Part 4

In 1573 Orange became a Calvinist, so as to identify himself more completely with the cause he had at heart. But he was not a bigoted Calvinist any more than he had been a devoted Catholic. He had always been ready to respect the good side of every religion. He never could understand why people should not live happily together, praying in their own way. The spirit of Religion appealed to him, not the letter or the doctrine. He would have been content to remain a Catholic, had it not been for the Church’s persecutions.

Now, his wife, Anne of Saxony, having left him and become insane, Orange married again for the third time—Charlotte of Bourbon, who had been a nun. This gave further offense to the Catholics.

The years 1576–78 were almost the most crowded, the most desperate, and yet the most triumphant of William’s life. He was, he writes to his brother, overwhelmed with work and grief and care. The terrible Spanish army, storming the cities of the Netherlands and butchering their inhabitants, seemed to have got the best of it. Many towns fell to them, and Orange at one moment felt at the end of his tether, when the fortunate occurrence of a mutiny for pay in the Spanish army and the death of its Grand Commander gave Orange his opportunity. While Philip hesitated, Orange acted. This brought about the union of Holland and Zeeland, which is known as the Union of Delft, a crucial act and the foundation of a great Power to come. Orange was given supreme authority as ruler. He was to support the Reformed Religion, but no inquisition was to be allowed into any man’s faith or conscience. For not only had Orange to fight the Catholics, but he had to hold back the Calvinists, who, immediately their power and numbers increased, revenged themselves most horribly on those of different creeds. The horrors of the Spanish Fury continued to increase. William called a conference of the States General and drew up the Pacification of Ghent. By this treaty all the seventeen provinces bound themselves into a solemn league to expel the Spaniards, and made it law that the ultimate settlement of all questions was to rest with the States General.

William’s appeals to the people of the Netherlands were masterpieces of eloquence and reason. He put it that disunion had been their ruin—union would save them. A stick is, he said, easily broken; a faggot of sticks bound together resists. He appealed not only to Protestants but to Catholics, asking them not to be taken in by the superstitious idea that loyalty means absolutely cringing to the every wish of a king, who is probably of all the people the most ignorant as to all that is being done in his name. The States were stirred by his appeals, and the Pacification was hailed with shouts of joy and relief. Orange at this moment reached the height of his career, and he was persuaded by his people to make a public entry into Brussels as their acknowledged leader. He received a tremendously enthusiastic and brilliant welcome. A little later, however, he had to suffer disappointment in the breaking away of the Southern from the Northern Netherlands. The persecution in the South had done its work and Philip gained the allegiance of Belgium. Henceforward they had separate histories and are known as Holland and Belgium. In his further struggles against Philip, Orange felt scarcely strong enough to hold his United Provinces without assistance from another country. He turned to France, offering to make the Duc d’Anjou, brother of the French King, sovereign of the United Provinces. His offer was accepted. The Duke proved to be a weak and treacherous man; he was a complete failure, and, making himself odious and impossible to his subjects, his rule was brought to an end.

The awful Granvelle had meanwhile whispered to Philip that they might assassinate Orange (1580), and they finally drew up together a ban putting a price upon the Prince’s head. They declared him a traitor and as such banished him “perpetually from our realms.”

Orange, living quietly with his wife at Delft, took it very calmly. He showed no fear; the Lord, he said, would dispose as He thought fit. But he wrote and published his famous _Apology_, a very lengthy document which is interesting as a history of his life. In it he answers the accusations brought against him in the ban—that he is a foreigner, a heretic, an enemy, a rebel, and so on.

The ban soon began to bear fruit, and several attempts were made on the 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.

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.