We were now on the threshold of the Divinity School; I glanced inside and saw that the auditorium was full and students were finding themselves places along the window-ledges and standing at the back. Coverdale was smiling expectantly up at me after delivering this direct threat. I studied his face for a moment and then nodded.
‘I understand your meaning, Doctor Coverdale, and will certainly give some thought to the matter.’
‘Good man,’ Coverdale said agreeably. ‘I’m sure you will see the sense in it. Shall we go in?’
I paused at the doorway and glanced over my shoulder in the direction of the city wall; the man with no ears was still lounging there, still casually watching us. I touched Coverdale’s elbow.
‘Who is that man?’ I gestured with my head in his direction.
Coverdale looked, blinked, then shook his head.
‘No one of significance,’ he said abruptly, and held the door for me to pass through.
I tried to put this conversation from my mind as I prepared to speak; a great hush descended upon the hall, broken only by the usual shuffling, coughing and rustling of gowns from the audience. I cleared my throat, and leaned forward over my lectern to begin my address.
‘I, Giordano Bruno the Nolan, doctor of a more sophisticated theology, professor of a more pure and innocent wisdom, known to the best academies of Europe, a proven and honoured philosopher, a stranger only among barbarians and knaves, the awakener of sleeping spirits, the tamer of presumptuous and stubborn ignorance, who professes a general love of humanity in all his actions, who prefers as company neither Briton nor Italian, male nor female, bishop nor king, robe nor armour, friar nor layman, but only those whose conversation is more peaceable, more civil, more faithful, and more valuable, who respects not the anointed head, the signed forehead, the washed hands, or the circumcised penis, but rather the spirit and culture of mind which can be read in the face of a real person; whom the propagators of stupidity and the small-time hypocrites detest, whom the sober and studious love, and whom the most noble minds acclaim – to the most excellent and illustrious vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford, many greetings.’
I bowed low towards the stage where the vice-chancellor sat, anticipating the volume of applause such an opening would invite in the European academies, and was taken aback when finally I realised that the susurration reaching my ears was that of mocking laughter. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Sidney; he grimaced and made a chopping motion across his throat as if to imply that my speech had been too much. I could not understand this; in Paris, a disputation was hardly considered worth the name unless the rhetoric reached absurd heights of grandiosity, but it seemed that in this, as in so much else, the English preferred to hide behind a plain and self-effacing style. I could hear them sniggering quite openly now – and I mean the Fellows, not the students, though they were beginning to pick up the cue from their elders; I heard a number of them mimicking my accent like schoolboys. Across the hall, Rector Underhill was leaning on his podium with a smile that suggested he was enjoying the spectacle; evidently he seemed to think he had already won. The palatine yawned loudly and ostentatiously.
‘I reject absolutely,’ I cried, banging a fist on the lectern and then raising my hand for emphasis as the laughter died away to a startled silence, ‘the notion that the stars are fixed on the tapestry of the heavens! The stars are no more nor differently fixed in the universe than this star the Sun, and the region of the Bear’s tail no more deserves to be called the Eighth Sphere than does that of the Earth, on which we live. Those with sufficient wisdom will recognise that the apparent motion of the universe derives from the rotation of the Earth, for there is much less reason why the Sun and the whole universe of innumerable stars should turn around this globe than it, on the contrary, should turn with respect to the universe. Let our reason no longer be fettered by the eight or nine imaginary spheres, for there is but one sky, immense and infinite, with infinite capacity for innumerable worlds similar to this one, rounding their orbits as the Earth rounds its own.’
I paused for breath, better pleased with this opening salvo, and Underhill took the opportunity to jump in.
‘Do you say so, sir?’ he countered, that self-satisfied smile playing at his lips. ‘It seems to me that, rather than the Sun standing still and the Earth running around it, it is your head which runs around and your brains which do not stand still!’
He turned to the audience of Fellows for congratulation and was not disappointed; a chorus of guffaws erupted and it was some moments before I could make myself heard in response.
The disputation, I am sorry to say, was not a success, and I will not trouble my reader with any more of its substance. It continued in much the same manner; Rector Underhill advanced nothing but the old, tired arguments in favour of Aristotle – claiming no more scientific proof than the weight of scholastic authority in placing the Earth at the fixed centre of the universe, as if authority has never been mistaken, and at one point suggesting that Copernicus had never meant his theory to be taken literally but had only developed it as a metaphor to aid mathematical calculation. All these arguments I had heard and rebutted many times before, in better society than this, but I was barely given the chance that afternoon, since Underhill’s main concern was not to persuade the audience by his own skill in debate (most of them were already squarely of his opinion and had not the courtesy even to listen to my arguments) but to ridicule me and expose me as often as possible to the mockery of his peers. This, it seemed, was their idea of entertainment, and the manners of the crowd were so poor that for the most part they chattered and commented throughout both our speeches. I was part way through an impassioned argument involving complex mathematical propositions when I was interrupted by an alarming noise that sounded like the low growl of a dog; overly sensitive to such sounds since the morning’s events, I started visibly and turned, only to discover it was in fact the palatine noisily snoring, but by then, the thread of my argument was badly frayed. A few moments later, we were disturbed by a great scuffle as an undergraduate pushed his way through the ranks of the seated Fellows to attract the attention of one of them; it turned out that he sought Doctor Coverdale who, apparently responding to a summons, immediately left his place in the middle of a row, apologising in a theatrical whisper to all those between him and the door who were obliged to rise in their seats to allow him through. I would not have expected Coverdale to show any restraint on my behalf, but I was surprised that he would behave with so little courtesy to his own rector as to leave in the middle of the debate.
We proceeded laboriously towards an ending that was nothing like a conclusion; I put forward my own complex calculations to account for the relative diameter of the Moon, the Earth and the Sun in terms even an idiot could understand, and in response Underhill merely repeated the old scholastic misconceptions common to all those who conflate science and theology and believe the Holy Scripture to be the last word in scientific enquiry. He also made frequent pointed references to my status as a foreigner, implying that it necessarily bestowed inferior intelligence, and more than once noted that Copernicus too was foreign and therefore could not be expected to display the robust reasoning of an Englishman – apparently forgetting that the whole occasion for this sorry pretence at debate was to honour Copernicus’s royal countryman. I was glad to be done with it; I bowed tersely to the smattering of insincere applause and climbed down from my pulpit feeling bruised and belittled.
Afterwards, as the hall cleared, none of the departing Fellows would meet my eye. I remained seated morosely beneath the window, thinking that I would wait for them all to leave so as to avoid any further mockery – or, worse, commiseration – when I saw Sidney fighting his way down from the dais. He pushed through to me, shaking his head.
‘This evening I was ashamed of my university, Bruno,’ he exploded, two spots of crimson flaming with indignation on his cheeks. ‘Underhill is a weasel – he didn’t once engage with the substance of your argument! I call it shameful – it was a display of pure blind arrogance.’ He shook his head, his lips pressed together as if he were reprimanding himself. ‘It is our least attractive trait as a