第99章

And now, all being full of mutation, rearrangement and infinite rumor, there marched next year (1614), on slight pretext, resting on great suspicions, Spanish troops into the Julich-Cleve country, and, countenanced by Neuburg, began seizing garrisons there.

Whereupon Dutch troops likewise marched, countenanced by Brandenburg, and occupied other fortresses and garrisons: and so, in every strong-place, these were either Papist-Spaniards or Calvinist-Dutch; who stood there, fronting one another, and could not by treatying be got out again;--like clouds positively electric VERSUS clouds negatively. As indeed was getting to be the case of Germany in general; case fatally visible in every Province, Principality and Parish there: till a thunder-storm, and succession of thunder-storms, of Thirty Years' continuance, broke out. Of which these huge rumors and mutations, and menacings of war, springing out of that final colloquy and slap in the face, are to be taken as the THIRD premonitory Symptom. Spaniards and Dutch stand electrically fronting one another in Cleve for seven years, till their Truce is out, before they clash together;Germany does not wait so long by a couple of years.

SYMPTOM FOURTH, AND CATASTROPHE UPON THE HEELS OF IT.

Five years more (1618), and there will have come a FOURTH Symptom, biggest of all, rapidly consummating the process;--Symptom still famed, of the following external figure: Three Official Gentlemen descending from a window in the Castle of Prag: hurled out by impatient Bohemian Protestantism, a depth of seventy feet,--happily only into dung, and without loss of life. From which follows a "King of Bohemia" elected there, King not unknown to us;--"thunder-clouds" all in one huge clash, and the "continent of sour smoke" blazing all into a continent of thunderous fire:

THIRTY-YEARS WAR, as they now call it! Such a conflagration as poor Germany never saw before or since.

These were the FOUR preliminary SYMPTOMS of that dismal business.

"As to the primary CAUSES of it," says one of my Authorities, "these lie deep, deep almost as those of Original Sin. But the proximate causes seem to me to have been these two: FIRST, That the Jesuit-Priests and Principalities had vowed and resolved to have, by God's help and by the Devil's (this was the peculiarity of it), Europe made Orthodox again: and then SECONDLY, The fact that a Max of Bavaria existed at that time, whose fiery character, cunning but rash head, and fanatically Papist heart disposed him to attempt that enterprise, him with such resources and capacities, under their bad guidance."Johann Sigismund did many swift decisive strokes of business in his time, businesses of extensive and important nature; but this of the slap to Neuburg has stuck best in the idle memory of mankind. Dusseldorf, Year 1613: it was precisely in the time when that same Friedrioh, not yet by any means "King of Bohemia," but already Kur-Pfalz (Cousin of this Neuburg, and head man of the Protestants), was over here in England, on a fine errand;--namely, had married the fair Elizabeth (14th February, 1613), James the First's Princess; "Goody Palsgrave," as her Mother floutingly called her, not liking the connection. What kind of a "King of Bohemia" this Friedrich made, five or six years after, and what sea of troubles he and his entered into, we know;the "WINTER-KONIG" (Winter-King, fallen in times of FROST, or built of mere frost, a SNOW-king altogether soluble again) is the name he gets in German Histories. But here is another hook to hang Chronology upon.

This brief Bohemian Kingship had not yet exploded on the Weissenberg of Prag, [Battle there, Sunday 8th November, 1620.]

when old Sir Henry Wotton being sent as Ambassador "to LIE abroad"(as he wittily called it, to his cost) in that Business, saw, in the City of Lintz in the picturesque green country by the shores of the Donau there, an ingenious person, who is now recognizable as one of the remarkablest of mankind, Mr. John Kepler, namely:

Keplar as Wotton writes him; addressing the great Lord Bacon (unhappily without strict date of any kind) on that among other subjects. Mr. John's now ever-memorable watching of those

Motions of the Star Mars, [ De Motibus Stellae Martis; Prag, 1609.] with "calculations repeated seventy times," and also with Discovery of the Planetary Laws of this Universe, some, ten years ago, appears to be unknown to Wotton and Bacon; but there is something else of Mr. John's devising [It seems, Baptista Porta (of Naples, dead some years before) must have given him the essential hint,--of whom, or whose hint, Mr. John does not happen to inform his Excellency at present.] which deserves attention from an Instaurator of Philosophy:--"He hath a little black Tent (of what stuff is not much importing)," says the Ambassador, "which he can suddenly set up where he will in a Field; and it is convertible (like a windmill) to all quarters at pleasure; capable of not much more than one man, as I conceive, and perhaps at no great ease; exactly close and dark,--save at one hole, about an inch and a half in the diameter, to which he applies a long perspective Trunk, with the convex glass fitted to the said hole, and the concave taken out at the other end, which extendeth to about the middle of this erected Tent: through which the visible radiations of all the Objects without are intromitted, falling upon a Paper, which is accommodated to receive them; and so he traceth them with his pen in their natural appearance; turning his little Tent round by degrees, till he hath designed the whole Aspect of the Field."[ Reliqui Wottonianae, (london 1672), p. 300.]--In fact he hath a CAMERA OBSCURA, and is exhibiting the same for the delectation of Imperial gentlemen lounging that way.