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The Queen’s Conjuror: The Life and Magic of Dr. Dee
Benjamin Woolley


A spellbinding portrait of Queen Elizabeth’s conjuror – the great philosopher, scientist and magician, Dr John Dee (1527–1608) and a history of Renaissance science that could well be the next ‘Longitude’.John Dee was one of the most influential philosophers of the Elizabethan Age. A close confidant of Queen Elizabeth, he helped to introduce mathematics to England, promoted the idea of maths as the basis of science, anticipated the invention of the telescope, charted the New World, and created one of the most magnificent libraries in Europe. At the height of his fame, Dee was poised to become one of the greats of the Renaissance. Yet he died in poverty and obscurity – his crime was to dabble in magic.Based on Dee’s secret diaries which record in fine detail his experiments with the occult, Woolley’s bestselling book is a rich brew of Elizabethan court intrigue, science, intellectual exploration, discovery and misfortune. And it tells the story of one man’s epic but very personal struggle to come to terms with the fundamental dichotomy of the scientific age at the point it arose: the choice between ancient wisdom and modern science as the path to truth.Note that it has not been possible to include the same picture content that appeared in the original print version.







THE QUEEN’S



CONJUROR





The Life and Magic of Dr Dee



BENJAMIN WOOLLEY























Copyright (#ulink_e0cc593c-ed19-58e0-962f-53bd19e1e286)


Flamingo

An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 77-85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in hardback by HarperCollins 2001

Copyright © Benjamin Woolley 2001

Benjamin Woolley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

Source ISBN: 9780006552024

Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2011 ISBN: 9780007401062

Version: 2014-10-17


‘He cometh unto you with a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney corner.’

SIR PHILIP SIDNEY, DEFENCE OF POESY




Contents


Cover (#u97a39560-7506-5e61-a355-8299f4718c8f)

Title Page (#u5ce526be-e411-573f-a2c5-5ac2d67ace29)

Copyright (#ufa6f2f6b-406e-56bb-87d7-111feeef1dd7)

Epigraph (#u922c00f1-876b-5f37-8303-abaeecf37bc3)

PREFACE (#u00978d91-e741-56ce-8f9d-1e50acdd21c2)

INTRODUCTION (#u2b74afe5-38a6-58d0-8c82-248a7f5275e6)

THE FLIGHT OF THE DUNG BEETLE (#u96e7f3fd-4352-5f9e-a679-f087d1c32998)

I (#u73453984-c659-537f-b5c5-37f080d695a6)

II (#ua5335f20-d675-5408-98bb-279fd436e517)

III (#ud5097579-89e9-5d17-9d55-9cfe9accfbc6)

IV (#ua9b18014-f4ef-5983-a036-fe41b9c2a2f0)

THE LORD OF MISRULE (#ud6a6a8dd-90b1-5403-84ef-3dc18219d3f0)

V (#ub26e14e9-ef62-53b9-8682-d1ece0a95765)

VI (#uc1056295-6c9d-556a-8c75-861e6ba56ec1)

VII (#uc5f5080d-ce95-5215-80ac-468ee0e08bb6)

VIII (#uf7111323-400f-57c3-a690-93f16d26062e)

THE MOST PRECIOUS JEWEL (#udf0e3bbe-51d6-5219-817d-391596a4e61a)

IX (#ue0d6b31a-e9b8-51b4-ae8e-e4f28dd98afd)

X (#u94250586-40a5-5b6c-afd1-9aa88a4501f8)

XI (#u293162b8-12e6-52dd-8efd-f84cbe56e1e1)

THE UNDISCOVERED LIMIT (#litres_trial_promo)

XII (#litres_trial_promo)

XIII (#litres_trial_promo)

THE FIERY TRIGON (#litres_trial_promo)

XIV (#litres_trial_promo)

XV (#litres_trial_promo)

XVI (#litres_trial_promo)

BRIGHT SQUADRONS (#litres_trial_promo)

XVII (#litres_trial_promo)

XVIII (#litres_trial_promo)

XIX (#litres_trial_promo)

THE PRINCE AND THE JUGGLER (#litres_trial_promo)

XX (#litres_trial_promo)

XXI (#litres_trial_promo)

XXII (#litres_trial_promo)

CAESAR’S COURT (#litres_trial_promo)

XXIII (#litres_trial_promo)

XXIV (#litres_trial_promo)

XXV (#litres_trial_promo)

RAVISH’D BY MAGIC (#litres_trial_promo)

XXVI (#litres_trial_promo)

XXVII (#litres_trial_promo)

XXVIII (#litres_trial_promo)

THE LONG JOURNEY (#litres_trial_promo)

XXIX (#litres_trial_promo)

XXX (#litres_trial_promo)

EPILOGUE (#litres_trial_promo)

KEEP READING (#litres_trial_promo)

NOTES (#litres_trial_promo)

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY (#litres_trial_promo)

CHRONOLOGY JOHN DEE (#litres_trial_promo)

INDEX (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Praise (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




PREFACE (#ulink_71c8b104-7afd-5723-9b59-6b8fa4f622b5)


For clarity and consistency, the spellings used in quotations have generally been modernised. I have also adopted the Gregorian calendar for dating events, including those occurring when the old style Julian calendar was still in use. The Gregorian system or ‘new style’ was introduced on 4 October 1582, making that month ten days shorter. It also standardised 1 January as New Year’s Day. England continued to use old style dates, celebrating New Year on Lady Day, 25 March. This means, for example, 1 March 1584 old style converts to 11 March 1585 new style. Where an old style date identifies an original document (such as a letter), it has not been converted.

Following Dee’s example, I have also anglicised the names of some of the people and places he encountered during his travels.

The primary source material for this book is a collection of diaries written by Dee. The personal diaries are preserved in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, the diaries recording his angelic ‘actions’ at the British Library in London. Selections have been published by Casaubon in True and Faithful Relation, Halliwell in The Private Diary of Dr. John Dee and most recently Fenton in The Diaries of John Dee (see the Bibliography for complete references). I would like to thank Edward Fenton for allowing me to quote from his book, and also for his help with my researches and writing.

For help with researches in Bohemia and Poland, thanks go to Michal Pober, György Szônyi and Yustyne Kilianćzyk, who accompanied me during my travels, and to Václav Bužek, Vladimir Karpenko, Lubos Antonin, Lubomir Konecny and Denisa Kera. For suggestions, corrections, contributions and translations, thanks go to Robin Cousins, Michal Pober, William Sherman, Stephen Clucas, Darby Costello, Alan Stewart, Stephen Clucas, William Stenhouse and Anke Holdenried. I should also like to acknowledge the authors whose recent scholarship has been invaluable in the compilation of this work, particularly Michael Wilding, Deborah Harkness, Julian Roberts, Andrew Watson, Christopher Whitby and Jim Reeds.

Personal thanks go to Arabella Pike, Anthony Sheil, Asha Joseph and Matthew Woolley.




INTRODUCTION (#ulink_33874cd7-286a-5bbc-834a-d8c739fd06a5)


One day in 1642, Robert Jones, a confectioner living at the sign of the Plough in London’s Lombard Street, decided to go with his wife Susannah to Addle Street, a lane running up from Casde Baynard, the great Norman fort on the banks of the Thames.


(#litres_trial_promo) The street was lined with joiners’ shops, and Mr and Mrs Jones were out to buy some ‘household stuff’. Their eyes alighted on a ‘Chest of Cedar wood, about a yard & a half long’. The lock and hinges were of such ‘extraordinary neat work’, the chest ‘invited them to buy it.’

They discovered from the shopkeeper that the chest had come from the household of Thomas Woodall, a royal surgeon.


(#litres_trial_promo) Woodall had apparently inherited it from his father, who was also a surgeon. Mr and Mrs Jones bought it and took it back to Lombard Street, where it remained undisturbed for twenty years.

In 1662, they decided to move the chest. When they lifted it, they heard a rattle ‘toward the right hand end, under the Box or Till thereof, & by shaking it, were fully satisfied it was so.’ Mr Jones decided to investigate further. In the base of the box, he discovered a ‘small crevice’ or slit. He stuck a knife into it, and a hidden drawer popped out. Inside he found a collection of books, papers and a small casket containing a necklace of beads made of olive stones, from which dangled a wooden cross.

The Joneses leafed through the books and papers but could make no sense of them. They had Latin titles such as 48 Claves Angclicae (The 48 Angelic Keys), and contained gibberish, word squares, hieroglyphs and tables. They put the pile to one side.

When their maid found the papers, she thought them particularly suitable for the lining of pie tins and ‘other like uses’. She had worked her way through about half the pile before her employers noticed. They put the surviving documents back in the chest, and forgot about them once more.

Mr Jones died in 1664. Two years later, the Great Fire of London broke out. As panic spread through the surrounding streets, Susannah Jones gathered together as many possessions as she could carry and took them to safety in Moorfields, north of the City wall. Too heavy to move, the chest was left to burn along with her home. However, she decided to remove the mysterious papers from the hidden drawer and take them with her.

Soon after, she remarried. Her new husband was Thomas Wale, a warder at the Tower of London. She showed him the papers, and, though he could make no sense of them either, he recognised their potential value. He knew of a man with an interest in such works, a lawyer and collector called Elias Ashmole.

Ashmole was an expert in astrology, alchemy and other occult matters. He was also one of the most important antiquarians of the seventeenth century, his collection forming the basis for Oxford’s magnificent Ashmolean Museum. On 20 August 1672, while he was at the country house of his friend the astrologer William Lilly in Hersham, Surrey, his servant Samuel Story turned up with a parcel containing the preserved papers. Thomas Wale wondered if Ashmole would be prepared to swap them for a volume on the Order of the Garter.

When Ashmole unwrapped the parcel, he could barely contain his excitement. These were papers he had spent years searching for, and had assumed to be destroyed. He arranged to meet Mr Wale’s wife a week later at the Excise Office in Broad Street, where he worked. When she told him the story of how the papers had come into her possession, his hopes were confirmed. John Woodall, the father of the former owner of the chest, had been one of the last known custodians of the effects of Dr John Dee.


(#litres_trial_promo) These volumes were the surviving remnants of Dee’s Liber Mysteriorum, his book of mysteries. According to the man in whose hand they were written, they contained the secrets of the universe.




THE FLIGHT OF THE DUNG BEETLE (#ulink_cdade368-be37-5672-9fc7-0fa646b5c22e)


My mind to me a kingdom is Such perfect joy therein I find, That it excels all other bliss That world affords or grows by kind.

EDWARD DYER,

‘MY MIND TO ME A KINGDOM IS’




I (#ulink_55f66a98-10b2-5170-9014-193c556ea581)


There is official record of the moment John Dee entered the world. He is not listed in any parish register or private correspondence. There is no birth certificate or diary entry. There is only a series of numbers, a cosmic coordinate: 1527 July 13 4


.2’ P.M. Lat. 51°.32’.

The data are inscribed on a mysterious document among his papers at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.


(#litres_trial_promo) A square containing a series of numbers and astrological symbols is sketched on parchment. It is a horoscope, drawn up in the ancient manner, showing the heavens at the precise time and place of Dee’s birth.

He was born at 4.02pm on 13 July 1527. His birthplace was 51 degrees and 32 seconds north of the equator, roughly the latitude of London.


(#litres_trial_promo) Latitudes, which specify how far north or south a location is on the earth’s surface, were absent from maps of early or mid sixteenth-century England (there were barely any maps anyway; the earliest to survive of London is dated 1558).


(#litres_trial_promo) However, the information could be found in tables of astrological data. One set compiled by Dee is to be found among his papers; it identifies the location of cities and landmarks across the world, from Paris (49° 10’, 150 miles from London) to the ‘Lake of Sodome’ (31° 10’, 2,404 miles from London).


(#litres_trial_promo) In that table, Dee gives London’s latitude as that shown on his birthchart, which – according to modern measurement – falls just outside the wall marking the city’s northern limit.

Following contemporary practice, Dee did not record the longitude of his birthplace. There was no standard meridian at the time, and the methods of measuring longitude were extremely unreliable. However, from the date and the position of the Sun plotted on the birthchart, it is evident that Dee’s birthplace was within a few degrees of the modern Greenwich meridian. The most likely location for Dee’s birth is the City itself. His father Roland, of Welsh descent, was a textile merchant and member of London’s powerful guild of ‘mercers’. His mother Jane, was the daughter of William Wild. Roland married her when she was fifteen. Born three years after the wedding, John was apparently their first and only surviving child.


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Roland was recorded as being resident in Tower Ward, the area immediately west of the great Tower of London, and within sight of Tower Hill, where, as the Tudor surveyor John Stow put it, ‘is always readily prepared at the charges of the city a large scaffold and gallows of timber, for the execution of such traitors and transgressors as are delivered out of the Tower’.


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In later years Roland would find himself a ‘transgressor’ and spent time in the Tower. But in the 1520s, he was on the threshold of a promising career, which drew him in the opposite direction, towards the City’s teeming square mile.

Many merchants in Tower Ward lived along Thames Street, close to Billingsgate Docks, where the quays bustled with barques and barges bringing herring, wine, wool and timber into the capital. Next to Watergate, which was a lane leading up from the river, stood ‘Wool Wharf’, which had been used for the ‘tronage’ – public weighing – of wool imports ever since the reign of Richard II.


(#litres_trial_promo) Roland Dee was later to perform a similar job, so he and his son were likely to have visited, and may have even occupied, the rickety riverside house, as bulbous packets of wool were heaved into its weighing room and dropped on the official scales or ‘tron’.

East of Thames Street lay the imposing parish church of St Dunstan’s. Its fabric was lavishly maintained by local merchants, whose bequests were rewarded with opulent sepulchres in its nave and cemetery. Dunstan was then one of England’s most revered and popular saints (another church is named after him in the west of the city). Much associated with Glastonbury and early British nationalism, his name would feature prominently in the life of the boy who was being brought up within the church’s precincts.


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Surrounding St Dunstan’s were bustling inns and narrow streets whose very names spelled commerce: Lombard Street, just north of the church, named after the merchants of Northern Italy who settled there in the twelfth century; the Three Cranes, which got its name from a timber crane used to unload lighters loaded with casks of Bordeaux, and the chosen venue for French tradesmen brokering deals with English vintners; Threadneedle, Milk and Friday Street, where tailors, dairymen and fishmongers plied their trades; Cheapside, the thoroughfare for London’s main market or ‘cheap’ which was lined with grocers and apothecaries; Ironmongers Lane, where among the clanking wares hanging from shopfronts, Roland would go to meet his fellow Mercers at their handsome Hall.


(#litres_trial_promo) This was the world that shaped Dee’s formative years: a place filled with the babble of foreign tongues and complex numbers, of ready ‘reckonyngs’ and tricky deals.

However, the City was not the only focus of Roland Dee’s career, and it is just possible that John was born just a few miles up the Thames, on the Greenwich meridian itself. Greenwich Palace stood on the bank of the Thames, Greenwich Hill rising up behind.


(#litres_trial_promo) It was King Henry VIII’s birthplace and his main residence. Roland had a position in Henry’s court as a ‘gentleman sewer’.


(#litres_trial_promo) His role, like so many court positions at the time, hovered between the ceremonial and the functional. It is unlikely Roland would have been expected to stitch the King’s clothing, but he may have been involved with buying and maintaining the innumerable fabrics that furnished the King’s palaces and person.

That summer of 1527, events were taking place within the confines of Henry’s private apartments at Greenwich which would prove momentous in English and European history. Just three weeks before John Dee’s birth, the King, desperate both for a male heir and to consummate his infatuation for Anne Boleyn, accosted his wife Catherine ‘in her closet’ and, reviving arguments about their union violating Biblical law, suddenly announced that their marriage was invalid.


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In the drama that followed, a key role was played by a colleague of Roland’s, another gentleman sewer in Catherine of Aragon’s retinue, Felipez. Catherine was desperate to get news of her predicament back to her nephew and Catholic guardian, Charles V of Spain, the Holy Roman Emperor and most powerful monarch in Europe. She told Felipez to go to Henry and protest that the Queen had cruelly refused him passage home to Spain, where his mother was dangerously ill. Catherine knew Henry would contradict her and dispatch the apparently disgruntled servant back home, where he could then make contact with Charles.

However, Henry was prepared for such ‘dissimulation’ and ‘did also dissimulate’. He granted Felipez a licence to leave the country while arranging for agents to waylay him en route. But Felipez managed to give them the slip and reach the Emperor at Valladolid, where he broke the news of Henry’s plan.


(#litres_trial_promo) These revelations precipitated Henry’s break with Rome and the turmoil of the Reformation, seismic events that would shape English politics for generations to come, and bring danger and conflict into the life of the infant son denied to Henry and Catherine, but so recently born to Roland and Jane.

While the world around was in turmoil, the heavens above presented a picture of serene certainty. Standing in the pastures and playing fields that surrounded the City’s walls, gazing at a vivid canopy of stars yet to be diminished by light or atmospheric pollution, John Dee beheld a universe that had apparently remained unchanged since the Creation.

Common wisdom was that the earth stood at the centre of the cosmos; the sun, the moon and the planets revolved around it, fixed to the perimeters of a series of concentric spheres. The outermost sphere carried the stars, and beyond lay heaven. Historians of science call the modern view of the universe mechanistic, but the ancient one was as mechanical as a clock. In a state of constant movement, the system was regulated by immutable laws. Change was possible only within the space between the earth’s surface and the orbit of the moon. This was the sphere of fire and air, the domain of such ephemeral astronomical phenomena as comets and meteors.

Where the modern universe is infinite, the size and age of this nest of glistening orbs was far more modest. Genealogies in Genesis and elsewhere in the Bible showed it to be less than six thousand years old. As for its size, the fifteenth-century printing pioneer and encyclopaedist William Caxton wrote:

If the first man that God formed ever, which was Adam, had gone from the first day that he was made and created twenty-five miles every day, yet should he not have comen thither, but should yet have the space of seven hundred and thirteen year to go at the time when this volume was performed by the very author. Or if there were a great stone which should fall from thence unto the earth it should be an hundred year ere it came to the ground.


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This, then, was the cosmos that Dee beheld: stable, fixed and finite. There were disputes over details, but the overall view had not changed significantly since the Egyptian astronomer Claudius Ptolemy had established the mathematical laws by which the universe operated in the second century. Ptolemy had invented a series of hypothetical entities such as ‘epicycles’, ‘deferents’ and ‘equants’ which made it possible to work out with a high degree of accuracy not just the motions of the planets in the past, but their positions into the distant future, accounting even for such astronomical gymnastics as retrograde motion, when a planet appears to stop, backtrack, and then continue onwards.

Many tables of planetary positions were compiled using Ptolemy’s formulae. These showed how each planet moved in relation to the stars, in particular the constellations of the zodiac. Such almanacs or ephemerides were among the most popular books to be produced in these early days of printing, and Dee would eventually accumulate more than fifteen different sets in his library. It was one of these that he used to work out his birthchart.

Exploiting the mathematical nature of these heavenly motions, he could plot the positions of the planets at the moment of his birth with far more certainty and precision than the flapping scholars his father passed in the Greenwich Palace corridors could determine the legitimacy of Henry VIII’s matrimonial manoeuvres.

Birth charts are now circular, but Dee’s was drawn up as a square, a form which went back to the ancient Egyptians. The information it contains is very similar to that of a modern chart, except that the as yet undiscovered planets Uranus, Neptune and Pluto are missing. Dee managed to map the position of each heavenly body in the sky to within a few minutes of arc (a minute being one-sixtieth of a degree), with the exception of Mercury, nearly two degrees adrift. The ascendant, which marks the position of the sign of the zodiac rising on the eastern horizon, is out by almost one degree.

The twelve triangles represent the most synthetic elements of any birthchart, the position of the ‘houses’. These are purely astrological (as opposed to astronomical) entities, determining how the planets influence the subject’s appearance, temperament, property, relationships and so on. As the signs of the zodiac are tied to the rotation of the celestial sphere, the houses are tied to the rotation of the earth, the two becoming enmeshed by the moment of birth.

Dee left no interpretation of his own chart. He rarely committed his findings to writing. Such works could be dangerous, particularly when the subjects were of aristocratic or royal status, which many were. Dee’s only interpretation of any length that survives concerns his pupil, the glamorous poet and soldier Sir Philip Sidney, for whom Dee drew up a sixty-two page nativity which made several tentative predictions. He foretold that Sidney would enjoy a wonderful career between the ages of fifteen and thirty-one. Then he faced mortal danger from a sword or gunshot injury which, if survived, would inaugurate even greater glories and a long life. Sidney was killed in battle in the Low Countries on 17 October 1586, aged thirty-one.


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Dee’s own chart depicts similar tensions. The two most powerful influences, the Sun and the Moon, the two ‘luminaries’, are in opposition – a common enough configuration, but one that suggested conflict. More notable was the position of Jupiter, which basked with the Sun in the ‘serene and warm’ sign of Cancer, where it was exalted. In his copy of Ptolemy, he marked the observation that Jupiter’s distance from the ascendant (the sign rising on the eastern horizon) indicated that he would be skilled in philosophy.


(#litres_trial_promo) ‘If he should be lord alone,’ Ptolemy had written, Jupiter would also promote ‘honour, happiness, content and peace.’

Unfortunately, in Dee’s chart, Jupiter was threatened by Mars, so his benign influence was seriously compromised. The same passage in Ptolemy that promised scientific proficiency also warned of isolation and condemnation. Other disturbing signs include the presence of the star Antares together with the planet Mars. Also known as the ‘Scorpion’s heart’, Antares appears in the middle of the constellation of Scorpio. Mars is a troublesome presence in any chart, causing ‘mischief and destruction’, as Ptolemy put it, and Antares was traditionally seen to have a similar influence, so the presence of the two apparently acting in unison, and within the sign ruled by Mars, must have struck Dee as a threatening combination.


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Dee’s chart thus revealed the cosmic setting of the life he was about to lead, one of schisms and oppositions, of sunshine and moonshadow, jovial humanity and Martian malevolence.




II (#ulink_e1a48a7c-4031-588b-85d6-dc32dad8cea3)


The first sign that there might be something magical about John Dee came in 1547. He was nineteen years old and a reader in Greek at Trinity College, Cambridge. The college had been set up by Henry VIII as one of the last acts of his reign. His effigy stands over the main gate to this day, reminding the many students who have passed beneath – including Isaac Newton, Byron and Stephen Hawking – of his benefaction.

Dee’s selection as one of Trinity’s founding Fellows very much reflected his success as an undergraduate at the neighbouring college of St John’s. When he had arrived in Cambridge in 1542, the university was in confusion. Henry VIII’s reforms had deprived it of two chancellors in under a decade – John Fisher in 1535 and Thomas Cromwell in 1540 – and enrolments had fallen to their lowest ever levels, an average of just thirty students a year.

But it was also a time of scholastic reform, with figures of the stature of Sir John Cheke, Dee’s Cambridge teacher, Sir Thomas Smith and Roger Ascham encouraging the adoption of the ‘new learning’ which had been introduced to the university by Erasmus. The domination of Latin texts and Roman numerals over the curriculum began to yield to Greek philosophy and Arabic arithmetic. A whole body of ancient writers who had been ignored or forgotten for centuries, such as Plato and Pythagoras, were translated and studied. There was a new emphasis on teaching the ‘quadrivium’ to undergraduates, the four of the seven ‘liberal arts’ which dealt with geometry, arithmetic, harmonics and astronomy.


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Dee thrived there. He was so eager to learn, he later recalled, so ‘vehemently bent to study’, that he worked for eighteen hours a day, allowing just four hours for sleep, and two for meals.


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Mathematics was his passion: although as a subject, it was regarded in some circles with suspicion. The seventeenth-century antiquarian John Aubrey reported that the Tudor authorities had ‘burned Mathematical books for Conjuring books’.


(#litres_trial_promo) Mathematics was still popularly associated with the magical ‘black arts’, the term ‘calculating’ (sometimes corrupted to ‘calculing’) being synonymous with conjuration. Pythagoras, a semi-mythical figure hailed as one of its founding fathers, was himself considered a magician. It was he who argued that numbers had inherent powers, pointing out the creative vitality immanent in the first four integers, 1, 2, 3 and 4. They expressed not only the most basic elements of geometry (the point, the line, the triangle and the solid) but also the harmonic ratios underlying both music and cosmic proportions. Such ideas inspired subsequent thinkers to search for other significances; assessing the meaning of the number of elements and planets; contemplating the precedence of the number nine over ten; constructing numerical hierarchies; and counting the number of angels on a pinhead. Even later figures such as Kepler and Newton, the founders of modern cosmology, allowed such numerological considerations to shape their work. Kepler believed that the planets must be spheres because of the trinity of centre, radius and surface; Newton decided to break with tradition and assert that there were seven colours of the rainbow because there were seven planets and seven notes in the musical octave.


(#litres_trial_promo) Like these men, Dee found the cosmic combinations thrown up by mathematics irresistible, and at the (numerologically-named) Trinity College, the young, ambitious Fellow undertook an extraordinary experiment to demonstrate their power (as well as make his mark).

He mounted a production of Aristophanes’ play Peace. First produced in 421 BC, it is a comedy, in style and humour much like Aristophanes’s better known Lysistrata. Peace, which (as its name suggests) explores a pacifist theme, is about Trygaeus, a ‘vine dresser’, who wishes to consult Zeus about the military fortunes of his fellow Athenians.

The opening scenes concern Trygaeus’s attempts to reach Zeus’s heavenly palace. He first attempts to do this using ladders, but they keep toppling over. So, like the mythical hero Bellerophon who slew the fearful Chimera, he calls on the services of a flying creature to carry him up to the Olympian heights.

However, where Bellerophon had the mighty steed Pegasus, Trygaeus is sent a dungbeetle, a giant ‘scarab’, which takes him on a ride so terrifying, he nearly ‘forms food’ for the creature.

Dramatically, it is a marvellous moment, but one, in the middle of Trinity’s main hall, virtually impossible to realise. Nevertheless, Dee was determined to find a way to bring his giant dungbeetle startlingly to life, and he turned to mathematics for a solution.

In his Mathematicall Praeface to Euclid’s Elements (1570), probably his most influential book, Dee discussed an ‘art mathematical’ he called ‘thaumaturgy… which giveth certain order to make strange works, of the sense to be perceived and of men greatly to be wondered at.’ The etymology is obscure: the OED dates the word’s origins to nearly a century after Dee’s first use, by which time it had become synonymous with magical trickery.

For Dee, however, it was mathematics not magic that offered the key to thaumaturgy. The examples he gave were feats of engineering such as the ‘dove of wood’ built by the Greek mathematician and reputed founder of mechanics, Archytas, which could apparently fly unaided, or the ‘brazen head’ attributed to the German monk Albertus Magnus, ‘which did seem to speak’. Dee recalled seeing such a ‘self moving’ automaton at Saint Denis in Paris. ‘Marvellous was the workmanship of late days,’ he continued,

for in Nuremberg a fly of iron, being let out of the Artificer’s hand did (as it were) fly about the gates… and at length, as though weary, return to his master’s hand again. Moreover, an artificial eagle was ordered to fly out of the same town, a mighty way… aloft in the air, toward the Emperor coming thither, and following him, being come to the gate of the town.


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Dee believed such artificial marvels showed that, with mathematics, man could achieve miracles to rival God, and with Peace he had his first opportunity to prove it.

On the day of the performance, the benches of Trinity’s main hall were packed with students and academics, even possibly a scattering of courtiers from London. The pitch lamps were ignited and the stage was set. Trygaeus made his entrance and mounted the insect. ‘Now come, my Pegasus,’ he cried. ‘Come, pluck up a spirit; rush upwards from the earth, stretch out your speedy wings and make straight for the palace of Zeus; for once give up foraging in your daily food.’ Then to the audience’s amazement, the creature leapt from the stage.

‘Hi! you down there, what are you after now?’ called Trygaeus, as he was lifted towards the eaves of the hall. ‘Oh! My god! It’s a man taking a crap in the Piraeus, close to the whorehouses. But is it my death you seek then, my death? Will you not bury that right away and pile a great heap of earth upon it and plant wild thyme therein and pour perfumes on it? If I were to fall from up here and misfortune happened to me, the town of Chios would owe a fine of five talents for my death, all because of your damned arse.

‘Alas! how frightened I am! oh! I have no heart for jests,’ the beetle’s rider cried, adding, while peering offstage, ‘Ah! machinist, take great care of me.’


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Dee’s coup de theatre had its intended effect. A ‘great won-dring’ spread through the audience. Dee gave no clue as to how he actually made his creature fly around the stage but the mechanisms mentioned in his Praeface include pneumatics, mirrors and springs. He also wrote a paper on the use of pulleys.


(#litres_trial_promo) An account of Trinity College’s theatrical expenses for 1546 and 1547 survive, but provide little clue, merely listing such commodities as pitch, ‘cressets’ (iron vessels in which pitch-soaked tapers were burnt for stage lighting) and costumes. The only ‘extraordinary item’ listed is a ‘great Rownd Candlestick for the stage in the hall’ which cost four shillings and sixpence.


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‘Many vain reports’ soon began to circulate speculating on how the effect had been achieved.


(#litres_trial_promo) Some believed such an act of levitation could not have been realised by stagecraft alone. Another, possibly diabolical force must have been deployed.

A scene in Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale echoes Dee’s experiment. Paulina tells King Leontes that she is about to bring what he believes to be a statue of his dead wife to life:

Quit presently the chapel, or resolve you

For more amazement. If you can behold it,

I’ll make the statue move indeed, descend,

And take you by the hand, but then you’ll think –

Which I protest against – I am assisted by wicked powers.


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Dee was similarly accused of being assisted by wicked powers, and he too protested. In the ‘Digression Apologeticall immediately following the passage in the Praeface that discussed thaumaturgy and theatrical effects, he wrote:

And for these and such like marvellous Acts and Feats, Naturally, Mathematically, and Mechanically wrought and contrived: ought any honest Student and Modest Christian Philosopher be counted & called a Conjuror? … Shall that man be (in hugger mugger) condemned as a Companion of the Hellhounds, and a Caller, and Conjuror of wicked and damned Spirits?

The answer, he was about to discover, was ‘Yes’.




III (#ulink_246a42b0-8dee-5660-aeb1-d9c28c282f37)


In 1547, the year of his dramatic debut at Trinity, Dee noted that at 10pm on 10 August he and a ‘Master Christopherson’ heard the nocturnal song of ‘whistlers’. This is the earliest surviving entry in Dee’s private diary. It is no ordinary journal. Diaries and calendars of the modern sort were not yet invented. The nearest equivalent, printed ephemerides, contained astrological tables plotting the positions of the planets for each month of the year. Dee used these to record notable events, each entry being scrawled next to the row tabulating the heavens’ disposition for the relevant period or day. It is likely he was thus trying to identify links between his personal life and celestial events. The result is a uniquely intimate diary of Elizabethan life. Unfortunately, his often illegible notes are frustratingly terse and have been patchily preserved. For the years 1547 to 1554, just six entries remain, only surviving today because the antiquarian Elias Ashmole happened to copy them down over a century later.

The entry concerning the whistlers is a typical one. The presence of Master Christopherson is unexplained. Even his identity is a mystery, though he may have been John Christopherson, later Catholic Bishop of Chichester between 1557 and 1558, who in Queen Mary’s reign Dee would encounter during interrogations of Protestant heretics. Dee does not even mention where this incident took place. The significance of the birdsong is also unclear. Edmund Spenser later noted in The Faerie Queen that the ‘Whistler shrill’ was a bad omen, ‘that who so hears, doth die’.


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Dee later recalled that his interest in astronomy first flourished during this period. Each clear night he would stand beneath the firmament, set up his quadrant or cross-staff, and make ‘observations (very many to the hour and minute) of the heavenly influences and operations actual in this elemental portion of the world. Of which sort I made some thousands in the years then following.’


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A cross-staff, its use was as awkward and uncomfortable as this contemporary illustration suggests. To find the angle between two points (such as the horizon and a star), the observer would need to align the top and bottom of each cross bar with both points. The angle between them could then be measured off a scale marked along the main shaft. (Museum of the History of Science, Oxford.)

Dee soon discovered, however, that England did not provide the best intellectual viewpoint for surveying the secrets of the universe. To find out all the latest advances, both scientific and astronomical, he needed to travel abroad, in particular to the Low Countries, the place where the light of the Renaissance now shone with its fullest intensity.

The Low Countries have since split into Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. They were termed ‘low’ because so much of the land was beneath the level of the North Sea. Rich and successful commercial centres, they were also prone to floods of foreign influences, what Dee called the ‘intertraffique of the mind’. Radical Protestantism poured in from Germany, Renaissance science and art from Italy, news of navigational discoveries from Portugal, and imperial forces from Spain, whose king, Charles V, now ruled the entire region.


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On 24 June 1548, Dee arrived at Louvain, near Brussels. It was home to the finest university in the region, which had been adopted by English reformers such as Dee’s friend and fellow academic Roger Ascham as a model for educational innovation.


(#litres_trial_promo) The town’s strong Protestant sympathies, braced against the Catholicism of the Imperial authorities, gave the university’s schools an intense, unsettled, but exciting atmosphere which was made all the more precarious by, as Dee noted in his diary, the recent arrival from Spain of Philip, Charles V’s son and heir.

Dee enrolled on a law course ‘for leisure’, but spent much of his time among the mathematicians, in particular a group clustered around the eminent scientist and physician Gemma Frisius.


(#litres_trial_promo) Frisius (1508-1555) was the university’s professor of medicine and mathematics, and practised as a physician in the town. However, his most important work was geographical not medical. Frisius pioneered the use of triangulation in land surveying, which enabled the position of a remote landmark to be measured from two points a known distance apart. The method relied on trigonometry, then almost unknown in England.


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Under Frisius’s influence, Louvain had become caught up in a rapture of scientific measurement, a mood reflected in the contemporary Flemish picture The Measurers.


(#litres_trial_promo) Frisius set up one of the finest workshops in Europe making measuring instruments. It was run by the engraver and goldsmith Gaspar à Mirica, and some of the leading cartographers of the Renaissance were apprenticed there.

In amongst the cross-staffs and astrolabes in Mirica’s workshop, Dee encountered Frisius’s leading cartographer, Gerard Mercator.


(#litres_trial_promo) He was labouring away on a series of globes and maps that incorporated the discoveries made by Columbus and his successors in the New World. Dee became fascinated by Mercator’s painstaking work, watching over his shoulder as a picture of the world emerged that to sixteenth-century eyes would have been just as startling and significant as the first photographs of Earth taken from space were in the twentieth. Medieval charts typically depicted the world as a disk or semicircle comprising three continents divided by the Mediterranean, Asia at the top, Europe to the left, Africa to the right and Jerusalem in the centre.


(#litres_trial_promo) They also often showed religious features, such as the Garden of Eden and the Tower of Babel.


(#litres_trial_promo) Mercator’s maps, in contrast, were starkly geographical, showing a world made up of four continents, its curved surface ‘projected’ onto a rectangular map using a mathematical method that enabled accurate navigation.

It was in the midst of these Measurers of Louvain that Dee’s ‘whole system of philosophising in the foreign manner laid down its first and deepest roots’.


(#litres_trial_promo) He and the thirty-six-year-old Mercator became inseparable. ‘It was the custom of our mutual friendship and intimacy that, during three whole years, neither of us willingly lacked the other’s presence for as much as three whole days,’ he reminisced years later. As a mark of his respect and affection, Mercator gave Dee a pair of his globes, one of the earth, the other of the heavens, objects of huge financial and scientific value. In return Dee later dedicated his astronomical work, Propaedeumata Aphoristica (1558), to Mercator.

At Louvain, Dee also practised his skill using such instruments as the cross-staff, perhaps during surveying expeditions guided by Frisius and Mercator, stealing off into the dangerous hinterland of cosmological speculation. Only a few years before Dee’s arrival, news of Copernicus’ heretical theory about the sun rather than the earth being at the centre of the universe had started to seep out of Germany. It was first described in an account by George Rheticius (which Dee owned, though it is unclear when he bought it),


(#litres_trial_promo) and later published in full in 1543 in Copernicus’ own De Revolutionibus. Whether or not Dee and Mercator were discussing Copernicus’ ideas at this point is uncertain but they were experimenting with new models of the universe. Mercator even made one from brass, especially for Dee. Dee called it a ‘theorick’. At first glance the theorick might have appeared to reflect the orthodox view of the universe, comprising a series of concentric rings made of brass representing the spheres thought to carry the planets and stars. But Dee mentions it having rings for the ninth and tenth spheres.


(#litres_trial_promo) According to the standard view of the universe, there were eight spheres: seven carrying the planets (the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn), and an outer shell carrying the stars. Ptolemy also proposed a ninth sphere, the primum mobile or divine force that drove the cosmic system. Mercator’s ‘theorick’ had ten rings, which at least suggests that it was unconventional, though in what way is impossible to know, as the device, like Mercator’s globes, was later stolen from Dee’s house.

Mercator may have been the most influential but was by no means the only mathematician and cartographer Dee encountered at this time. In 1550, Dee went to Brussels to meet Mathias Haker, musician and mathematician to the Danish court, and then ‘by wagon’ to Antwerp, to see Abraham Ortelius, Mercator’s one-time travelling companion and a fellow cartographer. Dee and Ortelius (who also came from a family of merchants) evidently got on well. Some time later Dee wrote a fulsome entry for Ortelius’s ‘Friendship Album’, to which he added his coat of arms (only granted in 1567) and an expression of love for Ortelius, ‘Geographer, Mathematician, Philosopher’.


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Another acquaintance at this time was Pedro Nunez, then Lisbon’s leading navigator who became a close friend and an important figure in Dee’s life. When struck down by serious illness in the late 1550s, Dee appointed Nunez his literary executor.

Dee generally had little to do with his fellow countrymen while abroad. The exception was Sir William Pickering, the English ambassador to Charles V’s court at Brussels. On 7 December 1549 Dee began to ‘eat at the house’ of Pickering, as he put it in his diary. He also became his host’s tutor, training him in the arts that would help Pickering establish a position in the ferociously competitive court of Europe’s most powerful ruler: ‘logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, in the use of the astronomer’s staff, the use of the astronomer’s ring, the astrolabe, in the use of both [i.e. terrestrial and celestial] Globes, &c.’


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Pickering had, like Dee, studied under Sir John Cheke at Cambridge, who presumably provided the connection between the young scholar and the powerful and glamorous diplomat. Pickering was of good family: his father had been Knight Marshal to Henry VIII. Dashing and wealthy, ‘one of the finest gentlemen of this age, for his worth in learning, arts and warfare’, he was to be a future suitor to Queen Elizabeth.


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The two men developed a long and fruitful relationship, Pickering occasionally sending Dee books he had managed to pick up from his various foreign postings.


(#litres_trial_promo) He also was to bequeath Dee a strange mirror which, like Pickering himself, would catch the eye of Queen Elizabeth.

Dining at Pickering’s table in Brussels and surveying with Mercator and Frisius in Louvain, Dee must have felt himself at the centre of the intellectual and political firmament, a feeling only confirmed when Charles V offered Dee a position at his court. It was the first of five such offers from ‘Christian Emperors’, and like the others, he turned it down. He never gave a reason for this decision. It may have been anxiety about embracing a Catholicism which would exile him from an increasingly Protestant England. It may have been a combination of loyalty to his homeland and the hope that its sovereign would one day make the same offer.



By 1551, the whole Continent seemed to lie at young Dee’s feet. On 20 July, after five days’ travel, he arrived in Paris, where, ‘within a few days after (at the request of some English gentlemen, made unto me to do somewhat there for the honour of my country) I did undertake to read freely and publicly Euclid’s Elements Geometrical… a thing never done publicly in any University of Christendom.’


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According to Dee, the lectures were a great success. Even though just twenty-four and unknown, he later boasted that he had packed out the ‘mathematical schools’, forcing latecomers to lean in through the windows. He left no record of what had attracted such numbers, but whatever it was, it apparently caused a sensation. ‘A greater wonder arose among the beholders, than of my Aristophanes Scarabeus [the dung beetle] mounting up to the top of Trinity Hall in Cambridge,’ he later wrote.


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More offers of royal patronage and jobs flowed in, as did invitations from learned scholars. Once again, Dee turned the work down. But he did exploit the chance to meet as many other mathematicians as possible and to start building up his book collection. One particularly precious item that came into his hands at this time was a manuscript copy of Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblios, the standard ancient work on astrology and astronomy, which came from the library of the French king.


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After his triumphs in Paris, Dee returned to a very different England. The throne was no longer overflowing with the dominating bulk of Henry, whose reign had ended in religious and political inertia. Perched upon it now was Henry’s nine-year-old son Edward VI, his feet not yet reaching the floor. Edward’s succession in January 1547 had released a surge of pent-up Protestant fervour. ‘Everywhere statues were destroyed in the churches,’ Dee noted in his diary.


(#litres_trial_promo) ‘The great crucifix… on the altar of St Paul’s was a few days ago cast down by force of instruments, several men being wounded in the process and one killed,’ and an alarmed Spanish ambassador reported. ‘There is not a single crucifix now remaining in the other churches.’


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The impulses of the reformers were not, however, purely destructive. A progressive academic mood, receptive to the ideas Dee had encountered in Louvain, swept through the court, promoted by Roger Ascham, now Edward’s Latin secretary, and John Cheke, Edward’s former tutor and now his close aide. Although Cheke professed he did not have a ‘mathematical head’, he showed ‘great affection’ towards mathematicians. Dee was evidently among them, as Cheke personally supervised his introduction to the upper reaches of the new Edwardian court. Among those Dee met was Cheke’s son-in-law, William Cecil, who was to become the foremost statesman of the Elizabethan era. Even this early in his career, Cecil was well established and it was he who presented Dee to Edward VI.

Dee proudly pressed into the King’s hands two astronomical works he had written at Louvain. Both clearly showed Mercator’s and Frisius’s influence, one being on celestial globes, the other on the sizes and distances of heavenly bodies.


(#litres_trial_promo) Neither work has survived (like much of Dee’s prolific output), though their very titles indicate that he was now hoping to establish himself as a British Mercator.

Dee could hardly expect the boy king to understand his works but the books’ dedication to Edward was certainly appreciated, and Dee was duly rewarded with a pension of one hundred crowns, which he exchanged in March 1553 for income from the rectory of Upton-upon-Severn. This produced eighty pounds a year, a modest but certainly comfortable sum for an ambitious young man with expectations of a large inheritance.

His situation improved even further when, on 28 February 1552, he was invited to enter the service of William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke.


(#litres_trial_promo) Herbert was then at the height of his powers; the wily broker who had sided with John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, in the scramble for political domination during Edward’s minority. Dee was probably retained as tutor to William’s sons.

It is hard to imagine how Dee got on in the household. The Earl of Pembroke was no Pickering. He was wild, ‘a mad… fighting fellow’, according to Aubrey.


(#litres_trial_promo) It was said that he could neither read nor write, and used a stamp to sign his name.


(#litres_trial_promo) His idea of good company was not a learned tutor or refined diplomat but his beloved ‘cur-dog’.

Despite their obvious differences, Pembroke evidently came to trust his in-house scholar, asking him to cast horoscopes for various members of his family, including his second wife.


(#litres_trial_promo) He may also have recommended Dee to John Dudley who, since his seizure of power from Edward’s Protector, the Earl of Somerset, had promoted himself to Lord President of the Council and Duke of Northumberland.


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Dee joined Northumberland’s household in late 1552, possibly as an advisor to the Duke himself or again as tutor to his sons.


(#litres_trial_promo) Dee would have been a safe choice for either role, with impressive testimonials from well-known Protestant humanists such as John Cheke and Roger Ascham.

Dee was now established as an intellectual of some standing. He was ‘astronomus peritissimus’, an expert astronomer, as John Bale put it in his Index of British and Other Writers, published in the 1550s.


(#litres_trial_promo) At the heart of the new Protestant order, he was poised to become a favourite of the King, and seemed destined to enjoy rank and wealth.

Then fortune intervened. The heavens turned hostile and, for Dee, as for Hamlet, all occasions did inform against him.




IV (#ulink_d09981e8-d121-54e9-bed9-0d6b68f7201a)


On the afternoon of 6 July 1553, a terrible storm broke over Greenwich as King Edward lay close to death. He had fallen ill the year before, and the Duke of Northumberland, possibly on Dee’s advice, had called in the Italian physician and astrologer Girolamo Cardano to treat the ailing King.


(#litres_trial_promo) Before seeing his royal patient, Cardano cast Edward’s horoscope, and discovered ‘omens of great calamity’. A physical examination followed which only confirmed the prediction: Edward was found to be suffering from consumption. Cardano was summoned to the Council to give his opinion. He did not report his grim astrological findings, as drawing up the horoscope of a monarch was potentially illegal, a form of spying through magical surveillance. All he said was that the King needed rest.

By the end of 1552, Edward was coughing up blood. He was prescribed opiates and other remedies, some quite elaborate, such as a mixture of spearmint syrup, red fennel, liverwort, turnip, dates, raisins, mace, celery and the raw meat of a nine-day-old sow, nine spoonfuls to be taken as required. To counter the rumours that the King was being poisoned, Northumberland planted the story that Princess Mary, Henry VIII’s only child from his first marriage and in Catholic eyes his only legitimate offspring, had given her half-brother the evil eye, attempting to despatch him by witchcraft. Northumberland rightly feared that if she became queen, England’s great Protestant experiment would be over.

Northumberland persuaded Edward to disinherit Mary in favour of Lady Jane Grey, the Protestant great-granddaughter of Henry VII. To protect his position further, Northumberland then married Lady Jane to his fourth son Guilford, and Jane’s sister Katherine to Pembroke’s son William, Lord Herbert. The joint ceremony was held on Whit Sunday 1553 at Durham House, Northumberland’s London palace overlooking the Thames. It involved the two families that were now acting as Dee’s patrons, and it is likely he attended the event.

Two months later, on that stormy July afternoon, King Edward prepared to meet his maker. With his final breaths, he was said to have whispered a prayer he had composed especially for the occasion, beseeching God to ‘defend this realm from papistry, and maintain Thy true religion, that I and my people may praise Thy holy Name, for Thy Son Jesus Christ’s sake, Amen.’


(#litres_trial_promo) He died at 6pm.

As soon as Edward was dead, Northumberland attempted to install Lady Jane Grey as queen. But popular sentiment, nimble aristocratic loyalties and the law favoured Mary. Within days, she had won over most of Northumberland’s allies, including the Earl of Pembroke, who stood outside Castle Baynard, his London home, and threw a ‘cap full of angels’ (gold coins, worth around ten shillings) to the people to celebrate her accession. He also announced the annulment of his son’s marriage to Katherine Grey, which he had taken the precaution of ensuring remained unconsummated.

The speed of Northumberland’s fall was breathtaking. On 23 August, barely a month after Edward’s death, he was standing on the scaffold on Tower Hill. Stretched out beneath him was the City that had abandoned him for Mary. Nearly a tenth of its population, around ten thousand people, had gathered to watch him die. They beheld a broken man who now publicly renounced his Protestant beliefs. He was, and wanted to die Catholic. Having recanted, he was blindfolded and knelt before the block. But before the executioner could strike, the blindfold slipped and the duke had to get up to put it on again. He knelt again, his distress now obvious, and with a single blow he was beheaded.

In the days leading up to his execution, Queen Mary’s Privy Council began to purge his sympathisers. On 21 August 1553, an order was issued to the Lieutenant of the Tower of London, requesting that three prisoners be sent before the Council for examination. One of the names listed was Roland Dee.


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Roland, like his son John, had prospered in recent years. Reforms such as the dissolution of the monasteries had released expanses of new land onto London’s starved property market and set off a boom that would see the City’s population nearly quadruple from fewer than 50,000 to nearly 200,000.


(#litres_trial_promo) Roland had directly benefited from this, being appointed by the King as one of two ‘packers’ with joint responsibility for checking all merchandise shipped through London and its suburbs, and the right to ‘untruss and ransack’ any consignment not packed in his presence. In return, he was to receive a ‘moiety’ (half share) of fees payable on the shipments, the other half going to the other packer, who was appointed by the Lord Mayor.


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Now he was a wanted man, though there is no record of the precise charge. Given the political situation, and the fact that the Privy Council itself wanted to interview him, it seems likely he had been identified as a Protestant activist or even one of Northumberland’s conspirators. Ten days later on 1 September, he was released, a ruined man. Having nurtured a position at court, a thriving business in the City and been rewarded with lucrative privileges – having, indeed, carefully laid the foundations for promotion to the gentry, perhaps ultimately even minor nobility – he had lost everything. This misfortune was also to have a devastating impact on the fortunes of his son. By such ‘hard dealing’, Dee later wrote in a begging letter to William Cecil, his father ‘was disabled for leaving unto me due maintenance’.


(#litres_trial_promo) In other words, having confidently expected to inherit independent means that would enable him to continue his studies as he wished, Dee suddenly had to fend for himself.

But the legacy of his father’s fall was to have even wider implications. Two years later, John Dee found himself in equal, if not greater, peril.

In 1555, Mary’s supporters began to burn prominent Protestants. As the church could not execute those it convicted of heresy so, under a statute called De Heretico Comburendo, the civil authorities undertook this responsibility. In force during Henry’s reign, the statute had been abolished in 1547, part of Edward’s Protestant reforms. In January 1555 Mary’s government restored it, and within a month the fires were alight. First victim was John Rogers, former canon at St Paul’s Cathedral. He was burned at Smithfield, which was London’s meat market, as well as the venue for its grisliest executions. For over four centuries traitors, witches and heretics had been brought there and, like the cuts of meat in the butchers’ stalls, hung, roasted and boiled.

Rogers was a married priest, therefore by definition a heretic and, according to partisan Protestant accounts, denied the chance to say goodbye to his wife and children before being tied to the stake. Across the country, many more met the same fate. The numbers vary widely according to the religious sympathies of those reporting them, but are estimated at around three hundred in the five years of Mary’s reign. Later, Protestant storytellers would send shudders through their audiences with highly coloured tales of agonising death, of necklaces of gunpowder which ignited and blew off the victims’ heads or, even worse, failed to go off, as happened to John Hooper, Bishop of Gloucester, who took three-quarters of an hour to expire. According to one tale, a baby erupted from a woman’s womb while she burned, which was thrown back into the fire by the executioner.

The flames burned fiercest in Smithfield and the smoke crept through the surrounding streets, stoking up rebellion as well as fear. There were reports of a mysterious voice emanating from a wall that spoke favourable words about Mary’s half-sister the Princess Elizabeth but remained silent about the Queen. A dead cat dressed as a Catholic cleric was hung from the gibbet at Cheapside.


(#litres_trial_promo) A dagger was thrown at one priest who criticised Edward VIs reign, a ‘murderous assault’ made on another during Communion. ‘The Blessed Sacrament itself was the object of profane outrages, and street brawls arising out of religious disputes were frequent,’ one Catholic commentary later noted.


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Late in May 1555, John Warne, an upholsterer living in Walbrook in the east of the City, looked up from his stitching to find the sheriffs at his door. Dragged off to Newgate prison, he was interrogated by Edmund Bonner, the ‘bloody’ Bishop of London. In Acts and Monuments of these Latter and Perillous Dayes (more popularly known as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs), compiled by the Puritan teacher John Foxe exiled in Switzerland during Mary’s reign, Bonner was named as the most diligent and heartless executor of Mary’s religious policy. Foxe summarised his view in two lines of doggerel:

This cannibal in three years space three hundred martyrs slew.

They were his food, he loved so blood, he spared none he knew.


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Bonner accused Warne, presumably on the testimony of informants, of failing to attend Mass and refusing to accept tran-substantiation – the Catholic belief that during Mass bread and wine were turned into Christ’s flesh and blood. Warne was also reported to have seen ‘a great rough water-spaniel’ with its head shaved in the manner of a Catholic priest: ‘Thou didst laugh at it and like it,’ Bonner said.


(#litres_trial_promo) Apparently unmoved by such accusations, Warne refused to recant his beliefs ‘unless he were thereunto thoroughly persuaded by the holy Scriptures’. This was a robustly nonconformist response, as belief in the Bible as the sole source of divine truth and authority was central to Protestant theology.

Having been examined by Bonner for three days, Warne was handed back to the sheriffs at Newgate to await his fate. On 31 May, he was taken to Smithfield, where, according to Foxe, he was chained to the stake and burned with John Cardmaker, another former canon at St Paul’s. As the flames leapt up around them, the two held hands and together ‘passed through the fire to the blessed rest and peace among God’s holy saints and martyrs’.


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The following day, the sheriffs were out again. This time the man they wanted was John Dee.




THE LORD OF MISRULE (#ulink_1bd28f42-7a52-5ee7-9987-11b7b90d5623)


… when the planets In evil mixture to disorder wander, What plagues and what portents, what mutiny, What raging of the sea, shaking of earth, Commotion in the winds! Frights, changes, horrors, Divert and crack, rend and deracinate, The unity and married calm of states Quite from their fixture!

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,

TROILUS AND CRESSIDA




V (#ulink_f06b7f90-5038-5aea-89c6-f84809399584)


On 28 May 1555 the Privy Council despatched a letter ordering Francis Englefeld, Mary’s Master of the Court of Wards, ‘to make search for one John Dee, dwelling in London, and to apprehend him and send him hither.’


(#litres_trial_promo) His house was to be sealed, and his books and papers seized as evidence. His living from Upton-upon-Severn was also confiscated, depriving him of his only regular source of income.

By 1 June Dee was in the custody of Sir Richard Morgan, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas. He was taken to Hampton Court, to be held incommunicado ‘until Mr Secretary Bourne and Mr Englefelde shall repair thither for his further examination’.


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This can hardly have come as a complete surprise. Many of Dee’s closest friends had already been arrested or forced into exile. Following an audience with Princess Elizabeth, Sir William Pickering had escaped back to the Continent, and been indicted for treason in his absence. John Day, a prominent printer who later published many of Dee’s works, had been imprisoned and, on release, also went abroad. The arrest of his own father must have further thickened the atmosphere of apprehension, casting suspicion on the whole family.

Dee was arrested with several others: one Butler, whose identity remains unknown; Christopher Cary, a pupil of Dee’s;


(#litres_trial_promo) John Field, a publisher and astronomer who was soon to collaborate with Dee on the printing of a set of ephemerides drawn up according to the heretical Copernican principles; and Sir Thomas Benger, by far the group’s most senior member, who later became auditor to Queen Elizabeth and was now one of her ‘principal servants at Woodstock’, as Dee put it.


(#litres_trial_promo) This list is a telling one. It suggests Dee was identified as a member of a secret Protestant cell Mary’s government believed to be clustered around Elizabeth. A week later Elizabeth herself was brought to Hampton Court, where Mary, now married to Charles V’s son Philip, approached the term of what turned out to be a phantom pregnancy. Mary was under pressure from her advisors to dispose of Elizabeth, whose very existence was seen as a threat to the English re-establishment of Catholicism. There were repeated attempts to implicate the princess in Protestant schemes and plots. In Mary’s private chambers, the sisters had a tearful confrontation, apparently (according to Elizabeth) within the hearing of Philip, hiding in a suitably Shakespearean manner behind an arras. Mary demanded that Elizabeth reject her Protestant beliefs, and she refused once more.

The many accusations against Dee focussed not on his religious leanings so much as his links with mathematics and magic. ‘In those dark times,’ John Aubrey later wrote, ‘astrologer, mathematician and conjuror were accounted the same things.’


(#litres_trial_promo) This was certainly the case with Dee. He was charged with ‘calculating’, ‘conjuring’ and ‘witchcraft’ on the grounds that he had drawn up horoscopes for Mary, her husband Philip and Elizabeth.

He was probably guilty as charged. The remnant of his diary for this period includes an entry (inaccurately transcribed by Ashmole) showing the date and time of Mary’s marriage to Philip, and noting that the rising sign at the moment of their wedding – 11am, 25 July 1554 – was Libra (a good omen, as Libra, ruled by Venus, was the sign associated with marriage or partnership).

The only other entry from his diary for this period, dated three weeks prior to his arrest, simply reads ‘Books brought from France to London’. Although it appears innocent enough, it may disguise an attempt to communicate with the exiled Pickering, one of Elizabeth’s partisans and a potential traitor. Dee may even have been acting as an intermediary between Pickering and Elizabeth because he was also in correspondence with the princess at this time.

Whether there were grounds for such suspicions or not, the merest whiff of intrigue was sufficient to have prompted the Council’s decision to arrest Dee, but if they were to keep him imprisoned, they would need something stronger than the suggestion he had been drawing up royal horoscopes.

A more serious accusation was duly found, and the very nature of its source hints at the political nature of the proceedings. Two informers were now cited who claimed to have evidence that Dee had ‘endeavoured by enchantments to destroy Queen Mary’. One of them was subsequently identified by Dee as ‘Prideaux’. A Catholic spy of that name later fled to Spain, seeking the protection of King Philip.


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The other informer was a rather more conspicuous character called George Ferrers, a lawyer, member of Lincoln’s Inn, MP and convicted debtor.


(#litres_trial_promo) In 1553 he was appointed London’s ‘Lord of Misrule’, an ancient role bestowed during yuletide revelries. This tradition had been revived by the Duke of Northumberland for Edward’s last Christmas and it had been a huge success. Decked in satin robes, Ferrers fulfilled his duties admirably, presiding over a court of fools and illusionists. He repeated the part during Mary’s reign, though no doubt the ‘merry disports’ that formed part of the event did not include jesters dressed as cardinals, as in the inaugural year. Ferrers now accused Dee of using ‘enchantments’ to blind one of his children, and to kill another.

Ferrers apparently bore Dee a longstanding grudge. In 1578 a suppressed edition of a pamphlet entitled Mirror for Magistrates included a story he wrote apparently lampooning Dee. It described a sorcerer hired by one Elianor Cobham to kill the Queen by sticking pins through a wax effigy of her. The story had a particular resonance at the time, as just such an effigy of Elizabeth had been found (at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where Ferrers practised as a lawyer), and Dee had been asked by the Privy Council to advise upon its significance.


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On 5 June, Dee, together with Cary, Benger and Field, was brought before the Secretary of State Sir John Bourne, Francis Englefeld, Sir Richard Read and Doctor Thomas Hughes to be examined on his ‘lewd and vain practises of cal-culing and conjuring’.

This tribunal was made up of Mary’s most loyal supporters. Englefeld was the man she later chose to investigate a conspiracy against Philip.


(#litres_trial_promo) Sir John Bourne was famous as ‘an especial stirrer up in such cases’, having ‘marvellously tossed and examined’ one of the leaders of Wyatt’s Rebellion. And Lord North was popularly reputed to have scoured the streets of London for a pauper’s baby to pass off as the male heir Mary was failing, after ten months of pregnancy, to produce.


(#litres_trial_promo) The atmosphere at Hampton Court was fraught with fears about the true nature of Mary’s ‘pregnancy’, with xenophobia towards the Spanish king Philip, with sectarian fervour, and with intense suspicions of plots being hatched in the palace’s every corridor and chamber.

The examiners demanded that Dee first answer four articles relating to his supposed offences, followed by a further eighteen. A ‘doctor’, probably Thomas Hughes, called for him to be committed to ‘perpetual prison’ on charges that, as Dee later put it, ‘he most unchristianlike and maliciously had devised’.


(#litres_trial_promo) But none of the charges could be substantiated.

A week later, having failed to extract a confession, his interrogators ordered that he be taken under guard by boat from Hampton Court to London, to face Lord Broke, Justice of the Common Pleas. Broke then referred the matter on to the Star Chamber at the Palace of Westminster.

By now the weakness of the case against Dee and his confederates was becoming obvious. Some members of the council were probably mindful that these men were close to Elizabeth who, despite Mary’s hostility, remained heir to the throne. So by July, without a decisive conviction in prospect, they decided to relax the conditions under which the prisoners were held, particularly for Sir Thomas Benger, held at Fleet Prison, named after the fetid Fleet River that carried most of the capital’s sewage past the cell windows into the Thames. On 7 July the Privy Council told the prison warden ‘to permit Sir Thomas Benger to have liberty of the Fleet, and his wife to come unto him at times convenient’.


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On 29 August 1555, three months after his arrest, Dee was bound over to keep the peace until Christmas of the next year. However, he had not escaped unscathed. He was permanently deprived of his post as rector of Upton, and thus of his living, and he alone of the group was to be handed over for further religious investigation.


(#litres_trial_promo) In other words, he was now suspected of heresy, and the man asked to examine him was the Bishop of London – ‘Bloody’ Bonner himself.




VI (#ulink_5110e74f-0718-5607-ab3d-cdb7d653b731)


Old St Paul’s Cathedral was far larger than Christopher Wren’s replacement, an immense hulk of Caen stone that had loomed over London for centuries. During Edward’s reign, it had been the focus of London’s religious reforms. In 1549, within the cathedral’s precincts, an ornate chapel and charnel house filled with elaborate marble monuments was torn down by Protestants. The bones found beneath – apparendy amounting to more than a thousand cartloads – had been dumped on the fields of Finsbury north of the city, creating a hill high enough to support three windmills.


(#litres_trial_promo) That same year, the cathedral’s altar and magnificent reredos were destroyed and replaced with a plain table, and the nave was turned into a thoroughfare between Paternoster Row and Carter Lane ‘for people with vessels of ale and beer, baskets of bread, fish, flesh and fruit, men leading mules, horses and other beasts’.


(#litres_trial_promo) With Mary’s accession to the throne, many of these alterations had been reversed, and it was a very different St Paul’s that another heretic approached one autumn morning in 1555, to be examined by Bishop Bonner. The altar had been rebuilt, the animals ejected and an air of reverent hush restored.

The prisoner was John Philpot, and his capture was quite a coup for Bonner. He was the son of a knight, educated at Oxford, widely travelled and highly cultivated, having ‘knowledge of the Hebrew tongue’. He had spent some time at Venice and Padua, but was suspected of being a heretic and forced to leave. In Protestant England, he had advanced quickly to become archdeacon of Winchester.


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However, following the return of Catholicism, Philpot was arrested in 1554 for refusing to conduct Mass and was imprisoned in Newgate. He remained imprisoned for a year before hearings began.

His first examination was with a panel of Mary’s commissioners on 2 October 1555. According to Foxe’s not entirely impartial account of the event, the commissioners poked fun at Philpot’s weight, implying that even a Protestant with his puritan values was not immune from fleshly temptations. Philpot responded with an impregnable composure that quickly drove his interrogators to distraction. A further examination followed a similar course and ended with one of the commissioners calling him a ‘vile heretic knave’, ordering that he be taken away to face Bonner’s more formidable inquisition.

The Bishop’s palace squatted among the buttresses of St Paul’s south-west side, beneath Lollards’ Tower, one of the cathedral’s two bell towers. Philpot was left in the palace’s coalhouse, which Bonner was using as a temporary prison.

The coalhouse was already filled with fuel for the Smithfield fires – six suspected heretics in all, including a married priest from Essex who had withdrawn a recantation extracted from him after the bishop had ‘buffeted’ his face black and blue. It was probably a worse prison than Newgate. It was windowless, and despite the generous supply of coal, there was no provision for making a fire to provide warmth or light. There was only straw for bedding, and in the dark adjoining chamber, a set of wooden stocks.

The reception Philpot got from the bishop’s staff was quite at odds with the meanness of his accommodation. He was given a ‘mess of meat and good pot of drink’ and copious apologies for the inconvenience of being incarcerated; apparently the bishop had not known of his arrival. A little later, he was brought to the bishop’s private study, where Bonner, sitting alone at a table, was full of bonhomie, offering his hand and suggesting that the whole business was a frightful mistake. ‘I promise you I mean you no more hurt than to mine own person,’ Bonner said. ‘I will not therefore burden you with your conscience as now, I marvel that you are so merry in prison as you be, singing and rejoicing, as the prophet saith, “rejoicing in your naughtiness”.’


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Bonner sent him off to be given a glass of ‘good wine’ from the palace cellars, which Philpot enjoyed standing at the cellar door, before being taken back to the coalhouse, ‘where I with my six fellows do rouse together in straw as cheerfully (we thank God) as others do in their beds of down’.


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A series of other examinations followed, each one taking the form of a polite and learned discussion on theological particulars, conducted in the genteel surroundings of the Bishop’s Palace, and each ending with Philpot being ‘carried’ (i.e. manhandled) back to the coalhouse.

On 19 November, Philpot was once again led blinking out of his cell and brought before the bishop. This time, Bonner had company: the Bishop of Rochester, the Chancellor of Lichfield and a Dr Chedsey. And another young scholar was also in attendance, who Bonner introduced to Philpot as one of his chaplains: John Dee. What was Dee, who might have been a cohabitee in the coalhole, doing there? Had the Protestant poacher turned Catholic gamekeeper? Unfortunately, no record remains of Dee’s own interrogation by Bonner, nor of his subsequent treatment. He disappeared into St Paul’s a suspected heretic, and now emerged an obedient chaplain.

The only record of Philpot’s imprisonment and examination is contained in Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, first published in English in 1563, after Elizabeth had succeeded to the throne, returning the country to Protestantism. It is a significant historical document, but by no means a politically or religiously neutral one. Though covering the entire history of religious persecution, it focuses with particular intensity on ‘the bloody murderings’ of ‘godly martyrs’ during Mary’s reign. Through the testimony of Mary’s Protestant victims accompanied by gruesome illustrations of beatings and burnings, Foxe embroidered a vivid but decidedly Protestant picture of Catholic cruelty. It is thus hardly surprising that the account of Philpot’s interview, based on his own account, does not portray John Dee in a flattering light.

The examination was to prove a turning point. It began with Bonner asking Philpot why he had kept his interrogators waiting. The bishop’s tone was now very different to the friendly one of their first meeting.

‘My lord, it is not unknown to you that I am a prisoner, and that the doors be shut upon me,’ Philpot replied.

This did not satisfy Bonner. ‘We sent for thee to the intent thou shoulds’t have come to mass. How say you, would you have come to mass, or no, if the doors had been sooner opener?’

‘My lord, that is another manner of question,’ Philpot replied. And Bonner did not pursue it, instead engaging Philpot in a theological debate on the subject of the unity of the church and the papacy. In particular, Philpot was asked to discuss the works of the third-century philosopher St Cyprian of Carthage who, according to Bonner, declared, ‘There must be one high priest, to which the residue must obey,’ a clear endorsement of Papal authority. Philpot disputed this interpretation, arguing thiat St Cyprian was referring to himself, as he was then patriarch of Africa.

At this point Dee intervened. ‘St Cyprian hath these words: “That upon Peter was builded the church, as upon the first beginning of unity”.’ Philpot replied with another quote, from a book of Cyprian’s that Dee himself would later have in his library: ‘In the person of one man, God gave the keys to all, that he, in signification thereby, might declare the unity of all men.’

After a further exchange, Dee announced that he was leaving the room, whereupon Philpot, losing his temper, called after him: ‘Master Dee, you are too young in divinity to teach me in the matters of my faith. Though you be learned in other things more than I, yet in divinity I have been longer practised than you.’ It was a clear reference to Dee’s reputation as a magician, which was obviously understood by all those present. Dee did not reply.

Dee did not attend any further interviews with Philpot which from this point on became increasingly hostile. However, at around the same time he did attend another examination with one of the newer arrivals at the Bishop’s palace, Bartlet Green. Dee mentioned Green in an account of his arrest written many years later, in which he described himself as having been a ‘prisoner long’ at the Bishop’s palace, ‘and bedfellow with Barthlet Green, who was burnt.’


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This was an economical version of the truth. In a letter to Philpot intercepted by Bonner, Green reported the encounter as follows:

I was brought into my lord [Bonner]’s inner chamber… and there was put in a chamber with master Dee, who entreated me very friendly. That night I supped at my lord’s table, and lay with master Dee in the chamber you [i.e. Philpot] did see. On the morrow I was served at dinner from my lord’s table, and at night did eat in the hall with his gentlemen; where I have been placed ever since, and fared wonderfully well.


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That is the only reference to Dee that Green gave in his submission.

Poor Bartlet did not fare so wonderfully well in the coming days, and neither did Philpot, who evidently attempted to engineer an escape. The Bishop’s men discovered a dagger sewn into the belly of a roasted pig delivered to him. In punishment, Bonner sent Philpot to be locked up in the coalhouse stocks, and a few days later himself came to the coalhouse to see his prisoner. Bonner claimed it was the first time he had ever visited the place and he thought it too good for Philpot. He ordered his guards to seize the prisoner, and to follow. He led them to the ‘privy door’ leading from his palace into St Paul’s, where his prison warder was waiting.

The keeper led the prisoner up the nave of the cathedral, past the reinstated rites and shrines Philpot so despised, and up the stone steps that led to Lollards’ Tower. Many fellow heretics were already incarcerated in one of the tower’s chambers, and forced to sit or lie with their feet and hands locked into a wall of wooden stocks, half-deafened by the din of the bells. But Philpot was taken along the walkway across the west side of the cathedral, into a tunnel leading into the bell tower on the opposite side, the ‘Blind Tower’. There he was confined in a chamber ‘as high almost as the battlements of Paul’s’ with a single east-facing window ‘by which I may look over the tops of a great many houses, but see no man passing into them’. He was searched and a number of letters were found hidden in his clothes, which he tried in vain to tear up as the guards pulled them from him. One of these letters was addressed to Bartlet Green.

Philpot’s interrogations did not stop, but they were now aimed solely at incriminating rather than converting him. His letter to Green, painstakingly pieced together, contained a reference to Dee, ‘the great conjuror’. ‘How think you, my lords, is not this an honest man to belie me, and to call my chaplain a great conjuror?’ Bonner asked the assembled Bishops. They obligingly smiled at his irony.

Philpot realised that his position was now hopeless. He asked his servant, whose visits provided his only remaining link with the outside world, to procure a ‘bladder of black powder’, but it was intercepted by Bonner’s men. Philpot explained that it was to make ink, but Bonner’s suspicion must have been that it was filled with gunpowder. Philpot no doubt planned to hang the pouch around his neck in the event that he was burned, to provide an early release from lingering agonies.

Formally condemned on 16 December 1555, Philpot was held in a small chamber in preparation for the handover to Newgate’s chief keeper – the moment when the ecclesiastical authorities returned to their chapels, leaving the secular arm of government to conclude the business. The first words of Philpot’s new keeper, Alexander, were: ‘Ah! Hast thou not done well to bring thyself hither?’ This cheery greeting was immediately followed by an order to hold the prisoner down on a block of stone, and lock his legs using as ‘many irons as he could bear’, which Alexander would remove only if Philpot paid him four pounds.

An appeal to the civic authorities brought gentler treatment. The city sheriff, Master Macham, ordered that the prisoner’s irons be removed and his personal possessions restored. Philpot was then taken to Newgate where he was given a cell to himself. The following day he ate his final meal and was told to make his preparations. He was awoken at eight the following morning. His guards carried him to the place of execution as ‘the way was foul’. As they lifted him up, he apparently joked ‘What? Will ye make me a pope?’

Bartlet Green was burned the next month. Beyond his brief encounter with Dee, little is known about his last days, although he was brought into one of the final interrogations with Philpot to identify the incriminating letter. On 27 January 1556, he followed Philpot’s short journey from Newgate up Giltspur Street to his pyre which was still smouldering from the burning of Thomas Whittle the day before. Bartlet was only twenty-five years old.

The figure of Dee glimpsed through the pages of Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, of the ‘great conjuror’, Bonner’s ‘chaplain’, flitting in and out of interrogations, is a disturbing one. He was a favoured and apparently enthusiastic member of Bonner’s household. Indeed, the bishop had become his ‘singular friend’, and would remain so even into the late 1560s, when Bonner, stripped of his honours by Elizabeth’s Protestant government, lay dying in Marshalsea prison.


(#litres_trial_promo) A note in one of his books also reveals that Dee was staying, perhaps even living, at Fulham Palace, the bishop’s Thameside residence four miles upriver, between 18 and 24 September 1555, the weeks leading up to Philpot’s interrogations.


(#litres_trial_promo) Could Dee, so recently an enthusiastic member of Edward VI’s Reformist court, have been a closet Catholic?

The Reformation did not split the world between Catholicism and Protestantism quite as neatly as many historical accounts suggest. Militants on both sides were prepared to kill and die for their cause but the vast majority, including many of the Reformation’s leading figures, were much more ambivalent. Throughout his life, Henry VIII himself clung to many Catholic rites and attitudes, even those concerning divorce. His was primarily a struggle for power rather than religious principles.


(#litres_trial_promo) Elizabeth I, a renowned symbol of Protestant sovereignty, told the French Ambassador André Hurault: ‘There is only one Jesus Christ… The rest is dispute over trifles.’


(#litres_trial_promo) This, it seems, was Dee’s view as well.

Dee always refused to commit himself to a particular religion, though it is certain he was not an orthodox Catholic. In 1568 – by which time England had reverted to Protestantism under Elizabeth – the Jesuit leader Francis Borgia received a secret report on the English Hospice in Rome. The hospice provided lodging for English pilgrims and later (as the English College) became a training camp for Catholic missionaries and spies. In the paper, probably written by the exiled Catholic militant Dr (later Cardinal) William Allen, a warning is issued to keep the hospice’s lodgers away from certain irreligious influences, including one ‘Ioannes Deus, sacerdos uxoratus, magicis curiosisque artibus deditus’ (‘John Dee, a married priest, given to magic and uncanny arts’).


(#litres_trial_promo) This curious note contains two pieces of information for which there is no other direct evidence: that Dee was ordained and married. Philpot’s reference during one of his interrogations to Dee being so ‘young in divinity’ suggests it could well have been Bonner himself who ordained Dee. This would explain the origin of the ‘Doctor’ title so closely associated with his name, for which Dee himself never publicly accounted. But as Catholic priests must remain celibate, the marriage must have come later. This was why the Jesuit report ordered the English hospice’s inmates to avoid him – it proved he had renounced Catholicism. Being connected with ‘magic and uncanny arts’ only compounded the sin. It represented pagan heresy and unorthodox scientific interests.

However, Dee could not be counted a committed Protestant either. Although he was very much a part of the Protestantism that defined Elizabeth’s reign (for example, when consulted by the government on the issue of Calendar reform, he openly criticised the Pope and ‘Romanists’), he became partial to Catholic rites in later life, and was comfortable among Catholic activists, such as Sir George Peckham, whom he advised about setting up a Catholic colony in the New World.

Such mixed messages left many of those that met him wondering where his loyalties lay. One correspondent of Francis Walsingham’s, who encountered Dee in Germany, was so befuddled by Dee’s theology, he concluded that the philosopher must have ‘disliked of all religions’.


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In fact Dee’s diaries are filled with heartfelt expressions of piety, including accounts of lengthy sessions of anguished prayer and supplication conducted in his own private chapel. But he refused to accept that either Protestants or Catholics, the Bible or the Pope had the monopoly. He believed that God’s truth was also to be found in nature and in learning. It was to the movements of the stars and to ancient texts that humanity must look to find the common ground upon which the Christian Church had originally been built. Only on Peter’s Rock, the long lost foundation of faith, could the ‘first beginning of unity’ proclaimed by St Cyprian – and reiterated by Dee during Philpot’s interrogation – be restored.

This was his theology, a religion founded on ancient principles and confirmed by science, and his behaviour following his arrest was, as subsequent events were to show, aimed at its fulfilment.




VII (#ulink_711affa4-72aa-567b-9ee5-c1c245f08eaa)


Following his brush with Bartlet Green and John Philpot, Dee appeared very much at home in the new Catholic order. On 15 January 1556, only a few days before Green’s execution, he published his ‘Supplication to Queen Mary….for the recovery and preservation of ancient writers and monuments’. The ‘monuments’ to which he referred were not the statues smashed by Protestant radicals in churches and monasteries, but the far more precious ancient and medieval manuscripts currently shelved in vestries and scriptoria. The tempest of the Reformation had already scattered many of these irreplaceable pages. ‘There was no quicker merchandise than library books,’ John Bale later observed of the period, noting that bundles of them were routinely to be found for sale in ‘grocers, soapsellers, tailors, and other occupiers’ shops, some in ships ready to be carried overseas into Flanders’.


(#litres_trial_promo) If action was not taken quickly, England’s fragile intellectual infrastructure would be gone forever.

Dee’s plan was to send agents across the length and breadth of the country to collect or copy these works for a new ‘Library Royal’. This great national archive would not only preserve manuscripts and books from ‘rot and worms’, but provide a resource to which ‘learned men’ could turn in times of religious strife and uncertainty to settle ‘such doubts and points of learning, as much cumber and vex their heads’. For there they would find, Dee argued, that all the most troubling issues of the day – for example the true meaning of St Cyprian’s words concerning the unity of the church, the subject of Dee’s heated argument with Philpot – ‘are most pithily in such old monuments debated and discussed’.


(#litres_trial_promo) Thus would ‘learning wonderfully be advanced’.

Although his scheme did not receive official backing, it provided Dee with a pretext for pursuing his own private version. A period of frenetic bibliographic activity followed. Dee criss-crossed the country, searching for material, keeping notes as he went:

Remember two in Wales who have excellent monuments. Mr Edward ap Roger in Raubon 7 miles from Oswestree Northward and…Edward Price at Mivod X [i.e. ten] miles from Oswestree, somewhat westwards. Archdecon Crowly and Robert Crowly sometime printer had Tully’s translation of Cyropaedia…


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Dee’s desire to preserve and own these texts pushed him to extreme measures. He borrowed four scientific manuscripts from Peterhouse College in Cambridge, promising to return them but apparently failing to do so. He acquired six manuscripts from the collection of John Leland within days of its supposed custodian, Sir John Cheke, being kidnapped in his exile in the Low Countries, brought home and forced to renounce his Protestantism.


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His quest was most obsessive when looking for scientific manuscripts and books. Dee also started work on one of his own, the Propaedeumata Aphoristica (Preliminary Aphoristic Teachings), a series of maxims explaining astrological powers ‘by rational processes’.


(#litres_trial_promo) For Dee wanted to discover the ‘true virtues of nature’, to find out how celestial events – the movement of the Sun, Moon and planets against the stars – influenced ‘sublunar’ (i.e. atmospheric and terrestrial) ones.

In early sixteenth-century England, astrology was in decline. This was not because of general disbelief in its powers. No one then seriously questioned that the planets influenced earthly events, any more than we would question the existence of gravity today. The cause of the decline was a general ‘torpor’, as the historian Keith Thomas put it, in English mathematics.


(#litres_trial_promo) It was impossible, for example, to get English ephemerides, so they had to be imported at great expense. Dee’s aim was to shake England out of this torpor, and it was his Propaedeumata that set the trend.

Dee theorised that every entity in the universe emanated ‘rays’ of a force which influenced other objects it struck. He took as an example the forces of attraction and repulsion produced by the ‘lodestone’ – magnetised iron ore. This demonstrated in miniature what was happening throughout the cosmos. The rays’ important feature for Dee was that they could be studied scientifically. He pleaded for more detailed astronomical studies, so that the true sizes and distances, and therefore influence, of the heavenly bodies could be established.

This became the basis of Dee’s natural philosophy, and in several ways it anticipates Isaac Newton’s ground-breaking Principia Mathematica, which triggered the scientific revolution and modern physics, by over a century. There are similarities with Newton’s theory of gravity: the idea of a magnetic-like force emanating from physical bodies which acts on others; the emphasis on mathematics combined with measurement as a way of discovering how such a force works. Furthermore Dee believed, like Newton, that the universe worked according to mathematical laws.

His other works of this time, few of which have survived, only reinforce the impression that he was moving towards a decidedly scientific view of the universe. He wrote papers on perspective, on astronomical instruments and on the properties of circular motions. As early as 1553, while working for Northumberland’s household, he wrote a work dedicated to the duke’s wife on the ebb and flow of tides, a subject directly related to the idea of gravity – also an interest of Newton’s.

He even endorsed the observation that two bodies of unequal weight fall to the ground at the same speed.


(#litres_trial_promo) The acceptance that this could be the case, even though it flew in the face of common sense and accepted theories of motion, is usually attributed to Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), and cited as proof of the great Italian astronomer’s pioneering role in making observation the keystone of scientific enquiry. However, Dee knew of it (and pointed out that others did before him).

But the Propaedeumata Aphoristica was no proto-Principia Mathematica: for at its heart lay a force that was magical as much as physical. This is revealed by the book’s title page, which shows the qualities of heat and humidity, the Sun and the Moon, the elements of earth and water all connected to the mystical symbol which dominates the centre of the image: the monad.

The monad was an astrological sign Dee invented. He regarded it as the key to a true understanding of the unity of the cosmos. Its appearance on the title page of the rationalist Propaedeumata Aphoristica indicates that Dee’s idea of physics strayed far beyond the limits of physical reality.

Dee’s belief that ‘rays’ emanating from physical objects could affect the human soul as well as body makes the Propaedeumata essentially an astrological work. For this was why astrologers, by applying principles abstracted from centuries of practice, could divine something about a person from the configuration of the heavens at the moment of his or her birth, and why, with a scientific understanding of such bodies and the rays, so much more could be achieved. Dee also suggested that the tools used to manipulate light could also be used to manipulate these emanations. Lenses and mirrors might be able to concentrate, reflect or refract these rays. Such instruments might even make them visible. Perhaps (though he was circumspect on the matter, because of its connotations of conjuration), a fortune-teller’s crystal ball works as a sort of lens, its material being of such quality that it is able to capture and focus the invisible rays in its immediate vicinity.

Thus, at the heart of Dee’s science lay what has come to be called ‘natural’ (as opposed to supernatural) magic. When God created the universe, itself an act that Dee accepted to be beyond scientific understanding, He let loose a divine force which causes the planets to turn, the Sun to rise and the Moon to wax and wane. Magic, as Dee saw it, is the human ability to tap this force. The better our understanding of the way it drives the universe, the more powerful the magic becomes. In other words, magic is technology.

Dee planned the Propaedeumata to be his magnum opus, but managed to complete only a hastily written summary. During the final years of Mary’s reign, England suffered a series of disasters: bad harvests and famines at home, diplomatic failures and military blunders abroad. Meanwhile, two devastating epidemics of influenza (which got its name from the belief that it was caused by malign astrological influences) swept the country in 1557 and 1558. Falling seriously ill, Dee thought his days were numbered. He set his affairs in order, and arranged for a draft of Propaedeumata to be published, handing over the rest of his literary affairs to Pedro Nuñez.

Queen Mary was also in decline. At the end of 1557, six months after Philip’s departure for Spain, she announced once again that she was pregnant. In February 1558, in anticipation of the birth, she withdrew to her chamber. As before, the baby failed to materialise, though Mary was still waiting at the end of March. She finally gave up hope in May, and fell into a depression from which she never recovered – dying on 17 November 1558. Anyone associated with her regime and religion was now dangerously exposed, chief among them Bishop Bonner and his chaplain, John Dee.




VIII (#ulink_d19521bf-049c-5859-a9fb-11823c194f73)


After all the stormy, tempestuous and blustery windy weather of Queen Mary was overblown, the darksome clouds of discomfort dispersed, the palpable fogs and mists of most intolerable misery consumed, and the dashing showers of persecution overpast, it pleased God to send England a calm and quiet season, a clear and lovely sunshine, a quietus from former broils, and a world of blessings by good Queen Elizabeth.


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Thus wrote the chronicler Raphael Holinshed in the 1570s. He could hardly have been further from the truth.

Legend records that she received the news of her accession while sitting alone beneath an oak at Hatfield House reading the New Testament in Greek, a scene that sublimely combines the Protestant virtues of humanism, piety and humility. One of the two nobles sent to make the announcement was the Earl of Pembroke, who, having switched allegiance from Northumberland to Mary, managed with equal agility to switch back again: he was rewarded with a position in Elizabeth’s council but never with her affection or admiration.

Entering London less than a week after her half-sister’s death, Elizabeth was received with rapture. Bonner stood in line at the walls of the City to welcome her. She offered her hand to the Mayor and aldermen to be kissed, but when Bonner approached and knelt before her she withdrew her hand and walked on. The message was obvious – here was a woman who was going to make a clean break with the past, theologically and politically.

Another sign of her intentions was her decision to appoint Robert Dudley, a radical Protestant and son of the disgraced Earl of Northumberland, as chief organiser of her coronation. Dudley enthusiastically accepted the role, and decided he needed the help of a scholar to set the date, someone who could draw on the most ancient and respected astrological and historical authorities to determine the best day. His appointment was a surprising one. He did not choose from among the ranks of persecuted exiles tentatively returning to the country. Instead he selected a man who, at least according to Foxe, reeked of the smoke from Bonner’s bonfires: John Dee.

Choosing the date of the coronation was far from a matter of scheduling. It was a highly sensitive decision. Her reign was by no means regarded with the unbridled enthusiasm that, following the triumph of the Armada, later Protestant chroniclers would retrospectively assume. England had just endured two troubled experiments in monarchy with Edward, the first sovereign anointed by a Protestant church, and Mary, the first Queen regnant.


(#litres_trial_promo) The idea of a third that combined both apparently disastrous innovations aroused deep apprehension.

As daughter of Anne Boleyn and offspring of Henry’s assault on the unity of the Church, Elizabeth’s inheritance of the divine right of sovereignty represented a challenge to the political, even cosmic order. Her half-sister Mary had found the idea of Elizabeth being Henry’s child literally inconceivable and assumed her father must have really been Boleyn’s lute player, Mark Smeaton. Making Elizabeth queen meant that England would be committed to a course of Protestant reformation from which it would be very hard to return.

Elizabeth’s sex amplified the uncertainty. The combination of femininity with majesty was still regarded as highly combustible. Mary had been the first English queen to rule her subjects, rather than act as a king’s consort. Some speculated that it was her gender as much as religion that had made her reign such a difficult one. John Knox issued his famous First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Raiment of Women in 1558, the final year of Mary’s reign. For him the idea of female government was so outrageous it demanded a new term – ‘monstriferous’. John Calvin, the Protestant theologian, wrote to William Cecil that Elizabeth’s coronation ‘was a deviation from the primitive and established order of nature, it ought to be held as a judgement on man for his dereliction of his rights.’ The prognostications of the French prophet Nostradamus for 1559, the first full year of Elizabeth’s reign, seemed to confirm this view. Translated into English, they were widely read, foretelling ‘divers calamities, weepings and mournings’ and ‘civil sedition’ that would make the ‘lowest’ rise up against the ‘highest’.


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Thus, the selection of the date that inaugurated this experiment was crucial. It needed to muster all the favourable auspices that ancient authorities could offer, and show that God would bless such an ordination.

O, when degree is shak’d

Which is the ladder of all high designs

The enterprise is sick!

…observed Ulysses in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida.

Take but degree away, untune that string,

And hark what discord follows!


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Nostradamus had foretold such discord and Dee’s selection of the coronation day had to prevent it.

Dee was well qualified for the role. His Propaedeumata had established him as one of the country’s leading natural philosophers and revived interest in mathematically-based astrology (as opposed to the divination practised by Nostradamus). His frantic bibliographic activity during Mary’s reign had also armed him with a formidable array of ancient texts from which to cite precedents and authorities.

But this was not enough to erase the stigma of his association with Bonner, which, thanks to Foxe and others was already widely suspected, if not known. There must have been some other redeeming quality.

A clue lies in the treatment Dee received in Foxe’s account of Bonner’s persecutions. In the first edition of Acts and Monuments, which was being completed in Basle around this time, Dee’s involvement with Bonner is fully documented. However, by the 1576 edition, he has completely disappeared. His words are still there but every occurrence of his name (more than ten) has been deleted, or substituted with the anonymous ‘a Doctor’.

This erasure is almost unique in a work otherwise notable for naming names. For example, in one of Philpot’s interrogations, Dee is joined by another Doctor, one Chedsey, whom Foxe did not allow the same anonymity, not even when they appeared in the same sentence.


(#litres_trial_promo) Perhaps Foxe removed Dee’s name because he was threatened with legal action, or pressurised by the court. But this seems unlikely. Acts and Monuments rapidly became one of the most revered texts of the Elizabethan age; the Queen commanded a copy to be lodged in every cathedral library in the country. Far more probable is that Foxe learned more about Dee’s activities in Bonner’s household and this meant that the portrayal of him in Acts and Monuments as a Catholic colluder was unfair.

In a deposition made to a delegation of Queen’s commissioners in 1582, Dee states that his arrest and handover to Bonner resulted from him being engaged upon ‘some travails for her Majesty’s behalf.’ He had undertaken these unspecified travails ‘to the comfort of her Majesty’s favourers then, and some of her principal servants, at Woodstock’, Woodstock being the palace where Elizabeth was held under arrest. These ‘favourers’ undoubtedly included Robert Dudley. They also included John Ashley, who had since become Master of the Queen’s Jewel House. Dudley was dead by the time Dee came to be interviewed, but Ashley was still alive, and Dee invited the Queen’s commissioners to go and ask him about the Bonner years should they disbelieve his claims.

Of course, these ‘travails’ may have been an invention. But, as Dee well knew, his testimonial to the commissioners would be read by Elizabeth, who was obviously in a position to confirm whether or not, at least in this respect, it was true.

It seems reasonable to assume that Dee’s presence in Bonner’s household was known, perhaps even encouraged by Elizabeth and her supporters. This would explain why, having been deprived of the rectorship of Upton after his arrest in 1553, he was now awarded the living at Leadenham in Lincolnshire, which was presented to him by two members of the Stanley family, Sir William and Henry, Lord Strange.


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Thus it was not as a shamed member of a failed regime that Dee emerged into the limelight in late 1558, but as the loyal ally of a glorious new one, as an ‘intelligencer’, in all the possible meanings of that peculiar Elizabethan term: a seeker of hidden knowledge, philosophical and scientific, as well as a spy.



The Christmas festivities of 1558-9 provided Catholic onlookers with disturbing portents of Elizabeth’s religious policies. ‘Your lordship will have heard of the farce performed in the presence of Her Majesty on Epiphany Day,’ wrote a concerned Spanish ambassador to his Duke, referring to a Twelfth Night masque. He had been appalled by the ‘mummery performed after supper, of crows in the habits of cardinals, of asses habited as bishops, and of wolves representing abbots’. ‘I will consign it to silence,’ he added.


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In the midst of these revelries, Dee set about writing a long and detailed analysis of the astrological augurs for her reign. He chose 15 January 1559 as its start date. His reasons, along with the document setting them out, are lost, but no doubt he was swayed by Jupiter being in Aquarius, suggesting the emergence of such statesmanlike qualities as impartiality, independence and tolerance, and Mars in Scorpio providing the passion and commitment a ruler needed.


(#litres_trial_promo) Such a day would mark the nativity of a great reign.

Having set the date, Dee was invited by Robert Dudley for an audience with the Queen at Whitehall Palace.

At the appointed time, Dee passed through the three-storey entrance gate of chequered flint and stone and approached the Great Hall built by Cardinal Wolsey. He was presented to Elizabeth by Dudley and the Earl of Pembroke. Dee remembered vividly what she said to him: ‘Where my brother hath given him a crown, I will give him a noble.’ It was a clever play on the names of coins, the noble being a gold piece worth two silver crowns. But this was not an offer of small change. She was promising a doubling of the fortunes he had enjoyed under Edward. He was to become a favoured member of her court, a player in the great Protestant era to come.

Dee might even have imagined she meant more. Was there not a suggestion, a hint – Dee’s mathematical mind could have calculated the implications in an instant – that she was promising him not just a noble but nobility… title, money, lands, respect, reckoning for the ‘hard dealing’ that had ruined his father and deprived him of his inheritance? The Dee dynasty could be restored and he would finally have the independence to develop new ideas, the resources to build up his library and the influence to found his scientific academy.

But nothing had been explicitly promised and there was no time to dwell on such dreams. Only a few days remained before the coronation date Dee had selected and frantic preparations were already underway There was such a surge in demand for crimson silk and cloth of gold and silver that customs officers were instructed to impound all available stock. Such an order would once have been carried out by Dee’s father Roland, but he was dead by 1555, before the change of regime could rehabilitate him.


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On the eve of the coronation, Elizabeth proceeded from the Tower of London to the Palace of Westminster, where she was to make her preparations for the ceremony. A series of magnificent pageants were performed on huge scaffolds erected along the route: at Gracechurch Street a ‘Pageant of the Roses’ represented the Tudor dynasty on a three-tiered platform; at Cornhill and Little Conduit a play on the theme of time. At Cheapside (somewhat inappropriately named for this occasion) she paused to receive a gift of a thousand gold marks, presented by the City Recorder. She passed through Temple Bar, an archway marking the City’s western limit, upon which were mounted huge statues of Gogmagog and Corineus, giants featured in the story of Brutus, a legendary king of ancient Britain who was to play a prominent part in Dee’s future explorations of British mythology.

The following morning, with the streets ‘new-laid with gravel and blue cloth and railed on each side,’


(#litres_trial_promo) Elizabeth appeared at the doors of Westminster Hall attired in coronation robes, made of cloth-of-gold, trimmed in ermine and stitched with jewels. Her auburn hair was down, emphasising her maidenly youth. She processed towards Westminster Abbey beneath a canopy carried by the Barons of the Cinque Ports, followed by nobles, heralds and bishops. The carpet upon which she trod, dusted with snow, disappeared as she went, the crowds lining the route scrambling to tear off samples to keep or sell as souvenirs.

Dee would have had his place in the Abbey, though not in the nave, which was reserved for the nobles who were called upon to declare Elizabeth’s rightful claim to the throne. Illuminated by thousands of torches and candles, standing beneath a thick canopy of tapestries amid a forest of soaring Gothic pillars, surrounded by the singing of choirs and cries of acclamation, Elizabeth then played her role in the ancient act of pagan magic that works a mortal human into a sovereign.

She emerged from the Abbey bearing the enchanted instruments of government, the orb representing the cosmos; the sceptre, the magic wand of authority; and the crown, the halo of monarchy. Smiling and calling to the crowd in a way that at least one observer thought indecorous, she walked back to Westminster Hall, where a great banquet was held that lasted until one the next morning, culminating with the Queen’s champion riding into the hall dressed in full armour, to challenge anyone who questioned her title.




THE MOST PRECIOUS JEWEL (#ulink_478eb52b-a167-5f92-99cb-52f97987f197)


When Faustus had with pleasure ta’en the view Of rarest things, and royal courts of kings, He stayed his course, and so returned home, Where such as bear his absence, but with grief, I mean his friends and nearest companions, Did gratulate his safety with kind words, And in their conference of what befell, Touching his journey through the world and air, They put forth questions of astrology, Which Faustus answered with such learned skill, As they admired and wondered at his wit. Now is his fame spread forth in every land; Amongst the rest the Emperor is one, Carolus the fifth, at whose palace now Faustus is feasted ’mongst his noblemen. What there he did in trial of his art, I leave untold – your eyes shall seeperform’d

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, THE TRAGEDIE OF DR FAUSTUS




IX (#ulink_4d657117-65ea-5c47-a810-1a3ff1c0a4e8)


Soon after Elizabeth’s coronation, Dee vanished. For nearly five years, he is absent from all historical records.


(#litres_trial_promo) All that can be divined was that he spent much of his time abroad, continued collecting books and started to explore a new field of research: the Cabala.

The Cabala was a potent combination of language, mathematics and mysticism based around Hebrew. Dee had taught himself the language, and acquired his first Hebrew texts around this time. Thanks to the influence of humanists such as John Cheke, there had been a growth of interest in Hebrew, because of its potential to release the knowledge contained in ancient texts. But for the Cabalists, Hebrew was much more than another language, because they believed encoded within it were the secrets of the universe.

‘In the beginning was the Word,’ as St John put it. Dee and his contemporaries assumed that Word to have been in Hebrew, or rather its original pure form before it became corrupted by Adam’s Fall. Thus, an analysis of Hebrew was a way of discovering the structure that underlay God’s creation. The laws of nature were its grammar, the stuff of physical reality its nouns.


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Cabalism’s obscure origins go back to first century Palestine. By the sixteenth century, it was regarded in orthodox academic circles with the same suspicion as mathematics, with which it shared many features. Among the multiplicity of methods it used to study language was Gematria, which involved searching for numbers which could be substituted for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet. By then performing arithmetical operations with these numbers, for example by ‘adding’ two words together, it was hoped to find a mathematical relationship underlying the language which would show how one phrase related to another.

Another feature of the Cabala was its numerological preoccupation with angels. Indeed, one of the purposes of Gematria was to work out how many there were (as many as 301,655,172 according to some calculations).


(#litres_trial_promo) It also provided a means for working out their names and relationships to one another. For example, it identified the seventy-two angels who provide a route to understanding the ‘sephiroth’ – the ‘ten names most common to God’ which together make his ‘one great name’. The names of such angels were derived from the Hebrew description of their function, suffixed with an ending such as ‘el’ or ‘iah’.

These angels exist at the top, divine level of the Cabala’s three-tiered universe. Below them lay the celestial level of the stars, and at the bottom the elemental level of the physical world. This structure is reflected in the Hebrew language itself, in the three parts of Hebrew speech and the twenty-two letters in the Hebrew alphabet, which divided into two groups of nine letters and one of four, corresponding to the nine orders of angels, nine spheres and four elements.

Such correspondences strike the modern mind as meaningless. Meric Casaubon, who published Dee’s spiritual diaries a century later, warned that ‘some men come into the world with Cabalistical Brains, their heads are full of mysteries… Out of the very ABC that children are taught…they will fetch all the Secrets of God’s Wisdom’.


(#litres_trial_promo) But to Dee, it provided a crucial link between language and the mathematical basis of nature.

The Cabala also had a practical, magical side. Since language was tied into the formation of the universe, words had the potential to change it. Cabalism provided a technology for engineering incantations that could summon spirits and influence events, as prayers are supposed to do, but formulated according to systematic, almost scientific principles. And, unlike prayers, such incantations would work whether you were Catholic or Protestant.


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There is no evidence that Dee tried to use the Cabala in this way at this stage in his career. He was, however, fascinated by another practical use, an application of particular interest in the tense atmosphere of Reformation Europe, where governments were eager to find ways of preserving their own secrets and discovering those of their rivals – the creation of secret codes and ciphers.



In February 1563, Dee reappears in the busy merchant town of Antwerp, staying at the sign of the Golden Angel. Still engaged in his endless, expensive search for works to add to his library, he was about to make what he considered to be the find of his life.

Antwerp was filled with the clatter of printing presses. It boasted one of the world’s most important publishing firms, founded by Christopher Plantin, whose ‘Officina Plantiniana’ workshop turned out thousands of Christian and humanist works distributed across Europe and as far afield as the Spanish colonies in Mexico and South America. But Plantin also produced several heretical works, notably those of Hendrick Niclaes, founder of the ‘family of love’. This secretive sect, whose members came to be called ‘Familists’, included Dee’s friend the mapmaker Abraham Ortelius, and the Birkmanns, a powerful bookselling family based in Cologne. Dee patronised their London shop continuously over forty years, falling into conversation with anyone who happened to be there.


(#litres_trial_promo) The familists invited all ‘lovers of truth…of what nation and religion soever they be, Christian, Jews, Mahomites, or Turks, and heathen,’ to become part of a learned brotherhood.


(#litres_trial_promo) They believed that members could show allegiance to any prevailing religious doctrine in order to promote the movement’s aims of developing an all-embracing theology. This reflected Dee’s own view, and it is likely he knew of and was sympathetic to the sect.


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During the winter of 1563, Dee heard rumours that a copy of one of the most precious manuscripts in circulation, for which scholars from all over Europe had been searching for over sixty years, had turned up in Antwerp. It was called Steganographia, and had been written by Johannes Trithemius.

Trithemius was one of the founders of modern cryptography. He wrote the first published work on the subject, Polygraphia, which appeared in 1518. Born in 1462, he took his name from Trittenheim, a town on the left bank of the Moselle in Germany. He claimed to be unable to read until he was fifteen. At that age he had a dream in which he was presented with two tablets, one inscribed with writing, the other with pictures. Told to choose between them, he picked the tablet with writing because of his ‘longing for knowledge of Scripture’.


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He later joined the Benedictine abbey of Sponheim, which was then ‘poor, undisciplined, ruinous, and virtually without furniture’. In July 1483, he was appointed abbot, and embarked on a complete renovation of the place, transforming it into a centre of learning. He built a lodge for visiting scholars, decorating the walls with classical and contemporary prose and poetry. He also rebuilt the library, increasing it from just forty-eight books to two thousand.

Trithemius’s book-collecting drew him towards the study of the Cabala, and his work became a strong influence for many of the great mystic scholars of the early sixteenth century, notably Henry Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim, who was his pupil. Agrippa was the leading writer on mysticism and magic of the Renaissance. His shadow ‘made all Europe honour him’, Marlowe wrote in Dr Faustus.

As with Dee, Trithemius’s interest in such subjects led to his being accused of ‘trafficking’ with demons. It was even said he conjured up the bride of Maximilian I soon after her death so the Emperor could see her once more. As Trithemius kept his work increasingly secret, so these accusations became ever more insistent and threatening.

Dee knew of the accusations against Trithemius, placing him alongside Socrates and Pico della Mirandola (pioneer of a Christian form of the Cabala) as a victim of intolerance. Like Dee, Trithemius drew a sharp division between magic and superstition. Magic was about knowledge, the study of the hidden forces – spiritual as well as physical – that rule nature. Superstition exploited ignorance. Thus Trithemius called for witches and wizards to be rooted out, and attacked the sort of fortune-telling which was practised by Dee’s contemporaries like Nostradamus as ‘empty and foolish’.

Trithemius summed up his career: ‘I always wanted to know what was knowable in the world…But it was not within my power to satisfy the desire as I wished.’ This was a sentiment Dee would one day echo. But for the moment, with his growing library, knowledge of languages and science, his influence at court and friendships with Europe’s leading intellectuals, Dee seemed at the threshold of complete success. And now he had a copy of Steganographia within his grasp.

Trithemius had started work on the book between 1499 and 1500. He sent a letter to his friend Arnold Bostius, a Carmelite monk in Ghent, in which he boasted that once finished it would be a ‘great work… that, if it should ever be published (which God forbid), the whole world will wonder at’. He promised that it would contain a host of hidden writing systems, a way of transmitting messages over great distances using fire, a method of teaching Latin in two hours and a form of communication that can be achieved while eating, sitting or walking without speech, facial expressions or signs. Unfortunately Bostius died before the letter arrived and it was read with horror by his brother Carmelites, who circulated it in an attempt to discredit Trithemius.

A further setback came when Trithemius was visited by an officious dignitary called Carolus Bovillus in 1500. Bovillus later reported that ‘I hoped that I would enjoy a pleasing visit with a philosopher; but I discovered him to be a magician.’ It was his perusal of the Steganographia, in particular its lists of the ‘barbarous and strange names of spirits’ in languages he did not recognise, that convinced him of this.


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Trithemius then abandoned the work, dying in 1516. But the Steganographia lived on, thanks to its advance publicity: manuscript copies of three of the four books mentioned by Bovillus were thought to have survived. They soon acquired mythical status and became as sought after as Aristotle’s lost dialogues.

Dee was intensely excited when he heard of the existence of a copy of the manuscript in Antwerp. Getting his hands on it proved difficult. It involved spending all his travelling money, some twenty pounds, and working through an intermediary, a mysterious ‘nobleman of Hungary’, who in return demanded that Dee ‘pleasure him…with such points of science as… he requireth’.


(#litres_trial_promo) Even then, he was only allowed to keep the manuscript for ten days.

Tucked away in his lodgings at the sign of the Golden Angel, he began transcribing the work. It was a difficult task. Ignoring any problems of legibility, the manuscript was a difficult one to copy. It was filled with tables of numbers and endless lists of nearly identical and apparently meaningless names. Dee had to work round the clock to get the job done in time.

On 16 February 1563, he forced his tired fingers to pen one more document: a letter to William Cecil, Queen Elizabeth’s key minister, reporting the discovery of this, ‘the most precious jewel that I have yet of other men’s travails recovered’, and begging for some recompense for his costs, which had left him virtually penniless.


(#litres_trial_promo) This discovery demonstrated why Elizabeth’s regime needed someone with his contacts and understanding scouring the Continent for new texts and ideas, and why it was worth paying him to allow him to continue.

When Dee wrote his letter, he knew that it was about to embark on a long and perilous journey that could last a few days or several weeks with no means of knowing when or even if it would reach its destination.

As every sixteenth-century prince and general knew, distance was the first enemy. Roads were often impassable, ‘noisome sloughs’, ‘so gulled with the fall of water that passengers cannot pass’.


(#litres_trial_promo) Despite such barriers and discomforts, despite the enormous cost, Tudor nobles, scholars and merchants were determined to travel. There was constant traffic of people and goods across Europe and as a result growing interdependence between regions. A system that promised instant communications over unlimited distances was of obvious importance, and that was one of many innovations that Trithemius had boasted to Bostius the Steganographia contained. When Dee finally managed to read the manuscript for himself, he found that Trithemius was apparently equal to his word. The Steganographia was divided into three books, the last incomplete and of a rather different nature to the first two. Books I and II describe an enormously elaborate system for sending messages between two people using incantations.

Trithemius gave several examples of how the system would work. For instance, the sender of a message first writes it out, using any language he chooses, after a preamble of paternosters and other supplications. He then speaks a special formula to summon one of the many spirits identified by Trithemius, say, Padiel:

Padiel aporsy mesarpon omeuas peludyn malpreaxo. Condusen, vlearo thersephi bayl merphon, paroys gebuly mailthomyon ilthear tamarson acrimy Ion peatha Casmy Chertiel, medony reabdo, lasonti iaciel mal arti bulomeon abry pathulmon theoma pathormyn.


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Padiel should then appear, whereupon the sender hands over the message. The spirit takes it to the recipient, who must speak another incantation, and the meaning of the message becomes clear.

To complicate matters further, the sender must learn the ‘places, names, and signs of the principal spirits, lest through ignorance one calls from the north a spirit dwelling in the south; which would not only hinder the purpose but might also injure the operator’.


(#litres_trial_promo) There are hundreds of thousands of spirits – some of which appear in the day, others of which prefer the dark of the night, some subordinate to others – each with its own sign. Books I and II list many of them, giving details of their powers and peculiarities and the conjurations needed to call them.

Book III, which is incomplete, is very different. It begins by promising even greater feats of communication than the first two, which are based on the discoveries of an ancient (apparently fictional) philosopher called Menastor. In the tradition of occult knowledge, the findings have been, Trithemius warns, presented in a way so that ‘to men of learning and men deeply engaged in the study of magic, it might, by the Grace of God, be in some degree intelligible’ but not to ‘thick-skinned turnip-eaters’.


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Instead of endless epistles, Book III is filled with tables. They are messily laid out, except for the one which appears in the book’s preface. This assigns numerical values for twenty-one spirits, each of which is associated with one of the seven planets. There will, Trithemius promises, be seven chapters in the following book, one for each planet. Chapter 1, which is the only one to survive, duly follows with a description of how to call on the help of Saturn to communicate with a fellow adept. It is accompanied by a series of numerical tables which are apparently to be used to perform astronomical calculations.

It would be another forty years before the manuscript that Dee now had in his possession was published. It appeared in Frankfurt in 1606, together with a shorter work called the Clavis (or ‘key’) to the Steganographia. It was the Clavis that revealed Trithemius’s true purpose. The apparently nonsensical spiritual incantations of the first two books turned out to be coded messages. For example, in the case of the call for Padiel:

Padiel aporsy mesarpon omeuas peludyn malpreaxo

the message, or ‘plain text’ as cryptographers now call it, was encoded in alternate letters of alternate words:

padiel aPoRsY mesarpon oMeUaS peludyn mAlPrEaXo

which yields the words ‘Primus apex’ (the first summit). The Clavis thus showed that Books I and II of the Steganographia were not really about magic. They were full of sample ciphers. However, the Clavis did not include a key for Book III. Did this mean it was really a work of magic or a code book too? The question remained unresolved for centuries. Gustavus Selenus (the pseudonym of Duke August II of Brunswick-Lüneburg) reprinted Book III in his definitive 1624 study Cryptomenytices et Cryptographiae, establishing Trithemius’s position as a founding father of modern cryptography, but offered no solution. W. E. Heidel claimed to have cracked the code in 1676, but published his results in the form of a series of equally indecipherable cryptograms, thereby managing merely to add to the mystery.

By the late twentieth century, most scholars seem to have given up, and had consigned the work to the occult.


(#litres_trial_promo) Then, in the late 1990s, two people settled the matter once and for all, one in 1993, the other in 1996. The first to succeed was a German linguist called Thomas Ernst.


(#litres_trial_promo) The second, who had no idea of Ernst’s success until he had published his own paper, was Jim Reeds, working in the Mathematics and Cryptography Research Department at AT&T. Reeds’s diligent efforts at analysing this and other mysterious texts associated with Dee have proved extraordinarily successful.

Ernst and Reeds discovered that the third book of the Steganographia did indeed contain a code. There were hints as to how it might work in the tables and the text. For example, Reeds noticed that the first column of the table in the preface contained multiples of twenty-five. What was the significance of this number? There was also a passage in the first chapter that seemed suggestive:

If you wish to operate in Steganography… you must first of all acquaint yourself with [Saturn’s] various and diverse motions; and first the various motions, pure, proper, mixed, direct, retrograde and perplexed.

With a combination of skill and guesswork, Reeds worked out that the numbers in the tables represented letters of an alphabet, with each letter being a number added to a multiple of twenty-five. Lengthy analysis revealed the alphabet to comprise twenty-two of the Roman characters (A to Z minus J, K and W), supplemented by three other symbols. It was also in reverse order, which was perhaps what Trithemius was hinting at in his reference to the ‘retrograde’ motions of Saturn.

Reeds tested the key by trying it out on various sections of the book. For example, a series of numbers in the first table spelt out ‘Ioannes’, the Latin form of John, Trithemius’s first name. A selection of words in one of the tables in chapter 1 contained German words which translate into the phrase ‘the bringer of this letter is a bad rogue and a thief’. Reeds found another puzzling phrase, this one in Latin. It was repeated several times: ‘Gaza frequens Libycos duxit Carthago triumphos’. It turns out to be a pangram, a phrase that contains all the letters of the alphabet (like ‘the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’).


(#litres_trial_promo) Presumably these phrases were chosen to demonstrate the capabilities of the cipher.

Having broken the code, the tables yielded up the secrets they had hoarded for five hundred years. Unfortunately these proved uninformative: besides one or two gnomic phrases, the remainder of the plain text seemed unintelligible. This may be because the plain text is itself encoded in some further way, or because the tables became corrupted over years of underground circulation in manuscript form. Nevertheless, the discovery of the true purpose of Book III of the Steganographia was a breakthrough, because it proved for the first time that it was primarily a work of cryptography, not magic.

But whether Dee realised that the Steganographia was a code book remains unclear. He may not have seen the Clavis, the key to Books I and II. So, when he so excitedly commended the work to William Cecil as ‘meeter’ (more suitable or useful) and ‘more behoveful’ (more beneficial) to ‘your honor or a Prince’ (Queen Elizabeth) than any other, what did he mean? Spiritual communication is a possibility – but unlikely. Cecil was both very practical and conservative, and, though he undoubtedly accepted the existence of spirits, was unlikely to have been persuaded to practise the elaborate rituals Trithemius described.


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Dee was fascinated by, and evidently expert in, cryptography. He owned several copies of Trithemius’s Polygraphia, which was explicitly about codes, and studied other key texts on the subject, notably Jacques Gohorry’s De Usu et Mysteriis Notarum and Jacopo Silvestri’s Opus Novum, the latter of which Dee used to practise writing in cipher for himself.


(#litres_trial_promo) Thus, when he promised Cecil that the book would advance the ‘secret sciences’, he was not necessarily referring to the occult. When Dee sent his letter, Cecil was just beginning to put in place the espionage network which, under Francis Walsingham, his successor as spymaster, would become one of the most formidable and effective in Europe. This network came to rely heavily on codes.


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Dee did not see the Stegonographia as merely a political or diplomatic tool, considering the text to have other, more esoteric uses. Cryptography, particularly of the sort practised by Trithemius, was closely connected to the Cabala and it was conceivable that the same techniques used in the Steganographia could be used to decipher other texts written in forgotten or corrupted languages. One that would arouse particular excitement was called The Book of Soyga, an anonymous tome which Dee came to believe contained an ancient message written in the language originally spoken by Adam – in other words the true, unspoiled word of God. Another was a mysterious volume attributed to Roger Bacon which in coming centuries became notorious among cryptanalysts as the Voynich Manuscript.


(#litres_trial_promo) It has yet to be deciphered. The study of codes, which was also the study of the structure of language, might yield the magic key to decoding such texts and revealing the messages they contained.

Beyond even that, Dee commended the Steganographia to Cecil as an example of the intellectual treasures the Continent held and that England so conspicuously lacked. In his letter, he deplored the lack of an English philosopher able to produce works ‘in the Science De Numeris formalibus, the Science De Ponderibus mysticis, and ye Science De Mensuris diuinis: (by which three, the huge frame of this world is fashioned…)’. His travels, learning and access to rare texts and Europe’s leading thinkers meant that he could be just such a philosopher, opening up the riches of the Renaissance to the English court.




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During his stay in Antwerp, Dee wrote:

‘When infancy and childhood are past, the choice of a future way of life begins to present itself to young men as a problem. Having hesitated for some time at the crossroads of their wavering judgment, they at last come to a decision: Some (who have fallen in love with truth and virtue) will for the rest of their lives devote their entire energy to the pursuit of philosophy, whilst others (ensnared by the enticements of this world or burning with a desire for riches) cannot but devote all their energies to a life of pleasure and profit.’


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From this earnest assessment, it is clear in which direction Dee imagined he would go. But when he decided to return to England after his lengthy Continental tour, he was to find the choice not as clear-cut as he had assumed.

He arrived at Greenwich Palace on 14 June 1564, accompanied by the Marchioness of Northampton and a slender volume entitled Monas Hieroglyphica, ‘The Hieroglyphic Monad’. The marchioness had arrived in Antwerp in April, as Dee was preparing to come home. She had breast cancer, and was there hoping to benefit from the more advanced medical knowledge found in the Low Countries. Dee offered to accompany her back to England, and in return she promised to reintroduce him to the court.

The first thing he did was show Elizabeth the Monas. He considered it his most important work to date. He said that he had felt ‘pregnant’ with it for seven years, then written it in a fit of intellectual and mystical rapture in just twelve days.

For a man once arrested for ‘calculing’ and still arousing suspicion because of his interest in the ‘uncanny arts’, the presentation of such a work as the Monas to the Queen was risky. It was filled with magical ideas, deeply influenced by Continental thinking, dangerously preoccupied with what churchmen, both Catholic and Protestant, considered pagan matters, combining numerology, the Cabala, astrology, cosmology and mathematics. This may explain why Dee decided to dedicate it not to Elizabeth, but the newly-crowned Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian II, nephew of Charles V of Spain. As Dee had discovered during a stay the previous year at the Emperor’s court in Bratislava, Maximilian was both broad-minded and interested in the sorts of ideas the Monas explored. Dee had no guarantee that Elizabeth would show such an attitude.

His decision to present the work to her could be seen as a sort of test, a way of seeing whether his homeland was ready for the philosopher skilled in the science ‘De Ponderibus mysticis’ that he had told Cecil England lacked and which he had now become.

Elizabeth’s response was encouraging. Intrigued, if baffled, by the Monas, she promised to become Dee’s ‘scholar’ if he disclosed ‘unto her the secrets of that book’.


(#litres_trial_promo) The two of them sat together ‘perusing’ the mysterious work; queen and subject, pupil and master, magician and apprentice. She became, he later proclaimed, a ‘sacred witness’ of its secrets.


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The title refers to a symbol or hieroglyph. The same symbol appeared on the title page on the Propaedeumata. Like the Propaedeumata, Monas comprises a series of theorems. But there the similarities between the two works end. Where the Propaedeumata is about observation and experimentation, the Monas rather arises from pure thought and mystical intuition.

A clue to its meaning is contained in a question posed in Dee’s dedication to Maximilian:

Is it not rare, I ask, that the common astronomical symbols of the planets, instead of being dead, dumb, or, up to the present hour at least, quasi-barbaric signs, should have become characters imbued with immortal life and should now be able to express their especial meanings most eloquently in any tongue and to any nation?


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It was ‘as if in an age long past they had been the same, or as if our forefathers had wished that in the future they would be such’.

In other words, Dee thought that the ‘astronomical’ symbols were relics of a lost universal language that transcended national and, by implication, religious barriers. The aim of the Monas was to test this hypothesis by looking for suggestive structures within the symbols themselves. What Dee claimed to have discovered, the ‘very rarest thing of all’, was that all the symbols could be combined into one, a variant on the sign for Mercury. This symbol formed the central motif of the Monas, exemplifying the unity of the universe.

Despite – or perhaps because of – the book’s inherent dangers, Elizabeth seemed drawn to the Monas. She even suggested she might act upon its findings.


(#litres_trial_promo) In the dedication, Dee wrote that if Maxmilian ‘will look at [the book] with attention, still greater mysteries will present themselves such as we have described in our cosmopolitical theories’.


(#litres_trial_promo) Presumably the same applied to Elizabeth.

Unfortunately, the nature of these ‘cosmopolitical theories’ remains obscure, as the work in which Dee apparently expounded them is lost. Dee later used the term ‘cosmopolitical’ in the sense of cosmopolitan, referring to a more global perspective on political affairs. In one book he described himself as a ‘Cosmopolites’, a ‘Citizen and Member of the whole and only one Mystical City Universal’.


(#litres_trial_promo) Perhaps these theories in some way related to his ideas on imperialism, a vision of world government run according to universal Christian principles.

Whether or not these were the ‘cosmopolitical’ concerns that Dee discussed with Elizabeth, she was beguiled by them, and ‘in most heroical and princely wise did comfort me and encourage me in my studies’.

He needed all the comfort and encouragement he could get, as the book received a less welcome reception in other quarters. ‘University Graduates of high degree’, Dee later wrote, ‘dispraised it, because they understood it not’.


(#litres_trial_promo) He does not say why, but its unorthodox treatment of what were essentially foreign philosophical and mathematical ideas was a likely reason.

Dee’s relationship with English academia had been deteriorating since he left Trinity College in 1548. The first sign of trouble had come in 1554, when he turned down a post to teach the ‘Mathematical Sciences’ at Oxford. The Monas marked a decisive split. In his preface to the English edition of Euclid’s Elements he pointedly identified the book’s readership as ‘unlatined people, and not University scholars’. He increasingly saw the latter as provincial, dogmatic and mathematically illiterate.

This antagonism may have preserved his intellectual freedom, but it came at a high price. An independent mind needs independent means, but, thanks to his father’s catastrophic fall from grace during Mary’s reign, that luxury was denied him. Without the support of an academic stipend, he had to look elsewhere to make a living.

There was only one alternative: the court, which was filled with the very people he had so roundly condemned for becoming ‘ensnared by the enticements of this world or burning with a desire for riches’.



In his poem ‘The Lie’, Sir Walter Raleigh described the court as a place that ‘glows and shines like rotting wood’. Its theatricals were spectacular, often entertaining, but always deadly serious. The stakes were very high: wealth, status, power, or poverty, oblivion and annihilation. In the Presence Chamber of the Queen’s palaces, where the courtiers gathered each day to catch Elizabeth’s attention and, hopefully, her favours, the selective pressures were intense and remorseless. It was survival of the quickest, smartest, prettiest and wittiest.

Everything revolved around Elizabeth. For courtiers such as the poet Sir John Davies, she was literally at the centre of the universe, and they railed against the newfangled Copernicanism espoused by Dee, for fear it might knock her and their whole world off balance. In a poem inspired by the sight of the Queen dancing, Davies wrote:

Only the earth doth stand for ever still,

Her rocks remove not nor her mountains meet;

(Although some wits enricht with learning’s skill

Say heav’n stands firm and that the earth doth fleet

And swiftly turneth under their feet):

Yet, though the earth is ever steadfast seen,

On her broad breast hath dancing ever been.


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Those who fell out of Elizabeth’s orbit found themselves banished into utter darkness, without money, influence or prospects. Following some unrecorded slight or insult, the poet and diplomat Sir Edward Dyer, Dee’s pupil and close, if sometimes troublesome friend, was excluded for years, and driven to the edge of destitution. He eventually won his way back to favour by staging a spectacular pageant featuring himself dressed as a minstrel, singing to the Queen from the branches of an oak tree of his ‘tragical complaint’.


(#litres_trial_promo) Elizabeth was charmed, and patted a place for him by her side.

Dee believed he also had a special place next to Elizabeth. He was one of very few commoners to be honoured with personal visits. Twice, they coincided with Dee’s personal tragedies. The first time she arrived, with the entire Privy Council in attendance, was just four hours after the death of his second wife. On the second occasion, Dee had just buried his beloved mother. On both occasions, Elizabeth refused his befuddled entreaties to come into his house, and offered consolation. Both times Dee anxiously struggled to overcome the awkwardness of the situation by trying to entertain her as she waited outside. During the first visit, he brought out the magical mirror Sir William Pickering had given him, which ‘to her Majestie’s great contentment and delight’ he demonstrated to her.


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He was frequently summoned to court to talk to her about various matters, some of which were quite intimate, such as the prospects for her proposed marriage to the Duke of Anjou. He had become, one commentator noticed, ‘hyr philosopher’.


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He reciprocated such attentions with strong devotion – something she engendered in many of her courtiers, who often translated their dependence upon her into expressions of rapturous love. He devised a special symbol, a capital letter ‘E’ topped with a crown, which he used to refer to her in his diaries. Minutely noting every favour she granted, he refused to blame her for the many denied.

In January, 1568, he gave copies of a new edition of Propaedeumata to William Cecil and the Earl of Pembroke to present to her. Three days later Dee heard back from Pembroke of her ‘gracious accepting and well liking of the said book’.


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On 16 February he was invited to Westminster Palace. He approached her in the palace gallery, Elizabeth’s preferred location for informal, unscheduled and confidential meetings, as she could pick out from the courtiers hovering nervously those she wished to talk to. Today it was her philosopher’s turn and their conversation quickly moved on from a discussion of the Propaedeumata’s astronomical findings to something more sensational. He revealed to her ‘the great secret for my sake to be disclosed unto her Majesty by Nicolaus Grudius Nicolai, sometime one of the Secretaries to the Emperor Charles the Fifth’.


(#litres_trial_promo) He never let on what this secret was, and little is known about Grudius, a Belgian poet. Dee noted his death in 1569 in one of his books, describing him as a ‘friend’. They also shared the same publisher in Antwerp, Willem Silvius.


(#litres_trial_promo) The assumption is that Grudius’s secret related to alchemy, a recurring interest among European monarchs desperate to find easier ways of filling coffers regularly depleted by wars.

The promise of such mystical revelations undoubtedly drew Elizabeth to Dee and her appetite for them drew him to her. Elizabeth had a profound sense of the forces of the cosmos acting upon her, and regarded her monarchical powers as magical in some way. For example, she was an enthusiastic practitioner of the ‘royal touch’. In this rite, which had origins reaching back at least to the reign of Henry II, a monarch would touch the neck of a sufferer of epilepsy or scrofula (a painful and disfiguring inflammation of the lymph glands which was also known as ‘the king’s evil’), who would then be cured. Elizabeth’s touch appeared so effective, it was often cited as vindication of her claim to the throne and proof that the Pope’s attempt to excommunicate her had been vetoed by God.

Not all the water in the rough rude sea

Can wash the balm off from an anointed king,

…as Shakespeare put it.


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Dee understood better than anyone how the magical balm worked. He could help Elizabeth make the most of it and become an adept at the magical practice of monarchy. However, as he was to discover, even these powers were not enough to levitate him above life’s necessities.




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Light miles upstream from the city of London along the Thames’s meandering course lies the village of Mortlake. According to dubious tradition, its name means ‘dead lake’. No such lake exists there now, nor in recorded history, though in the distant past one may have gathered on the bend of the river, a dark pool perhaps fouled with the rotting remains of plague or war victims. A less picturesque explanation, suggested by Daniel Lysons in his 1792 survey of London, is that the name comes from the Saxon ‘mortlage’, meaning a compulsory law.


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The village that Lysons described in the late eighteenth century was much as it had been in the sixteenth, a small community that had expanded gently over the centuries. It served the stream of river and road traffic that passed by every day, delivering goods and travellers between London and the towns and palaces upstream. Two thousand acres in size, part of the manor of Wimbledon, it comprised a modest church, a cluster of houses mostly concentrated along the Thames tow-path, and a few asparagus fields.

Even without its dead lake, Lysons found that Mortlake had its local legends. One was recorded by Raphael Holinshed, a contemporary of Dee’s and source for Shakespeare’s history plays, who wrote of a monstrous fish caught there in 1240. Another legend Lysons mentioned was that the village had once held the extraordinary library and laboratory of the great conjuror John Dee.

In 1672, Elias Ashmole, planning a biography of Dee which was never written, visited Mortlake to interview the village’s oldest inhabitant, eighty-year-old Goodwife Faldo, who was the last surviving link with the time Dee lived there.

Her memories were vivid. Dee was ‘very handsome’, tall and slender with a fair complexion, smartly dressed in an ‘artists’ gown’ with hanging sleeves, and sporting a long ‘picked’ (pointed) beard which in old age turned snowy white. Faldo recalled how children ran screaming from him because he was ‘accounted a conjuror’, how he would act as a ‘great Peacemaker’ among squabbling adults, and how neighbours would ask his advice on the most trifling domestic problems.

Faldo remembered an incident concerning a basket of pewter tableware that had been sent to London to be polished for a wedding. The job done, the basket was delivered to a prearranged spot on the banks of the Thames to be collected by the boatman Robert Bryan. But Bryan took the wrong basket, and the furious owner found his gleaming pewter substituted by beef tripe. By means that Faldo could not fathom, Dee directed the hapless boatman to a woman in nearby Wandsworth. It turned out the tripe was hers, and she told Bryan he would find the plate still sitting by the river, as she had found it too heavy to carry home.

This ambiguous image of the cunning wizard and wise seer was enhanced by Dee’s impressive connections with foreigners and powerful courtiers. Many such figures came through Mortlake, en route between the Queen’s palaces at Westminster, Greenwich, Richmond, Nonsuch and Hampton Court. Faldo recalled Dee frequently visiting nearby Barn Elms, the home of Sir Francis Walsingham and later the Earl of Essex, Queen Elizabeth’s most rebellious favourite and husband of Walsingham’s daughter Frances. Dee had also once taken Faldo and her mother to Richmond Palace, so they could watch a royal dinner with the King of Denmark.

At the age of just six, Faldo (and her mother) had been invited into Dee’s home, where in a darkened room he showed them the image of a solar eclipse projected through a pinhole.


(#litres_trial_promo) Despite the reactions of the village’s other children, Faldo seemed quite unafraid of entering Dee’s strange world of ancient manuscripts, intricate devices and chemical smells, walking into the labyrinthine corridors of what by then had become one of the most extraordinary residences in Europe.

Dee had moved to Mortlake out of necessity. Despite the Queen’s welcome on his return from the Continent in 1564, he found life in England far from convivial. The Marchioness of Northampton, whom he had escorted back from Antwerp, had secured the promise of the deanery of Gloucester when it fell vacant, as was imminently expected. It was just the sort of post he needed, promising to provide him with the secure and undemanding living he needed to continue his philosophical work. However, in April 1565, when the marchioness finally succumbed to breast cancer, so did his claim to the deanery. Such offices were entangled with growing antagonisms at court, the tensions between Robert Dudley (just made Earl of Leicester), the leader of the militant Protestant faction and the Duke of Norfolk, the nation’s most senior peer and focus of Catholic sympathies. Dee’s religious loyalties were not delineated clearly enough to arouse the support of either, so he was swept aside in favour of John Man, a radical Protestant who later became Bishop of Gloucester.

Dee did not help the situation by being so inept at cultivating aristocratic patrons. He attended court irregularly, and then only to see the Queen. Robert Dudley had known Dee when he was appointed to the household of his father the Duke of Northumberland in 1553, and would have been an excellent potential benefactor, yet Dee did not dedicate a single work to him. Rather, he eulogised Robert’s brother John, Earl of Warwick, in his Mathematicall Praeface, who had died in 1554.

He seemed to put as much effort into befriending Elizabeth’s servants as her courtiers, welcoming both her Italian dwarf, Tomasina and a ‘Mr Fosku’ of the Queen’s wardrobe to Mortlake.

His hopes that the Queen herself might offer him a post as court philosopher were wildly optimistic. There was certainly a demand for philosophical advice of all sorts: astrological, alchemical, theological, even medical. When a wax effigy of Elizabeth stuck with pig bristles was found under a tree in Lincoln’s Inn Fields; when a ‘blazing star’ appeared in the sky; when the Queen fell sick with a mysterious illness – it was Dee who was called upon to advise. Even on strategic matters, such as the maintenance of a navy or the management of trade, he could expect an eager audience. But whenever the court summoned him, it was as a diligent subject not a paid professional. Only the sophisticated and lavish households of Continental monarchs could afford professional court philosophers. In England, they were considered an unnecessary luxury. For there were Ladies-in-Waiting, Gentlemen-of-the-Wardrobe, even Grooms-of-the-Stool, but no masters of philosophy.




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