Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City (24 page)

In 1608 Rudolf was forced to abdicate as Emperor, and after Rudolf came the deluge, in which Kepler, along with any prospect of peace in Counter-Reformation Europe, was swept up and washed away. By the winter of 1611, Prague was in chaos. Troops under the command, so-called, of Archduke Leopold V, Bishop of Passau, whom Rudolf had engaged in a hare-brained plot to regain power, ran riot in the city, doing the things that an undisciplined soldiery always does, and clashing in running, bloody battles with gangs of Bohemian vigilantes. In his house in the New Town, Kepler, labouring to uncover the secret harmony of the universe, could look down from the window of his workroom on the scenes of mayhem and rapine in the streets round about. Meanwhile on the
the atmosphere in the royal palace 'was thick with madness and ruin'
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as Rudolf's final piece of lunacy ended in his being stripped of all power and his hated brother seizing the Bohemian throne. In April Kepler had his own fall from grace, when the impossibility of life in Prague forced him to accept a teaching post at a school in Linz in Upper Austria. The Imperial Mathematician was once more a schoolmaster. There was worse to come when, in June, Barbara died of fever. Despite his genuine grief for this woman who had shared so many of life's vicissitudes, Kepler married again, a little more happily this time, although the children of his second marriage were also to die, as his and Barbara's had. Then, in 1615, a charge of witchcraft was brought against his mother, and he spent the next six years - yes, six years - engaged in her legal defence. He got her off, but she died a few months later. Through all these trials and troubles Kepler never ceased to work at astronomy. As the world around him collapsed into the disorder and horror of religious warfare, he became more and more obsessed with the quest for celestial harmony, turning now, as a true Pythagorean, to music as a model. On May 15th, 1618, completing the final stages of one of his key books, the
Harmonice mundi,
he discovered the third law of planetary motion, the 'harmonic law', defining the relationship between the orbits of the planets and their distances from the sun. He was exultant, and at the end of the
Harmonice
composed a paean of gratitude to his God: 'O You who by the light of nature arouse in us a longing for the light of grace . . . I give thanks to You, Lord Creator . . .'

On May 23rd, eight days after Kepler had discovered his third law, a crowd of a hundred or so Protestant nobles forced their way into the Chancellery of Rudolf's palace to protest at the revocation of Rudolf's 'Letter of Majesty' which had guaranteed religious tolerance in the province - and the attempts by Rudolf's Habsburg heirs to suppress the Bohemian church, founded at such bloody cost by Jan Hus. Acting in the usual way of the devout when they have been slighted, they seized on two Catholic councillors, Jaroslav
z Martinic and Vi-lem Slavata, and threw them and their secretary, Filip Fabricius, out of the Chancellery's eastern window. The three clung on to the sill, but the leader of the Protestants, Count Thurn, beat on their fingers with the hilt of his sword until they let go. Luckily for the victims, the moat far below the window was clogged with sewage, so that they had a relatively soft landing. This was, as every schoolboy used to know, the Second Defenestration of Prague, and the beginning of the Thirty Years War.
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The Emperor Matthias died the following year, and the crown passed to his nephew, Ferdinand II, the Jesuit-trained bigot who had personally exiled Kepler and his co-religionists from Graz in 1600. The Bohemian Estates promptly rebelled, and invited Frederick V, the Elector Palatine, to become King of Bohemia. In 1613 Frederick had married the Princess Elizabeth, daughter of James I of England. Europe had high hopes for the golden couple, who 'have something of the air of a Shakespearean hero and heroine.'
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Their fabulous castle at Heidelberg, 'with its gardens and grottoes, its water organs and singing statues', was a rival for Rudolf's
palace and 'a citadel of advanced seventeenth-century culture.'
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Elizabeth was a young woman of wide learning,
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while her husband was described by the English Ambassador as 'much beyond his years religious, wise, active, and valiant'. The couple debated carefully the offer of the Bohemian crown, consulting among others the Archbishop of Canterbury, who urged acceptance, and Frederick's mother, who implored him to say no. However, Frederick the zealous Protestant considered that he had been divinely called, and on September 27th, 1619, he and Elizabeth set out with their eldest son, Prince Henry, for Prague. Much of Protestant Europe rejoiced, while England considered that the 'only Phoenix of the world', Queen Elizabeth I, was about to return in the form of her namesake. The coronation of the couple in St Vitus's Cathedral was, as Frances Yates remarks, 'the last great public ceremony to be sponsored by the Bohemian church'.

Bohemia believed its new King and Queen would be the saviours of the country's autonomy and the religious freedoms which had been one of the more solid aspects of Rudolf's mystico-magical reign. But Bohemia was dreadfully mistaken. It had put its faith in Elizabeth's father, James of England, whom they believed would champion their cause, with military might if necessary. James, however, in awe of the Habs-burgs, was against the Bohemian adventure, and behind the scenes busied himself in disowning his daughter and her husband. Nor did the German Protestant princes come forward with the sup port that might have been expected of them. Meanwhile the Catholics were massing their forces, and on November 8th, 1620, Frederick's army was utterly defeated at the Battle of White Mountain, fought at Bila Hora just outside Prague. The 'Winter King' fled with his wife to The Hague. After the rout, the Habsburgs exacted a frightful revenge on the Bohemian Protestants. The following year, on the morning of June 21st, twenty-seven leaders of the Czech Protestants, including nobles, knights and burghers, were beheaded on the Old Town Square by the Prague executioner, Jan
One of those who died on that day of infamy was kindly old Jan Jesensky, Rudolf's doctor and later Rector of Prague University, who had acted as arbitrator in Kepler's negotiations over the terms of his contract with Tycho Brahe. The heads of the twenty-seven victims were impaled on spikes on the Charles Bridge, where they remained for a decade, until Swedish forces entered the city in 1631 - Brahe's Scandinavian heart would have swelled with justly vindictive pride - and removed them for burial in the Tyn church. Ripellino in
Magic Prague
sees that terrible day as emblematic of the city's miseries down the centuries, and rages in particular against Mydlaf the executioner, condemning him to the inferno:
Tn ignem aeternum, in ignem aeter-numl'

Kepler spent the final years of his life wandering restlessly back and forth across war-ravaged southern Europe, seeking support first from the Duke of Wurttemberg, which was refused on religious grounds, and, more successfully, from the Bohemian general Albrecht Wallenstein, Duke of Friedland and Mecklenburg and Prince of Sagan, who had scored a notable victory by repulsing an invasion of north Germany by Christian IV of Denmark - once again Tycho in his grave must have bridled with satisfaction and who was almost as strong a believer in the influence of the stars on the fortunes of men as the Emperor Rudolf had been. Wallenstein lured Kepler to Sagan in 1628 with the promise of a house and a grant of 1,000 florins a year, as well as a printing press on which he might publish his own books, in return for which rewards Kepler would act as the general's official astrologer. The printing press was particularly welcome, as publishing was more difficult than ever in those years of endless war, and Kepler had a pet project - his last, as it happened - that he was determined to put into print. This was
Somnium,
the world's first work of science fiction, a twenty-eight-page fantasy of a trip to the Moon. In it, the narrator visits Uraniborg and learns Danish in order to communicate with Tycho and his assistants, after which he travels to the Moon and gives an account of how the Earth and the planets appear from a lunar perspective.

Somnium
was an unintentionally prophetic title. Printing of the book was still under way in October 1630 when Kepler set out on his last, brief wanderings. From Sagan he travelled 450 kilometres south to Linz - surely stopping off at Prague - in a vain effort to collect back pay from his teaching post there. From Linz he rode nearly the same distance north again all the way to Leipzig to sell his wares at the autumn book fair in the city. He had shipped ahead nearly 150 of his own books, including sixteen copies of the
Tabulae Rudolphinae,
which, despite Tengna-gel's attempt to take them over, Kepler had finally completed in 1624; they were, as later scientific scholars have attested, a miracle of thoroughness and accuracy, and in them Kepler paid due regard to the man who had made them possible, Tycho Brahe. When the fair was over Kepler rode another three hundred kilometres south to Regensburg, where the Diet was meeting to settle the succession of the Emperor Ferdinand's son, another Ferdinand, who had conspired to depose Kepler's patron Wallenstein from command of the imperial armies. Kepler hoped to beard the Emperor and extract from him monies that were still owing to him as Imperial Mathematician, a title which he still held, worthless though it was. He arrived in Regensburg on November 2nd, riding a broken-down nag, and lodged at the house of an old friend, Hillebrand Billig. There he fell into a fever, and died two weeks later. He was a month short of his sixtieth birthday. He had already prepared his own epitaph, which, like everything this endearing, bizarre and prodigiously gifted creature wrote about himself, contains a hint of amusement and self-mockery:

I measured the heavens, now the earth's shadows I

    measure.

Skybound my mind, earthbound my body rests.

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When as an adult Tycho was at last told by his mother that he had a dead twin brother he seems to have been deeply affected, and wrote a Latin poem which he set in the mouth of the dead child, who looked down on the living mortal with compassion:
He dwells on earth, while I dwell on Olympus.