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played a part in Henry’s decision to settle at a compromise. That way all of his people would grow to accept it rather than rise up in rebellion as some had done in certain parts of the country. Civil war was thus avoided at that stage in English history.
    An intriguing consequence of Henry’s actions against the Catholic Church was that Britain grew to be the leading light in scientific progress. In turn, it would become the dominant force in industrial modernisation. Elsewhere in civilized Europe scientists would face Catholic inquisitions and charges of blasphemy for daring to suggest that natural laws dictated and explained the way things work. While scientists such as Copernicus and Galileo would be persecuted on the continent, Newton and others would be celebrated in England.

Ivan The Terrible

     
    You’d have to have a pretty bad reputation to earn the epithet ‘the Terrible’, so what was so terrible about Ivan? Well, the answer is that he went one better than Cesare Borgia, who famously killed his own brother. Ivan actually killed his own son – also called Ivan – in a fit of blinding rage during a row. This act of filicide, as it is technically known, removed the heir to the throne. As it happened the argument was catalysed by the fact that Ivan, the elder, had beaten his daughter-in-law, causing her to miscarry. So, he had in fact removed two possible heirs to the throne in one fell swoop of madness. When he died his kingdom was left to his younger son Feodor, who was wholly unfit to reign and childless to boot.
    Ivan the Terrible was properly known as Ivan Vasilyevich, or Tsar Ivan IV of Russia. In truth his popular name arose due to a whole list of atrocities during his reign, topped off by killing Ivan the younger. His reign formally began when he was aged just three years, but he didn’t actually assume the role of tsar until he was fourteen. His formative years had been spent being generally mistreated and neglected by the people charged with looking after him – families of aristocrats, or boyars, known as the Shuiskys and Belskys. Consequently, he grew into a young man with an intrinsic hatred of boyars and a malicious streak that was expressed by his cruelty to animals. The signs for his lack of mental stability in later years were already there as a teenager, just like Vlad the Impaler.
    Despite his burgeoning penchant for cruelty, Ivan spent the first nine years of his reign in positive and constructive mood. He did much to expand the realm of Russia, turning it into the multiethnic region it remains today with its mix of races and religions. This included the conquest of Siberian and Tatar (Central Asian, Mongolian and Turkic) regions, to the north-east and east of Russia.
    Things started to go wrong though when Ivan fell seriously ill in 1553. His wife Anastasia died at the same time and Ivan suspected the boyars of having murdered her with poison. This was in part because they has refused to swear an oath of allegiance to his infant son – Ivan the younger – in case Ivan died of his illness. When Ivan eventually recovered his health the boyars had hell to pay.
    He wrought vengeance on the boyars so that many were brutally murdered whether guilty or innocent. By 1565, Ivan was so paranoid about his position that he had formed a police state called the Oprichnina in which he was omnipotent, so that the boyars held no sway over his power. His personal guard were known as the Oprichniki. They dressed in black and had a ruthless reputation, something like that of Hitler’s SS.
    The latter years of Ivan’s reign saw his mental health progressively deteriorate. At the same time, he set his sights on expanding his kingdom westward so that he might establish sea trade links with Western Europe and elsewhere via the Baltic Sea. This resulted in prolonged periods of warfare with Scandinavian and Eastern European nations who resisted his attempts at invasion. Added to the terrors of war there