first clue as to the character
of Mekepher Alphery. It must have taken courage to appear before
the representative of the Tsar and to refuse to go back with him
- courage, and an outstanding ability to argue. Evidently he was
a self-assured young man - no shrinking violet. A Cambridgeshire
proverb of the time runs: 'A Royston horse and a Cambridge MA
give way to no man'. The horse referred to was one of the heavy-set
working type that drew the malt wagons for which Royston was known.
Rather like juggernauts on our modern roads, they commanded respect
from other road-users. Mekepher, it seems, though not quite yet
a Master of Arts, would have illustrated the second part of the
saying admirably. After three days' argument with him, Aleksei
Zyuzin threw in the towel. Mekepher was free to return to his
studies.
He returned to a Cambridge in ferment. It is hard to imagine,
in secular Britain, just how much importance the men of the seventeenth
century attached to religious questions. The nearest modern equivalent
is perhaps, the radical political position adopted by some students
in Europe and North America during the 1960's. But instead of
free love, Marxism and nuclear disarmament, the students of early
seventeenth-century Cambridge were discussing Calvinism and Arminianism
in the English church. Instead of political rallies and marches,
they were attending rival sermons and Sunday lectures and discussing
them avidly afterwards. Controversies were raging over such issues
as Predestination, the status and duties of the clergy, transsubstantiation,
and the use of images in church. There were even isolated outbreaks
of violence - Puritan students in 1609, for instance, had attacked
the hall in which a play was being performed, using crossbows
and muskets - but leaving aside these extreme responses, the level
of debate was intense. It was keener in the Universities than
anywhere, even twenty-five years before the rival factions came
to blows in the Civil War. It is worth remembering that within
a very few years of Mekepher's time at Clare College, the young
Oliver Cromwell would be lodging a few streets away at Sidney
Sussex - a college specifically founded to provide a Puritan education.
Mekepher, an Anglican cleric in the making, could not have stood
aloof from all this. We cannot look inside his soul, especially
at a four-hundred year distance, and know exactly where his sympathies
lay on all the controversial issues, but we will be able to make
some surmises from the events of his later life.
In 1615, he obtained his Master's degree. Shortly afterwards,
he was ordained deacon, then priest. What became of him after
that isn't clear. Employment prospects for newly-ordained men
were fairly grim, in the short-term. In the long-term the horizon
was brighter, and for the most part they found beneficed livings.
Meanwhile, most either found a curacy or taught school while they
waited for an opportunity to arise.
Neither curates nor teachers then made much impression on official
records, and thus far, I have been unable to find trace of Mekepher.
We don't, then, know where he was or what he was doing when Ivan
Gryazev came to England early in the following year. Gryazev wasn't
dignified with the title of ambassador, and had come merely to
bring a message regarding the peace talks between Russia and Sweden.
He made no request to the Privy Council about the four young men,
but he did speak to members of the Muscovy Company about them.
The newly-knighted Sir John Merrick was back in Russia at the
time - taking part, in fact, in the peace talks - but in his absence
the matter was dealt with by Sir William Russell, Merrick's brother-in-law
and fellow-investor in the Company.
But Gryazev fared no better than Aleksei Zyuzin. Russell merely
repeated the same story: two of the young men were in the East
Indies, one was in Ireland acting as the King's Secretary, and
the last, Mekepher Alphery, would be brought to meet the envoy.
In Gryazev's opinion, the English were 'hiding the State's men'.
The interview with Mekepher did not go well. Both men lost their
tempers. Gryazev doesn't seem to have been a man to mince his
words; he may have blustered or threatened. In an extraordinary
outburst of petulance, the newly- ordained cleric declared that
he prayed to God for the Englishmen who traded with Russia, in
gratitude for their having brought him here. He wished they would
bring all Russians out of their darkness and into the light of
true faith. As Mekepher went on in this vein, Gryazev could hardly
believe his ears. He was shocked to hear his religion called 'backward'
and described as a prison. He quickly brought the interview to
a halt, more in bafflement than in anger, wondering whatever could
have caused a young man from a respectable family to make such
wicked remarks. Sending his interpreter to speak to Mekepher privately,
he discovered that the situation was even worse than he had imagined.
Not only had he abandoned his Orthodox faith, he admitted to hiding
from the envoy. He was most unwilling to return to Russia, and
quite determined that none of the others should be forced to go
either.
This was all too much for Ivan Gryazev. Clearly, the young man
had been coerced into changing his religion. On his next meeting
with Russell, the envoy taxed him with this suspicion. Russell,
not surprisingly, denied it, saying that all four young men had
voluntarily become Protestants. He ended by reminding Gryazev
that Mekepher had gone so far as to take Holy Orders.
Gryazev remained unconvinced. He might accept that no-one had
forcibly converted the four Russian youths. All the same, it was
dishonourable of the English to entice to their religion young
people - half-formed children, as he called them - sent to them
in good faith for an education. Young Englishmen, he pointed out,
had gone to Moscow to learn Russian and had returned with their
religious convictions undisturbed. Finally, he asserted that it
would profit the English little to be in disfavour with the Russian
government. Sadly, it was starting to look as though Tsar Boris'
bold experiment in international co-operation was about to result
in a major diplomatic row.
Fortunately, the affair didn't live up to Gryazev's bluster.
The next Russian embassy to reach London was that of Stepan Ivanovich
Volinsky and Mark Ivanovich Posdeyev, late in 1617. They had come
chiefly to seek a loan towards the reconstruction of Russia, a
matter of much greater importance than the retrieval of four young
apostates. They were instructed to deal with the matter, but their
approach was to be very different from that of the previous year's
envoy. The four men, once the ambassadors had managed too find
them, were to be treated 'kindly', not to be coerced or constrained
in any way, and every attempt was to be made to please them. Unfortunately
for Volinsky and Posdeyev, nothing very much had changed. The
Privy Council once again repeated its earlier statement: two of
the youths remained in the East Indies, one was in Ireland (and,
moreover, had taken a wife there) while the fourth, still in England,
simply didn't want to return. Their Lordships added, however,
that they had now had time to consider his case, and had decided
that Mekepher was at liberty to dispose of himself. He would be
brought before the ambassadors, who might attempt to persuade
him to return, but to send him away by force would be, in their
words 'against the law of nations'.
The Russians show every sign of having been baffled by this decision.
They were left wondering why their Lordships were so keen to hold
onto these four young men. Truly, it was a riddle wrapped inside
a mystery inside an enigma. To them, the issues were clear. The
Tsar's subjects were the Tsar's subjects. They had been sent away
from home temporarily, and now their temporary period of absence
was over. It would have been over much sooner, had not the Time
of Troubles intervened. Moreover, the reason for their absence
was to study, for the benefit of the state on their return - not
to go off and make new lives for themselves. The young men had
to return home, whether they wished to or not; their wishes barely
entered into the question.
This was simply not the European way. To their Lordships of the
English Privy Council, forcible repatriation might be permissable
for felons and wrongdoers, but for honourable men - and gentlemen
at that - the demand appeared utterly unreasonable. What had started
as a minor diplomatic wrangle over four young Russian students
had now brought two whole cultures into collision.
It was far, far too late for Volinsky and Posdeyev to persuade
Mekepher of anything, and he was far too self-assured a young
man to be 'pleased' into going back to Russia. Not surprisingly,
they too utterly failed to achieve this part of their mission.
At about the same time that Mekepher was meeting with the ambassadors,
something happened which made it even less likely that he would
ever return to Russia. Evidently he was still in touch with his
old friend John Bedell, for in the March of 1618, Bedell was at
last able to offer him a living in the Church of England.
It may at first sight seem strange that a merchant - a layman
- should be responsible for appointing clergymen. The explanation
is largely historical. When Henry VIII had ordered the Dissolution
of the monasteries in the preceeding century, the land belonging
to religious foundations was sold off into private hands. Whole
manors were bought and resold at profit. Attached to the land,
however, were various rights - the rights to hold local manor
courts, for example - which were sold along with it. Another of
these rights was that of advowson - loosely speaking, the right
to choose the next incumbent of the church. Advowsons, like all
the other rights, were treated as property by the litigious folk
of Tudor England, to be bought, sold, or even leased 'for the
next turn'. Some patrons, of course, were responsible and even
devout men, their candidates, excellent churchmen, and there were
quite complex restrictions on who might be chosen. But by the
early seventeenth-century so many advowsons had fallen into lay
hands that the matter had become something of a national scandal
- it was, in fact, one of the Puritan reformers' major grievances.
John Bedell had acquired the manor of Woolley in Huntingdonshire,
along with the advowson of its rectory, in a very ordinary manner.
He had inherited it from his father. It wasn't a particularly
rich manor - his elder brother had inherited that - but it did
now provide a very useful opening for John Bedell's ordained friend,
Mekepher Alphery. When in March 1618 the aged incumbent of St
Mary's, Woolley died, Mekepher was on hand to take his place.
There is barely a village at all today at Woolley, just a few
scattered houses spread out along a narrow, single-track road.
Most sadly of all, the tiny church has been demolished. Parts
of the fabric, including a bell cast and installed during Mekepher's
tenure, have turned up in neighbouring village churches, but St
Mary's eighty-foot octagonal spire has been reduced to stumps
of broken masonry, its churchyard to a muddy patch of grass and
trees studded by a few tall gravestones. A church had stood on
this site since the twelfth century, and had continued to stand
until it was demolished in 1962.
St Mary's Woolley stood at the lowest point of a shallow valley
enclosed by low, rolling hills. Opposite, by a slow, meandering
brook, stood its parsonage- house, long vanished, but probably
little more than a Tudor cottage with a stamped-earth floor and
a small patch of vegetable garden. Like all of East Anglia, the
village was liable to flood in the winter, when with virtually
no provocation Woolley Brook would overrun its banks and turn
the surrounding land into a quagmire. It was a remote and sleepy
little place - yet within five miles from Mekepher's new parsonage-house
there ran one of the major arteries of English trade. Ermine Street,
the march road of the Roman legions, still did duty as the main
road from London to Scotland and the North, and carried the varied
goods brought in from the sea along the River Ouse. Six miles
away was the county town of Huntingdon - a fact that was later
to have dark significance in the life of Mekepher Alphery.
Woolley was not a particularly valuable living, but it was at
least a Rectory, rather than a Vicarage - a distinction with financial
implications. Sofon and Kazarin in the East Indies probably earned
slightly more in wages than Mekepher drew from his tithes. But
clearly it was enough to support a wife, for within months, Mekepher
had married one.
Joanna Betts was a native of Pidley, a hamlet some miles away
on the edge of the Great Fen. She was the daughter of a local
farmer. Most probably, it was a love-match. We often suppose that
all marriages at that time were arranged by parents with finance
very much in mind, but in fact, this only tended to apply in aristocratic
circles. Young people of other classes did have quite a high degree
of freedom to choose their own marriage partners. How the two
met, however, is a mystery. Pidley is some twelve miles away from
Woolley, and there is no obvious connection between the two villages.
No direct road links or has linked them in the past, and in any
event, if they met after Mekepher arrived at St Mary's, it must
have been a lightning courtship. These facts about his marriage
make me suspect that during the 'missing years' between graduation
and obtaining his benefice, Mekepher had found some employment
in the area from which his wife hailed, perhaps as a curate or
schoolteacher.
Children soon followed their marriage. Mekepher himself performed
the baptism of his eldest son, proudly recording the fact in his
parish register: 'Mikepher Alphery, ye son of Mikepher Alphery,
was baptised October ye 7th by me, Mikepher Alphery'. A second
son, Robert, was born the following year. If ever there had been
any doubt about it, the matter must have seemed well-and-truly
settled. Mekepher Alphery would not be returning to Russia.
But in early 1622, while Joanna was pregnant with their third
child, her husband received a sudden summons to London. A new
Russian ambassador was in the country, and he was intending to
pursue the matter of the four Russian students to the best of
his ability.
The summons itself must have aroused local curiosity. In all
probability, the inhabitants of Woolley would have noticed a well-mounted
rider arriving in the village and making his way to the parsonage-house.
And in the depths of January, through the mud and the sleet -
clearly it was a matter of some importance. It is easy to see
how wild rumours might have arisen about the true identity of
their exotic foreign clergyman.
The message had come from Sir John Merrick, who had accompanied
the ambassador from Moscow. He was becoming exasperated with requests
for the four young men, and had already received something of
a dressing-down from the Russian Boyar Council on the subject.
In vain had he protested that he too wished to return the young
men. The Boyars accused him, with some justification, of dragging
his feet and doing nothing. By this time, word had reached England
of the deaths of Sofon and Kazarin, which news Merrick passed
on to the Boyars. We know, of course, that he is telling the truth
- but the Boyar Council knew no such thing. What it did know was
that these two untimely deaths were highly convenient, and that
it would be no trivial matter for them to verify Merrick's statement.
At this, the Englishman's patience finally snapped, and he brought
the matter to a close saying that he had no commission to deal
with the subject and was not sufficiently briefed.
So the matter had rested, until Isaac Samoilovich Pogozhev, Tsar
Mikhail's Stolnik (Cupbearer), took up the baton. The Tsar sent
him as ambassador to London, together with his secretary, Ulyan
Vlassev(2), and a letter from the Tsar. The letter asserted that
the four young men were 'deteyned and kept in England against
their wills'. Clearly, the Tsar had been dissatisfied with the
answers Merrick had given.
Pogozhev once more asked the Privy Council about the four young
men. They didn't give him an immediate answer, but Merrick went
through the whole story once more and agreed to send for Mekepher,
the only one of the four still remaining in England. In February,
the two came face to face.
Like his predecessors, Pogozhev had been told to handle Mekepher
with kid gloves, and he seems to have stuck to his brief. He assured
him that the Tsar would show him mercy if he returned, and would
not punish him. Mekepher insisted that he was a true believer
in the Anglican faith. In Russia, he would be unable to follow
his religion. Taking the pulpit must have become something of
a habit to him, for the ambassador reports that he 'went on and
on, and not in a humble manner'.
When his ears had ceased ringing, Pogozhev admitted defeat -
for the time being. He waited upon the reply of the Privy Council
to his request. When this finally came, in May, it wasn't the
answer he wanted to hear. Mekepher, he was told, was free to leave
whenever he wanted. But to send him away by force, to a country
where he would be unable to practice his religion, was out of
the question. His Majesty had said as much on many occasions and
now expected that the matter would be dropped.
Refusing to take the hint, the dogged Pogozhev appealed directly
to the King. He went through the arguments all over again, trying
to cast doubt upon both Mekepher's faith and his fears. These
were, he said, excuses so that he could remain abroad. He also
added a final argument, one which he considered quite compelling.
Mekepher Alphery's wishes were irrelevant. He was the Tsar's subject,
and as such, could be commanded back to Russia against his will.
King James, to his credit, didn't agree. At this point, the Russian
state admitted defeat. It was the last time the matter of the
four men's return was ever to be raised in diplomatic circles.
Mekepher took himself back off to Huntingdonshire in triumph,
just in time to perform the baptism of his elder daughter, Joanna.
His next years were to be those of a peaceful family man: in that
time, five more children were born to the Alpherys. They were
Stephen in 1624, Mary in 1625, John in 1628, James in 1630 and
Gregory in 1635.
Meanwhile, the religious controversies that had been so hotly
disputed at Cambridge had not gone away. In fact, they were fuelled
by the accession of the new King, Charles I, in 1625. James had
been skillful at playing off the two factions against each other,
but his son Charles, a man of an altogher different stamp, had
come down firmly on one side of the debate. Religion, for Charles,
was a matter of ritual, of visual beauty, and of sacramental mystery.
He naturally gravitated towards those churchmen who favoured images,
who wished to keep the Communion table decently railed off, and
who favoured keeping preaching to the priesthood, rather than
allowing laymen to deliver sermons and lectures. To make matters
worse, in Queen Henrietta-Maria he had married a Catholic wife,
who worshipped openly among her attendants despite its being strictly
illegal to do so.
In all this, Charles' Puritan opponents saw crypto-Catholicism,
and that frightened them. No-one had quite forgotten the Gunpowder
Plot, and the Thirty Years War, now raging across Europe, had
come to be seen as a kind of millennial showdown between Protestant
and Catholic forces. Meanwhile, the runaway bestseller of the
day was - and had been since its first publication - Foxe's Book
of Martyrs, which kept alive memories of the persecution of Protestants
under Mary I. For the majority of English Protestants, Catholicism
was the major bogeyman of the age, and anything that smacked of
it was something to worry about.
Of course, the English Civil War was not solely a religious conflict.
There were important political and economic dimensions to it.
But these strands were in any case hopelessly intertwined, and
since it was chiefly the religious conflict which affected Mekepher
Alphery, it is this I shall choose to highlight.
We have already noted that remote Woolley was only six miles
from the town of Huntingdon - birthplace and home of a young man
named Oliver Cromwell, who was soon to make something of a name
for himself. In fact, the whole of East Anglia was to gain a reputation
as a hotbed of Puritanism, and indeed, it had already seen more
than its share of unorthodox Protestant sects springing up, or
drifting across from the Low Countries. But a mere five miles
from Woolley, there was a religious foundation of quite a different
temper. Little Gidding achieved both fame and notoriety in its
day, and the revived community there in more recent times was
immortalised by T S Eliot in one of his 'Four Quartets'.
The driving force behind the family community at Little Gidding
was Nicholas Ferrar, the son of a London merchant, who turned
his back on a number of possible careers in favour of an ascetic
withdrawal from the world. Ferrar's life demands more attention
than we can possibly give it here, and a precis will have to content
us for now. He had been a precocious learner, entering Clare College
in 1606 at the age of thirteen, where after graduating, he remained
on a Medicine Fellowship until 1613. There, he and Mekepher would
certainly have crossed paths, at the very least. After Clare,
Ferrar spent five years travelling in Europe, soaking up a kaleidoscope
of knowledge about the lands through which he passed. As a result,
he came home with several European languages, trunkloads of books,
and a variety of religious traditions to draw upon.
1625 was a Plague year in London, and with his whole family -
his aged but still agile mother, his brother and sister and their
spouses, fourteen children, two grandchildren and the household
servants - Nicholas packed up and moved to Little Gidding. He
had persuaded them to sell everything they had in London to buy
and restore this depopulated village, its crumbling manor house
and its semi-derelict church - then being used as a pigsty, much
to the horror of devout old Mrs Ferrar. He visited London one
final time, to be ordained deacon, though he declined to take
the next step and be ordained priest. Then he returned to Gidding
to start his family community.
But Little Gidding was much more than a retreat from the world.
There was asceticism, prayer, and piety, but there were good works,
too. Thirty to forty people lived there at its height, including
three schoolmasters and a number of widows, there as almswomen.
A Sunday school taught the children of the local poor - and provided
them with a midday meal - while the sons of the local gentry came
to learn Latin and arithmetic. The Ferrars ran an infirmary and
dispensary for those who couldn't afford a doctor, and in times
of hardship, bought in flax to provide work for the unemployed.
In many ways, it functioned like one of the monastic foundations
lost to the country at the Dissolution.
Like many hermits over the centuries, Ferrar soon found himself
besieged by the curious, who wanted to see for themselves what
being secluded involved. These he began, gently, to discourage,
but genuine visitors were still welcome. The Bishop of Lincoln,
John Williams, in whose diocese Gidding lay, was a friend and
a frequent visitor, and neighbouring clergymen came to hear services
or to take part in discussions on the issues of the day. It is
surely not so unlikely to suppose that Mekepher Alphery, living
five miles away at Woolley and an alumnus of the same Cambridge
college, might have been among them.
There was one other thing the inhabitants of Little Gidding did,
and did supremely well. They produced books: fine hand-bound New
Testaments and concordances to the Bible, which were admired at
the time and remain objects of great beauty today. Some found
their way into the hands of the King and Prince Charles (later
Charles II), and are preserved at the British Library in London.
Nicholas Ferrar never married and had no children, but his young
nephew, also Nicholas, seemed set to follow in his uncle's footsteps.
He had evidently inherited the propensity for learning foreign
tongues, for by the time young Nicholas was eighteen, he had already
produced a Polyglot Gospel of St John in several languages. One
of those languages was 'Moscovite'.
So far as I know, no-one seems to have enquired where young Nicholas
Ferrar learned his 'Moscovite'. His uncle certainly never claimed
to it as one of his many tongues. So did Mekepher Alphery play
some small part in producing this work of beauty and scholarship?
Sadly, I do not believe we will ever know for certain, but with
a mere five miles of gently rolling countryside separating him
from the Ferrar household, there is surely room for speculation.
Little Gidding was not to fare well in the Civil War. The music,
the objects of beauty and the ritual of its services made it a
target for the soldiers' reforming zeal. Pamphleteers attacked
it, calling it 'the Arminian nunnery' because some of the female
inhabitants had apparently taken vows of virginity. Its roof also
sheltered the fugitive King Charles, on one of the last nights
of freedom he was to enjoy before giving himself up to the Scots
army at Newark. None of this was likely to go down very well on
Oliver Cromwell's own doorstep.
Mekepher Alphery and his family also fared badly in the cataclysm.
When the Parliamentarians took it upon themselves to remedy the
ill of 'scandalous ministers', he was one of the first clergymen
in Huntingdonshire to be ejected from his living. It is difficult
to say exactly why. So many reasons were given for the removal
of ministers - 'lewd living', drunkenness, encouraging the playing
of games after Church on Sunday, bowing to the cross or keeping
images of the Virgin Mary were just some of a vast range of offences
they were alleged to have committed. Later, 'disaffection towards
the Parliament' and supporting the King became valid reasons for
sequestration. The feeling one has is that in many cases, if a
minister kept quiet about his personal convictions, he might well
sit out the war in his parish, but if he insisted too strongly
upon his rights and annoyed some vociferous opponent, he was likely
to find himself sequestered or otherwise ejected from his living.
Another strong impression one gets from looking over the evidence
of sequestrations is that there was massive scope for revenge-taking
by very small numbers of parishioners with grudges.
In Mekepher's case, there does not even seem to have been an
official sequestration, with deponents giving evidence against
him, until long after his ejection. I will let John Walker tell
the story:
"On a Lord's Day, as he was Preaching, a File of Musqueteers
came and Pull'd him out of his Pulpit, Turn'd him out of the Church,
and his Wife and Children, with their Goods, out of the Parsonage-House.
The poor Man thus Ejected out of his House, built an Hutt, or
Booth, over against the Parsonage-House, in the Street, under
the trees growing in the Verge of the Church yard, and there liv'd
for a Week with his Family. He had procured Three Eggs, and gathered
a bundle of rotten Sticks (in that time) and was about to make
a Fire in the Church Porch, to boyl his Eggs, but some of his
Adversaries (whose Names are known) coming thither, broke his
Eggs, and kicked away the Fire."
This is a poignant picture - an elderly rector deprived of his
livelihood, hustled from his church at musket-point by a troop
of soldiers, his wife and children driven from their home. And
could anything be less charitable, less Christian, than to deprive
them, after all this, of a meagre supper?
But how far can we rely upon it? We have already seen that some
of Walker's details have proved only approximations to the truth.
It is now time to look at 'Sufferings of the Clergy' in a little
more depth.
For one thing, it is a highly partisan work. Walker is replying
to a work of Edmund Calamy, which deals with the ejection of Puritan
ministers at the Restoration of Charles II. He is attempting to
defend his High Church party by saying, effectively, 'tu quoque'.
Perhaps worse, much of Walker's research rests on what amounts
to a survey, conducted by means of a postal questionnaire. It
was perhaps the first ever targeted mailshot. He solicited personal
accounts and sent out circular letters to hundreds of clergymen,
enquiring about their predecessors. Sixty years had elapsed since
the events of which he was inquiring, and in most cases, there
would have been very few eyewitnesses remaining.
There were two replies concerning Mekepher, on which Walker based
his account. Both are from Peter Phelips, the then Minister of
Woolley St Mary. Two further incumbents separated him from Mekepher,
and he could not possibly have had personal knowledge of the events
he described.
Walker, however, did make attempts to check his facts wherever
possible. He had access to some of the official papers of the
plethora of Committees that had dealt with sequestrations, and
did manage to confirm the bare bones of his story.
Not only this, it is a plausible story. There are many reported
cases of similar ejections by troops of soldiers in other parts
of the country. War is very rarely civil, and soldiers are soldiers.
Mekepher's response, too, is credible. It is of a piece with the
young man who stood his ground and argued with ambassador after
ambassador. He was exactly the sort of man who, rather than meekly
walk away, would remain on the spot and build a shelter for his
wife and children. Very probably, he was exactly the sort of man
who would refuse to take down his holy pictures or to remove the
rails around the Communion table, and very probably it was this,
in many ways admirable, character trait which had got him into
trouble in the first place.
Naturally, we cannot know what Mekepher's exact religious convictions
were, but it seems most likely that he was no Puritan. For one
thing, his native religious tradition would have predisposed him
to the more sacramental brand of religion favoured by the King
and his Archbishop, William Laud. To leap from Russian Orthodoxy
to radical Low Church Protestantism would have been, not an impossible
journey, but an extreme one. For another, his college, Clare,
had no Puritan tradition - rather the contrary. His involvement,
if we are correct, with the Ferrars of Little Gidding would seem
to argue against it. Finally, his patron John Bedell appears to
have taken the Royalist side - which, while it doesn't necessarily
indicate his religious feelings, is a strong clue. And since in
that climate it would be a remarkably broad-minded patron indeed
who appointed a cleric with whom he radically disagreed, we can
assume that Mekepher broadly shared his convictions.
The largest single shred of confirmation, though, comes from
a pair of newspapers of the day. On 20 April, 1643, the 'Perfect
Diurnall' reported that Colonel Cromwell had 'done very good service
in Huntingdonshire' disarming 'malignants' and others disaffected
towards the Parliament. 'Mercurius Aulicus' on 7 May saw it differently.
Cromwell, it reported, had been through the county 'robbing and
spoiling' at will. In particular, it went on, he had made 'great
havock' there among the clergy. There are journalistic exaggerations
in both reports, but both sides agree that Cromwell and his soldiers
have marched through Huntingdonshire doing something at exactly
the time when it is claimed that Mekepher was being ejected. It
looks as though the musketeers referred to are real enough, and
they would seem to have been men of Oliver Cromwell's own troop.
We do not know exactly who were the family members who, according
to Walker, lived a week in this hut in the church yard. The younger
Mekepher had married and was probably living in London at this
time. His brother Robert had also married, but still lived with
his wife and infant son in Woolley. Sadly, Joanna had died three
years previously, not long before her eighteenth birthday. Stephen
we know survived and was probably living at home, as were his
brothers John and James, youths of fifteen and thirteen. It isn't
clear whether Mary and the youngest child, Gregory, were still
alive at this point.
However, this was still a large family to feed on no income.
Under the new regime there was, in theory, provision for the wives
and children of ejected ministers. They were entitled to one-fifth
of the tithe income from their husbands' former parishes. Unfortunately,
this depended on the new incumbent being willing to pay it to
them - a requirement not all replacement ministers were keen on
fulfilling. In fairness, sometimes this was not entirely the new
incumbent's fault, for in many parishes, the parishioners withheld
their tithes where they didn't approve of the change. The results
were chaotic. Over the next few years, Joanna Alphery appeared
time and time again before the Committee for Plundered Ministers
to try to obtain her fifth. Mr Beale, the new minister, seems
to have been most reluctant to pay up.
The great trading companies sometimes had openings for clergymen.
Their ships and their men stationed in foreign ports required
chaplains. What was more, some of the companies were defiantly
employing men ejected from their benefices. But when approached,
the Muscovy Company regretted that they were unable to offer Mekepher
a living, and referred him to a charitable foundation for merchants.
What came of this is unknown, but it seems unlikely that very
much did. The call on charitable funds must have been great at
this time, with the wholesale loss of property, plunder and destruction
that the Civil War brought with it. Hardship was everywhere.
Somehow or another the Alpherys had found enough money to buy
some land in Warboys, close to Joanna's home village on the edge
of the Fens. There, they built a house. The land had to be kept
in Joanna's name - as a sequestered minister, any property owned
by Mekepher could have been taken from him to finance the war
against King Charles. We know very little of how they lived there,
although in 1650, Mekepher was able to earn a small amount of
money by preaching at Easton, not far from Woolley, for two shillings
and sixpence a sermon.
Joanna died in 1654. It may have been at this time that Mekepher
went to live with his son in what was then a dormitory suburb
of London. Mekepher the younger seems to have made, or married,
money in the years he has been away from Huntingdonshire. Certainly
he is describing himself as a gentleman, and he has amassed some
property in London and its suburbs. Walker says he is living at
Hammersmith, although I have found no trace of him there. At various
later dates, he is certainly nearby in Ealing, and owns a tenement
at Charing Cross, then a highly desirable inner suburb of the
city.
Wherever in present-day West London Mekepher the elder found
himself, he seems to have taken his son Stephen with him, for
three years later, we find Stephen getting married in Wandsworth,
where he settled and became a smith. Robert, the second son, continued
to farm at Warboys with his wife and family. Both branches of
the family continue into another generation.
At the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, like many ejected clergymen,
Mekepher returned to his living. By this time he was in his late
seventies. He remained at Woolley for a further six years before
settling a curate in his living and retiring.
Two years later, in April 1668, he made his will and shortly
after died. He left behind the land in which he had fought to
be allowed to remain and have freedom of conscience. Sadly, it
was a land which, even then, was not yet ready for religious toleration.
___________________________________
(1) Ian Burrell gives talks on Mekepher Alphery to local history
societies in the Huntingdon area, at which he has been known to
have descendents of Alphery planted among the audience. At the
end of his lecture, he will then ask them to stand up - much to
the delight of his hearers.
(2) Incidentally, this is the earliest instance I have found
in Russia of the name Ulyan (William). I take it to have been
an English import brought by traders like William Merrick. Since
the Merricks, father and son, and the Vlassevs were acquainted,
the connection may even be direct. It is interesting to note,
in passing, that there has of course been at least one Russian
of international reputation bearing the name Ulyanov.
________________________________________________________________________________
Part Four: Fyodor Kostomarov
Fyodor has proved the most difficult to track down of the four
Russian youths. So far, he is a shadowy figure, of whom there
is still no positive evidence. It appears, as we have seen in
the last part of this account, that we must look for him in Ireland,
where he is described as 'the King his secretary'.
It might be supposed that a man named Fyodor Semyonov syn Kostomarov
would stick out in the records like a sore thumb among the O'Dalys
and O'Connors of Ireland. In fact, there are a great number of
difficulties with this.
The first and most obvious is that before 1641 the records themselves
are scant. The rebellion of that date, apart from swallowing up
the English settlers themselves, appears to have swallowed up
much of the paperwork, where it existed at all. Secondly, the
non-Celtic population of Ireland at that time was highly mobile.
It is more than possible that Fyodor was there in order to hide.
Then, as now, it was a good place to disappear. And if he couldn't
be found in 1622 when Isaac Pogozhev wished to speak to him, it
seems unlikely that four centuries later, it will be an easy task.
All we really know about Fyodor Kostomarov at this point is that
he went to Ireland as 'the King's Secretary'. What might this
mean? Two things. In the early years of the seventeenth century,
English settlement in Ireland was really only established in Dublin
and its environs - the famous 'Pale' beyond which the outrageous
might occur.(1) The reigns of Elizabeth and James were a period
of English plantation in Ireland, and though for the most part
these schemes were not particlarly successful, their legacy is
still with us today. Indeed, the plantation scheme most pregnant
with consequence - that of Englishmen and Scots in Ulster - was
just beginning at the time that Fyodor seems to have gone there.
But though English rule nominally covered all the island of Ireland,
in practice, it was only able to be enforced within the Pale.
So if Fyodor was acting as the King's Secretary - one, presumably,
of many - the chances are that at least at first, he was in or
around the Dublin area.
The strongest possibility to have emerged to date is that he
might be found in the office of the Irish Master of the Rolls.
For the question once again arises as to how he obtained his employment,
and once again, the answer may lie with a man employed by the
Muscovy Company.
Edward Cherry was another of the ubiquitous John Merrick's brothers-in-law.
John was married to the daughter of Francis Cherry, a prominent
member of the Company with whom he had a long-standing working
partnership both in Russia and in England. Edward was Francis
Cherry's son.
We know that Francis had had some involvement with the four Russian
youths, because he seems to have paid either some expenses or
some school fees for them during the early part of their stay
in England. This we know, because the Muscovy Company refunded
him the sum of ?43 6s 10d paid out on their behalf. We also know
that Edward Cherry spent time in Russia working for the Company.
Unfortunately for Edward, he seems to have won the disapproval
of some other important Company member, and after his father was
asked to reimburse the Company to the tune of ?100 to cover his
'lascivious expenses', he may have decided that some other career
was for him.
Young Edward can't have been such a wild-child as all that, since
he went on to make a very good marriage. He married the daughter
of his Surrey neighbour, Francis Aungier, the Master of the Rolls
in Ireland. Edward was soon to describe himself as 'of Dublin',
so clearly this was where he made his home. Did he introduce Fyodor
to his father-in-law as a man worthy of employment? It's a large
leap, but it is the best we have to go on.
The only other details we have of Fyodor come from the embassies
sent from Moscow to retrieve the young Russians. It seems that
he was interviewed at least once, by Aleksei Zyuzin in 1614. By
May 1618, the Privy Council was able to tell ambassadors Volinsky
and Posdeyev that he had married in Ireland. And in 1622, John
Merrick told Pogozhev that he had moved to another country. His
whereabouts were unknown, and he hadn't been in England for around
three years. Since so far, what the ambassadors have been told
seems to have proved correct, we might be inclined to believe
what they are told about Fyodor.
Merrick's assertion is interesting. He doesn't, on this occasion,
mention Ireland, but merely 'another country'. By 1622, this would
have been a very circuitous way to refer to an island nominally
under English government. Could it mean that Fyodor has emigrated
a third time, perhaps following the drift from Ireland to the
colonies of North America?
It may be that we shall never run Fyodor Kostomarov to ground
in Ireland. If so, we can only say that his attempt to hide has
been more successful than he could ever have imagined.
___________________________
(1) For readers unfamiliar with the English idiom 'beyond the
Pale': a pale is a fence, and anything which is beyond it, an
outrage. For example, "His behaviour has always been bad,
but this is beyond the Pale." The expression is said to originate
from this Dublin Pale beyond which English law was unenforceable.
________________________________________________________________________________
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