The match was not a brilliant one for her, though Lange was her equal as regards birth, but in searching for the philosopher's stone he had become greatly indebted, and in order to escape his creditors he left the country in 1591, hoping perhaps abroad to be more successful in the gold-making line than he had been at home. It is needless to say that he met with new disappointments, and Sophia and he were not united till 1602, six months after Tycho's death.[1]
Sophia Brahe and her future husband were not the only guests at Uraniborg in the spring of 1590, at which time Tycho received his most distinguished visitor, King James VI. of Scotland. This monarch had several years before made overtures for the hand of Princess Elizabeth, the eldest daughter of Frederick II. His envoy, Peter Young, had, however, produced powers so limited, or had conducted the negotiations in so lukewarm a manner (it is supposed at the instigation of Queen Elizabeth), that the Danish king did not believe the wooer to be in earnest, and promised his eldest daughter to the Duke of Brunswick. Not discouraged by this failure, and yielding to the loudly expressed wish of the Scotch nation to see the king married soon, James solicited the hand of King Frederick's second daughter, Anne. The Earl Marshal, Lord Keith, was sent to Denmark in 1589, and the marriage was celebrated at Kronborg Castle by procuration. The bride set out for Scotland in September, escorted by a Danish fleet of fourteen vessels, but a storm obliged the fleet to seek shelter at
- ↑ Danske Magazin, iii. (1747), p. 12 et seq. During Lange's absence abroad Sophia Brahe sent him a long letter in Latin verses, which is printed in Resenii Inscriptiones Hafnienses (1668), but from a very incorrect copy. There is a more correct copy in the Hofbibliothek at Vienna, printed in Breve og Actstykker, pp. 6–25. The poem is most interesting from the numerous allusions to alchemy and astrology in it, but Sophia Brahe cannot have written it in Latin, to judge from what Tycho says of her attainments in a MS. note, also in the Hofbibliothek (ibid., pp. 160–161).
