The Court Chamberlain continued: “Now, among the seven Electors, there is one who is friendly to our cause. For his sake I shall not name him but suffice it to say it is neither the Archbishop of Trier nor the Archbishop of Cologne, papal zealots both.” The Emperor: “I want to say who it is.” He raised both the horn and the bowl and cried: “It is the Duke of Saxony!” The Court Chamberlain: “It is. And the Duke is well positioned, for though he is a Lutheran he is a lukewarm one and has steadfastly refused to join the Union of Auhausen, a fact that has led Matthias to believe that the Duke wishes to curry favor with the Catholic states, and has even led Matthias to dream—rather madly—that he might coax Saxony to join the Catholic League.”

Leibniz, parenthetically: “This incidentally supports a theory of mine that events which the astronomer narrated as taking place over three or four days actually took place, if they took place at all, over three or four years, for the Protestant Union was not formed at Auhausen until 1608, four years after the supernova, and the Catholic League was not formed until July of the following year…”

The Emperor pressed the horn and the bowl together and scrutinized them that way. Then he put the horn into the bowl, held the bowl aloft in the palm of one hand, and scrutinized that.

The Court Chamberlain said: “So we were in the fortunate position that the very person whom we wanted to gain Matthias’s confidence was being sought out by Matthias, who wanted to gain his, the Duke’s, confidence … Instead of the Duke approaching the Archduke, we could wait for the Archduke to approach the Duke.” The Emperor murmured: “Archduke, archduke, duke, duke, very astute.” The Chamberlain: “And that’s what happened. Matthias midway through the Frankfurt conclave sidled up to the Duke of Saxony and said, sotto voce, So, how do we settle our little Heinrich problem once and for all? This happened just a few days ago. How, in short, Matthias asked the Duke, do we put the bastard to bed? And the Duke of Saxony, as we had rehearsed, said: We ought to let my fellow Electors see the boy’s behavior for themselves … If they have some suspicions of what you say, especially our friend from the Palatinate, it is because they know you aren’t impartial, you do after all have an interest in the matter, they fear that it aligns too well with the interests of Rome. But let my colleagues see the poor Prince for themselves, let them assess his sanity, or I should say his insanity, with their own eyes, and their doubts will be put to bed—and with their doubts the bastard himself. Let them see him, I say! He is said to be interested in the stars, let us pose him one or two simple questions, which one is the Dog Star, which one is the New Star, how far away do you suppose they are from us, he will respond in his disturbed and disordered way, and that will be that. And Matthias thought this very crafty, a sanity assessment the boy was bound to fail. How far is the New Star, do you suppose? we will ask him, said Matthias, probably smirking, a most innocent question, and the boy will utter something unutterably mad, and that will be the end of it! Of course,” the Court Chamberlain told the astronomer, “what he does not know is that Prince Heinrich, in the meantime, will have mastered, under your tutelage, the principles of trigonometry…”