When the people of Moskva became sufficiently familiar with the fact that their terrible Gosoudar was dead and safely buried, even if their imagination could not picture him, as his son had, in his coronation speech, solemnly assured them, “transformed into an angel,” they began to take stock of the men who had replaced him in the government. The effete and placid Thedor was supported by a Douma (Council) of five. Of these Ivan Petrovitch Shouyskie, member of a family which had tasted the sweets of power and drained the dregs of disgrace in the early years of the late reign, had won new consideration and honour by his celebrated defence of Pskov; Mstislavskie was another Rurik-descended boyarin-kniaz; Bogdan Bielskie represented the last of Ivan’s Vremenszhiki; Nikita Romanov was important as maternal uncle of the new Tzar, and Boris Godounov, descendant of a Tartar family Christianised in the fourteenth century,[175] stood nearest the throne from the fact of being brother to the Tzaritza Irena.[176] The Douma, thus constituted, did not long retain its original formation. A sudden popular commotion in the capital took the form of an ugly rush towards the Kreml; the Kitai-gorod was overrun by a surging mob of many thousands, scarcely to be held back by the strielitz from forcing the gates of the citadel. Mstislavskie and Romanov, fronting this tumultuous gathering and inquiring the nature of its demands, learned from a thousand throats that the blood of Bogdan Bielskie was in request. A compromise was effected; the offending boyarin was removed from the Council to the comparatively harmless post of Governor of Nijhnie-Novgorod, and the Moskvitchi returned to their houses. Whether this was a spontaneous ebullition, a reaction from the passive endurance under Ivan, or whether it was set afoot by the Shouyskie family, who had considerable influence among the merchant class, and were not unused to such machinations, it strengthened the hands of the one man whose authority dwarfed that of Romanov, Shouyskie, and Mstislavskie alike. Godounov was a man capable of grasping to the full the advantages which his position as kinsman of a weak, easily-ruled sovereign gave him, and he was of sufficient merit to labour for the welfare of the State as well as for his own interests. The latter were by no means neglected; immense territorial possessions in the Dvina district and along the valley of the Moskva, certain State revenues and other desirable perquisites swelled his yearly income to the estimated total of 93,000 roubles,[177] and he was reputed to be able to bring 100,000 men into the field.[178] But the man who swayed the councils of the Tzarstvo and stood behind the puppet-monarch Thedor was far removed from the ordinary type of Vremenszhikie, and the internal and foreign affairs of the realm suffered nothing by the transfer of administration from Ivan IV. to Boris Godounov. His predominance