Horsey had engaged upon a daring undertaking, and had an adventurous journey. It was winter; Russia was beset by Ivan's enemies, who hated the English for the help given the Muscovite ruler. As soon as he crossed the border he feigned to be a refugee, but was taken as a spy and cast into prison. The governor of the castle, hearing that he came from Moscow, would learn some news of his daughter, who had been carried away a captive by Ivan's troops. She was among those whom Horsey had helped to settle in the Sloboda, and he gave so good an account of her, that the grateful jailer liberated him and helped him forward on his long journey. When he passed through the Netherlands the merchants gave a banquet in his honour and, for favours he had rendered the foreigners in Moscow, presented him with a silver bowl full of ducats. Horsey returned the ducats, as he says, "not without afterwards repenting of this," but kept the bowl to remind him of their good will. He reached England, and was received by the Queen and indicted by the sordid governors of the Russia company, who made a number of trivial and baseless charges. He returned to Russia more than once, got the extravagant demands of the company conceded, some thousands of roubles were "preened from the shins of Shalkan, the Chancellor," and after living through the "troublous times" he finally settled in England; was married, knighted, and lived far into the seventeenth century. Probably his "good friends" at court were Nikita Romanof, grandfather of the first elected Tsar, and Boris Godunov with whom Horsey was always on excellent terms. Ivan sent a couple of hundred of his opritchniks to pillage the house of his father-in-law Nikita Romanof, and the English then sheltered the family in their house close by, and supplied them with food and stuffs "for they had been stripped of all they possessed." In its turn the English House suffered; it was burned by the Tartars in 1591, and the inmates huddled in the cellar for days, lost Spark, the explorer, Carver, the first apothecary in Moscow, and others, but the survivors rushed out during a lull in the conflagration and made their way through the smoke and flames to the Kremlin, where they were helped over the wall. In 1611 it was again destroyed by fire, in the struggle between Pojarski and the Poles, and finally destroyed during the French invasion. Its site is now occupied by the Siberian Podvor, in the Varvarka. It was not rebuilt, but a plot of land between the Broosovski and Chernichefski Pereuloks--the streets that connect the Tverskaya and Nikitskaya behind the Governor-General's residence--was granted the colony by Alexander I., and there a new English church, parsonage and library have been erected.