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The imperial army entered Prague the next day without opposition. The soldiers were released on the city, as the phrase is, with the common results. One of those who entered was René Descartes, who wandered in the old town and up to the Carolinum; he had the idea that he would like to view the famous collection of Tycho Brahe's astronomical instruments that Johannes Kepler had left behind when he too left Prague precipitously. The young man had—would always have—an uncanny ability to pass single-mindedly through scenes that did not pertain to his own business, seeing in effect nothing. The instruments, unfortunately, had already been removed and dispersed, and René walked back again through the town, where snow was now beginning to fall, snow stained red in the squares and alleys. He was thinking again—of a way to reduce all kinds of physical problems to mathematical equations of the third and fourth degree, perhaps—and in his notebook that night he wrote: On November 11, 1620, I began to conceive the foundation of an admirable discovery.
In the coming weeks those of the Bohemian leadership who didn't escape abroad were methodically tried and executed by an imperial commission. One cheated them by committing suicide (another tower window, another leap) but his head and right hand were exhibited, nailed to the gallows. Eventually twenty-seven knights, counts, ministers and patriarchs, judges, scholars, and burghers were executed; lesser men were whipped, branded, or lost goods. That Hussite preacher who once led a parade of fellows dressed as sturdy Hussite peasants to welcome Elizabeth to Prague (what a noise they had made with their flails, those false harvestmen, flailing, flailing—what an ungodly noise!) and who had given tongue so long and loud to praise her—he had that tongue nailed to the gallows. Nothing was to be forgiven, or forgotten either.
Through the deepening snows Frederick and Elizabeth struggled toward home. Everyone says they were remarkably brave, clear eyed but calm, all happiness gone, everything lost, spoiled, and themselves to blame: especially Elizabeth. Her mind, said the English ambassador, could not be brought under fortune.
Home slipped out of reach. The Spanish general Spinola, the Spider, left Flanders with his army and moved toward the Rhine and the Palatinate. Soon Mainz had fallen to him (in stories of war, cities fall at the advance of generals, but it's not so; metonymy and synecdoche don't do the fighting and dying, the soldiers and the townspeople do, one at a time, and not in a sentence but for hours and days). Celadon, now with the Protestant forces trying to regroup, wrote to Elizabeth: Voilà, my poor Heidelberg is taken. They have used all sorts of cruelties, pillaged the whole town, burnt all the suburbs, which were the chief beauty of the place. The invaders seized the vast Bibliotheca palatina, which was sent off to Rome; the great librarian Gruter saw all his own lifetime's collection of books and papers thrown into the street and yard where horses were stabled, to be irremediably fouled. It always happens, a calculated insult, endlessly repeated: Protestant soldiery stable their horses in the chapels of saints, Catholics in the courtyards of schools or libraries. What was in poor Gruter's papers? A whole world vanished here, says Dame Yates. What story was lost in that street? None? This one?
There exist a number of broadsides mocking the runaway Winter King, political cartoons as dense with symbols as alchemical texts, let him who does not understand be silent, or learn. In many of them the king is shown with one stocking falling down—he has lost his garter, or Garter, which means his English father-in-law's support. And in one he stands uneasily, fearfully, upon a Y; the Y stands on a Z; the Z, on a wooden ball. Saturn with glass and wings and scythe looks on, old Kronos or Chronos, and he declares:
The wooden ball's this world of mine
Whereon the Bohemians wedded the Palatine.
They thought they'd teach the states anew,
Reform the schools, church, law courts too,
Return us to that blessed state
Before the apple Adam ate,
Or even Saturn's days of old
Which all men call my Age of Gold.
For this, those Rosicrucians yearn
The mountains into gold to turn.
So Y leads nowhere but to Z, the last letter, the end, the fall.
In Bohemia and Moravia the Czech Brethren were harshly suppressed; their chapels and houses despoiled, their ministers and bishops hunted down, driven away, hanged if they resisted. Their last bishop was Jan Andreas Comenius, who was driven from his home and his congregation with only what he could carry—papers, of course, mostly. He wrote then in despair or hope: When the wrath of the nations has passed, the rule of thy country will return to thee, O Czech people. It was not a time he himself would live to see; he would never see Moravia again. His wife and two of her children died of hardships on the way to shelter with a sympathetic lord in Brandeis; there he wrote The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart.
In that story—it would become a classic of Czech literature, until it became unreadable again—a pilgrim wanders in the dark maze of a city, which is divided into many quarters and streets, a multiplex of arches squares palaces and churches whereon he sees all arts and sciences laid out as in a Memory City. His foolish or obtuse companions insist on the wonder and worth of all that they see, though the pilgrim can only question. And a trumpet on high gathers all the seekers together, to the central square, where a robed brother offers Rosicrucian secrets for sale, in boxes with names like Portae sapientae, Gymnasium universitatis, Bonum Micro-macro-cosmicon, Pyramis triumphalis. They mustn't be opened, the hawker says, they will work by auto-penetration of the box, but some buyers do open them, to see the wondrous thing inside, and of course the boxes are empty, all empty, every one. Finally, despairing, the pilgrim hears a voice call to him: Return whence you came, into the house of your heart, and close the doors.
In Tübingen, Johann Valentin Andreae (Comenius's friend in a former age) opened his own old, old allegory, The Chemical Wedding: by Christian Rosencreutz, which he wanted no one any longer to read. But there was no way to call back every one of the little winged things and send them into the flames. Andreae (one of those authors who can't resist reading their own prose, their old prose, when they come upon it) read the title page and the last page and the scene he loved the best, the one where Christian is induced by the wicked or reckless page to waken Venus before her time. He read from there to the end, when the brothers board their ships, the sign of Cancer painted upon the crimson sails, to go out into the world and make it new.
Did he think that his book had helped to bring about the ruin all around? Was he sorry? He was also one of those authors who believe their works do bring about things, and indeed he was sorry, he was. And yet surely, surely they should have known, he thought, those who had read it; they should have seen Andreae's smile, seen through him and his book. Look: just below the title and the false date he'd put on it (1459!) there was the motto Arcana publicata vilescunt, et gratiam prophanata amissunt. Ergo: ne Margaritas objice porcis, seu Asino substernere rosas. Secrets told to all are spoiled, things made common have no power; therefore do not throw pearls before swine, nor proffer roses to an ass.