For several years the studies of Tycho had been treated with an unwilling toleration by the Danish Court. Many of the nobles envied the munificent establishment which he had received from Frederick, and the liberal pension which he drew from his treasury. But among his most active enemies were some physicians, who envied his reputation as a successful and a gratuitous practitioner of the healing art. Numbers of invalids flocked to Huen, and diseases, which resisted all other methods of cure, are said to have yielded to the panaceal prescription of the astrologer. Under the influence of such motives, these individuals succeeded in exciting against Tycho the hostility of the court. They drew the public attention to the exhausted state of the treasury. They maintained that he had possessed too long the estate in Norway, which might be given to men who laboured more usefully for the commonwealth; and they accused him of allowing the chapel at Rothschild to fall into decay. The President of the Council, Christopher Walchendorp, and the King's Chancellor, were the most active of the enemies of Tycho; and, having poisoned the mind of their sovereign against the most meritorious of his subjects, Tycho was deprived of his canonry, his estate in Norway, and his pension. Being no longer able to bear the expenses of his establishment in Huen, and dreading that the feelings which had been excited against him might be still further roused, so as to deprive him of the Island of Huen itself, he resolved to transfer his instruments to some other situation. Notwithstanding this resolution, he remained with his family in the island, and continued his observations till the spring of 1597, when he took a house in Copenhagen, and removed to it all his smaller and more portable instruments, leaving those which were large or fixed in the crypts of Stiern-berg. His first plan was to remove every thing from Huen as a measure of security; but the public feeling began to turn in his favour, and there were many good men in Copenhagen who did not scruple to reprobate the conduct of the government. The President of the Council, Walchendorp--a name which, while the heavens revolve, will be pronounced with horror by astronomers--saw the change of sentiment which his injustice had produced, and adopted an artful method of sheltering himself from public odium. In consequence of a quarrel with Tycho, the recollection of which had rankled in his breast, he dreaded to be the prime mover in his persecution. He therefore appointed a committee of two persons, one of whom was Thomas Feuchius, to report to the government on the nature and utility of the studies of Tycho. These two individuals were entirely ignorant of astronomy and the use of instruments; and even if they had not, they would have been equally subservient to the views of the minister. They reported that the studies of Tycho were of no value, and that they were not only useless, but noxious.