I stumbled across Cleyn’s painting in 2010 during a casual visit to Kingston Lacy, the Bankes’s former estate in Dorset now owned by the National Trust. I have not been able to unriddle its Galilean hieroglyph in the manner of Sherlock Holmes, who worked by excluding everything not immediately relevant to his investigation. He had not heard of Copernicus before Dr Watson told him that the earth travels and he then did his best to forget it. I have been obliged to copy the melancholic Burton, raking over all sorts of material, some perhaps not strictly pertinent to my inquiry, but not known to me not to be. There is no end to the potentially relevant.
Doubt not but in the end you will say with [Burton], that to anatomize this [painting] aright…is as great a task as to reconcile those chronological errors in the Assyrian monarchy [and] find out the quadrature of the circle.…as great a trouble as to perfect the motion of Mars and Mercury, which so crucifies our astronomers, or to rectify the Gregorian calendar.10
I have set out what I think relevant to the painting in a manner that should satisfy the strictest Trinitarian. The first three chapters sketch the background: Rome with its resurgent papacy and Venice with Galileo and his subversive friends; conflicts among the main Christian sects and between prerogatives and privileges in the mixed and muddy Stuart government; and the eccentricities and random shrewdness of James, the culture and self-deception of Charles, and the struggles of both against Puritans and parliaments. As far as the documents allow, these wide matters are presented through the particular experiences of Sir John Bankes. Chapters 4–6 take up cultural matters pertinent to Cleyn’s picture: literature, theater, art, and popular astrology; cosmology and elevated astrology; melancholy and medicine. The last three chapters are devoted to the painter; the situation in wartime Oxford, where Sir John, Sir Maurice, young John, Dr Williams, and Francis Cleyn came together to make our painting; and a Galilean dialogue between Cleyn and his sitters exploring the painting’s meaning.
In treating these many themes, I have had Cleyn the designer of tapestry in mind. Threads from the histories of art, literature, science, medicine, politics, law, and religion come in and out, in a way that his contemporaries might have experienced them, which is not how modern historians have divided them. None is teased out to an extent that would have challenged the learning of an ordinary Jacobean or Caroline gentleman. This learning included cosmology, not as mathematics, but, as we learn from Henry Peacham’s Complete Gentleman (1622), as a “sweet and pleasant study,” more recreation than labor, “besides being quickly, and with much ease attained to.”11
Galileo’s image is multivalent. We see its flexibility in its contrasting employment by the anti-royalist John Milton, in his well-known argument for an almost free press, Areopagitica (1644), which appeared within a year of our picture, and by the royalist Sir John Bankes, in commissioning a portrait of his melancholy son. A postscript outlines the exploitation of Galileo’s image by reactionary as well as by progressive forces since Cleyn began the process four centuries ago.
1
Galileo’s Europe
In the Jubilee year of 1600, Galileo reached the midpoint of the eighteen years he regarded as the happiest of his life. These were the years he spent as professor of mathematics at the Venetian University at Padua, where expression was freer than elsewhere in Italy and the Roman Inquisition had little sway. Venice tolerated people who increased its wealth and welcomed well-to-do foreign students, including English Protestants, to its university. When at the end of the happy years Galileo had the misfortune to discover through his telescope stars and moons never before seen by any human being, his British students were prepared to defend his claims and to inform folks back home of the astonishing refashioning of the heavens above Padua.
Almost six years to the day after Galileo had published his Sidereus nuncius in March 1610, the cardinals of the Holy Roman Inquisition for the Suppression of Heretical Depravity decided that the Copernican system of the world, which Galileo believed his discoveries supported, was formally heretical because contrary to Scripture and, moreover, untenable in the Aristotelian physics to which the Christian worldview was wedded. To be precise, the cardinals found that the thesis of a stationary sun was formally heretical, that of a moving earth erroneous in faith, and both absurd in philosophy. Why the Roman Catholic Church thought it necessary to intervene in a dispute over cosmic geometry, and why it believed that it could do so effectively, take some explaining.
Resurgent Rome
The Roman Catholic Church had much to celebrate at its Jubilee in 1600. On the periphery of Europe, in Poland and Ruthenia, Jesuits were winning back Protestant souls. The King of Scotland, James VI, was intriguing for the throne of England and flirting with converting to Rome. His wife, Queen Anna, had already signed up. Beyond Europe, missionaries, Jesuit, Franciscan, Dominican, and Benedictine, successfully proselytized for the truth as they saw it. Strayed sheep—Nestorians, Copts, Maronites—had returned to the fold.1 International Protestantism was on the defensive, although it still held its own against Spain in the Netherlands. In France, it enjoyed a measure of toleration under the Edict of Nantes (1598), and in Venice, whose nobles declined to celebrate the Jubilee, it may have had more friends in high places than the ruler of Rome. “[A]ll the world knows [the Venetians] care not Three-pence for the Pope.”2
The division of Christian Europe between the Protestant northern German states, Scotland, England, Switzerland, and the Scandinavian countries, on the one hand, and Catholic Austria, Bavaria, Poland, Italy, Spain, and Portugal, on the other, would not change much, despite the hot spots where the two blocks rubbed together. This was the insight of Edwin Sandys, a risk-prone Oxford graduate, who acquired his objectivity by investigative travel, three years of it, in Germany, Italy, France, and Geneva. Sandys praised the Catholic Church for its training of priests, charitable institutions, and uniformity of doctrine, and excused its censorship, inquisition, confession, and ostentation as useful means of social control. On this criterion he could regard the pope, Clement VIII, as a “good Man, good Prelate, and good Prince.” Where the Catholics did well, as in organization and uniformity of doctrine, the Protestants, with their splits and wrangles, scored poorly. Sandys reckoned the Anglican Church the best of the lot for its compromise between reform and tradition and dreamt that English practice might serve as “an umpire and also as a director” for bringing Christendom together again. Many of our actors, including King James, shared this dream, with the reservation that popes and Jesuits had no part in it. In short, like many of his countrymen, but unlike his puritanical father, a former Archbishop of York, Sandys could tolerate the Catholic faith but not the Roman Church.3 His book, A Relation of the State of Europe (1605), would become a weapon in the hands of Galileo’s friends.
The popes had a more formidable armory. Besides Spanish and Austrian arms and money, they had new institutions and doctrines to combat the heresies of Luther and Calvin. These instruments included the Society of Jesus, formed in 1540 primarily to succor the poor, but grown by 1600 into the schoolmasters of Catholic Europe and the most disciplined and dangerous agents of their own and papal policy; the Roman Inquisition (the Holy Office), formed in 1542 to extirpate heresy within the church; the Roman Index of Prohibited Books (1557–9), appointed to ensure wholesome reading matter; and the Council of Trent (1545–63), assembled to outfit Catholics for battle with heretics. The council issued decrees on discipline and doctrine that created better educated priests, more responsible bishops, greater uniformity of dogma, and a more aggressive Papacy, and thereby insured the permanent division of Christendom.
One of Trent’s reforms defined and controlled the distribution of indulgences, or remissions of penalties for sins. The council abolished their sale, which had pushed Luther to rebellion, while upholding their value.4 Securing them was the main purpose of the pilgrims who came to Clement’s jubilee by the hundreds of thousands, 1.2 million or perhaps 3 million in all, in a tremendous demonstration
of the reach and power of the Catholic faith.5 Pilgrims obtained their indulgences most readily and reliably through an innovation intended to symbolize resurgent Rome. By visiting the basilicas of S. Pietro, S. Paolo, S. Giovanni in Laterano, and Santa Maria Maggiore fifteen times in any order and proper contrition, they would receive a plenary indulgence for past trespasses. A pilgrim lucky enough to drop dead immediately after completing the course would be nearly as sinless as a freshly baptized babe. Clement expanded easy opportunities for indulgence by enrolling the four obelisks planted in front of the basilicas a decade earlier. Whoever knelt at any of these symbols of Christian triumph over paganism and, while gazing at the cross surmounting it, prayed for “Holy Church and the Roman Pontiff,” would receive an indulgence of 10 years and 10 quarantines, which exact sinners will know sum to 4,052 days, including leap years.6
Among the pilgrims came a number of heretics, some to laugh at, others to flirt with, the old religion. Many of both kinds converted, drawn by their countrymen who had already gone over and urged along by accomplished proselytizers. Potential recruits might receive charitable treatment followed by a hard sell and, thus softened, joyfully join their benefactors. Physicians harvested many such souls from hospitals. The prize catch of 1600 was the grandnephew of the archfiend Calvin, who had come to mock, fell ill, abjured his errors, and joined the Capuchins.7 The English College in Rome, where Jesuits trained infantry for the spiritual reconquest of Britain, and its affiliated English Hospice, were particularly hazardous places.8 But there was danger everywhere. A case of consequence for our story, Tobie Matthew, survived a life-threatening illness only to succumb to Rome. Like Sandys, he was the liberated son of a puritanical Archbishop of York. His friends tried to return him to England and the true faith; but Matthew had been snared by the beautiful churches, good sermons, learned men (including Galileo), and “wholesome wines…excellent pictures…and choyce music” of Italy. He ignored his friends and became a priest.9
As if to remind the faithful that their nourishing Mother was hitched up to an authoritarian Papa, the Inquisition sent the impenitent monk Giordano Bruno to the stake before a throng of fascinated, horrified pilgrims during the second month of the Jubilee year. Bruno had traveled Europe, even unto Oxford, shocking Protestants and Catholics alike before the Inquisition caught up with him. It did not succeed in talking or torturing him out of such heresies as denying the divinity of Christ and expounding an animistic religion purer than Christianity. He co-opted Copernicus into the congregation of animists on the far-fetched ground that a moving earth implied a living one and claimed to be the first among Copernican exegetes. His views and fate helped to make Copernican ideas suspect and scary wherever the Inquisition impended. In England, in contrast, Bruno and Copernicus were regarded as more mad than menacing. In the influential opinion of George Abbot, a future Archbishop of Canterbury, “[Bruno] undertooke among other matters to set on foote the opinion of Copernicus, that the earth did goe round and the heavens did stand still; whereas in truth it was his owne head which rather did run round, and his braines did not stand still.”10
Anti-Roman Trio
The form of government that insured the longevity, prosperity, and relative tranquility of the Republic of Venice, and earned it the epithet of Serenissima, presented a problem to the early Stuarts. Standard political theory held that the security of a state required at least outward conformity in religious observance. Venice, however, prospered while allowing nonconformists to worship much as they pleased provided that they did not politic or proselytize. So thick were the English in Venice that the pope demanded that its Senate thin them.11 In vain. Venetian wealth depended on an import–export business conducted through middlemen of diverse religions who worshipped together at the shrine of Mammon. Equal application of the law stabilized the system. Or so English playgoers would conclude from the equation of trade and justice in The Merchant of Venice.
The [Doge] cannot deny the course of law
. . . . .
Since that the trade and profit of the City
Consisteth of all nations.12
The despised Jew Shylock expected the fair operation of the law to grant him the pound of flesh owed him by the merchant Antonio.
The Venetian constitution reserved executive offices in the state to patricians who elected the Doge from among the older and wiser members of their class by an elaborate semi-random procedure; and, as a further barrier to despotism, hedged the winner around with rules that made it difficult for him to accumulate power.13 Wealth and wisdom were the state’s hallmarks, and longevity their consequence. “Could any State on Earth Immortall be ǀ Venice by Her rare Government is She.”14 Ben Jonson’s Volpone enforced these characteristics by parody. The play is situated in Venice, where Sir Politic Would-Be has come to practice statecraft and his garrulous Lady (“The sun, the sea will sooner both stand still ǀ Than her eternal tongue”) to learn the style of its courtesans.15
Nothing could be further from dogeship than the concept of kingship that the future James I developed while only King of Scotland and wrote out in a manual for the benefit of his heir. This handbook, Basilikon doron (1599), or “Royal gift,” teaches that a prince and his dynasty hold office by appointment from God. A doge, elected by his peers and succeeded by another so chosen, was no real prince. Fear that they might be reduced to the status of a doge haunted the first Stuart kings. And rightly so, for that is just what happened to James’s son and heir Charles I.
According to James’s doctrine, a prince ruled absolutely, by divine appointment, within his domains. He extended the same status to the pope, whom he acknowledged as a divine-right ruler within the Papal States as well as the spiritual leader of the Roman Catholic Church. Over English Catholics the Pope had no temporal jurisdiction. When James succeeded Queen Elizabeth I, he claimed the power to regulate religion within his three kingdoms of Scotland, England, and Ireland. He would do so, popelike, through a hierarchy of bishops. They were the key to religious discipline and could be hard or soft on nonconformity as their commitments and the royal will required. The Stuarts believed that without their episcopate they would have no jurisdiction: “no bishop, no king,” as James liked to say. That, too, Charles proved to be correct.
The subjection of bishop to prince, of church to state, became a life or death matter for the Republic of Venice when, in 1606, an interdict imposed by Clement’s successor, Paul V, disturbed the tranquility of the Serenissima. Paul imposed the interdict, which prohibited clergy from marrying the quick and burying the dead, to force Venice to change policies limiting Rome’s rights to inherit land and protect clergy accused of crimes. The Senate ordered priests to continue their services and expelled those, like the Jesuits, who refused to obey. Its adoption of James’s view of church–state relations precipitated the equivalent of a constitutional crisis.16 Rome chose as its principal paladin in the resultant paper war the master controversialist Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, chief of the Jesuit theologians, deep, crafty, and learned. Against him the Republic fielded the smartest man in Europe, Fra Paolo Sarpi, of the placid Order of Servites. Among Sarpi’s friends was someone almost as smart as he, Galileo Galilei; and among his supporters was someone bolder than both, the Archbishop of Spalato, Marc’Antonio De Dominis. The three earned the sustained attention of the Roman authorities, which, in good time, killed the archbishop, imprisoned the mathematician, and tried to assassinate the monk. Most of the books of Sarpi and De Dominis made their way onto the Index, where Galileo’s Dialogue, the book in our picture, joined them. The crimes of these bravos were well known in England.
The Monk
Sarpi’s circle of friends included the English ambassador to Venice, Henry Wotton, who engaged him in a project to convert Venice to Protestantism. Sarpi’s theology was probably closer to Protestant than Catholic; his disdain of Paul V (“timid with equals, ungrateful to benefactors, supercilious with inferiors, and passionately fond of money”) was b
oundless; and he clung to the absolute sovereignty of the state as a bulwark against papal claims to supreme authority over Christian princes.17 The Venetian monk and the English ambassador therefore had a firm basis for collaboration. Since Venetian law prohibited foreign diplomats from dealing privately with state officials without permission, Wotton worked for his church and Sarpi’s conversion through several intermediaries, of whom the most important were Wotton’s chaplain William Bedell and Sarpi’s lieutenant Fra Fulgenzio Micanzio.18
The chaplain, a pious and upright man, frequented his friends’ monastery on the pretext of teaching them English. Their choice of textbook was Sandys’s Relation, which Bedell translated, Micanzio corrected, Sarpi annotated, and the Doge approved. Although ready for the press before 1610, the book and its anti-Roman annotations did not come out until after Sarpi’s death. Its editor then was Jean Diodati, a Calvinist from Geneva, famous for his translations of Scripture, who had collaborated with Wotton’s group to insinuate Protestantism into Venice.19 Chaplain Bedell’s discovery that the Roman numerals in the dedicatory phrase, pavlo v. vice-deo, found in Jesuit texts, sum to the Number of the Beast (dclvvvi = 666), no doubt encouraged them all.20
Knowing that a picture can be more persuasive than words, Wotton surreptitiously obtained Sarpi’s portrait and sent it overland to England to display the strength and quality of Venetian leadership. The Inquisition confiscated the talisman. Wotton promptly had a second portrait made, which carried an even stronger message, as it showed Sarpi with the patch he then wore to cover scars from the Vatican’s attempt to kill him.21 Wotton shipped the new portrait by a secure route and had it reproduced in England to give to friends who could appreciate its expression of fearless determination (Figure 7).22 Portraits have powers.
The Ghost of Galileo Page 2
