MANLEY, Roger

First edition of this historical account of the Time of Troubles in Russia. The narrative concerns the violent dynastic struggles – conspiracies, murders and warfare – after the death of Feodor I in 1598, during whose ineffective reign the country had been ruled by the regent Boris Godunov, as well as the supposed reappearances of his half-brother Tsarevich Dmitry. Godunov is cast as a ‘bloody tyrant’ by Manley, who claims it is ‘more than conjectural’ that Boris had Feodor poisoned, and who describes in bloody terms his murder of Dmitry. However, Manley is seemingly convinced by the story that Dmitry had been swapped with some unfortunate child and escaped assassination, though he acknowledges that the later Dmitrys are false. Manley prints numerous letters from the first ‘False Dmitry,’ including to the English ambassador Sir Thomas Smith (d.1625). On occasions he has a neat turn of phrase, comparing, for example, the rapid growth of a mob to that of a snowball that ‘increases by rolling,’ and describing the final pseudo-Demetrius as a ‘mushroom that had but peeped up.’ He also has an eye for gory details, describing one man’s fall of forty feet from a window as being ‘so great that he vomited blood from the crush of it.’

Roger Manley had travelled in Russia during the English civil wars, and he notes the similarities between the ‘intestine calamities’ of his own country and those experienced in Russia earlier in the century, referring to ‘that most horrid of murthers perpetrated in our own land against the best of princes.’ The preface recounts his impressions of Russia, including its ‘insufferably cold’ winters, hot summers, abundance of honey, and its inhabitants, which he describes (excluding the nobility) as ‘barbarous, yet cunning, unfaithful, immeasurably debauched, luxurious, cruel; and yet so servile, that they glory in it.’ Manley also describes Russia’s system of governance – absolute monarchy of the most extreme sort – and its army.