before, that I do not intend to go to any further expense about it; there was far too much spent on it before, and if I had the money back, it should hardly be so badly spent."[1]
Soon after Tycho's death, in May 1602, Cort Barleben received Hveen in fief, and shortly afterwards he was granted permission to pull down the forge. His successor was a mistress of the king's, Karen Andersdatter, who got the island in 1616, and was followed by her son, Hans Ulrik Gyldenlöve, who died in 1645, and seems to have been succeeded by some nobleman's widow. The destruction of Uraniborg had in the meantime gradually proceeded, as there was nobody to look after it. A new dwelling-house was erected on the site of Tycho's farm, called Kongsgaarden, which stood for about two hundred years, but has now dis- appeared, so that only some farm buildings remain. This Kongsgaard was built of the bricks and stones of Uraniborg, as a mason in 1623 was paid for 60,OOO bricks which he had "pulled down and renovated from the old castle Oranienborg."[2] In 1645 Jörgen Brahe, a nephew of Tycho's, was granted permission to remove "any stones with inscriptions or other carved figures or characters " which might be found at Hveen.[3] Perhaps Tycho's nephew was anxious to secure some slight relic of his uncle before it was too late, for a couple of years later, when Gassendi inquired about the island, he was informed that there was only a field where Uraniborg had been.
In 1652 the island was for the first time after 1597 visited by a man of distinction. Pierre Daniel Huet, afterwards so well known as the editor of the classics "in usum Delphini," and sometime Bishop of Auranches in Normandy, was a young man of twenty-two when, in 1652, he accompanied the learned Bochart, who had been invited by Queen Christina to join the galaxy of learned foreigners at Stockholm. Passing through Copenhagen, Huet paid a visit to Hveen, and found scarcely a trace of the buildings. In his autobiography, which he did not draw up till more than sixty years later, when he says himself that both his senses and his memory were impaired after a serious illness, Huet adds the very absurd statement that neither the clergyman
- ↑ Breve og Aktstykker, pp. 53 and 104.
- ↑ Vandalism of that kind is not confined to any age or nation, but the destruction of many a fine old monastery or chapel in the heat of the Reformation had made people at that time particularly callous to the pulling down of historical relics.
- ↑ Friis, Tyge Brahe, p. 308.
