The gradual unveiling of the City of the Sun
Campanella's great work, Civitas Solis, the ‘City of the Sun’, was written during his long years of incarceration between 1599 and 1627. The earliest printed edition, in Latin, was published in Frankfurt, Germany in 1623.52 However Campanella's first draft of the manuscript – in Italian, not Latin – was complete as early as 1602, and has survived (although it was not published until 1904).53 By 1613, and possibly as early as 1611,54 the manuscript copy of another draft had been smuggled out of Campanella's prison by one of his disciples and regular visitors – the Lutheran Tobias Adami as we saw in Chapter Twelve. We know that Adami took the smuggled manuscript to the city of Tübingen in southern Germany,55 where at the time lived Johann Valentin Andreae, a scholar with undeniable Hermetic and Rosicrucian connections and the possible author, or part-author of The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz.
Did Adami pass Campanella's manuscript to Andreae and to others in the proto-Rosicrucian circle in Tübingen? It seems highly likely. In which case – since the Fama and the Confessio did not appear until 1614 and 1615, while the Chemical Wedding appeared in 1616 – there is time enough to allow, as Yates suggests, for a Campanellan influence on ‘Rosicrucian aspirations after a universal reform.’ The link is tightened, Yates reveals, by the presence amongst Andreae's close friends of another of Campanella's German Lutheran disciples – a man called Wilhelm Wense.56
Dame Frances Yates has not been alone in noting the implications for our understanding of the Rosicrucian phenomenon of these behind-the-scenes connections involving Campanella, Adami, Wilhelm Wense and the enigmatic Johann Valentin Andreae. Christopher McIntosh similarly argues that Campanella's ‘utopian work, Civitas Solis, which describes an ideal society ruled over by Hermetic priests … helped create the atmosphere in which the Rosicrucian Manifestos were produced.’57 It would appear that Wense had even suggested to Andreae that the society the ‘Christian Union’ which Andreae wanted to create in Germany should be called Civitas Solis.58
In 1619, four years before the first (1623) publication of Civitas Solis but at least six years after the manuscript had reached Lutheran circles in Tübingen, Andreae was to publish a book of his own expounding the virtues of Christianopolis – a special kind of utopian city. There can be little doubt that Campanella's Hermetic-Christian vision of an ideal state was its inspiration.
The union of the Thames and the Rhine
The central image of The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz is the marvellous, magical wedding of a mythical king and queen. In February 1613, three years before the publication of the Chemical Wedding, a fabulous and almost mythical wedding did in fact take place …
The story begins on 24 March 1603 when Queen Elizabeth I of England died in Richmond Palace. Her life had been childless, and so the kingdom passed to her closest cousin, King James Stuart VI of Scotland, who was crowned James I of England at the age of 37. He was naturally followed into England by many loyal noblemen and gentry of his original Scottish court. With them they brought not only their traditional clannish sense of bonding in elite male fraternities but also the budding seed of what was eventually to become the most powerful and influential secret society of modern times.
James I was a staunch Protestant who, on the death of his illustrious cousin, found himself transformed from the king of a small, relatively poor country – Scotland – to the supreme head of one of the most powerful states in the world. His personality, it seems, was crude and ill-mannered, leaving much to be desired. Though married he apparently harboured an acute disdain for women, and preferred to spend his time in the company of men – with whom, it was inevitably rumoured, he was not averse to enjoying occasional sexual relationships.59
An all-out biblical fanatic of the worst sort, James I was fired by an adamant belief in his own ‘divine right’ to rule. In practice, however, he was to prove rather mediocre as a king and a statesman, some might even say, a failure. The English mistrusted the peace that he had struck with their traditional mortal enemy Spain, and were perplexed when he began to involve himself in an increasingly intimate relationship with the Spanish ambassador.
But all was forgiven in late 1612, when James I announced the marriage of his daughter, who bore the evocative name of Elizabeth, to the young and much loved German Protestant Prince Frederick V, the elector of the Lower Palatinate. As well as the high romance, the glamour, the excitement and the anticipation of the impending event (then, as now, the masses loved royal weddings) this move seemed to confirm James I’s commitment to the Protestant cause. Many in England and elsewhere even began to hope that he might, after all, champion and defend the Protestants of Europe as Elizabeth I had before him. And such hopes, quite naturally, were focussed in particular on what might happen in Germany, the hub of the Protestant Reformation.
The elector of the Lower Palatinate was a sensitive, handsome and very gentle young man. He had received a refined French education at the famous University at Heidelberg, an enchanting university-city that was the seat of the Lower Palatinate, and in 1610 had succeeded his father, Frederick IV, a staunch Calvinist and one of the founders of the German Protestant Union. This was a coalition of German Protestant principalities whose objective was to resist the Catholic League and the power of the Hapsburgs by forging alliances amongst themselves in Germany and also with foreign sympathisers such as the French Huguenots under Henry of Navarre, and the English Protestants.
There were, in fact, two Palatinates, the Upper Palatinate in northern Bavaria and the Lower or Rhine Palatinate located on both sides of the middle Rhine. Since medieval times the Palatine rulers had served as stewards of royal territory in the absence of the Hapsburg emperors, and eventually obtained the right to be among the electors of new emperors, hence their title of ‘electors’. When the Palatinate adopted Calvinism in the 1560s, these principalities suddenly became the bulwark of the Protestant cause in Germany. As elector of the Lower Palatinate, Frederick V symbolised Protestant resistance against the Counter-Reformation spurred by the Catholic League under the Hapsburgs, and quite naturally his marriage to the daughter of James I was perceived as a great strengthening of this resistance.
When Frederick arrived in England in the autumn of 1612 he made a huge positive impression on the English court. The young Princess Elizabeth fell deeply in love with him at first sight, and he, too, with her. It all promised to be the ultimate fairy-tale of the century. Frederick was invested with the Order of the Garter, and everyone in the realm rejoiced at the prospect of the fabulous wedding and of the great things that would come from this union.
The wedding took place on 14 February, St. Valentine's Day, 1613, amid lavish festivities along the River Thames near London. And two months later, on 25 April, the sparkling royal couple left for Germany, and set up court at the magnificent Heidelberg Castle in the Lower Palatinate.
Dee and Christian Rosenkreutz
We shall recall from Chapter Eleven that in 1583, the year Giordano Bruno arrived in England, the famous Elizabethan astrologer, conjuror and mathematician, John Dee, was preparing to leave. The Polish prince, Albert Laski, who had been amongst Bruno's audience at Oxford, had invited Dee and his family to join him at his home in Trebona, Poland, and Dee had accepted. Dee also took along his young clairvoyant assistant, Edward Kelly.
After leaving England in October 1583 Dee and his little party first stayed in Trebona for a year and then travelled extensively through Poland and Bohemia, from town to town, performing mystical séances and conjurations for the nobility until 1587. Dee and his family then returned to England, passing through Germany and Holland, but Kelly decided to stay in Poland. He was eventually killed in 1593 in an accident while trying to escape from a German prison where he had been jailed for heresy.
Back in England Dee feel into deep poverty, and was nearly destitute when Elizabeth I took pity on him and appointed him chancellor of St. Paul's Cathedral. A few years later Dee was
appointed warden of Manchester College, where he stayed until the death of Elizabeth I in 1603. Under James I, however, Dee lost all influence with the crown and all its support as well. He died in 1608, in an awful state of poverty, at the age of 81.
Curiously the character of Christian Rosenkreutz in the Chemical Wedding published eight years later, is also 81 years old. Remembering how the Rosicrucian Manifestos boast that the brothers communicate with one another in coded language, we suggest this may not be a coincidence. The author, whoever he was, may have been trying to express a deliberate, if cryptic, link between Dee and Christian Rosenkreutz, the legendary founder of the Rosicrucian movement.
This is speculation, of course. But what lends it some credibility is the fact that many scholars believe the roots of the Rosicrucian movement do go back long before the publication of the Fama and the Confessio in 1614 and 1615 – perhaps even all the way back to Germany and Bohemia in the 1580s, right after John Dee's visit to those countries. Dame Frances Yates, the greatest scholar of this field, certainly thought she could detect Dee's influence. This might have followed directly from his own travels in Germany and Bohemia. Or it could have come later and indirectly through the retinue of English scholars and artists, many of whom may have been influenced by Dee, who followed Elizabeth Stuart to her new home at Heidelberg Castle and then later on at Prague in Bohemia.60
Such influences were too well hidden for any scholar to expect to uncover them fully today. All we can say for sure is that the Rosicrucian phenomenon of 1614 – 16 followed closely on from the ‘alchemical marriage’ in 1613 of Frederick V and Elizabeth Stuart. Taken together with other signs of the times, these events conspired to raise hope of an end to the age-old system of religious and political intolerance that had ruled Europe for so long and seemed to offer the promise of a new dawn.
The Rosicrucian investment in Frederick V
To ‘build the City of the Sun’, in Hermetic parlance, requires the patronage and participation of powerful secular leaders. Without their support the great social, political and religious changes that the process requires – not to mention the architecture – are just impossible dreams. With this in mind it is, in our view, quite possible that Frederick of the Palatinate, head of the Protestant Union in Germany, was deliberately groomed by Rosicrucian and Hermetic thinkers to play the key secular role in their grand plan for Europe – the same role that they may also have had in mind for Henry IV of France before his assassination in 1610. The added frisson in Frederick's case was his marriage to the king of England's daughter – taken by many as a token of future English military intervention against the Hapsburgs and the Catholic League.
Frederick's most trusted chief advisor at Heidelberg was Prince Christian of Anhalt, a keen student of esoteric and mystical topics, particularly alchemy, Cabala and the occult. He was the patron of the German alchemist Oswald Croll, who was his physician, and he was a close friend of Peter Rosenberg, a wealthy landowner with estates around Trebona whose brother, Villem Rosenberg, had acted as host to John Dee during his stay there a few years before.61 Even more striking is the fact that one of Prince Christian's closest relatives, Prince Augustus of Anhalt, is credited with having published – in 1605, nine years before the Fama – the earliest known reference to the Rosicrucian brotherhood.62
It was under Prince Christian's influence that the Heidelberg court, as well as Frederick and Elizabeth's later court in Prague, came to be frequented by many well-known Rosicrucian sympathisers – amongst them the famous English Hermetic philosopher Robert Fludd, a pupil of John Dee, and the German alchemist Michael Maier. Interestingly, Prince Christian is also known to have been in close contact with the great Italian reformer Paolo Sarpi, the latter a Venetian theologian and statesman who, other than his intensely anti-Catholicism sentiment, also wanted to turn Venice into an independent Protestant republic.63 Sarpi was in turn a close friend of Galileo and is often credited with having been the first to introduce to this great astronomer the primitive optical long-distance sighting devices – telescopes – that were then being developed in Holland.
Prince Christian was 45 years old when the young Frederick, then barely 14, became elector of the Palatinate. Frederick and Elizabeth were still only 17 when they married and set up court in Heidelberg in 1613. Having previously served under Frederick IV, and with enormous experience of diplomacy, it was easy for Prince Christian to become a father figure to the impressionable royal couple – and there seems little doubt that it was he who promoted Frederick V as the figurehead of a great and imminent universal reformation. It is known that Prince Christian even harboured the hope that his protégée might become the first Protestant Holy Roman emperor after the anticipated overthrow of the Catholic Hapsburgs.
In August 1619 the throne of Bohemia, which the rebellious nobility of Prague considered to be an elective rather than a hereditary title, was offered to Frederick. Against the sound advice of the union of Protestant princes and the beseeching of his own mother he unwisely accepted the offer and late in September 1619 he and his English wife left Heidelberg Castle and headed for Prague. When the news reached England, it was greeted with huge enthusiasm by the public – almost as though a new or ‘reincarnated Queen Elizabeth’ had manifested herself in central Europe in defence of Protestantism. This time, moreover, a splendid young prince was to be found at her side bearing the title of head of the Protestant Union and protected by his powerful father-in-law, James I.
It was all a grave mistake, for James I had absolutely no intention of jeopardising the precarious peace that England then enjoyed with Spain and thus, indirectly, with the Catholic League and the Hapsburgs.
In these adverse political and military circumstances – which surely he must have been aware of – historians have often wondered why Frederick V accepted the crown of Bohemia at all? What was it that prompted him to take such a huge risk? Explaining this very matter to an uncle, Frederick himself stated in a letter that he believed it to be his ‘divine calling which I must not disobey … my only end is to serve God and his Church.’64
By God's ‘Church’ Frederick presumably meant the Bohemian or Calvinist-Reformed Church. But it is not altogether impossible that his idea of his ‘divine calling’ might have encompassed a much larger ‘mission’ extending beyond Bohemia, beyond Germany and even beyond Calvinism. Through Prince Christian of Anhalt, the Rosicrucian and Hermetic influences that are likely to have reached the young elector all envisaged a great and imminent religious and cultural reformation of the world – nothing less than a new Hermetic golden dawn for mankind that was about to break very soon. Those who promulgated such ideas believed that the instrument to bring this about was an ancient and secret knowledge that had recently been rediscovered – a knowledge that they had understood and that was to be found in the Hermetic writings, in the Cabalistic Hebraic texts, and in the old sciences of alchemy and natural magic.
All those who promoted such ideas – at high risk to their freedom and lives – were also seeking an enlightened monarch or prince to bring about this great universal reform and advancement of learning. It was expected that he would do so from the heart of a utopian republic or ‘city’ ostensibly named Civitas Solis (Campanella), Christianopolis (Andreae) or, as we shall soon see, New Atlantis (Bacon) or even New Jerusalem. It was visualised as a wonderful and magical Hermetic-Christian state ruled by a ‘solar’ king and governed by his wise and learned priest-scientists, priest-philosophers or magi, set at the very epicentre of the known world.
What better location, then, than the central European state of the Palatinate, ruled by an enlightened prince, a chivalrous knight of the Order of the Garter, who had just married a wonderful and sensitive princess of the blood royal of England? The latter, moreover, had been groomed in the sophisticated and enlightened Baconian and Shakespearian milieu of the Jacobean Renaissance. Better still, she brought with her the clout of her powerful father, James I, to buttress the great adventure and enter
prise ahead.
After the unexpected death of Henry IV of France a terrible sense of loss and frustration befell free thinkers in central Europe until, it seems to us, a clever propaganda campaign using Hermetic-Christian-Cabala changed the direction of the movement. Now it was no longer France but Germany that offered the best vector for the great reform. As the leading Hermetic scholar Joscelyn Godwin puts it: The hopes of all whose outlook could be described as ‘Rosicrucian’ were pinned on Frederick: hopes that he could initiate the reform of which the Fama and the Confessio spoke …65
The Battle of White Mountain
Days after Frederick V was crowned king of Bohemia, his rival, the deposed Ferdinand of Hapsburg, was immediately declared Holy Roman emperor – Ferdinand II – by the Catholic League. The league then mounted a ferocious crusade against the usurper Frederick and the Protestant cause in general. This was the start of the terrible Thirty Years War that was to scourge central Europe and kill half the population of Germany.
Through swift negotiations with his Catholic allies and even the ‘heathen’ Turks, Ferdinand II was able to form a powerful coalition against Frederick and his supposed Protestant allies. Badly organised and weakened by personal feuds, one by one the Protestant princes and the other foreign Protestant powers began to abandon the elector. The final blow came when it was gradually realised by all that James I, his powerful father-in-law, was not going to send any military support to him. The dismal end to Frederick's short reign was now imminent.