confusion of which have in a great measure obscured its history. The
numbers engaged, the order of battle on the side of the Imperialists,
the number of the slain, the period of Pappenheim's arrival, what part
of his forces were actually engaged; above all, the circumstances of the
King's death, are perplexed amid the contrariety of contemporary
narrations, representing partly the imperfection of human testimony and
partly the different interests, jealousies, and suspicions of the times.
Among the last may be mentioned the imputation cast upon the Duke
Francis Albert of Lauenburg, of having, according to previous compact
with the Imperialists, murdered the King on the field of battle. This he
is said to have effected as he was leading him away wounded, by placing
a pistol behind him, and shooting him in the back. The Duke, who was now
about thirty-two years of age, had served during the Mantuan war in the
Imperial army, but, from some impression that he had been neglected,
joined Gustavus two or three weeks before the battle of Luetzen, as a
volunteer. After the King had fallen, supposing that all was lost, he
ran away to Weissenfels, and did not appear again among the Swedish
ranks until next morning, when the cool reception he received from the
generals induced him probably to leave and go to Dresden, where he
obtained from his relation, the Elector of Saxony, the rank of
field-marshal under Arnim. Wallenstein courted his friendship by
restoring to him without ransom some of his attendants captured at
Luetzen. The Duke was not ungrateful, and took a zealous part in the
negotiations between Wallenstein and the Elector of Saxony, and Duke
Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar in January and February, 1634. On the night of
Wallenstein's assassination he was arrested by Gordon and sent to
Vienna, where he remained a year in imprisonment, but, at the expiration
of that time, by embracing the Roman Catholic faith, obtained at once
his freedom and a command in the Imperial army in Silesia. In the battle
of Sweidnitz, May 30, 1642, he was wounded and taken prisoner.
Torstenson rescued him with difficulty from the vengeance of the Swedish
soldiers; and the next day he died of his wounds.
The story that he had murdered the King had at one time taken such a
hold upon the Swedes that no historian of that nation could venture to
treat it as a fable. But a full examination of the facts by Forster
shows upon how slight a foundation the charge has rested. The motive of
personal animosity arising out of a blow given by the King to the Duke
is destroyed by the fact that the quarrel in which the insult is
supposed to have been given was not with Duke Francis, but with his
brother. The corroboration of his guilt, that he wore the device of
Wallenstein's officers in the field, a green scarf, is annihilated by
the answer that Wallenstein's officers did not wear green scarfs, but
crimson. And the only direct evidence of his crime falls to pieces
against counter-evidence of still greater weight. Even the Swedes
themselves, if they still retain the convictions of their forefathers,
have grown tolerant of opposite convictions; and Geijer has not scrupled
to intimate, with tolerable plainness, that he considers the charge
against the Duke of Saxe Lauenburg unproved.
Gustavus' body was brought on a powder-wagon to the hamlet of Meuchen,
where it was placed for the night in the church, before the altar. The
next day it was carried to the schoolmaster's house, until he, being
joiner of the village also, constructed the simple shell in which it was
conveyed to Weissenfels. There the body was embalmed by the King's
apothecary, Caspar, who counted in it nine wounds. The heart, which was
uncommonly large, was preserved by the Queen in a golden casket. A
trooper, who had been wounded at the King's side, who remained at
Meuchen until his wound was healed, assisted by some peasants, rolled a
large stone toward the spot where he fell. They were unable, however, to
bring the stone, now called the "Swede's Stone," to the exact spot, from
which it stands some thirty or forty paces distant.
The death of Gustavus Adolphus cast a gloom over the whole of Europe.
Even foes could lament the fall of so noble an enemy. To his subjects,
to his allies, to the bondmen who looked to him for redress and
deliverance, his loss was a heartrending sorrow. Grave and aged senators
wrung their hands and sobbed aloud when intelligence reached Stockholm.
In the unfortunate Frederick of Bohemia it produced, as we have seen, a
depression that contributed probably to this death.
Nor was the grief shown by the many merely political or selfish, excited
because the public or individual hopes centred in the King seemed to
have perished with him. A heartfelt loyalty, a strong personal
admiration and attachment, intermingled with other sources of regret and
dignified the sorrow.
It would have been strange had it been otherwise. There were in Gustavus
most of the advantages and amenities of person and character which make
a popular king, a man admired and beloved. In his latter years, indeed,
he no longer possessed the graceful form that had belonged to him when
he was an ardent and favored suitor of Ebba Brahé; but the slight
inclination to corpulency that grew with him as he advanced toward
middle age detracted probably little, if at all, from the commanding
dignity of his person. His countenance to the last retained its
captivating sweetness and expressive variety. It was a countenance of
which the most accomplished pencil could give in one effort only an
inadequate idea, and which Vandyke--to whose portrait of the King none
of the engravings which I have seen, probably, do justice--has
represented only in repose.
But in the varying play of Gustavus' features men could read his
kindness of heart, his large powers of sympathy, his quick intelligence,
his noble, chivalrous nature. And these were infinitely attractive.
There, too--it must not be concealed--they could often discern the flash
of anger, to be followed quickly by the rough speech which gave pain and
offence where a little self-control and consideration might have spared
a pang and prevented a quarrel.
This propensity to anger diminished in some degree both the popularity
and merit of Gustavus; yet he rarely permitted his anger to rage beyond
a harsh expression, and with generous instinct he knew how to open the
door of reconciliation, not only by frankly confessing his irritability,
and by conferring fresh favors, but also by demanding fresh services
from those noble natures which in his heat and rashness he had injured
or pained.
In the field he shared the dangers of his soldiers with a courage
liable, doubtless, to the charge of temerity, but to which, no less than
to his participation in their hardships, his sympathy with their
feelings, and his great military talents, he owed, under God, his
success and renown. That his military fame was well founded, that no
series of accidents could have produced success, at once so splendid and
so uniform, we must have believed, though all professional authorities
had been silent; but the special merit of no other commander has been
more generally acknowledged by those of his own craft. His most
celebrated living rival and the greatest conqueror of modern times have
both set their seals to it. Wallenstein on two separate occasions
pronounced him the greatest captain of his age; and among the eight best
generals whom, in his judgment, the world had ever seen, Napoleon gave a
place to Gustavus Adolphus.
RECANTATION OF GALILEO
A.D. 1633
SIR OLIVER LODGE
From Socrates to Galileo, as from the Church's early martyrs to
its latest victims, runs the same story of conflict between the
free human spirit and the repressive environment of custom
acting through personal will or through constituted power.
When in 1633 Galileo, standing before the Inquisition at Rome,
denied his own great work and swore that earth stood still,
science staggered under the heavy blow. Galileo was being
punished, not directly for the great astronomical discoveries
he had made with his telescope, but for asserting that they
proved, or that he believed in, the Copernican system. This
declared that the earth moved, while the churchmen had
interpreted the Bible to mean that it did not.
Thus science, threatened in the person of its greatest leader,
terrified by his sufferings, no longer dared proclaim the thing
it saw. Descartes and many another thinker, though throbbing
with the eagerness of the new dawning light, hushed their
voices, hid their views. They were philosophers, not martyrs.
What this newly roused vigor of thought might have accomplished
except for the repressive hand of the Church we cannot tell. As
it was, the supremacy of intellect passed away from Catholic
Italy, turned from the South to the North, from Galileo to
Newton and Leibnitz. The forced recantation of the great
astronomer thus stands out as one of the events which have
changed the course of destiny.
In 1615 Pope Paul V wrote requesting Galileo to come to Rome to explain
his views. He went, was well received, made a special friend of Cardinal
Barberino--an accomplished man in high position, who became, in fact,
the next Pope. Galileo showed cardinals and others his telescope, and to
as many as would look through it he showed Jupiter's satellites and his
other discoveries. He had a most successful visit. He talked, he
harangued, he held forth in the midst of fifteen or twenty disputants at
once, confounding his opponents and putting them to shame.
His method was to let the opposite arguments be stated as fully and
completely as possible, himself aiding, and often adducing, the most
forcible and plausible arguments against his own views; and then, all
having been well stated, he would proceed to utterly undermine and
demolish the whole fabric, and bring out the truth in such a way as to
convince all honest minds. It was this habit that made him such a
formidable antagonist. He never shrank from meeting an opposing
argument, never sought to ignore it or cloak it in a cloud of words.
Every hostile argument he seemed to delight in, as a foe to be crushed,
and the better and stronger they sounded the more he liked them. He knew
many of them well, he invented a number more, and, had he chosen, could
have out-argued the stoutest Aristotelian on his own grounds. Thus did
he lead his adversaries on, almost like Socrates, only to ultimately
overwhelm them in a more hopeless rout. All this in Rome, too, in the
heart of the Catholic world. Had he been worldly-wise, he would
certainly have kept silent and unobtrusive till he had leave to go away
again. But he felt like an apostle of the new doctrines, whose mission
it was to proclaim them even in this centre of the world and of the
Church.
Well, he had an audience with the Pope--a chat an hour long--and the two
parted good friends, mutually pleased with each other.
He writes that he is all right now, and might return home when he liked.
But the question began to be agitated whether the whole system of
Copernicus ought not to be condemned as impious and heretical. This view
was persistently urged upon the Pope and college of cardinals, and it
was soon to be decided upon.
Had Galileo been unfaithful to the Church he could have left them to
stultify themselves in any way they thought proper, and himself had
gone; but he felt supremely interested in the result, and he stayed. He
writes:
"So far as concerns the clearing of my own character, I might return
home immediately; but although this new question regards me no more than
all those who for the last eighty years have supported those opinions
both in public and private, yet, as perhaps I may be of some assistance
in that part of the discussion which depends on the knowledge of truths
ascertained by means of the sciences which I profess, I, as a zealous
and Catholic Christian, neither can nor ought to withhold that
assistance which my knowledge affords, and this business keeps me
sufficiently employed."
It is possible that his stay was the worst thing for the cause he had at
heart. Anyhow, the result was that the system was condemned, and both
the book of Copernicus and the epitome of it by Kepler were placed on
the forbidden list,[33] and Galileo himself was formally ordered never
to teach or to believe the motion of the earth.
He quitted Rome in disgust, which before long broke out in satire. The
only way in which he could safely speak of these views now was as if
they were hypothetical and uncertain, and so we find him writing to the
Archduke Leopold, with a presentation copy of his book on the tides, the
following:
"This theory occurred to me when in Rome while the theologians were
debating on the prohibition of Copernicus' book, and of the opinion
maintained in it of the motion of the earth, which I at that time
believed: until it pleased those gentlemen to suspend the book, and
declare the opinion false and repugnant to the Holy Scriptures. Now, as
I know how well it becomes me to obey and believe the decisions of my
superiors, which proceed out of more knowledge than the weakness of my
intellect can attain to, this theory which I send you, which is founded
on the motion of the earth, I now look upon as a fiction and a dream,
and beg your highness to receive it as such. But as poets often learn to
prize the creations of their fancy, so in like manner do I set some
value on this absurdity of mine. It is true that when I sketched this
little work I did hope that Copernicus would not, after eighty years, be
convicted of error; and I had intended to develop and amplify it
further, but a voice from heaven suddenly awakened me, and at once
annihilated all my confused and entangled fancies."
This sarcasm, if it had been in print, would probably have been
dangerous. It was safe in a private letter, but it shows us his real
feelings. However, he was left comparatively quiet for a time. He was
getting an old man now, and passed the time studiously enough, partly at
his house in Florence, partly at his villa in Arcetri, a mile or so out
of the town.
Here was a convent, and in it his two daughters were nuns. One of them,
who passed under the name of Sister Maria Celeste, seems to have been a
woman of considerable capacity--certainly she was of a most affectionate
disposition--and loved and honored her father in the most dutiful way.
This was a quiet period of his life, spoiled only by occasional fits of
illness and severe rheumatic pains, to which the old man was always
liable. Many little circumstances are known of this peaceful time. For
instance, the convent clock won't go, and Galileo mends it for them. He
is always doing little things for them, and sending presents to the lady
superior and his two daughters.
He was occupied now with problems in hydrostatics and on other matters
unconnected with astronomy: a large piece of work which I must pass
over. Most interesting and acute it is, however.
In 1623, when the old Pope died, there was elected to the papal throne,
as Urban VIII, Cardinal Barberino, a man of very considerable
enlightenment, and a personal friend of Galileo's, so that both he and
his daughters rejoice greatly, and hope that things will come all right,
and the forbidding edict be withdrawn.
The year after this election he manages to make another journey to Rome
to compliment his friend on his elevation to the pontifical chair. He
had many talks with Urban, and made himself very agreeable.
Encouraged, doubtless, by marks of approbation, and reposing too much
confidence in the individual good-will of the Pope, without heeding the
crowd of half-declared enemies who were seeking to undermine his
reputation, he set about, after his return to Florence, his greatest
literary and most popular work, _Dialogues on the Ptolemaic and
Copernican Systems_. This purports to be a series of four conversations
between three characters. Salviati, a Copernican philosopher; Sagredo, a
wit and scholar, not specially learned, but keen and critical, and who
lightens the talk with chaff; Simplicio, an Aristotelian philosopher,
who propounds the stock absurdities which served instead of arguments to
the majority of men.
The Aristotelians were furious, and represented to the Pope that he
himself was the character intended by Simplicio, the philosopher whose
opinions get alternately refuted and ridiculed by the other two, till he
is reduced to an abject state of impotence.
The infirm old man was instantly summoned to Rome. His friends pleaded
his age--he was now seventy--his ill-health, the time of year, the state
of the roads, the quarantine existing on account of the plague. It was
all of no avail; to Rome he must go, and on February 14th he arrived.
His daughter at Arcetri was in despair; and anxiety and fastings and
penances self-inflicted on his account dangerously reduced her health.
At Rome he was not imprisoned, but he was told to keep indoors and show
himself as little as possible. He was allowed, however, to stay at the
house of the Tuscan ambassador instead of in jail.
By April he was removed to the chambers of the Inquisition and examined
several times. Here, however, the anxiety was too much, and his health
began to give way seriously; so, before long, he was allowed to return
to the ambassador's house; and, after application had been made, was
allowed to drive in the public garden in a half-closed carriage. Thus in
every way the Inquisition dealt with him as leniently as they could. He
was now their prisoner, and they might have cast him into their
dungeons, as many another had been cast. By whatever they were
influenced--perhaps the Pope's old friendship, perhaps his advanced age
and infirmities--he was not so cruelly used.
Still, they had their rules; he _must_ be made to recant and abjure his
heresy; and, if necessary, torture must be applied. This he knew well
enough, and his daughter knew it, and her distress may be imagined.
Moreover, it is not as if they had really been heretics, as if they
hated or despised the Church of Rome. On the contrary, they loved and
honored the Church. They were sincere and devout worshippers, and only
on a few scientific matters did Galileo presume to differ from his
ecclesiastical superiors: his disagreement with them occasioned him real
sorrow; and his dearest hope was that they could be brought to his way
of thinking and embrace the truth.
This condition of things could not go on. From February to June the
suspense lasted. On June 20th he was summoned again, and told he would
be wanted all next day for a rigorous examination. Early in the morning
of the 21st he repaired thither, and the doors were shut. Out of those
chambers of horror he did not reappear till the 24th. What went on all
those three days no one knows. He himself was bound to secrecy. No
outsider was present. The records of the Inquisition are jealously
guarded. That he was technically tortured is certain; that he actually
underwent the torment of the rack is doubtful. Much learning has been
expended upon the question, especially in Germany. Several
eminent scholars have held the fact of actual torture to be
indisputable--geometrically certain, one says--and they confirm it by
the hernia from which he afterward suffered, this being a well-known and
frequent consequence.
Other equally learned commentators, however, deny that the last stage
was reached. For there are five stages all laid down in the rules of the
Inquisition, and steadily adhered to in a rigorous examination, at each
stage an opportunity being given for recantation, every utterance,
groan, or sigh being strictly recorded. The recantation so given has to
be confirmed a day or two later, under pain of a precisely similar
ordeal.
The five stages are: (1) The official threat in the court; (2) the
taking to the door of the torture-chamber and renewing the official
threat; (3) the taking inside and showing the instruments; (4)
undressing and binding upon the rack; (5) _territio realis_. Through how
many of these ghastly acts Galileo passed I do not know. I hope and
believe not the last.
There are those who lament that he did not hold out, and accept the
crown of martyrdom thus offered to him. Had he done so we know his
fate--a few years' languishing in the dungeons, and then the flames.
Whatever he ought to have done, he did not hold out--he gave way. At one
stage or another of the dread ordeal he said: "I am in your hands. I
will say whatever you wish." Then was he removed to a cell while his
special form of perjury was drawn up.
The next day, clothed as a penitent, the venerable old man was taken to
the convent of Minerva, where the cardinals and prelates were assembled
for the purpose of passing judgment upon him.
The judgment sentences him: (1) To the abjuration, (2) to formal
imprisonment for life, (3) to recite the seven penitential psalms every
week.
Ten cardinals were present; but, to their honor, be it said, three
refused to sign; and this blasphemous record of intolerance and bigoted
folly goes down the ages with the names of seven cardinals immortalized
upon it. This having been read, he next had to read word for word the
abjuration which had been drawn up for him, and then sign it.
THE ABJURATION OF GALILEO
"I, Galileo Galilei, son of the late Vincenzo Galilei, of Florence, aged
seventy years, being brought personally to judgment, and kneeling before
your Most Eminent and Most Reverend Lords Cardinals, General Inquisitors
of the universal Christian republic against heretical depravity, having
before my eyes the Holy Gospels, which I touch with my own hands, swear
that I have always believed, and now believe, and with the help of God
will in future believe, every article which the Holy Catholic and
Apostolic Church of Rome holds, teaches, and preaches. But because I
have been enjoined by this Holy Office altogether to abandon the false
opinion which maintains that the sun is the centre and immovable, and
forbidden to hold, defend, or teach the said false doctrine in any
manner, and after it hath been signified to me that the said doctrine is
repugnant with the Holy Scripture, I have written and printed a book, in
which I treat of the same doctrine now condemned, and adduce reasons
with great force in support of the same, without giving any solution,
and therefore have been judged grievously suspected of heresy; that is
to say, that I held and believed that the sun is the centre of the
universe and is immovable, and that the earth is not the centre and is
movable; willing, therefore, to remove from the minds of your Eminences,
and of every Catholic Christian, this vehement suspicion rightfully
entertained toward me, with a sincere heart and unfeigned faith, I
abjure, curse, and detest the said errors and heresies, and generally
every other error and sect contrary to Holy Church; and I swear that I
will never more in future say or assert anything verbally, or in
writing, which may give rise to a similar suspicion of me; but if I
shall know any heretic, or anyone suspected of heresy, that I will
denounce him to this Holy Office, or to the Inquisitor or Ordinary of
the place where I may be; I swear, moreover, and promise, that I will
fulfil and observe fully, all the penances which have been or shall be
laid on me by this Holy Office. But if it shall happen that I violate
any of my said promises, oaths, and protestations (which God avert!), I
subject myself to all the pains and punishments which have been decreed
and promulgated by the sacred canons, and other general and particular
constitutions, against delinquents of this description. So may God help
me, and his Holy Gospels which I touch with my own hands. I, the
above-named Galileo Galilei, have abjured, sworn, promised, and bound
myself as above, and in witness thereof with my own hand have subscribed
this present writing of my abjuration, which I have recited word for
word. At Rome, in the Convent of Minerva, June 22, 1633. I, Galileo
Galilei, have abjured as above with my own hand."
* * * * *
Those who believe the story about his muttering to a friend, as he rose
from his knees, "_E pur si muove_" ("And yet it does move"), do not
realize the scene.