Johannes Kepler the German astronomer, died today in 1630. Kepler, a devout Lutheran who saw the universe as a mirror of the Holy Trinity, formulated three laws to account for the movements of the planets (as pictured above in 1660), and supported the controversial heliocentric discoveries of Galileo, which had been condemned by the Roman Catholic Church. He also invented the terms ‘orbit’ and ‘satellite’, and said that the ‘attractive virtue which is in the moon extends as far as the earth, and entices up the waters’, linking the moon with ocean tides.
‘It is not improbable, I must point out, that there are inhabitants not only on the moon but on Jupiter too. But as soon as somebody demonstrates the art of flying, settlers from our species of man will not be lacking. Given ships or sails adapted to the breezes of heaven, there will be those who will not shrink from even that vast expanse.’ Johannes Kepler
It is the feast day of St Malo, who lived in the 6th and 7th centuries. According to legend, he came from Llancarfan in Wales, and was a companion of St Brendan the Navigator on his Atlantic voyages. He evangelised Brittany and became Bishop in what is now the Breton port of St-Malo.
St Albert the Great, the 13th century German theologian and philospher, also has his feast day today. A legend in his own lifetime, he was known as ‘Dr Expert’ and ‘the Great’ even before he had died, for the brilliance of his inquiry into logic, philosophy, astronomy, botany, law, zoology, alchemy, and other disciplines. One of his students in Köln was Thomas Aquinas.
The Jesuit missionary Roque González y de Santa Cruz was murdered today in 1628, just before supervising the installation of a bell at the mission church in Todos los Santos de Caaró, Brazil. González was working to protect the Guaraní people from Spanish and Portuguese colonists, but the local chieftain saw him as an agent of colonisation. He and another priest were killed with a tomahawk and dragged into the church, which was set on fire. He was made a saint in 1988.
Richard Whiting, the last Abbot of Glastonbury, England, was hanged, drawn and quartered on Glastonbury Tor today in 1539, following the wrecking of his abbey on the orders of King Henry VIII’s enforcer, Thomas Cromwell. He had been interrogated in the Tower of London by Cromwell, but was tried and sentenced the day before he died by a rigged jury in Wells, a few miles from Glastonbury. The abbey was one of the largest and richest in England, and Whiting, almost 80 years old and much loved in Glastonbury, was treated as a traitor for resisting the stripping and desecration of the abbey and its church.
‘Item. To see that the evidence be well sorted and the indictments well drawn against the said abbots and their accomplices. Item. How the King’s learned counsel shall be with me all this day, for the full conclusion of the indictments. Item. The Abbot of Glaston to be tried at Glaston and also executed there.’ Thomas Cromwell’s Book of Remembrances, showing that Whiting’s death was predetermined
Image: British Library