His body was given to his family, and laid in the tomb he had already
prepared in Chelsea Church; but the head was set up on a pole on London
Bridge. The calm, sweet features were little changed, and the loving
daughter gathered courage as she looked up at them. How she contrived
the deed, is not known; but before many days had passed, the head was
no longer there, and Mrs. Roper was said to have taken it away. She was
sent for to the Council, and accused of the stealing of her father's
head. She shrank not from avowing that thus it had been, and that the
head was in her own possession. One story says that, as she was passing
under the bridge in a boat, she looked up, and said, 'That head has
often lain in my lap; I would that it would now fall into it.' And at
that moment it actually fell, and she received it. It is far more likely
that she went by design, at the same time as some faithful friend on the
bridge, who detached the precious head, and dropped it down to her in
her boat beneath. Be this as it may, she owned before the cruel-hearted
Council that she had taken away and cherished the head of the man whom
they had slain as a traitor. However, Henry VIII. was not a Creon, and
our Christian Antigone was dismissed unhurt by the Council, and allowed
to retain possession of her treasure. She caused it to be embalmed, kept
it with her wherever she went, and when, nine years afterwards, she died
(in the year 1544), it was laid in her coffin in the 'Roper aisle' of
St. Dunstan's Church, at Canterbury.
UNDER IVAN THE TERRIBLE
1564.
Prince Andrej Kourbsky was one of the chief boyards or nobles at the
Court of Ivan, the first Grand Prince of Muscovy who assumed the Eastern
title of Tzar, and who relieved Russia from the terrible invasions of
the Tatars. This wild race for nearly four hundred years had roamed over
the country, destroying and plundering all they met with, and blighting
all the attempts at civilization that had begun to be made in the
eleventh century. It was only when the Russians learnt the use of
firearms that these savages were in any degree repressed. In the year
1551 the city of Kazan, upon the River Kazanka, a tributary of the
Volga, was the last city that remained in the hands of the Tatars. It
was a rich and powerful place, a great centre of trade between Europe
and the East, but it was also a nest of robbers, who had frequently
broken faith with the Russians, and had lately expelled the Khan Schig
Alei for having endeavored to fulfill his engagements to them. The Tzar
Ivan Vassilovitch, then only twenty-two years of age, therefore marched
against the place, resolved at any cost to reduce it and free his
country from these inveterate foes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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