The first acts of the aroused Moskvitchi were comparatively moderate. The Tzaritza-mother, the young Thedor, and his sister were removed from the palace and held prisoners in the private mansion of the Godounovs, and a clean sweep was made of the relatives and adherents of the fallen House, who were imprisoned or carried off to distant parts of the gosoudarstvo. For the rest, the people celebrated the upheaval by getting universally intoxicated, and to the wild fury of the day succeeded a night of stupefied repose. The revolution, however, was yet to claim its victims; while the new sovereign was still halting at Toula his enemies were forcibly removed from his path. The Patriarch was dragged from before the altar of the Cathedral of the Assumption and dispoiled of his robes and office, and a few days later a report was circulated that Thedor and his mother had poisoned themselves. Their bodies, exposed to the public view, bore traces of violence, and it was said that they had been strangled by some strielitz at the command of the voevoda Golitzuin.[185] What hand, if any, the Pretender had in the matter there is nothing to show. Thus ended a dynasty which eight weeks previously had seemed in assured possession of the throne. On the 20th of June, amid the resounding of myriad bells and the hoarse shouting of the people who lined streets, and roofs, and campaniles, the Phantom rode into the city of his endeavours, with a crashing of trumpets and kettle-drums, with a glittering retinue of Polish cavalry, German guards, Kozaks and strielitz. The long lost Dimitri, as his subjects fondly imagined him, made solemn obeisance at the tomb where the dread Ivan slept, and incidentally ordered the remains of the usurper Boris to be removed to a less hallowed resting-place. A cross-current of coffins and persons journeyed to and from the centre-point of Moskovite life; Nagois and Romanovs, living and defunct, came in from their monasteries or lonely graves to dwell or decompose in the favoured places of the Kreml, while the Godounov connections and Vremenszhiki went, literally, out into the cold; that is to say, to Perm and Sibiria. Vasili Shouyskie, the man who had conducted the inquest on the murdered Tzarevitch, had the indiscretion to recall this circumstance to the minds of a people gone wild with enthusiasm. His reminiscences were not interesting to the Tzar, who had him promptly arrested. He was interrogated, probably with the accompaniment of torture, and condemned, by a council of boyarins and citizens, to death. While his head was actually awaiting the axe-stroke a dramatically timed reprieve stopped the execution of the sentence, which was commuted to one of banishment. The people, with whom the Shouyskie family were more or less popular, might appreciate the sovereign’s clemency, but it did not strengthen their conviction that he was the son of the terrible Ivan. A new Patriarch was elected, Ignacie, a Greek, once Archbishop of Cyprus, from which see he had been driven by the Turks, since Archbishop of Riazan; he had been one of the first of the Vladuikas to recognise the adventurer as Tzar. There remained one more step towards establishing his identity, which, though of slight historical value, it was important that the Pretender should take. Mariya Nagoi, seventh wife of Ivan IV., was still living, and her testimony was naturally called for as to the authenticity of the person who posed as her son. In the middle of July the ex-Tzaritza was summoned from the convent that had been her prison for so many years, and was met at Tayninsk, a village near Moskva, by the man who claimed her as mother; whom, after a private interview, she publicly acknowledged as the true Dimitri. After thirty years of banishment and disgrace, half of which had been spent in cloistered seclusion, the relict might well have considered that it was a wise mother that knew her own child in the person of a reigning and popular sovereign. The very fact that his imposture had overturned her hated enemies, the Godounovs, would have gone far to soothe any possible scruples. It is significant that after her testimony the “Otrepiev” theory, first put forward by the Patriarch in the reign of Boris, began to gain ground in the capital. The people who had feared to oppose a forlorn and desperate pretender, from an idea that he might be the genuine heir of the Rurikovitches, were not comfortable at seeing him on the sacred throne of Monomachus, from a suspicion that he might not be.