Thomas Digges

• 1. Introduction

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  Thomas Digges described the outermost universe as "the palace of felicity garnished with perpetual shining glorious lights innumerable, far excelling our sun both in quantity and quality." Those words appeared in print in 1576. At the time, virtually every astronomer in Europe held that the stars were fixed to a single rigid sphere enclosing the cosmos. Digges was proposing something different: no such sphere existed, and the stars stretched outward without end.

  Born around 1546, he was an English mathematician and astronomer. He became the first person to lay out the Copernican heliocentric model for readers in the English language. He went further than Copernicus himself, arguing that stars fill space at infinitely varying distances from Earth. He also posed a question that would trouble astronomers for centuries. If stars truly fill endless space in every direction, why does the night sky go dark at all? Behind these questions lay a family of scholars, a lifetime of public service, and a stellar explosion that challenged everything Aristotle had said about the fixed heavens.

• 2. Leonard's Son

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  Leonard Digges, born around 1515, was a mathematician and surveyor who wrote a perpetual almanac circulating in print across the mid-sixteenth century. He was Thomas's father. Thomas's mother, Bridget Wilford, was the daughter of Thomas Wilford of Hartridge in Cranbrook, Kent. When Leonard died, the young Thomas passed into the guardianship of John Dee, a figure described as a typical Renaissance natural philosopher. Dee moved easily between mathematics, cosmology, and the tradition of natural magic.

  Thomas had five siblings: brothers James and Daniel, and sisters Mary, Anne, and Sarah. Mary married a man surnamed Barber. Anne married William Digges. Sarah married twice, first to a man surnamed Martin and then to John Weston. When Thomas died on the 24th of August 1595, his last will specifically excluded his brother James and William Digges from his estate. The will was proved on the 1st of September. Thomas was buried in the chancel of St Mary Aldermanbury in London. The almanac his father had written was already in its third edition by 1556. Thomas would later turn it into the unlikely home of a revolution in cosmology.

• 3. Copernicus in English

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  In 1576, Digges published a new edition of his father's almanac. He left Leonard's original text untouched and added his own material in several appendices. The most important appendix bore the title A Perfit Description of the Caelestiall Orbes according to the most aunciente doctrine of the Pythagoreans, latelye revived by Copernicus and by Geometricall Demonstrations approved.

  For the most part, the appendix was a loose translation into English of selected chapters from Copernicus's Latin book De revolutionibus orbium coelestium. Copernicus's heliocentric model had been circulating among scholars in continental Europe, but it remained controversial and poorly understood even among specialists. No one had yet carried it to English readers. The appendix provided a detailed account of the sun-centered universe and was recognized as a milestone in the popularization of science. Digges also attached a diagram to the text. It represented the planets in their Copernican orbits, with stars arranged in an outer region whose boundaries the illustration left undefined.

• 4. Dismantling the Sphere

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  Copernicus had said little or nothing about what lay beyond the sphere of fixed stars. Digges filled that silence with a specific proposal. The scholar Harrison characterized Digges's contribution to cosmology as dismantling "the starry sphere, and scattering the stars throughout endless space." Harrison also noted that by "grafting endless space onto the Copernican system," Digges pioneered "the idea of an unlimited universe filled with the mingling rays of countless stars."

  Giordano Bruno set out the same argument in 1584, and William Gilbert did so in 1600. Both came after Digges had already committed the claim to print. Four years before the 1576 appendix appeared, a specific object in the night sky had already given Digges empirical grounds to question Aristotle.

• 5. The Supernova of 1572

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  In 1572, Tycho Brahe observed a new star appearing in the night sky. Digges set out to measure the star's parallax. An object close to Earth appears to shift position noticeably when viewed from different locations. One that is very distant shows almost no shift at all. Digges concluded that the new star displayed no measurable parallax, placing it beyond the orbit of the Moon.

  Aristotle had held that no change could take place among the fixed stars. That conclusion was what made Digges's finding so significant. A star materializing from nothing and later fading was precisely the kind of change Aristotle's framework excluded. By placing the new object among the fixed stars, Digges made a geometric argument for change in the highest realm of the cosmos. That argument was the work of a man who was also navigating a demanding career in public life.

• 6. Soldier, Statesman, Family

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  Digges served as a member of Parliament for Wallingford. From 1586-1594, he held the post of Muster-Master General to the English forces engaged in the war with the Spanish Netherlands. In that role, he was instrumental in promoting improvements to the Port of Dover.

  In 1583, Lord Burghley appointed Digges, along with Henry Savile and John Chamber, to a commission examining whether England should adopt the Gregorian calendar. John Dee, Digges's former guardian, had put forward the proposal. England did not make the switch until 1752, more than a century and a half after the commission sat.

  Digges married Anne St Leger, born in 1555, the daughter of Sir Warham St Leger. Her mother, Ursula Neville, who died in 1575, was the fifth daughter of George Neville, 5th Baron Bergavenny. Digges's will named two surviving sons and two surviving daughters. Sir Dudley Digges, born in 1583, became a politician and statesman. Leonard Digges, born in 1588, became a poet. The two daughters were named Margaret and Ursula. Anne St Leger outlived her husband by more than four decades, dying in 1636. After Thomas's death, she married Thomas Russell of Alderminster in Warwickshire. In 1616, William Shakespeare named Thomas Russell as an overseer of his will.