The Ghost of Galileo

by J. L. Heilbron

  Harkening to Bankes, Charles prepared to go to London to negotiate. But temporizing as usual, he consulted others and remained intransigent in York.143 Meanwhile Bankes’s parliamentary correspondents willing to compromise continued to seek his intercession. Lord High Admiral Northumberland, on 19 May, answering Bankes’s letter of the 16th: “You being in a place where I hope your wise and moderate counsells may contribute toward the composure of the differences makes me desirous a little to expresses my sense unto your Lordship.” The sense was that, if the king would only assent to the “few humble desires” that parliament was drawing up, the Crown would retain its prerogatives, parliament its privileges, and the country its king. On 21 May Holles replied, assuring Bankes of his and parliament’s eagerness for accommodation, “upon the first indication of a change in his Maiestie, that he would [listen to Bankes and] forsake those counsells which carry him on so high a dislike and opposition to their proceedings by mispossessing himself of them.” On 31 May, the Earl of Essex, the Lord Chamberlain, soon to be the commanding general of parliament’s army, wrote in the same vein: “I know none but must abhor this difference between his Majestie and the Parlement, but delinquents, papists, and men that desiar to mack their fortunes by the troubles of the land.”144 According to a contemporary observer, it was these bad actors, “malignant and dangerous spirits, who are near his Majestie’s person,” who frustrated Bankes’s attempts.145 They included thoughtless Queen Henrietta, reckless Prince Rupert, cavaliers eager to fight, and privy councilors ignorant of the state of the country.

  Parliament’s proposals, set forth in nineteen propositions, reached Charles on 2 June 1642. They were hardly humble; “overreaching,” rather, and “unreasonable.”146 Parliament’s desiderata included appointments to all high offices of state; control of all forces and fortresses; management of affairs of state, direction of the education and marriage of the royal children, and jurisdiction over religious conflicts; and the power to enforce the laws against Catholics, to reform the Anglican Church, and to intervene effectively for the Protestant cause in Europe. Charles haughtily rejected these nineteen forms of castration. That caused Lord Saye to appeal to Bankes to bring the king to his senses. “I beseech you, use your best indeavour to prevaile with the King to trust his Parliament before private men, his great counsel, before men engaged and interested for their owne endes.” Northumberland besought Bankes to move the king to gentler language, which might yet (so he wrote on 14 June) avert the calamity of a civil war. “Let us but have our lawes, liberties, and privileges secured unto us, and lett him perish that seekes to deprive the King of any part of his prerogative or that authoritie that is due unto him.”147

  The same post brought a letter from the Puritan Lord Philip Wharton, who in a month’s time would lead a parliamentary raid on the magazine at Manchester in one of the first skirmishes of the Civil War. Wharton asked Bankes for an assignment to help arrest the slide toward armed conflict if the Chief Justice could diagnose the reason for it: “the wantonness of some few interested or unprovided people,” or “a judgment upon us immediately from the hand of God, for which no naturall or politique reason can be given”? He repeated his desire for an assignment on 13 July, which would have reached Bankes about the time of the skirmish in Manchester.148

  Each side hurriedly armed while assuring the other that it intended its army only for defense. The king’s Secretary of State, Lord Falkland, and his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir John Colepeper, both recently active among Charles’s opponents in parliament, joined with Lord Chief Justice Bankes and thirty-four peers in an engagement to defend the king and Crown against “all persons and powers.” They also promised to stand up for “the true Protestant religion established by law, the lawful liberties of subjects, just privileges of the Crown and of both Houses,” and to refuse to obey “any rule, order, or command concerning the militia without royal assent.” That was on 8 June.149 In desperation Northumberland suggested that “an act of oblivion and generall pardon…would incline many to an accommodation.” Parliament sent one last set of propositions in mid-July. Charles peremptorily called on his Chief Justice for advice. The king’s mood, as Bankes relayed it to Lord Saye on 11 July, was truculent. He complained of parliament’s high-handedness in its several sets of propositions. Still, he seemed ready to grant “whatsoever is petitioned for or demanded of right either concerning the ecclesiastical or temporal state, etc. But that may not be extorted, and the King is now in a condition not to have anything inforced from him.” Charles would accept no more Venetianizing. Bankes urged him again to meet with the Houses. Charles ignored the advice and answered parliament in language regarded as harsh even in York, in order, he said, not to encourage new raids on his prerogatives and discourage his strongest supporters.150

  On 22 August the king set up his standard. Typically, he hesitated over details. At the last minute he decided to edit his declaration of war for style. The herald who was to read it stumbled over the corrections.151 What should have been a clarion call came out in toots. It is said that the wind promptly blew the standard down, a bad omen in that age of symbols. The first major clash occurred at Edgehill in Warwickshire on 23 October. The edge went to the king. But his losses too were great and he retired to Oxford. On 22 January 1643, Charles wrote to Bankes to attend him immediately. “We have speciall occasion to advise with you concerning some Affaire [that] will admit of no delay…[It] is of that importance as is neither fit to be imparted to you by letter nor will beare any delay or excuse.”152 Bankes rushed to his sovereign in Oxford.

  4

  Cultural Threads

  King James’s Handful

  Jacobean Cosmology

  In October 1589, a violent storm forced the ship carrying James’s 15-year-old bride Anna, whom he had married by proxy, to seek refuge on the Norwegian coast. Her voyage began with a misfired salute to the Danish–Scottish alliance that blew up the guns and the gunners. Despite the omen, against all advice, completely out of character, and although he preferred no wife to any, James set forth upon the stormy deep to get his queen and beget an heir; “as to my awne nature, God is my witness, I could have abstaint langair nor the weill being of my patrie could have permitted.” The ardent wooer had courage for only one winter crossing of the North Sea.1 He spent his long honeymoon in Denmark talking Latin with the great astronomer Tycho Brahe and other learned men. Brahe worked on a small island, Hven, given him by Anna’s father, where he had built the largest observatory in Europe. With the help of students and visitors he sometimes marooned there, Tycho measured the positions of the stars and planets more accurately than anyone had done before.

  James visited Tycho’s island for seven hours just before the vernal equinox of 1590. He and his host inspected instruments, wrote epigrams, and talked about world systems.2 James prided himself on his first-hand knowledge of Tycho’s work. “We have seen it and heard about it, with our own eyes and ears, in your castle dedicated to Urania; and in wide-ranging learned and interesting conversation with you we have been so elevated that it is hard to decide if our pleasure or our admiration is the greater.”3 Although James advised his sons Henry and Charles against acquiring knowledge for its own sake, “nakedly…like those vaine Astrologians, that studie night and day on the course of the starres, onely that they may, for satisfying their curiosity, know their course,” he had allowed himself to learn enough of this “most necessary and commendable” science to appreciate the import of astronomical discoveries.4

  Very probably James had learned his astronomy grudgingly from a long Latin poem by his tutor, George Buchanan, an adventuresome humanist who had spent his young manhood on the Continent studying and teaching as a Catholic before returning to Scotland and the Reformed Church. James heartily hated him for his stern discipline and perverse advocacy of the right of Scots to depose a tyrannical king.5 Among Buchanan’s unwelcome teachings was respect for the Venetian constitution; as he saw it, a king should be little more tha
n a doge, an executive of a constitutional government, an ordinary human being subject to the law. He counseled James presciently but ineffectually to despise flattery, favorites, and incompetents. Buchanan developed these liberal ideas in a book on Scottish history, De jure regni apud scotos (1579), that made him additionally odious to his tutee; for Buchanan judged that Scottish law and customs justified the forced abdication of Mary Queen of Scots.6 The book became notorious: the Scottish Parliament banned it (1583); the Long Parliament took it as a fundamental text; the University of Oxford burnt it (1683); American revolutionaries consulted it. That suave defender of James’s mother Mary, George Conn, likewise dismissed Buchanan’s history (“infamous lies”) and condemned its author (“that impostor,” “that malicious dissembler”).7 But in James’s time, and in Denmark, Buchanan was the prince of Scottish scholars. A portrait of him hung in Uraniborg.8

  Tycho’s successor Kepler supposed that the cosmic harmony he heard among the stars might be brought to earth by his fellow student King James. Did not James’s skill in damping discord in his ill-assorted kingdoms, and in nudging most English Protestants toward the same hymnbook, betoken a healthy polyphony in church and state, conducted by a ruler in step with the law? This was the way to manage human affairs as well as celestial motions! Midway through his wild exposé of world harmony, Harmonices mundi (1619), which he dedicated to James, Kepler expressed the essence of the best possible polity by an arithmetic–geometric proportion.9 Knowing how earth related to heaven, human government to divine, and scepter to telescope, the Scottish Solomon would know how to use the perspective Kepler offered him. “O Telescope…Is not he who holds you in his right hand made King and Lord of the works of God?”10

  In England, too, a bold thinker linked James’s mastery of astronomy to the concord of Christianity. He was Thomas Tymme, a preacher devoted to alchemy.11 In a dialogue published in 1612, Tymme made James the arbiter between a sharp docile student, Philadelph, and a dull preachy teacher, Theophrast.12 Theophrast defends the traditional cosmology (Figure 17). Would it not be more economical, Philadelph asks, to spin the earth than the heavens, and more reasonable to place the earth in orbit than the planets on epicycles? Theophrast offers the crushing rejoinder: “[I]t seemeth you will preferre novelty before Antiquity.” Such hubris! To join the crowd of arrogant fools who have “laboured to draw out of the shallow Fordes of their owne braine, the deepe and unsearchable misteries of god”! Aristotle had died from this intoxication. Unable to explain the tides, he had leapt into the sea crying lengthily and cleverly, “Quoniam Aristoteles mare capere non possit, capeat Aristotelem mare,” a proper ending, says Tymme, for a man who “asketh to be wise without God and his word.”13

  Figure 17 The universe according to Thomas Tymme, A Dialogue Philosophical (1612), 55.

  Philadelph observes that his teacher has not answered Copernicus’s arguments. Theophrast replies with Joshua’s stopping of the sun and other decisive texts and, though unnecessarily, adds that he has seen a convincing material model of a geocentric universe. This was a perpetual astronomical clock with an attachment that simulated the diurnal motion of the tides. Its inventor, James’s Dutch engineer Cornelius Drebbel, claimed that the motion was perpetual. Philadelph rightly doubts the pertinence and perpetuity of the model but surrenders instantly on learning that King James certified it. Tymme said nothing about Galileo’s discoveries.14 Soon, however, his readers would be able to reinforce Philadelph’s doubts by viewing Jupiter’s moons through glasses made in England by Drebbel.15

  One of Galileo’s former students saw a duplicate of Drebbel’s ingenious machine made for the emperor and described its tidal simulator to his master. It consisted of an air-filled metal sphere fixed to a vertical hollow ring half filled with water (Figure 18). The fixing (the vertical axis) conceals a hollow pipette and a partition that divides the ring into two branches. A small hole in the sphere’s equator allows its interior and, via the pipette, the left-hand branch, to communicate with the atmosphere. When the external temperature rises, the pressure in the globe and branch increases and the water moves anticlockwise; cooling reverses the motion; thus two tides a day.16 By 1616, when Galileo began to circulate his tidal theory, Drebbel’s natural magic had spread beyond the cabinets of kings and emperors (Figure 19). Was it in response to it that Galileo claimed to have a machine (never exhibited!) that mimicked tidal motion in a semi-circular canal? The device created for the amazement of King James might well have reinforced Galileo’s commitment to the theory that capped the Copernican argument of the Dialogue.17

  Figure 18 Cornelius Drebbel’s perpetual motion machine (c.1610); detail of Figure 19.

  Figure 19 Jan Brueghel the Elder and Hieronymous Franken II, The Archdukes Albert and Isabella Visiting a Collector’s Cabinet. The yellow sphere to the rear, left, is Drebbel’s perpetual motion machine.

  James picked up more than astronomy and Anna during his stay in Denmark. He adopted the theory of witchcraft he developed in his demented Daemonologie (1597), which accepts that witches can cure or cause disease, induce love or hate, conjure sprites, ruin digestion, sail in sieves, and “raise stormes and tempests in the aire, either upon Sea or land.”18 This last power he had experienced himself: for it was quite true, as rumor on both sides of the North Sea reported, that witches had called up the storm that detained Anna. Some crones encouraged by torture explained how to stir up a tempest by tying human body parts to a cat before throwing it into the sea; none of them, however, knew how to turn off a breeze. One terrified woman terrified the king by reporting the words he had whispered privately to Anna on their first night together; “whereat the Kinges Majesty wondered greatlye, and swore by the living God that he beleeved that all the Divels in hell could not have discovered the same: acknowledging her woords to be most true, and therefore gave the more credit to the rest.” Why did the devil desire his followers to drown the royal couple? The witches’ answer, that the devil feared James of all men, proves that the Evil One was a Papist; “the union of a Protestant princess with a Protestant prince…being…an event which struck the whole kingdom of darkness with alarm.”19

  James had his Daemonologie reissued the year he became King of England. His new subjects needed to know that witchcraft abounded among them.

  For the great wickednes of the people on the one part, procures this horrible defection, whereby God justly punishes sinne, by a greater iniquity: And on the other part, the consummation of the world, and our deliverance drawing neare, makes Sathan to rage the more in his instruments, knowing his kingdom to be so neare an end.

  The wicked people heard, and presented the king with a play, Macbeth, in which witches sail in sieves, raise the winds, and predict the future with dreadful accuracy. Soon some fraudulent accusations that James himself exposed caused him to doubt the Satanic pact.20 Later he “laughed consumedly and made great fun of the Catholics saying they put their trust in the oaths and depositions of the demon and in the things which idle persons and witches say they see in their diabolical games.”21

  “Learning,” opined the playwright William Davenant, “is not knowledge, but a continu’d Sayling by fantastic and uncertain winds towards it.”22 James accepted continental learning about witches until favorable winds drove him to a better position. It would have taken a hurricane to move the very learned Archbishop Ussher. Knowing from revelation that the devil had been let loose around the year 1000, Ussher was not surprised by a message delivered via a fish in Cambridge market in 1626. The fishy message was a copy of Richard Tracy’s A Preparation to the Cross (1540), which warned about the scourges God visits upon us for indulging “luste of the fleshe, concupiscence of the eyes, and pryde of life.” Ussher: “the Accident is not likely to be lightly passed over, which (I fear me) bringeth too true a Prophesy of the State to come.” To reinforce the message, God, still in a maritime mood, sent a great waterspout up the Thames right into the garden gate of Buckingham’s riverside mansion. Ussher again: “[L]et
the Lord prepare us for the day of our visitation.”23 Ussher’s alertness to such announcements may serve as a salutary reminder that in early Stuart times, as no doubt now, rational discourse and great learning can paper over a world of beliefs incompatible with them. It is as unfair to smile at Ussher’s sensitivity to omens as to cavil at his error of thirteen billion years in dating Creation to 23 October 4004 bce, towards 6:00 in the evening.

  Missed Opportunities

  James might have been a mighty patron of the arts and sciences had he been rich and decisive enough to support the meritorious projects submitted to him that later British monarchs saw fit to patronize. Three of these proposals if implemented would have given him a unique, and uniquely balanced, portfolio of initiatives in history, literature, and natural science.

  When James came to England, a small group of antiquaries centered on William Camden, a senior official in the College of Heralds, met regularly to discuss old charters, inscriptions, monuments, and coins. Among those who agreed with him that the study of antiquity “hath a certaine resemblance with eternity” were Arundel and Andrewes. Other members of the group were Lord John Lumley, a relation of Arundel, famous for his library; Robert Cotton, a former student of Camden, also famous for his library, in which much of Dee was preserved; John Spelman, a lawyer with a passion for Saxon studies; James Ussher, who often left his posts in Ireland to collect books in England; and John Selden.24

  In 1603, Camden’s group petitioned Elizabeth for a charter to establish an Academy for the Study of History and Antiquity and a royal library for the collection and preservation of old books and manuscripts. She died before she could act on the proposal. James signaled that he would like Camden’s group to disappear. Its concern with the relative antiquity of kings and parliaments could raise difficulties for a monarch who held prerogatives by divine right. Although the group stopped meeting around 1608, the legal historians among its members found ways to continue to alarm the government.25 Their arsenals were their libraries stocked with useful documents inaccessible in the Tower or the Exchequer, or unknown there because lost or crumbling.