nor the other inhabitants of Hveen had ever heard the name of Tycho Brahe, except one old man, who did not give a flattering account of him. Successive writers down to the present day have quoted this story without noticing the absurdity of the idea that a small community of a few hundred people should in the course of fifty years have quite forgotten the man who raised such fine and singular buildings and was visited by kings and princes.[1]
A few years after, Hveen ceased to belong to Denmark. In February 1658 the Danish king was forced to conclude the humiliating treaty of Roskilde, by which the provinces east of the Sound, which from before the dawn of history had been Danish, were handed over to Sweden. King Carl Gustav, who was not content with what he had got, but soon after made an ineffectual attempt to take the whole of Denmark, claimed Hveen as belonging to Scania, because the inhabitants were now under the jurisdiction of the court of Lund.[2] The spot where Tycho had lived and worked was thus torn from the country which had so little valued him, and, like Scania, the island soon became perfectly Swedish—a very natural consequence of the close affinity between the two nations, rivals for so many centuries, but now animated only by brotherly feelings.
In 1671 the Académie des Sciences sent Picard to Hveen to determine the geographical position of Uraniborg. The foundations were still easily recognised, and the earthen walls round Uraniborg untouched, except that a stone wall had been built across the enclosure, cutting off the north-eastern wall and a little of the two adjoining ones, and the parts thus cut off had been nearly obliterated by ploughing. Of Stjerneborg he saw nothing except a slight hollow in the ground, and he did not trouble himself about making exca-
- ↑ I have looked through the Gazette de France for 1652, in the hope that Huet might have sent a letter from Stockholm in which he might have described his trip to Hveen. But there is nothing from him or about him, so that the only account is the one given in his book Petri Danieli Huetii, Episcopi Abrincensis, Commentarius de rebus ad eum pertinentibus, Amsterdam, 1718, 12mo, p. 86 et seq. As perhaps hardly one of the writers who have copied Huet's story from Weidler's Historia Astronomiæ have seen it, I have quoted it in Note G. The proverbial "oldest man in the parish," from whom Huet got his information, attributed the destruction of the buildings to weather and the carelessness of Tycho's successors.
- ↑ Peder Winstrup, Bishop of Lund (son of the Bishop of Seeland of the same name), is said to have produced many arguments to support the claims of the Swedish king, who had the best possible argument—the sword. Hofmann, Portraits historiques, vi. partie, p. 8. About the change of jurisdiction, see above, p. 88.
