Kepler's Witch (35 page)

Not surprisingly, given the weight of prejudice against her, on August 18, the Stuttgart
Oberrat,
the chief judge, indicted Katharina: “The accused is once more and in all seriousness with warning of the executioners to be examined. If she will not confess and will not speak, all evidence shall be collected, and the accused charged
ad torturam.
If it is brought to light then, to execute the torture and report her confession, i.e., her statement after enduring the torture.”

At this point, Christoph, the man whose business dealings with Ursula Reinbold had started all the trouble, suddenly remembered his reputation as an upright citizen and distanced himself from the case. Pastor Binder joined him in this. After all, how would it look for a man of God to be associated with a known witch? On August 26, Christoph asked the town scribe, Werner Feucht, to write a letter for him to the duke, begging the duke to transfer his mother's case to another town, any other town. Three days later, his mother was carted off to Güglingen, where they chained Katharina, now broken and confused, in a musty dark prison cell in the Güglingen Tower.

Margaretha had remained loyal to her mother, however. Soon after the arrest, she wrote to Johannes in Linz and described the entire situation to him. He wrote at once to the Duke of Württemberg and begged him in the name of his “God-given and natural right” to protect his mother, asking him to hold off Katharina's actual trial until he could arrive. The
Oberrat
's decision was an indictment, but the trial still remained. Soon after, Johannes Kepler left his home in Austria and traveled as fast as he could to his mother's side, to a nasty wet prison cell in Güglingen.

 

A
FTER THE RIOTS HAD DIED DOWN
in Prague, the Estates gathered to form an interim government. They had revolted, so they said, to protect their rightful king, Ferdinand, from the insidious influence of the Jesuits. In truth, however, they rebelled in order to overthrow Habsburg power. They elected thirty directors, with ten for the barons, ten for the knights, and ten for the towns. The leadership of the directorate was radical, though the rank and file was moderate. As it turned out, there were moderates and radicals on both sides. The Protestant radicals wanted war, and actively sought alliances with other Protestant nations. The moderate Protestants still believed that they could negotiate and achieve their ends through peace. Emperor Matthias was the moderate on the Catholic side, because he too hoped for negotiations that could avoid a war. Archduke Ferdinand, now king of Bohemia, and the Catholic faction, however, wanted to crush the Protestants wherever they found them, to leave none standing, and to negotiate only with the dead.

Suddenly, Emperor Matthias, by then an old man, died in 1619, just after the defenestration. The most obvious choice for emperor was ArchDuke Ferdinand, an energetic man of forty who was intelligent, but not to excess, cheerful to those who knew him, and possibly the most virulent anti-Protestant leader in eastern Europe. His election was fairly certain. Even the Protestant electors voted for him, though there was some doubt about Friedrich V of the Palatinate, but in the end even Friedrich voted for him. In fact, just hours after the electors had met in Frankfurt to confirm Ferdinand's election, Ferdinand learned that his own people in Prague had rebelled and rejected him as their king and that they had chosen the same Friedrich of the Palatinate to replace him.

The moderate Protestant faction had watched their hope of negotiation evaporate with the death of Matthias, and they began to gear up for war. It was not a particularly unified rebellion, however. The members of the Estates disliked and distrusted one another and fought over everything. They had no army to speak of and few allies. The Habsburgs, on the other hand, had a deep bench and could call upon the support of Spain, Bavaria, Poland, Tuscany, and even Lutheran Saxony. The Prague Estates, who were new at this game and had not yet established a network of support,
approached England, Holland, the Italian Piedmont, and the Republic of Venice, asking for whatever military support they could get, and if not that, then loans to help them raise a local militia. But the Estates were outclassed. They were up against the most successful imperial dynasty in the history of Europe, a dynasty that had lasted longer than the Caesars, the Claudians, the Stewarts, and the Tudors. For hundreds of years, that single family had understood power better than any other on the continent. They knew how to use it and, as a lot, they were mad enough to use it without conscience or restraint. The last two emperors, Rudolf and Matthias, were indecisive and not very effective. That was not true of Ferdinand, however. He had a simple mind, given to seeing the world in blacks and whites, and he had the energy to act. He was, therefore, a dangerous man.

Soon after his election, Ferdinand removed Cardinal Khlesl from his position as the emperor's chief political adviser. This was the same Cardinal Khlesl who had written the notorious response to the Protestant Estates. But that was not why Ferdinand removed him and ordered him confined. The cardinal, who was more intelligent than the new emperor, had advised Ferdinand to negotiate with the Protestants in order to avoid war and because it was the smart political move. But Ferdinand was an ideologue and did not want to make the smart political move, so he sent the good cardinal to his room.
⁸

Ultimately, the Protestant Estates were not very successful in gathering international support, and so in the summer of 1619 the Estates in Bohemia and Upper and Lower Austria gathered into a confederation that declared itself to be the enemy of the Habsburgs. It officially banished the Jesuits from the city of Prague forever and gathered a war chest from the sale of confiscated Catholic properties. Then, with great ritual and the blaring of trumpets, it officially threw Ferdinand II off the throne of Bohemia and sent word of its offer of the throne to the young elector palatine, Friedrich, the husband of Elizabeth, the daughter of King James I of England. Friedrich was in Frankfurt at the time, voting for Ferdinand as emperor. As the prince-elector of the Palatinate, Friedrich was the most celebrated Protestant ruler on the continent, and no doubt the offer of the crown to
Friedrich was done with the hope of bringing along more international support.

Friedrich certainly looked the part of the serene monarch. He was a slim, good-looking, elegant young man of twenty-four with a grave and serious demeanor, but one who had no head for war. They said that he would have made a better gardener. He was not particularly intelligent either, though he was not always wise enough to know it. The best that could be said for him was that he dutifully followed good advice when he got it. Had he been born in a time of peace, he would have done well. His education by the French Calvinists had made him into a philosopher, a rhetorician, and a good gardener. He was fascinated with mechanical fountains of any kind. He was a spoiled child married to a spoiled child, neither of whom had any idea about the world they lived in. His wife, Elizabeth, was probably better suited for rule, but she was too busy giving birth and raising her children to take control. Elizabeth, who was a plain woman, had once been courted by numerous princes and kings from all over Europe, from the French dauphin to Gustavus Adolphus when he was the crown prince of Sweden. Understandably, she did not like Ferdinand very much and said that he would make a bad emperor, and so she acquiesced when Friedrich, taken by a sense of divine call, decided to accept the Bohemian offer.

At the end of September 1619, they left Heidelberg accompanied by a thousand soldiers, several hundred servants, and over a hundred and fifty wagons full of goods. As a royal couple, they loved hunting, entertaining, and riding in the forests accompanied by witty young men and women, most of whom spoke only French. The fact that they were going to rule the Czech people, while none of them spoke Czech, did not seem to register. And neither did the fact that they might have to go into battle against the implacable Habsburgs. When they arrived at the Bohemian border, they were met by representatives of the Bohemian Estates, who welcomed them with a great deal of ceremony and at least several Latin speeches. Then, on October 21, they entered Prague to a great celebration, cheering crowds, adoring faces, and troops in review, and there they were crowned king and queen of Bohemia in two different ceremonies, Friedrich first
and then Elizabeth, at St. Vitus Cathedral, one of the great religious centers of Habsburg power.

And while Friedrich and Elizabeth held court in the Prague Castle, receiving ambassadors and throwing gorgeous parties, the storm clouds gathered around them. The rebellion that had given them the crown was fraying, because none of the nobles trusted one another enough to levy the taxes that they needed to raise an army. Moreover, for all the grand celebration and the words of welcome, the new king and queen of Bohemia were outsiders, and though they seemed to be oblivious to it, they were treated as outsiders by the very nobility who had hired them in the first place. When Friedrich approached the Prague burghers for a personal loan so that he could gather an army, they refused him, even though it was their own necks on the line as well.

No doubt Friedrich and Elizabeth had no sense of Slavic culture or of the Slavic version of Protestantism. They were both Calvinists, trained in the French style, and could not completely understand the Bohemian Brethren. Elizabeth did not make much of an impression either, with her lavish parties, her French entourage, her fashionable hairstyles, and her plunging necklines. Moreover, it was becoming increasingly apparent to the rebels that Friedrich and Elizabeth had been a bad choice. They were largely chosen with the hope that they would bring along the support of other Protestant rulers, especially James I of England, Elizabeth's father. But Friedrich had never read his father-in-law's signals correctly. King James may have been willing to marry off his daughter to the young prince, to spend a great deal of money on the wedding, and to give them a glorious send-off, but he did not want to involve England in the military quagmire that was central Europe. James could see that fighting the Protestant cause in Germany was a no-win situation, because the Habsburgs were too strong, and besides, the Church of England was never extraordinarily Protestant anyway. Going to war with Ferdinand meant going to war with Spain, and possibly even with France, a bit more than little England was willing to take on.

The rest of the Protestant rulers in Europe were not overly eager to jump onto Friedrich's bandwagon either. The Bohemian nobles had set a
bad precedent. The idea of an absolute monarch with the divine right to rule was firmly entrenched in many European courts. The age of constitutional government had not yet arrived, and so few among the royalty of Europe wanted to come to the aid of what looked like an anti-imperial revolution. The Bohemian nobles were not republicans by any means, however, but they had been willing to throw out the king that they had accepted only two years before and to choose a man who was more to their liking. Therefore, feeling the ground shift beneath their thrones, most of the Protestant kings stayed neutral, and although many of them were willing to raise a glass to Friedrich, they weren't willing to do much more.

On the other hand, Ferdinand had to rely on allies to provide his own army. Most of the nobles in the Habsburg lands in Austria and in their attending provincial estates were Protestants and had already sided with the Bohemian rebels. Moreover, he did not have the kind of funding he needed in order to raise a mercenary army. But he was the emperor, and through the judicious doling out of imperial privileges and, of course, of the bits and pieces of Friedrich's old territory of the Palatinate, he could make alliances. Ferdinand gave Maximilian, the Duke of Bavaria and an old Counter-Reformation partner, Friedrich's electoral vote along with a chunk of the Palatinate. The rest of the Palatinate lands went to Philip III of Spain, Ferdinand's cousin, who also sent an army to help. Oddly enough, after being given the promise of the Habsburg territories in Lusatia, the Lutheran elector of Saxony also joined the emperor's side and sent his own army into Bohemia. This showed the fundamental political weakness of the Protestant cause.

On October 21, 1620, Friedrich and Elizabeth were crowned king and queen of Bohemia, but by early November, two Catholic armies and one Protestant Lutheran army had entered Bohemia and were closing on the city of Prague. Suddenly, Friedrich and Elizabeth realized that they needed to be elsewhere. They packed what goods they could into a coach and took along what soldiers and servants they could muster. As they were beginning to set out, Elizabeth suddenly remembered that she had left the baby behind in the castle and sent Baron Christopher Dohna to go and fetch the child. The baron came running back with the infant, wrapped in a bundle,
and handed him through the window as the coach was moving toward the gate. Somehow they managed to evade the three armies and to escape Bohemia altogether, but they could not return to Heidelberg, for by taking the crown of Bohemia and thereby usurping Habsburg privilege, Friedrich had made himself an outcast. His old principality of the Palatinate was gone, doled out to the rulers of the invading armies. His home was gone. His gardens were gone. His mechanical fountains were gone. Instead, he and Elizabeth and the children, their few servants, and a few soldiers made their way to Holland, first traveling to Kunstin and then on to Berlin, and from there across Germany to the Dutch lands. There they set up a court in exile. Friedrich retreated further into his fantasy world, styling himself the king of Bohemia until he died in 1632, two years after Johannes Kepler. Elizabeth stayed on in Holland after Friedrich's death and returned to England only one year before she died herself.

 

O
N
A
UGUST
29, they moved Katharina to Güglingen in response to Christoph's petition to the duke. When it had authorized the transfer, the court also ordered that Katharina be accompanied by a guard. As the two wardens looked on, the jailer shackled the old woman to an iron band with chains, and from that point on, as long as the guards were with her, they gouged her for money, eating their way through her small estate and burning an excessive amount of firewood to keep themselves warm.