In 1614 there began to appear those weird announcements of the Invisible Brothers among us, of the Universal Reformation of the Whole Wide World, starry messengers, and a More Secret Philosophy concerning a man-shaped cross (stella hieroglyphica), explicated by one Philip à Gabella, whom no one could find, to thank or to burn. And a hundred other brothers then made themselves known, all on their own, from England to Vienna: yes, I share in their plans and secrets; yes, I am a soldier of that unseen army of the wise and peaceable.
Then disaster: in June 1617, the Bohemian Estates met in Prague city and elected the Archduke Ferdinand of Austria to be their next king.
How could the estates have done it? Christian of Anhalt had urged and cajoled and begged them to elect Frederick, Prince Palatine, instead, a Protestant who would protect the rights of the Bohemian Protestant majority and all its churches, brotherhoods, congregations, a knight sans peur et sans reproche who was truly the one favored by all the powers of Heaven, whose father-in-law was King James of England, whose wife was named for their old English champion Elizabeth, the queen who confounded the Spanish fleet and sent it to the bottom. But no one else believed as yet in the pleasant young man or his wonderful fate. And as if in a dream where you can't help but do just what you mustn't, the baffled estates in the end voted for the Archduke Ferdinand, a rigid and ultra-Orthodox Catholic, a Hapsburg, a despot, and a very able and tenacious man, who was certain to be elected emperor soon as well.
It took a year of insults and punitive laws from the hand of this Catholic king-elect and his factors, but the Protestant nobles of Bohemia at length awakened, and revolted. On May 23, 1618, a deputation of great men, followed by a much larger crowd of citizens, went to the Hradschin, climbed the huge stair, took over the offices and rooms, herding the imperial officers like sheep before them, until the two imperial governors of the city were found in the last high chamber to which they had retreated. Po staro ... esku! Throw them out!
The throwing-out-of-the-window of Prague. The elder governor, Martinic, went out first; Slavata, the other governor, begging for a confessor, clung to the jamb until his hand was struck with a dagger hilt and he went too. Their secretary, who was attempting to slip away quietly, was thrown out after them. None of the three was killed; they fell on a pyramid of dung below the window, which broke their fall, or maybe (as the Catholics claimed) they were aided by the Virgin Mary, who spread her sky blue cloak to catch them. Dung and the Virgin, and not much harm done: for this happened in Prague.
It was, for the time, a gentle revolution, a revolution made in the name of keeping all things as they were, as they had been under Rudolf, who never changed anything. A mob did invade the Jewish quarter, as a mob always did in upheavals of all kinds, but with less damage than was usual; Catholic churches were disestablished, but only those that had been recently built on land seized from Protestant congregations, and the Jesuits were expelled. And then the crown of Bohemia was offered to Frederick, the Elector Palatine.
This changed everything. Frederick was among few who were not surprised.
Should he accept? Did God truly want him to take up this cup? Or let it pass from him? He asked his wife. There would be hardships, he said. I had rather eat cabbage as a queen than roast beef as a princess, said Elizabeth.
He would be called a rebel against his emperor, an outlaw, he told her; he would be at war against his sworn sovereign, God's anointed, whom he should respect above all. Emperor Ferdinand has but one eye, and that one not good, Elizabeth said.
Still he couldn't choose.
And at that moment there arrived at the gates of Heidelberg a troupe of actors, Englische kömoedianten, come with new plays, drum and tabor, beasts and tumblers, scattering rose petals and salt. Elizabeth clapped her hands. Oh, these are the best, said Anhalt, who knew everything, the best for tragedy, comedy, history, historical comedy, tragical history, pastoral tragical historical comical.
What were they playing? A Game at Chess, showing the Wedding of the White Queen and the Red King, together with the infinite jests of Cupid, and the waking of his mother Venus; the Weighing up of those thought powerful and wise, and who is found wanting; the Solemn Vows taken of the Brothers of the Golden Stone to defend the King and Queen, their Son, their Daughter, and all persons of good will; Transformations and Wonders of earth, air, fire, and water, the joining of the Rose and Cross, and the return of all good things in the course of time.
The play's the thing, whispered Tom to his fellows, by which we'll catch the conscience of the king.
* * * *
And Frederick accepted the crown of Bohemia. In September 1619 he wrote to the Bohemian Estates: It is a divine calling, and I must not refuse. Next month the couple set out from Heidelberg, walking hand in hand beneath the Elizabeth-Pforte in dress of appropriate astrological colors, Venus's blue and white for her, Mars's gold and red for him. As though to reverse the music of loving-kindness that had played when Elizabeth had arrived from England, the drums and trumpets played in vehement Phrygian mode as they went out. Behind them came their soldiers, servants, lords, ladies, squires, pages—and their troupe of actors. Over the hills and far away.
It took them weeks to reach Prague. To transform the world as you pass through it takes a longer time than simply to cover ground. At every city and town of the Rhineland the people wept to see them go by, as though they took their homeland with them. On the other side of the border the towns and cities of Bohemia met them with joy and flung roses; then, as they climbed the mountains, there came at them out of the forest a crowd of harvestmen, Hussite farmers (or actors dressed as them) who made a roaring with their grain flails; their leader, a Hussite preacher, made a long speech of blessing and welcome. The land of Hus was safe beneath their rule.
And yet they were still just two happy people, young parents (one son already squalling in his crib, another in the oven), liable to offend their new subjects and tread on toes, but what could it really matter? In Prague city Elizabeth's gowns shocked the Calvinists, her breasts symbolic of course but also just breasts, and too exposed. The king swam naked in the Moldau, and she and her ladies watched from the bank: that upset the elders. Well, let them mutter, look at him rising from the waves like Leander, like a young river god. More people were shocked when she decided to take down an ancient corpus from his cross in the middle of the Caroline bridge. It had worked wonders for thousands, its nailed foot worn smooth by the kisses of the devout. That naked swimmer, said vengeful Elizabeth.
The former Giordanisti—unrecognizable to their old audiences, before whom they had once played the Faustspiel and the comic inventions of Onorio the ass—played now under the ægis of the king and his queen, before cloths of gold, in Prague's palaces and great houses, with music drawn from ancient sources, in dramas that were great Seals acted out by hypostases of Virtue and hilarious Vice, and the people laughed and wept and resolved to change their lives. They played The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, they played The Wedding of Agent and Patient, they played The Apotheosis of Rudolf II in the Happy Isles. Philip à Gabella and his troupe of actors took no part, though, in the celebratory Pageant of All the World Systems that was held in the streets, maybe prematurely, in honor of the royal couple—how could his infinite universe of suns and planets, forever continuing, be pictured?—but they could watch, and laugh. The scholars from the Carolinum presented the Ptolemaic world, replete with spheres and epicycles and green earth sheltered in God's arms, apple of his eye; Tycho Brahe's vision was produced by the artisans of the Imperial Observatory, with crane-flown acrobats as the circling, leaping planets around the gold-foil sun, but both sun and planets revolving together (the crowd cheered to see them fly) around the same green earth; and then there was Copernicus's great cart, drawn by thirty oxen, with the sun aboard, titanic lamp shining through a sun of glass, all the planets including little earth outflung. A face able to be seen glowing in the glass sun was said to be God Almighty, but some said it looked more like Galileo. And next came Kepler's variant of this, a merry cart, the planetary orbits around the central sun expressed by the five geometric solids, and each of them producing an appropriate liquor, old beer for Saturn, white wine for Venus, golden Tokay for Jupiter—maybe it was these, dispensed too freely, but the pageant by degrees became disordered, pageant carts colliding, oxen and dray horses shunting one another, drivers unable to brake, and finally the World Systems themselves tilting and the flags and explanatory seals and spheres and mappamundi falling together, just plaster and lathe and paper after all, becoming finally inextricably mixed up, with priests, scholars, artisans, and partisans coming to blows, Copernicus's sun put out, the actors dressed as the planets tearing the finery from one another's persons to show the bare human within. So a good time was had by all, though some who witnessed it took it as an unsettling omen: the picture worlds colliding, and if they, why not the worlds they pictured?