Among the monarchs reigning in various parts of Europe during Harvey's time there were, for instance, in that part of the Empire of the West which was called Germany, Rudolph II, Matthias and Ferdinand. In Sweden reigned King Sigismund, Charles IX, the great monarch Gustavus Adolphus, and Queen Christine. In Prussia the throne had been occupied by Joachim, George William and Frederick William, as electors, this being before the days of the Prussian kings. In Russia the Czars Boris Godunow, Michael Theodore and Alexis had occupied the throne.
France had but recently passed through the inhuman butchery of the massacre of St. Bartholomew and its accompanying persecution of the Huguenots, under Charles IX, who expressed the hope that not a single Huguenot would be left alive to reproach him with the deed, but who died himself soon after the massacre, which is said to have caused him bitter remorse. Charles had been succeeded by his brother Henry III, a weak, fickle and vicious monarch, whose weakness caused him to be embroiled in civil strife, which was only concluded by his own assassination at the hands of a Dominican friar. Then came Henry IV, he of Navarre, afterwards surnamed The Great, who fought the famous battle of Ivry in 1590, and who reigned for twenty-one years, the greatest and most popular sovereign who ever occupied the throne of France. Notwithstanding his noble qualities he did not succeed in preserving his court from many of the contaminations of the age, and in his reign it is said that no less than 4,000 French gentlemen were killed in duels, chiefly arising out of quarrels about women. He was succeeded by Louis XIII, who was still on the throne when Harvey died.
In Harvey's own country James I was occupying the throne when Harvey appeared upon the scene. He was that royal pedant whom the Duke of Sully pronounced "the wisest fool in Europe." After his death, and when Charles I ascended the throne during his twenty-fifth year, in 1625, Harvey was preparing to publish his great work. It was this Charles I who retained as a favorite the worthless scoundrel Buckingham, whose misconduct in Spain prevented the proposed marriage of the king with the Spanish Infanta and brought about the Civil War. It was because of the cost of this war, and of the king's disputes with Parliament regarding the matter, that England was rent between the conflicts of the Cavaliers and the Roundheads, two of the consequences of this intestine strife being the execution of the Earl of Strafford and of Archbishop Laud. The troubles thus engendered finally cost the life of the king himself, who was beheaded in 1649. Harvey even lived to see the first half of the short tenure of office of Cromwell as the Great Protector, and was perhaps fortunate in dying before began the reign of that odious profligate Charles II.
It is worth while to enquire for a moment what was doing on this side of the ocean at this period which we have now under consideration. In 1607 Virginia was settled by the English, in 1614 New York, by the Dutch, in 1620 Massachusetts and, three years later, New Hampshire, by the English Puritans; in 1624 New Jersey, by the Dutch, in 1627 Delaware by Swedes and Finns, in 1630 Maine, by the English, in 1634 Maryland, by Irish Catholics, in 1635 Connecticut, by English Puritans. Thus it will be seen that the active period of Harvey's life was synchronous with the beginnings of our colonial activities. Very little knowledge of what was going on in the then world of science was brought to this country at this period of its existence, however, and it was many years before in these colonies there were any exhibitions of scientific interest save in extremely scattered and sporadic cases.
Among Harvey's literary associates were a number of celebrated English poets, for example,—Marlowe (1593), Spenser (1598), Beaumont (1615), Shakespeare (1615), Herbert (1635), Ben Jonson (1637), Massinger (1639). Lord Bacon died a year or two after the appearance of Harvey's book, while Baron Napier, the inventor of logarithms, had passed away. His contemporaries in Italy, where he had studied, included Tasso (1595) and Galileo (1645). Rubens had died in 1640, Michael Angelo in 1564 and Titian in 1576. In France, Calvin, the practical murderer of Servetus, had passed away in 1564, Beza died in 1605, Descartes in 1650, Pascal in 1662 and Gassendi in 1655. Portugal had produced but one great figure in the 16th century, namely Camoens, who died in 1579. In Spain, Loyola, the ascetic and fanatic founder of the Jesuits, had joined the great majority in 1556; but Cervantes did not die until 1616, Lope de Vega in 1635, Velasquez in 1660 and Calderon in 1667.
In Germany some great figures had but recently disappeared. Paracelsus died in 1541, Copernicus in 1543, Luther in 1546, Hans Holbein in 1554, and Melancthon in 1560. Mercator, who introduced a new method of cartography, died in 1594, Tycho Brahe in 1601, Keppler in 1631, Van Dyck in 1641, Grotius, the great scholar, in 1645, Rembrandt in 1668 and Spinoza in 1677.
In philosophy, scepticism was the prevailing doctrine in the time of Harvey. It had been founded a hundred years previously by Montaigne, and continued by Charron, the chaplain of Queen Margaret of Navarre, who died in 1603, and who declared all religion to be opposed to human reason;—a remarkable attitude for a chaplain to assume. Opposed to the scepticism of Harvey's day was the mystic, Cabalistic or supernatural philosophy especially represented by Böhme, a peasant shoemaker, uneducated and yet wonderfully gifted. He had been the philosophical colleague of that great Meistersinger, Hans Sachs. Later philosophers and thinkers, yet belonging to Harvey's time, were Pascal, the great Jansenist, who discovered the variations of atmospheric pressure at different levels, and Malebranche, who figures prominently in the history of philosophy.
Descartes, who died in 1650, held the pineal gland to be the seat of the soul. He was the discoverer of the laws of refraction of light and furnished the explanation for the rainbow. He attained greatest eminence in mathematics, physics and philosophy, and was one of the inventors of modern algebra. One of his greatest opponents was that noble Jew, Spinoza, whose colleagues had expelled him from the Sanhedrim to the sound of the trombone.
The Italian Dominican Campanella, who died in 1639, considered the foundation of knowledge to be supernatural revelation and its perception by the senses. In spite of these views he came before The Inquisition on a charge of heresy and of cooperation with the Turks, was tortured by the rack, and imprisoned for thirty years.