Prince’s life; one, a year later, was very nearly successful. A youth
offered him a petition, and as Orange took it he discharged a pistol at
the Prince’s head. The bullet went through his neck and through the
roof of his mouth, carrying away some teeth. The Prince was blinded and
stunned. When he came to his senses he called out, “Don’t kill him! I
forgive him my death.” Every one thought he had been mortally wounded,
and crowds went to the churches to offer up prayers for his recovery;
and he did recover, but his poor wife Charlotte, who had nursed him
devotedly, died of the shock. This had been a perfect marriage, lasting
seven years, and Charlotte had had six daughters, all of whom had
afterwards interesting and eventful histories. A year later William
married Louise de Coligny, the daughter of the famous French general.
She was one of the noblest and most attractive women of her day, and
gave her husband one son, a remarkable person and the first of many
illustrious Stadtholders.
In Delft, William with his wife, surrounded by his many children,
ranging in age from two to nearly thirty years, lived a very happy,
simple life. Their large plain house was in a pleasant street planted
with lime-trees, so that in June the surface of the canal they looked
upon was covered with their fallen blossoms. There in the street
William of Orange would sometimes be seen looking like any ordinary
burgher, very plainly dressed in a loose coat of gray frieze over a
tawny leather doublet, a high ruff round his neck and a wide-brimmed
hat of dark felt with a cord round it. In appearance, Orange was
rather tall, well-made and strong, but thin. His hair and complexion
were brown, and his eyes were brown, too, and very bright and large.
His head was small and well-shaped, but the brow was broad, and now,
late in life, very much wrinkled and furrowed with thought and care.
His mouth was firmly closed and rather melancholy. His whole appearance
was that of a man of great strength of character and of self-control.
At this time, though weary after many strenuous years of toil, he was
never more cheerful, amusing, and sympathetic. He was busy still as the
practical ruler of his devoted people—“Father of the Country,” as they
called him; but when the States begged him to become their sovereign he
refused. He had quite enough reward and consolation, he said, in the
devotion of Holland and Zeeland, and he wanted rest in his advanced
age. He was only fifty-one, but no doubt felt old, for he was old in
experience and sorrow, and so he asked to be excused more cares and
responsibilities.
In the summer of 1584, the Prince was one day with his wife going
to his dining-room for dinner, when a man presented himself at the
door of the dining-room and demanded a passport. The Princess was so
much alarmed at the man’s looks that she asked her husband about him.
The Prince said he was only a man who wanted a passport, and ordered
his secretary to prepare one. He then ate his meal quite calmly and
happily, and at the end of it walked out of the room leading the way
to his own apartments up some stairs. He had just begun to ascend them
when a figure emerged from a dark archway near the staircase and shot
a pistol straight at the Prince’s heart. One bullet went right through
him, and he, feeling his wound, cried out, “Oh, my God, have mercy upon
my soul! Oh, my God, have mercy upon this poor people!” and then he
died.
The murderer’s name was Balthazar Gerard. He had pretended to be a
Calvinist, and in this manner had approached Orange with all sorts
of pathetic stories to arouse his sympathy, and had got to know all
Orange’s habits and movements. Now he was seized by the Prince’s
devoted people and, in the barbarous custom of that day, tortured in
a most hideous fashion until he died, all of which he bore with great
bravery. He was an absolute fanatic, and believed he was doing a very
fine thing in ridding the world of Orange. Being dead, he could not
receive himself the reward promised by Philip, but his parents were
enriched and ennobled for their son’s act.
The Great Leader was no more, and it is easy to picture the indignation
and misery among his people. How were they to get on without his kind,
commanding figure, without his tact, his patience and resolution?
His death was indeed a calamity which put back the fortunes of the
Netherlands for many years, for his second son Maurice, who became
Governor, was only seventeen years old, and it was hard work to
continue the struggle. But Orange’s labors had not been in vain.
He was the real founder of the Dutch Republic, and he knew before
he died that the cause he had suffered for would at last succeed,
that the Hollanders were now in a position to offer successful
resistance to Philip. And his blood ran, too, in the veins of many
noble descendants—his children, and later his grandchildren and
great-grandchildren, who were to carry on his work. Some inherited his
extraordinary powers of statesmanship and others became great soldiers.
William of Orange, like all great men of character, had his enemies and
critics. He was accused of being governed by ambition and the desire
to see himself in high positions. He has been called insincere, and
even accused of cowardice on the field of battle. If we study his life
carefully it seems to be a complete refutation of these accusations. If
he had only cared for high posts and honors, how easily he might have
retained them! He need not have taken the line he did against Philip.
He might, as he was a Catholic, have overcome the feeling he had that
persecution was an intolerable thing and agreed to the general system
of Inquisition. In the beginning he owed everything to Charles V, so it
was not natural or possible to throw over his son immediately. Besides,
he was a statesman—one of the greatest of that age: he wanted to do
the best for his country. Like many open-minded persons, he was able to
see two sides to a question and to see it in its widest sense. He was
tolerant and ahead of his times. To be all this in an age of bigotry
and intolerance was to be insincere.
By circumstance William the Silent was placed in an extremely difficult
position, and all must admit that he came out of it with the greatest
glory. His troubles came upon him only because he was too honest. It is
a difficult thing to understand, but a man’s sufferings and troubles
are often a result of his own finest qualities, and so it was with
Orange. As to his lack of physical bravery, his life was also a living
contradiction of this criticism, as witness his indifference to the ban
put upon him. It did not make him in the least nervous, and he took no
precautions for protecting himself against assassins. For years, too,
his life was spent on the field of battle, meeting with great reverses
and hairbreadth escapes, yet he never shirked it, but endured and faced
it. It is true that, unlike his brother Louis, he had no actual joy
in battle. His blood was not stirred by the clash of arms, for he was
not naturally a soldier, any more than he was a rebel; circumstances
and his own fair-mindedness had made him so; while rebelling against
an utterly unfair and unlawful condition of things, he used all his
powers to moderate people’s passions, and to make them live peacefully
together. The end part of his life was spent in drawing up laws to that
purpose.
In thinking over the character of Orange, the fact that strikes one
most is that his character deepened and strengthened as he grew older
and in proportion to his sufferings. If he had not been tried to
the very limit by misfortunes, and if he had always been rich and
prosperous, the finest things in his character might have remained
untried and unknown to us. We should not have realized that beside his
charming qualities, his great understanding of men, his gentleness
and generosity, there lay heroic qualities of endurance, devotion,
and courage. That he should not by nature have been an ascetic,
despising amusements, good food, and fine clothes, and the lighter
side of existence, but an aristocrat, easygoing, enjoying possessions
and the beauty of life, and with some human weaknesses, only draws
us more closely to him, for it makes us understand the struggles and
difficulties he had to overcome in himself in order to do what he did.
He gave away everything he had, and at one time possessed hardly the
common necessaries of life, so that he was almost a beggar as well as
an outlaw. In the darkest hours of his life he tried to smile and to
appear cheerful for the sake of his people, and to encourage them,
which made his enemies say he was flippant and heartless. But he was
a truly religious man, inheriting from his mother the religious
spirit—reverence and belief in good and trust in God.
In the words of Motley, “He went through life bearing the load of a
people’s sorrow upon his shoulders with a smiling face, and when he
died the little children cried in the streets.”
D. P.
III
TYCHO BRAHE
1546–1601
Esse potius quam haberi
There is a small island called Hveen which lies in the Sound half-way
between the coasts of Denmark and Sweden and about ten miles north of
Copenhagen. It looks now a rather desolate and abandoned place. But if
you had been alive about the year 1580 and had gone there, you would
have been very much surprised at what you found. On landing you would
have seen right above you in the middle of the island, rising up out
of the trees, a wonderful castle with galleries and turrets and gilded
spires, just like a palace in a fairy tale. Let us imagine it was
summer, and you were very bold and wended your way up the rocks through
a grove of fruit trees into a lovely garden with avenues and terraces
and fountains and gorgeous flower-beds. An attendant is standing in the
porch, and you ask him to show you round, as you are naturally curious
to see what the inside of such a place is like. The inside is even more
surprising. As you pass through the hall and along the stone corridors
lit by stained-glass windows, the song of caged birds, the splash of
fountains, and the distant sound of music greet your ear. You notice
Latin inscriptions painted over the doors and rich decoration on all
sides.
Through the windows of the spacious rooms filled with carved furniture
and decorated with pictures and tapestries you catch a glimpse of a
glorious view of the Swedish and Danish coast, with the towers of
Copenhagen in the far distance. In the great library there are cabinets
of rare and beautiful objects: the walls are lined with books: the
tables are piled with papers all covered with numbers and geometrical
figures: curious-looking instruments stand on the shelves: an enormous
brass globe occupies one corner of the room and a complicated-looking
clock, all wheels and works, stands in another. Down in the basement
you find a vast apartment where masses of bottles and crucibles and
retorts and glasses filled with strange-colored mixtures are ranged on
shelves and tables. Who on earth lives in such a place as this? you ask
the attendant. It is the Castle of Uraniborg, he tells you, the home
of the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe—the greatest astronomer of the
age—who is known as “the noblest of the learned and the most learned of
the nobles,” and he whispers under his breath that he is a magician.
[Illustration: TYCHO BRAHE]
Laughter and the sound of animated voices reach you as you pass the
door of the banqueting hall. Your informant explains that there are
guests in the castle—a prince and his suite have spent the day there,
and some learned men from foreign lands form part of the company. The
evening is closing in, and attendants come hurrying from all quarters
carrying books and instruments; a student from one of the observatories
in the towers goes into the hall to inform his master that the night
is clear. Through the open doorway you catch sight of the great
man himself, sitting at the end of his dining-table, discoursing
vivaciously to his guests. He is a broad-shouldered, burly-looking man,
with short, bright red hair and a thick mustache curling over an auburn
beard. But what an odd nose he has got! it seems to shine like metal.
It _is_ metal, the attendant tells you: for once, as a student, he
fought a duel with another student, and his adversary got the best of
it and slashed Tycho’s nose right off with his sword. He made himself
a new nose out of a mixture of gold and silver, which he stuck on and
wore for the rest of his life. Crouching at the foot of his chair you
observe a funny little dwarf, his jester, who from time to time takes
morsels of food from his hand and interrupts the conversation with some
ridiculous joke.
Soon the banquet is over, the procession passes out, and you notice
how grandly the astronomer is dressed, with doublet and white ruff, a
sword at his side, a chain of gold round his neck. The prince and his
courtiers do not appear more magnificent. Is it out of compliment to
his guests? No, you are told; when he goes to watch the stars, even
alone, he always dresses like this, as if he were some great ambassador
accredited by the earth to the heavens.
The guests walk across the castle yard, down a flight of steps to a
domed subterranean building not far off called Stjerneborg—the castle
of the stars—which is entirely given up to astronomical requirements,
the only decoration on the walls being portraits of astronomers,
including one of Tycho himself. There, when the prince has left the
island and the other guests have retired to rest, the astronomer will
remain rapt in contemplation of the mysteries of the universe.
Our remotest ancestors were struck with awe and interest when they
looked at the heavens. They believed them to be the residence of God,
and at the same time they were their clock and calendar. Astronomy
is a very ancient science. It was practised by the Egyptians, the
Chinese, and the Babylonians in the remotest ages of history, as well
as by the Arabs and Greeks. The most marvelous discoveries have been
made with regard to the number and motion of the stars since the days
when primæval man looked on the heavens as a great blue vault “fretted
with golden fire.” It may have been thought once that the stars could
be numbered. The telescope and photography have shown this to be
impossible, and have taught us the overwhelming fact that our universe
contains, at the very least, one hundred millions of suns, and that
the light from some of the most distant stars has taken over 18,000
years to reach us! This seems very bewildering, though not more so than
to know that there are animals so minute that if a thousand of them
were ranged abreast they would easily swim, without being thrown out
of line, through the eye of the finest needle. We live in the midst
of incomprehensible marvels, infinitely great and infinitely small,
between the limitless future and the limitless past.
What wonderful patience and toil it must have required for the
astronomers of all nations, working together and comparing notes, to
store up the vast amount of knowledge of the heavens which we now
possess. It is amazing, too, to think how three or four hundred years
ago they were able to make so many discoveries and calculations without
the aid of a telescope. For before 1600 the telescope was practically
unknown. So when you see standing in a modern observatory gigantic
instruments, thirty or forty feet long, of marvelous ingenuity and
highly complicated mechanism, which in spite of their size and weight
are capable of being moved by a hair’s breadth and adjusted to the
hundredth part of an inch: their object-glasses alone perhaps over
thirty inches in diameter, costing thousands of dollars; and then you
think of these early astronomers gazing through a hole in a vaulted
roof at the tiny specks of light with their naked eye, the work they
accomplished appears still more astounding. It is true that their
discoveries were at first casual and haphazard. But at last it occurred
to one of them that the progress of astronomy depended on continuous
observation and the most scrupulously accurate calculations, carefully
planned and carried on over a number of years. It was Tycho Brahe who
first did this.
You have heard of Copernicus, the Pole, who was really the founder of
modern astronomy, because he discovered that the earth went round the
sun and was not the center of the universe, as every one had supposed.
He died three years before Tycho Brahe was born. Galileo, the famous
Italian, was born in 1564 and lived till he was seventy-eight. He made
further discoveries about the stars and used a telescope of a very
primitive kind. He supported Copernicus’s theory with regard to the
relative movement of the earth and the sun, and this brought upon him
the serious displeasure of the Church. The notion that the earth was
not the center of the universe was considered wicked and blasphemous.
The Pope commanded him to come to Rome, and after a long trial he was
made, under the threat of torture, to retract what he had said. The
story is that as he turned away at the end of his trial he stamped his
foot on the ground and muttered: “E pur si muove!” (And yet it _does_
move!)
Kepler is another well-known astronomer, of whom we shall hear again.
These three are all more eminent men than Tycho Brahe, whose fame does
not depend on any startling discovery, but on the fact that he devised
wonderful instruments, and by unceasing energy and industry collected
a mass of material which was of untold value to his successors. But
perhaps most of all it is his romantic life and his strong character
which make him stand out in history.
Tycho was born in 1546 and was the eldest of ten children. His father,
Otto Brahe, was lord of Knudstrup in Scaane, which now forms part of
Sweden. At an early age he was adopted by his uncle, Jorgen Brahe, who
treated him as if he were his son, had him educated at Copenhagen, but
by spoiling him a good deal was no doubt responsible for the somewhat
conceited and domineering manner he developed in later years. At the
age of fourteen Tycho received what might be termed his “call” from
the heavens. It came in the form of an eclipse of the sun, which
roused the boy’s interest to such an extent that from that moment he
made up his mind to turn his attention to astronomy. It is a curious
fact that ten years later, when chemistry had so absorbed him that
he had almost abandoned his astronomical studies, he again received
a sign from the heavens. This time it was the appearance of a new
star which he observed one night while walking from his laboratory,
and which caused him to take up again the beloved pursuit of which he
never wearied to his dying day. He discovered the new star, and it may
be equally truly said that the star discovered him. But at first the
idea of his devoting his time to astronomy was not at all favored or
encouraged. After he had spent three years in the Copenhagen University
his uncle sent him to Leipzig, where it was intended he should study
law. His tutor, who accompanied him, conscientiously tried to make
Tycho devote all his attention and time to his legal studies, but his
task was almost hopeless. It is impossible to force any one to take an
interest in something he does not like. These obstacles only served to
strengthen Tycho’s resolve. He devoured every book he could find on
astronomy, and at night, unknown to his tutor, he would creep out and
begin his first intercourse with the stars. A copy of Ptolemy’s great
work on astronomy, copiously annotated and marked by the schoolboy,
is preserved as one of the chief treasures in the library of the
University at Prague.
While he was thus engaged a fatal accident befell his uncle. Jorgen
Brahe was riding in attendance on the King of Denmark when a bridge
collapsed under them. He plunged into the water and attempted to save
the King’s life. In consequence of this he contracted a chill, which
soon afterwards caused his death. Tycho hurried home to Copenhagen,
but he did not stay long. He returned to Germany and continued his
studies at Wittenberg, the home of the great Reformer Luther, who had
been dead only about twenty years. He seems to have had no desire to
go home, for he settled down at Rostock and then at Augsburg, where
he was fortunate enough to find many scientific men with whom he
could associate and exchange ideas. Here it was that he invented and
constructed some remarkable astronomical instruments, one of which
was that enormous globe you saw in his library. It was four feet in
diameter, and covered with a coating of brass on which was engraved a
representation of the heavens founded on his own observations.
Otto Brahe, who was governor of Helsingborg Castle, died in 1570, and
Tycho returned to Denmark to arrange his father’s affairs. Another
uncle placed his house at the disposal of his remarkable young nephew,
and soon Tycho was eagerly watching his new star, about which he wrote
a book in Latin. There was some difficulty about publishing the book,
because it was supposed to be beneath the dignity of a nobleman to
demean himself by writing books. However, by the assistance of friends,
it was published and added very much to his reputation. This was an
age when nobles and aristocrats had great power and dominated the
country. Like nobles in all ages, physical work in time of peace or
mental work of any kind was beneath their dignity: they occupied most
of their time in pleasure and amusement. They considered themselves the
elect, who were born to be served. Although he belonged by birth to
this class, Tycho detested the frivolous, aimless lives they led. In a
letter in which he expresses his intention of leaving Denmark, he says:
Neither my country nor my friends keep me back; one who has courage
finds a home in every place and lives a happy life every where.
Friends, too, one can find in all countries. There will always
be time enough to return to the cold North to follow the general
example, and, like the rest, in pride and luxury to play for the rest
of one’s years with wine, dogs, and horses (for if these were lacking
how could the nobles be happy?). May God, as I trust He will, accord
me a better lot.
He traveled about in Germany, Austria, and Italy, and he made great
friends with the Landgrave of Hesse, who was very much interested
in mathematics and astronomy and had a fine observatory of his own.
While Tycho was staying with him at Cassel a serious fire broke out
in the palace. But such was the astronomer’s power of concentration
and absorption in his work that, regardless of the general alarm, he
could not be persuaded to leave his study until he had finished the
particular piece of work with which he was occupied at the moment.
The fame of the great astronomer was now spreading, and the King of
Denmark, Frederick II, who heard his praises sung by the Landgrave
of Hesse, was determined to show his appreciation of the remarkable
talents of his subject in a practical way. He therefore presented Tycho
Brahe with the island of Hveen, in the Baltic, as his own personal
property, with sufficient money to erect on it whatever buildings he
might desire. The foundation of the great castle was laid on August
30, 1576. A party of scientific friends had assembled, and the time
had been chosen so that the heavenly bodies were auspiciously placed.
Libations of costly wines were poured forth and the stone was laid
with due solemnity. Here at Uraniborg, the castle you visited, he
lived for about twenty years, keeping a diary not only of astronomical
observations but of all events that passed on the island.