Kepler's Witch

by James A. Connor

  Meanwhile, the Kepler family found out about Jakob Reinbold’s petition, and in January 1617 Christoph and Pastor Georg Binder petitioned the duke to dismiss Jörg Haller’s request that Katharina’s estate pay for the support of his children. For once, the Keplers were successful. The duke, perceiving the corruption behind the whole affair and yet not knowing what to do about it, was embarrassed and avoided taking sides. However, as more petitions fluttered his way, his embarrassment grew. He really wanted the whole thing to go away.

  In February Emperor Ferdinand, who succeeded Matthias after his death, summoned Kepler to Prague, and so Kepler hurriedly left for the capital. He didn’t stay long, however, because he wanted to return to Linz to take his mother to Leonberg. Meanwhile, in Leonberg, Einhorn had refused to show Katharina Kepler’s advocate the duke’s order and instead read them excerpts—“a little of this and a little of that.” On March 9, Christoph Kepler and Pastor Binder wrote to the duke directly to complain about Einhorn’s behavior, especially his refusal to show them the duke’s order.

  From February to August, the Keplers fought with Einhorn, trying to get him to allow the slander case to come to trial. The duke ordered Einhorn to do so, but on more than one occasion he ignored the order, and then bragged that if the duke forced him to obey his order, he would petition the Royal Chamber Court. The town bailiff of Leonberg, Jakob Kern, set the date for the slander trial on at least three occasions, but each time Einhorn managed to find a pretext to worm out of it.

  At the end of August 1617, the weather was still hot, the air still humid. The farmers were preparing for the harvest, and the gossip of Leonberg was afire with the terror of witches. Katharina, certain of her innocence, insisted on her day in court and, in spite of all that had happened to her, returned to Leonberg and tried to move back into her house. She still believed she would be vindicated in the end and that the court would restore her good name.

  On September 1, Johannes Kepler wrote to the duke to inform him of all the events in Leonberg and to request a proper administrator for his mother’s assets. Up until this time, the administrator would have been Einhorn, which would have been a serious conflict of interest. In his letter, Johannes explained to the duke: “I have doubts and I worry that before the examination of those witnesses, by whom she will prove her innocence, that because she is a careless old woman (who has already let go of the keeping of her own house and has rented her estate), it will lead presently to additional useless costs, and also subject her to the machinations of her adversaries.” He then asks the duke to authorize “that her property and estate be managed by someone who will administer, advice, and provide expert opinion to the war magistrates of Leonberg, and will save her estate from ruin and reduction, and will take from it only as much as is necessary for her legal personal use and also for the payment of her debt.”

  In October, Katharina arrived in Heumaden. She had been gone over nine months in Linz and complained bitterly about being away from Leonberg. Johannes left Linz soon after, but on the way he suffered another tragedy. He stopped in the little town near Regensburg, on the Danube River, where he found out that his stepdaughter, Regina, by then a married woman with children, had recently died. Her husband, Philip Ehem, had no one to care for his children, so he asked Kepler to leave his fifteen-year-old daughter, Susanna, behind to watch the children while Kepler traveled on to Leonberg. Finally, on October 30, Kepler arrived. It should have been a time of celebration, for it was the Lutheran jubilee. All around him, however, there were tragedies. His stepdaughter had died. His mother was on trial for her life. And fire had destroyed Vaihingen, a nearby town.

  Kepler had traveled all the way to Leonberg hoping that his presence would help his mother’s case and that he could run political interference for Katharina in ways that Christoph could not. The chief counsel set a new date for the slander trial in November, but once again Einhorn managed to slip by the order. On November 20, without consulting with the bailiff, Einhorn summoned Katharina to his office once again to fish for some new “development” that might allow him to evade the new slander trial date, set for November 24, even though the date had been announced and all the parties informed. Frustrated and angry, Kepler finally asked the duke if his mother could return with him to Linz without loss of honor on her part, and the duke agreed. But Katharina would not go. She would have her day in court, even if it killed her. Even so, the high court in Stuttgart ordered the magistrate to allow Kepler to take his mother back to Linz with him. Also, they told Kepler that the duke would not allow the Reinbolds to postpone the slander trial any longer.

  Throughout 1617–18, Einhorn managed to sidestep everybody. Jakob Kern, the bailiff, tried to schedule the slander trial in spite of Einhorn, but failed. Johannes Kepler, realizing that his mother’s case against the Reinbolds was stalled, returned home in December 1617 only to find his daughter Katharina sick in bed.

  Nothing much happened after that until May 1618, when the examination of witnesses on the slander trial began. No one knows what day that trial took place or what the result was. Somehow the documents disappeared. Kepler claimed that his mother had won the day, because four honest old town councilors, elder burghers with some standing in Leonberg, had come forward to set the record straight, saying that Katharina Kepler’s reputation was impeccable and that the Reinbold woman’s reputation was nowhere near as clean. The Kepler family waited for the judgment against the Reinbolds to be made public, but it never was. That judgment was quickly lost, because Einhorn and the Reinbolds, possibly with the help of the Prince Friedrich Achilles, worked furiously to bury it.

  Suddenly there was a bill of indictment against Katharina consisting of forty-nine articles, finally putting on paper what up until that time had had merely been gossip. Johannes was furious. This started off as an evil fantasy, and now, because of Einhorn, his mother was fighting for her life.

  Then on May 23, 1618, the Thirty Years’ War started with a comic opera in Prague, and Germany paid for its years of sectarian hatred.

  LETTER FROM KEPLER TO HERZOG JOHANN FRIEDRICH VON WÜRTTEMBERG

  NOVEMBER 1620

  Highest Honorable, Merciful Duke and Sir,

  Your Ducal Highness is aware of my modest obedient service.

  Merciful Duke and Sir,

  As much as I did not want to bother your Ducal Highness, the misfortune and the misery of my mother, under arrest at Güglingen, is becoming so great that all of us, including our relatives, fear what is becoming obvious—her utter ruin. Her suffering is accompanied by the suffering of the three of us, her children, but we do not in any way assume that your Ducal Highness has taken joy in this judgment, but rather, as the trusted father over his subjects, that you would like to help all of us escape from it.

  For our mother, who in her seventy-fourth year and with present maladies of body and soul, was foremost never convicted before this arrest, now four months long, is heartbreaking. And if she, poor thing, considers that she has withstood four months of torment, with neither judgment nor legal proceeding, it is all the more painful for her when she remembers that those accusations she was charged with are as incredible as they have ever been. She has not knowingly committed even the least visible injustice, nowhere close to any of the charges brought so far. For this reason, they want to assume her to be culpable on the basis of the gathered suspicion. We would rather that these same legal proceedings should be praised as Christian love in many parts, and that those who have suspected others unfairly—only and solely her adversary, those who slandered her among the people six years ago and was lawfully charged for it—is to carry blame.

  But much harder for us, and much more dangerous for our mother, is that our mother is being guarded by two keepers, men who themselves are deeply in debt, whose common thinking and conscious efforts are solely intended to extend their duty as long as possible. To achieve this, they think that no act is too audacious or too low. They take the unfortunate utterances, despondency, ficklen
ess, impatience, and whatever else this troublesome situation may exact from such an old woman and interpret it maliciously, comment and portray it in a manner that when, finally, were she to be released, she would be burdened with even more suspicions than were put upon her before her arrest. To this end, we can doubtlessly interpret the purpose of our adversary’s journey to Güglingen.

  Thirdly, these useless and wasteful guards have caused unmanageable expenses by unnecessarily burning wood so they did not have to sleep too close to the fire, to such an extent that within a few weeks, after keeping house in this manner, my mother would have nothing left of her income. Even her income is in danger, since the magistrate of Leonberg, in order to obtain alimony for her, sold all her fields and then raised an untimely dispute between us, the children, who have our own expenses. In addition, my brother fears that I will cause him to be thrown into poverty in the future, since my arrival in the country has led to such an extension of the court case and has incurred such great expenses. I have to lament to God in Heaven, since I have been forced to abandon my poor wife and children on the road in a foreign place near Regensburg, without food or money. And still I will soon have to leave, task unaccomplished, with shame, ridicule, and heartache, for I have no credit in the country.

  XIII

  With Present Maladies of Body and Soul

  Where the Thirty Years’ War begins with the Second Defenestration of Prague, and where Katharina Kepler is tried and convicted of witchcraft.

  ON MAY 23, 1618, in Prague, spring was slowly edging into summer, the spring rains were giving way to summer’s heat, and the capital was nearly at war with itself. The Protestant Bohemian Estates had come to the point of murder, because the Habsburgs, who had once made promises of religious concessions to them, had reneged.1 After the Habsburg brothers’ war, Matthias replaced Rudolf as emperor. He stayed on in Prague until after his brother’s death and then transferred his capital to Vienna, where it remained. He passed the rule of Bohemia on to his nephew Archduke Ferdinand of Styria, who with the negotiated blessing of the Estates took the crown in 1617. Before leaving, Matthias confirmed all the promises he had originally made to the Protestants, promises that he had made under duress when he needed their help to fight Rudolf. Protestants could practice their religion as they saw fit; they could hold public office; they could live without fear of losing their land, their titles, or their lives. But then the Catholic faction, like a boulder in the river, refused to move. This was the same group that Rudolf, by nature more open to new ideas than Matthias, had to deal with for years. Led by the Spanish but with cousin Ferdinand’s not too secret support, they would not sign any document that promised equality to the Protestants, because for them there was only one Christian church, one heir to Peter, and one true doctrine. There could be no compromising with heretics.

  This was not that different from what the more radical Protestants believed in their secret hearts, though in the Habsburg lands, being the underdogs, what they settled for was freedom. They did not get that either. Under the new archbishop of Prague, Johannes Lobelius, the Catholics turned up the heat, and one by one the concessions to the Protestants evaporated. Anger swelled in the ranks, and the Bohemian Estates turned from petitions for imperial concessions to secret meetings and whispers about violence. Civil war was brewing all over the city. Protestants could no longer hold the offices that they once held, while the Prague towns had lost their right of self-rule. The cap was the day the Catholics tore down two new Protestant churches that were built on lands once belonging to a Benedictine monastery, claiming that the land was still Catholic land. The Protestants stamped about, their whispers becoming shouts. All church lands belonged to the king, they said.

  The Protestant Estates held a meeting at the largely Hussite Carolinum University to discuss the situation. Their resolution was to send one more petition to Matthias requesting that he honor his promises. One evening, the radical faction, led by Václav Budova of the Bohemian Brethren and Count Matthias Thurn, known for his hot temper, met in the Minor Town in the home of one of their members, Jan Smiřický, to plot murder. Their specific targets were the royal administrators who lived in the Prague Castle, whom they accused of subverting Matthias’s honest promises to them.

  But there were deeper reasons hidden behind these. Even in the age of absolute monarchy, kings had limited power. As rulers of national governments, they still had to deal with the local nobility, town councils, and estate representatives, since most of the actual work of government was done by them. Kings rarely had standing armies, and what they did have was meager. They relied on taxing the local governments to maintain their armies and their way of life, and if a king did not have a healthy relationship with his local governments, then his support, military and financial, could dry up. This was especially true after the Reformation and the Peace of Augsburg. In spite of the old formula “whose the land, his the religion,” if a local ruler belonged to a religion different from that of his people, most especially from that of those who formed his local governments, then his position was precarious. Even in a world that operated on the divine right of kings, new radical theories were popping up around Europe, even in Prague, that held that the people could legitimately depose their own king, if that king practiced the wrong kind of religion.2 But even the most radical would rarely shout that theory from the rooftops, for it was too new and frankly dangerous. They would rather make their revolt while gravely proclaiming they were saving the rightful king from bad advisers. That was the position that Ferdinand II found himself in, in both Austria and Bohemia.

  Before they sent their petition to the emperor, radicals such as Thurn and Budova were in the minority. But that soon changed. Matthias responded to their request, but his response was not what the Estates had hoped it would be. His answer was haughty and condescending, the answer of a man who had achieved the power he had wanted and planned on using it. Matthias’s refusal set fire to the city. The radicals had suddenly become the darlings, and the political faction of the Protestant Estates had become a movement.

  On May 23, a hot crowd of angry Protestants, all members of the Estates, followed the radical faction up the hill to the Prague Castle, where the Catholic Diviš Černín opened the gate for them. He would later die on Emperor Ferdinand’s scaffold for that mistake. From there, they stormed the staircase leading to the offices of the royal administrators; they brawled their way in and confronted the bureaucrats along with their secretaries. There were only four of the administrators there that day, the other six having left town rather suddenly, for their health. The remaining four, Jaroslav of Martinic, Adam of Sternberg, Dìpold of Lobkovic, and Vilém Slavata of Chum, either had important business to conduct, were very brave men, or were slow on the uptake.

  The mob confronted them and accused them of intrigue and of being responsible for the king’s bad faith. The tension in the room nearly exploded, teetering on the edge of riot. The four administrators pleaded with the Estates men, assuring them that they were not the ones responsible for the tone of Matthias’s answer and that they were only servants of the emperor, like the Protestants themselves. This did not mollify the crowd, however, for they had come ready for blood. The radicals had been planning for this day for some months and would not back down. The fact that the four men had little to do with the king’s answer to the Estates did not matter. The fact that the answer had actually been written by Melchior Cardinal Khlesl, the gray eminence of the imperial court, meant nothing. These men were Catholic, they were intransigent, and they were there.

  The radicals would have done away with all four of them, but the rest of the Estates men were more level-headed. They separated out the moderate Catholics—Dìpold of Lobkovic and Adam of Sternberg—from the ones who were more intransigent and pushed the moderates into an adjoining room, where they let them go. Then Count Thurn incited his fellow rebels, shouting encouragement. The time for talk was over, and the time for action was beginning. They should act n
ow, decisively and quickly.

  The remaining administrators—Jaroslav of Martinic and Vilém Slavata—had been two of the most anti-Protestant members of the king’s court in Prague and had been deeply involved in the Catholic faction for twenty years. They had consistently dragged their feet when ordered to approve Protestant rights, had argued against religious tolerance, and had worked tirelessly against the Protestant cause. Count Thurn, in good Bohemian fashion, hearkened back to the first defenestration of Prague performed by the followers of Jan Hus in the fourteenth century and ordered the two men thrown out the high window of the Bohemian chancellery, a fall that was a good fifty feet. Out went Jaroslav of Martinic without much ceremony. Then they picked up Vilém Slavata, but he grabbed on to the window sill and called out for his father confessor. Apparently, his conscience was not as clear as his compatriot’s. This stalemate went on for a few long painful seconds until one of the rebels took the hilt of his dagger and pounded at Slavata’s hands until he let go. But that was not enough, not quite. One of the secretaries, Johannes Fabricius, was edging along the wall toward the door when one of the Protestant men saw him; the crowd took him and threw him out the window too. Well, why not?

  Oddly enough, all three men survived the fall and managed to crawl off in spite of the pistol shots that fell all around them. Later the Protestants claimed that the men fell on a pile of horse manure that had been left at the bottom of the wall under the window. Catholics, on the other hand, claimed that the men lived because the Blessed Virgin had spread her mantle under them so that they fell as lightly and as gently as rose petals. They were saved by a miracle, said the Catholics. They were saved by shit, said the Protestants.