Queen Elizabeth, anxious to maintain friendly relations with an empire so vast, and opening before her subjects such a field of profitable commerce, having been informed of the conspiracy against Ivan IV., of his abdication, and of his resumption of the crown, sent to him an embassador with expressions of her kindest wishes, and assured him that should he ever be reduced to the disagreeable necessity of leaving his empire, he would find a safe retreat in England, where he would be received and provided for in a manner suitable to his dignity, where he could enjoy the free exercise of his religion and be permitted to depart whenever he should wish. The tolerant spirit manifested by Ivan IV. towards the Lutherans, continued to disturb the ecclesiastics; and the clergy and nobles of the province of Novgorod, headed by the archbishop, formed a plot of dissevering Novgorod from the empire, and attaching it to the kingdom of Poland. This conspiracy assumed a very formidable attitude, and one of the brothers of the tzar was involved in it. Ivan immediately sent an army of fifteen thousand men to quell the revolt. We have no account of this transaction but from the pens of those who were envenomed by their animosity to the religious toleration of Ivan. We must consequently receive their narratives with some allowance. The army, according to their account, ravaged the whole province; took the city by storm; and cut down in indiscriminate slaughter twenty-five thousand men, women and children. The brother of Ivan IV. was seized and thrown into prison, where he miserably perished. The archbishop was stripped of his canonical robes, clad in the dress of a harlequin, paraded through the streets on a gray mare, an object of derision to the people, and then was imprisoned for life. Such cruelty does not seem at all in accordance with the character of Ivan, while the grossest exaggeration is in accordance with the character of all civil and religious partisans.