- Becoming Tycho Brahe.
- Edward de Vere, Shakespeare and Tycho Brahe.
- How Tycho Brahe Got an Island.
- Uraniborg: Tycho Brahe’s Cosmic Castle.
- King James VI’s visit with Tycho Brahe at Hveen.
- Tycho Brahe’s Frenemy, Johannes Kepler. (Pending)
When the Scottish King James VI showed up at Tycho Brahe’s
door, on March 20, 1590, he himself was a guest of the royal house of Denmark.
Princess Anne, of that house, had married
him via a proxy, George Keith, the Earl Marischal of Scotland. This
after the failure of long negotiations for the hand of her elder sister, Elizabeth, that had begun well before Danish King Frederick II’s
death in April of 1588.
though several different ambassadors were sent from Scotland
to Denmark, they produced powers so limited, or insisted on conditions so
extravagant, that Frederick could not believe the King to be in earnest; and,
suspecting that there was some design to deceive or amuse him, gave his
daughter in marriage to the Duke of Brunswick.[1]
James's attentions immediately shifted to Anne. Her brother, King Christian IV, relented. The brief signing ceremony went forward. Anne boarded ship to meet her new husband in Scotland only to be turned back by treacherous seas.
By this point James was at the end of his patience. To the
end of his life he would blame witchcraft for the storms and would give one
wretch after another, unpopular enough with her neighbors to be accused of the practice, to
the flames.
Witchcraft notwithstanding, James sailed to his bride,
picked her up after some excellent food and wine, and set sail for home… only
to be driven back by treacherous seas. Aware that the winter season was not the
time to travel the North Atlantic, the entire Scottish party copped an
invitation to stay for a few months.
The timid monarch did not care to face the boisterous North
Sea a second time in winter, and remained in Norway for some time, until he
accepted the invitation of the Danish Government and set sail for Kronborg,
where he arrived with his bride on the 20th January 1590.[2]
It would be spring before they departed.
It is said that James took the opportunity to do a bit of
sightseeing. As part of that pastime we are told that he sought out famous
intellectuals in order to enjoy their conversation.
Just how precise these observations might be cannot be said
with certainty. This may be the only reason why James visited Tycho Brahe’s
island home of Uraniborg. Or not. As for Brahe, we are told that he made a
single entry in his Daily Weather Diary to verify for history that the king arrived on March 20.”
Rex Schotiae venit
mane H. 8, abiit H. 3.[3]
“The King of Scotland arrived at 8 in the morning, stayed
until 3.” His excitement, it seems, was somewhat less than palpable.
Purported details of the visit appeared an article by Jakob
Langebe in volume 2 of Danske Magazin in 1746. It is here that we are
informed that James left an inscription in Brahe’s guest book.
The lion’s wrath is noble
Used sparingly with subjects and unsparingly
in battle
King James.[4]
Whoever applied the inscription — king or biographer — was
well aware of Brahe’s harsh treatment of the tenants under his rule on the
island. It is possible that the famous astronomer felt that the time for departure could not come soon enough. Even with
James leaving behind “two fine English mastiffs before his departure.”[5]
But this was likely not the worst of it. Among King James’s
party in Denmark was his personal physician, Dr. John Craig. Before becoming a
royal physician he had been a Professor of Logic and Mathematics at Frankfurt.[6]
For all Craig was a pathetically poor astronomer, he had the confidence of one
of the greats. Somehow he had managed to get ahold of a copy from a tiny
pre-publication press run of Brahe’s book on the famous comet of 1577 done at
the island print-shop for Brahe’s closest and most accomplished friends in the
field.
Only three letters from Craig to Brahe would seem to have
survived. They all were written shortly after James’s visit to the island and drop
the high names of European nobility and intellectual fame with whom he had just
traveled in the king’s retinue in Denmark. The letters are reprinted in a book of
business correspondence of famous men.[7]
While the dates of the letters do not include the year, the first he informs
the astronomer was begun in March and ended in the beginning of the following
May in Edinburgh. Again, the visit to the island was in March. The king’s party arrived
back in Edinburgh on May 1.
The second letter describes the joy of the party that the
king had married such a noble wife. It is dated just after the 1590 coronation of
Anne that would also serve as a blowout public wedding.
What all three of the letters include is insufferable
intellectual arrogance and claims that, the two being like old friends from the
first they met, he need not stand on ceremony. Both were enforced via shameless
name-dropping. It is quite possible that it was Craig who convinced the King to
take such a demanding trip to see an astronomer whose name he had possibly
never even heard.
This may explain the behavior that Dreyer found so
confusing regarding Brahe's book on the comet.
After a long silence [Christopher Rothman] wrote once more to
Tycho in September 1594,… inquiring why Tycho's book on the comet of 1577 had
not yet been published. Tycho wrote him in January 1595 a very long answer,
which is almost entirely taken up by a defence of his book on the comet against
the attack made on it by John Craig, formerly Professor of Logic and
Mathematics at Frankfurt on the Oder, and now Physician to the King of
Scotland.[8]
Some visits only merit an entry in the Daily Weather Diary. Perhaps not
even that if they don’t involve meeting a monarch.
Two years later, Craig published an attack against Brahe’s (almost) entirely correct theories regarding the 1577 comet. With his connections it was
widely read and in all the most powerful patronage circles.
[1] Robertson,
William. History of Scotland During the Reigns of Queen Mary, And Of King
James VI. (1831), II.310.
[2] Dreyer,
J. L. E. Tycho Brahe: a Picture of Scientific Life (1890), 203.
[3] Dreyer, 203. n.1.
[4] Langebe, Jakob. Danske Magazin
(1746), ii. p. 266
Est nobilis
ira Leonis
Parcere
subjectis et debellare superbos.
Jacobus Rex.
[5]
Ibid.
[6]
Dreyer, 208.
[7] Nolten
, Rudolph August. Commercium Litterarium Clarorum Virorum (1737). 1-12.
[8] Dreyer,
208.
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