Free Republic

Ivan the terribly rude By John Vincent (Filed: 02/01/2004) In a barely literate rant that would have landed him in the Tower had he been an Englishman, the Russian ruler railed against the Queen's "boorish" advisers and likened her to an old maid. The letter, discovered at the National Archives at Kew, south-west London, was especially inadvisable since at the time it was written, on Oct 28, 1570, the tsar was involved in a courtship of England and in particular English trade. But, historians will speculate, perhaps it was the failure of a courtship of a different kind that prompted...