A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

That is why, when we read the Elizabethans, we feel that their minds are akin to our own. Dante,
Chaucer, Petrarch, even Malory, seem to be strangers, inhabitants of another universe. They
accepted that there was some great scheme of things, of which they were a tiny part. The
Elizabethans were the first generation to grow up in a new climate of religious scepticism. The
English had never really been interested in religion. As Conyers Read says, ‘in thirty years they
accepted five distinct changes in their religion without any great fuss about the matter.’ (The
Tudors p. 138.) A people who could accept these swings from Protestantism to Catholicism and
back again as a matter of course were not likely to feel that either had a monopoly of religious
truth. They might not be in the least inclined towards atheism, but the new religious climate was
bound to make them willing to discuss such questions as predestination - the doctrine upheld by
Calvin - and the immortality of the soul. (Marlowe’s contemporary Sir Walter Raleigh acquired a
reputation for atheism because of his eagerness to discuss such topics over the dinner table.) And
men who cease to feel that such subjects are forbidden have begun to take responsibility for their
own consciences. They are thinking and behaving like individuals.
Christian dogma was also being undermined from another direction - but so gradually and gently
that at first no one paid any attention. In 1506, eleven years before Luther nailed up his theses on
the church door, a quietly-spoken physician named Nicholas Copernicus became secretary and
medical adviser to his uncle, the bishop of Ermland, between Prussia and Poland. Copernicus was a
canon of the Church, and his hobby was astronomy. Six years later, when his uncle died of food
poisoning, Copernicus had more time to devote to the stars, and he wrote a small book suggesting
that the sun is the centre of the universe and that the earth is a ball that travels round it once a year.
This amazing assertion contradicted everything believed by the Church throughout the Middle
Ages, which accepted the complex system of Ptolemy in which the earth is the centre of the
universe. To anyone who observed the heavens closely, Ptolemy’s system had enormous
disadvantages, in that it had to explain why the planets travel around the earth in such strange and
complicated orbits - sometimes even going backwards. Copernicus, who was a timid little man and
in no way a revolutionary, saw that these contradictions vanished if he assumed that the earth goes
round the sun, like all the other planets. No one was shocked by Copernicus’s ideas, even when he
published On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies in 1542; in fact, the pope’s right-hand man,
Cardinal Schoenberg, suggested that the book ought to be published, and no one paid much
attention when it appeared. Copernicus died shortly after it came out, and was soon forgotten. Half
a century later, the greatest astronomer of his time, the Dane Tycho Brahe, was convinced that
Copernicus was mistaken and that the earth was the centre of the universe. His reason had nothing
to do with religious prejudice. He saw that if the earth moved round the sun, then it must travel
millions of miles every year. In that case, the stars ought to change their positions - as a church
tower changes its position when seen from a moving train. And they don’t. Tycho did not realise
that the stars are so many billions of miles away that we would not notice the small changes in their
position - it would be many years before someone would invent an instrument delicate enough to
measure it.
Although Tycho had no magnifying telescope - they had not yet been invented - he made thousands
of minute observations of the position of the planets. When he died in 1601, his young assistant
Johannes Kepler, who believed in Copernicus’s theory, studied Tycho’s figures and tried to
understand the laws that governed the planets. What baffled him was that Tycho’s figures showed
that every planet travels at different speeds at different times. That seemed absurdly complicated.
Then, one day, he succeeded in working out the shape of such an orbit, and saw that it was not at all