And this cannot have been a happy prospect for her, as Princess Elizabeth does not seem to have fit in particularly well at her mother’s court. The numerous responsibilities, both social and political, that daily claimed her attention seemed only to irritate her. “The life which I am obliged to lead, leaves me hardly disposition nor time to acquire the habit of meditation… Sometimes the interests of my family which I ought not to neglect, sometimes conversations and complaisances which I cannot avoid, lower this weak mind of mine with weariness or vexation that it is rendered useless for a long while,” Princess Elizabeth once confided in frustration. Translation: she often found herself bored into a stupor.
Small wonder, then, that she took whatever opportunity she could to escape into the outside world, to blend in anonymously dressed as someone other than herself. But it is highly unlikely that Princess Elizabeth took these boat trips simply to engage in some surreptitious coquetry. Rather, she used the barges as other people did, as the quickest means of getting to Leyden or Utrecht, where the elite universities in Holland were located.
For Princess Elizabeth had made herself into a scholar of note. Even the French doctor admitted it. “Wonders were told of this rare personage; it was said, that to the knowledge of strange tongues she added that of abstruse sciences; that she was not to be satisfied with the mere pedantic terms of scholastic lore, but would dive down to the clearest comprehension of things; that she had the sharpest wit and most solid judgment… that she liked surgical experiments, and caused dissections to be made before her eyes… her beauty and her carriage were really those of a heroine,” he revealed.
Reports of the princess’s intellectual accomplishments were in no way hyperbole. Nor was she the only woman in Holland to have succeeded in infiltrating the heretofore almost exclusively male world of scholarship. In her pursuit of learning, Princess Elizabeth had obviously been inspired by the achievements of her good friend, the remarkable Anna Maria van Schurman.
Anna Maria was a prodigy. She was a gifted artist and singer as well as a voracious reader and formidable intellect. She had been taught Latin and Greek as a child by her father, who early recognized her abilities and encouraged her in her studies. Later, the rector of the University of Utrecht, impressed by her erudition, allowed her to attend lectures (although she was required to sit separately from the rest of the all-male class, in a small alcove shielded by curtains) and personally instructed her in Hebrew and theology. “Desire for knowledge absorbed me,” she confessed simply.
Princess Elizabeth met Anna Maria through Gerrit van Honthorst, who, impressed by her artistic talent, brought her into his school, where she took lessons with the queen of Bohemia’s children. Eleven years older than Princess Elizabeth, Anna Maria had already mastered Ethiopian and produced a grammar as a study guide for others, and was renowned throughout Europe for the publication of a Latin treatise in defense of women’s higher education. “My deep regard for learning, my conviction that equal justice is the right of all, impel me to protest against the theory which would allow only a minority of my sex to attain to what is, in the opinion of all men, most worth having,” she wrote in 1637 in a letter to an eminent theologian, explaining her motivation in writing the pamphlet. “For since wisdom is admitted to be the crown of human achievement, and is within every man’s right to aim at in proportion to his opportunities, I cannot see why a young girl in who we admit a desire of self-improvement should not be encouraged to acquire the best that life affords,” she concluded. Princess Elizabeth, whose passion for learning was considered excessive by her family (they signaled their amusement by assigning her the nickname “la Grècque,” the Greek), recognized Anna Maria as a kindred spirit and looked up to the older woman as a role model. “Despising the frivolities and vanities of other princesses, she raised her mind to the noble study of the most lofty science; she felt herself drawn to me by this community of tastes and interests, and testified her favor as well by visits as by her gracious letters,” Anna Maria remembered.
Her eldest daughter might have disparaged the diversions of the Winter Queen’s court—the endless rounds of hunting, balls, and concerts that defined the upper echelons of Dutch society—but in fact, her mother’s presence at The Hague, along with the household of the prince and princess of Orange, contributed greatly to the blossoming intellectual environment. The encouragement and patronage of these two courts attracted some of the best minds in Europe to Holland. The prince of Orange’s secretary was an accomplished poet and scholar, and although he referred to his position as “his golden fetter,” it nonetheless provided not only his livelihood but also access to and influence within the international academic community. The queen of Bohemia, too, was known to take an interest in all the latest developments in the arts and sciences, and hosted many of the leading intellectuals at her salons. “This town [The Hague] can certainly compare with the first towns in Europe,” boasted the same French physician, “and in my time was proud of possessing three Courts: firstly, the Court of the Prince of Orange, a military court, where might be seen above two thousand noblemen and their suite of soldiers decked out in buff doublets, with orange scarves, high boots, and long sabers, and who were this Court’s chief ornament; secondly, the Court of the States-General, full of provincial deputies and burgomeisters, and representatives of the aristocracy, in black velvet coats, broad collars, and square beards; lastly, the Court of the Queen of Bohemia, which seemed that of the Graces, seeing that she had four daughters, at whose feet all the beau monde [fashionable society] of the Hague came to depose their homage, and whose talents, beauty, and virtues were the subject of all men’s talk.”
And so it was that when the eminent French philosopher René Descartes, looking for the solitude necessary to his work and an atmosphere of intellectual freedom, decided to move to Endegeest, right outside Leyden, in the early 1640s, it was more or less inevitable that he would one day end up on the Winter Queen’s doorstep.
PHILOSOPHY IS ONE OF those subjects, like astrophysics and neurosurgery, that are not for the fainthearted. To delve into the absolutes of the human experience, to seek to advance the progress of enlightenment first expounded by the likes of the revered Aristotle and Plato, to search for the answers to the profound questions of the universe, often at the risk of deadly reprisal from entrenched powers, requires not only brilliance and tenacity but a deep sense of purpose. But even among this select fraternity, Descartes stands out. From him did we get practical discoveries like coordinates in geometry and the law of refraction of light. But what he really did was to shake loose the human mind from the shackles of centuries of stultifying religious orthodoxy by creating an entirely original approach to reasoning: the Cartesian method. You know you’ve gotten somewhere when they name a whole new branch of science after you.
René Descartes was born into a family of minor regional nobility in a small town in western France near Poitiers in 1596, which made him only a year or so older than the queen of Bohemia. He had been quite sickly as a young child, so when he was nine and his father sent him to the nearby Jesuit school, he instructed the headmaster, who was a close friend, to have a care for his son’s health. Consequently, Descartes’s academic experience fell quite outside the boundaries of traditional instruction for the period. Where his fellow students were required to awaken early each morning and attend classes led by dreary masters who often resorted to scoldings or beatings if a pupil failed to absorb the material, Descartes was allowed to sleep late and stay in bed reading as long as he liked, a privilege of which he took full advantage and which instilled in him the lifelong habit of rarely rising before the noon meal. As a result, and possibly alone in the entire history of Jesuit school training, Descartes actually enjoyed his years at the seminary and always remembered them fondly. As he was a brilliant student who was particularly gifted in algebra and geometry, this innovative approach produced a higher-quality education than what he would have received if he had been subjected to the usual
routine. “I had been taught all that others learned,” he observed, “and, not contented with the sciences actually taught us, I had, in addition, read all the books that had fallen into my hands… [It was like] interviewing the noblest men of past ages who had written them.”
He left school at the age of eighteen and, intent upon experiencing “the great book of the world,” as he called it, determined to travel. Somewhat inexplicably for a young man whose talents tended so obviously to the cerebral, he chose to satisfy his craving for new people and places by enlisting in foreign armies. Again, his sojourns in the military, like his time spent at the Jesuit school, differed substantially from that of the common soldier’s. While there is evidence that he could handle his sword, he does not seem to have used it very often. It’s also unclear how frequently (if ever) he actually went into battle, although he was usually stationed near one. Moreover, as a gentleman knight of small but independent means, Descartes considered his valet to be as vital a component of his equipage as his bayonet, and generally camped out in a warm, comfortable room at a local inn where he could keep to his preferred regime of ten uninterrupted hours of sleep, followed by lying in bed and thinking until noon. Nor during those rare periods of the day when he condescended to dress and go out did Descartes waste much time on military affairs. Dismissing his fellow officers as dissolute louts, he instead made a point of seeking out all the leading mathematicians and academics in the area and dazzling them with his knowledge of algebra and geometry, and in this way obtained an ever-increasing circle of learned friends and admirers.*
It was in November 1619, during one of these intervals of semi-active service (when, ironically, he was attached to the imperial army under General Buquoi, who was fighting against the king and queen of Bohemia), that Descartes had his great epiphany. It came to him (where else?) in bed as a dream that most of what he had learned in school was incorrect and that in order to rectify these errors, it was going to be necessary to start all over again from the beginning, this time using the sort of rigorous proofs that worked so well in logic and mathematics. “As for the opinions which, up to that time, I had embraced, I thought I could not do better than resolve at once to sweep them wholly away, that I might afterwards be in a position to admit either others more correct, or even perhaps the same when they had undergone the scrutiny of Reason,” he later wrote. From that moment on—and here was the big break with accepted wisdom—Descartes would apply this objective, logical approach to every aspect of life, including the really tricky ones, like the existence of God, the relationship of the mind to the body, and the nature of consciousness.† This is where Cogito, ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”) comes from; his ability to reason was, to Descartes, the one irrefutable truth that he could rely upon and on which he would in the future strive to rebuild all human knowledge, “like one walking alone and in the dark.”
Descartes spent the next period of his life, through his twenties and into his thirties, refining his methodology with the intention of publishing his doctrine. Although he gave up the life of a soldier, he continued to wander restlessly across Europe, seeking out mathematicians and philosophers wherever he went and working on his treatise. He had completed a first draft and was just about to send it off to a publisher in France when the news broke that the astronomer Galileo had been condemned by the Inquisition for supporting the thesis, first advanced by Copernicus, that the earth went around the sun, and not the other way around. Despite going down on his knees and recanting his views, the distinguished scientist had been sent to prison, where, as part of his punishment, he was required to repeat seven psalms of contrition aloud every week for the next three years.
René Descartes
Galileo’s conviction came as a terrible shock to Descartes, who, as a devout Catholic and a great admirer of the Jesuit order, had been hoping to use the principles of logic and mathematics to reconcile the Church to scientific inquiry. “I could hardly have believed that an Italian, and in favor with the Pope, as I hear, could be considered criminal for nothing else than for seeking to establish the earth’s motion,” he wrote, almost in despair, to the friend in France to whom he had been about to entrust his own manuscript. “I thought I had heard that… it was constantly being taught, even at Rome; and I confess that if the opinion of the earth’s movement is false, all the foundations of my philosophy are so also, because it is demonstrated clearly by them. It is so bound up with every part of my treatise, that I could not sever it without making the remainder faulty,” he concluded despondently. Descartes was so terrified of courting a similar fate that in the immediate aftermath of Galileo’s condemnation in 1633, he seriously contemplated destroying all of his notes and papers.
But despite his fears, he couldn’t let it go, and in 1637 he summoned up the courage to publish his first major work, A Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences, which he followed up in 1641 with a second volume, Meditations Concerning the First Philosophy in Which Are Demonstrated the Existence of God, and the Immortality of the Soul. Both tracts were widely circulated throughout Europe, but it was the first, A Discourse on the Method, that vaulted Descartes into the public consciousness and made his name as a brilliant philosopher.
And so it was as something of an international celebrity that he first walked into the queen of Bohemia’s drawing room and there met her eldest daughter, Princess Elizabeth.
THERE IS NO RECORD of what occurred during this first interview, but by the spring of 1643, forty-seven-year-old Descartes, who had been made aware through an intermediary that twenty-four-year-old Princess Elizabeth had read his work and wished to discuss it with him, was sufficiently interested to make an impromptu visit to The Hague specifically to talk to her. Unfortunately, the princess was with her mother at the royal hunting lodge in Rhenen on the day the philosopher chose to call, an oversight that prompted a gracious note of apology from his absent hostess. “Monsieur Descartes,” Princess Elizabeth wrote on May 6, 1643, “I have learned with much pleasure and regret the intention you had of seeing me a few days ago, and was equally touched by your kindness in wishing to converse with one so ignorant… and by my misfortune in losing so profitable a conversation.” She went on to say that she had questions about some of his theories and had been encouraged by her tutor to approach him directly. In particular, she had trouble understanding how metaphysics controlled emotions and bodily functions, and so, “I have driven from my mind all other considerations than that of begging you to tell me how the soul of a man can determine the motions of the body to perform voluntary actions (being but a thinking substance). For it seems that all determination of movement comes from the force exercised on it… Therefore, I ask for a more particular definition of the soul… that is to say, of substance separate from its action, thought.”*
Although this was clearly not the ordinary “So sorry to have missed you!” society missive, Descartes, in his response, seems to have assumed that her position outweighed her intellect, and he elected to toady rather than teach. “The favor with which your Highness has honored me in allowing me to receive your commandments by letter is far greater than I could ever have dared hope,” his fawning reply began. “And it makes my defects easier to bear than the one event that I would have fervently wished for, to have received them from your own mouth… seeing a discourse more than human come from a body so like those painters give to angels, I would have been in the same rapture it seems must be those who, coming from earth, enter for the first time into heaven,” he continued, before fobbing her off with an answer that even he noted was not “entirely satisfactory.”
He was right; it wasn’t. “Your kindness is shown, not only in pointing out and correcting the faults of my reasoning, as I had expected,” Princess Elizabeth shot back on June 10, “but also to render their recognition less vexatious you try to console me—to the prejudice of your judgment—by undeserved praises, which might have been necessary… if my being brought
up in a place where the ordinary style of conversation had not accustomed me to hearing of them from people incapable of estimating them truly, and made me presume myself safe in believing the contrary of what they said,” she observed drily. (Translation: I expected more from you than sycophancy. I don’t have to consult a renowned philosopher to hear cheap compliments, I get them at home for free all the time.) “But as you have undertaken to instruct me I assure myself that you will explain to me the nature of immaterial substance and the manner of its actions and passions in the body.” (In other words, Take me seriously or not at all.) Signed (to take the sting out of it), “Your very affectionate friend, Elizabeth.”
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