The Arch Conjuror of England (15 page)

Like Pantheus's method, de Lannoy's embraced both medicine and transmutation. He could distil a compound called ‘pantaura’ which incorporated the virtues of ?'the soul of the world’ to heal diseases instantly. His method involved multiplying his ‘medicine’ through progressive multiples of ten, to which Dee attributed such kabbalistic significance in his
Monas
. As Thomas Tymme later interpreted the
Monas
, ‘By the DENARIE is meant the Multiplication of Gold and Silver, by the perfection of the Medicine, from 1 to 10, from 10 to 100, & so by the Number to a Number infinite by Arithmetical proportion’. Dee still believed this in 1607.
²⁹
De Lannoy similarly offered to use one part of his ‘medicine’ to transmute ten or a hundred or a thousand parts of pure gold into medicine of the ‘second order’, a ruby stone like the phoenix, ‘having besides many other colours’. Ground to fine powder, this would turn a hundred or a thousand times as much molten lead into pure gold.
³⁰
He could also make pure gold worth annually £33,000, and diamonds, emeralds and other precious stones. Ten pieces of gold could multiply into one thousand within four months.
³¹

Cecil's enthusiastic response again suggests that beneath the grave exterior of his stuffy official portraits beat the excitable heart of a speculator in occult philosophy. His retention of Charnock's book, like his enthusiasm for de Lannoy, attests to his lifelong fascination with alchemy, which, as with Dee, began during his education in Aristotelian natural philosophy at St John's, Cambridge. He acquired the texts of Geber and others after 1545. That shared experience partly explains his patronage of
Dee. In 1552 Cecil employed as secretary the geographer Richard Eden, who had spent the previous three years seeking the philosopher's stone.
³²
When Eden successfully sought Cecil's patronage in 1562, he appealed to Cecil's ‘pleasure in the wonderful works of Art and nature’, the standard euphemism for alchemy, ‘wherin doubtless shineth the spark of the divine spirit that God hath given you’.

Eden enclosed a treatise describing a model of the universe ‘moved by the same spirit of life wherby … all nature is moved’. This derived from ‘The Material of the Philosopher's Stone’. He concluded that his alchemical discoveries would have delighted their old Cambridge friend Sir John Cheke, ‘As I know the divine spark of knowledge that is in your Honour partly received of him, will move you to do the like’.
³³
Cheke was Dee's connection to Cecil, Elizabeth's teacher, and Cecil's brother-in-law and tutor. Cheke doubtless instilled the same ‘divine spark’ in Elizabeth. This accounts for the treatise on the philosopher's stone amongst Cecil's papers and explains why he carefully filed away offers of alchemical medicines to cure his chronic illnesses.
³⁴

In fact, though de Lannoy has been dismissed as a plausible conman, his reception demonstrates how the prospect of alchemical transmutation fascinated Elizabeth's inner circle. Faced by an empty royal treasury, Elizabeth and Cecil willingly believed de Lannoy's promises to transmute gold worth £33,000 a year. The Queen supplied him with Somerset House, another house in the country, all his materials, and expensive equipment, plus monthly living expenses for his family and servants. By March 1565 Cecil had paid their travelling expenses, and Elizabeth awarded de Lannoy the enormous pension of £120 per annum, which Cecil ensured he received each quarter, in advance. Dee spent much of his life vainly petitioning for such support.

By August, despite Elizabeth's pressure for quick results, de Lannoy was complaining about shoddy English glass and pottery vessels, and sending to Antwerp and Kassel for specialist alchemical replacements. To modern eyes this looks like delaying tactics. Yet Armigall Waad, who managed de Lannoy for Cecil, reported that de Lannoy was using the elixir only to transmute gold for himself.
³⁵
Elizabeth visited the laboratory
at Somerset House and demanded de Lannoy's copy of an alchemical manuscript. She practised her own alchemy in her Privy Chamber – de Lannoy assumed that she knew how to proceed.
³⁶
When in July 1566 Waad reported de Lannoy's boast that he had omitted crucial sections from the manuscript, Elizabeth demanded that he provide another copy to check against her own.
³⁷

All this suggests that Elizabeth, Cecil and Dudley, now Earl of Leicester – whose interest in occult philosophy matched the Queen's – believed the elixir really worked. Even Waad considered that de Lannoy's complaints, delays and evasions were a cover not for fraud but for the alchemist's self-enrichment. De Lannoy's growing reputation gave him fabulous lines of credit. In mid-January 1566 Princess Cecilia of Sweden, currently visiting Elizabeth, borrowed £10,000 from de Lannoy, who had formerly served the King of Sweden, and a further £13,000 in early March, and these transactions were quickly revealed to Cecil. By the end of March, Waad believed de Lannoy and the princess were plotting to escape to the Netherlands together. But Waad still promised Cecil the greatest gift ever given to a Queen, ‘the projection of the medicine to be done before her highness, first by me and afterward by her Majesty's own hand’. The most fanciful stories about Elizabeth have not dared to conjure this real vision of her moving restlessly among her alembics and pelicans, endlessly seeking the elixir to repair the ravages of the smallpox, fight the decay of her aging body, and halt time itself, as in her motto
semper eadem
, ‘always the same’.
³⁸

The prospect of losing the elixir, rather than suspicion about de Lannoy's claims, explains why Elizabeth first restricted his movements, then removed him with his laboratory to the Tower.
³⁹
For Waad had uncovered de Lannoy's escape plans and firmly believed that he had ‘The Medicine or Elixir [which] he will carry with him upon his own person together with the book of the art’. If the Queen arrested him en route, ‘her Majestie shall come by the Art and the thing itself’.
⁴⁰
De Lannoy still exuded great confidence in late May ‘and speaketh words every inch of a foot and a half long’ when Waad forestalled another escape plot.
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Waad continued to suspect de Lannoy of defrauding the Queen by trying to keep the gold. In July he interrogated him in the Tower about his method.
It involved multiplying the ‘medicine’ as in ‘Voarchadumia’. However, Waad calculated that this would produce not just the Queen's £33,000 but almost £825,000, four times the annual income of the Crown.
⁴²

Therefore, Cecil continued to pay de Lannoy's expenses in August 1566, when he removed his furnaces to the Tower. But in early 1567 Cecil lost patience and transferred de Lannoy to a cell. From there the prisoner desperately petitioned Cecil and Leicester, promising to transmute lead with the red powder in just two days.
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Cecil's disgusted diary entry for February 1567 that ‘Cornelius Lanoy, a Dutchman, [was] committed to the Tower for abusing the Q[ueen's] majesty in Somerset House in promising to make the Elixir’ and ‘to convert any Metal into Gold’ should not be taken as evidence of general scepticism about alchemy. Rather it reflects Cecil's disappointment with this specific alchemist, upon whom he had pinned great hopes. He kept de Lannoy in the Tower until at least 1571.
⁴⁴

In 1568 Cecil questioned the English ambassador to France about an Italian alchemist who had written asking to be ‘entertained’, even though the Queen ‘will in no wise hear of any such offers, which she thinketh are but chargeable without Fruit’. Elizabeth may have been burnt by her experience with de Lannoy, but Cecil remained an inveterate gambler regarding alchemy's ability to restore the royal finances and ‘had earnestly moved her Majesty to have adventured some small piece of Money upon such a man’.
⁴⁵

Dee may have partly inspired Elizabeth and Cecil's patronage of de Lannoy. However, the Court fashion that the Queen and her Secretary thus encouraged seriously affected Dee's career, because Prestall seized the opportunity to obtain his release from the Tower by trumpeting his own alchemical abilities. Armigall Waad's first extant report to Cecil about de Lannoy in August 1565 passed on Prestall's request: ‘to remember your honour of his suit. He sayeth that being granted that he might at liberty be conversant among us he would do great service’.
⁴⁶
One of Prestall's many get-rich-quick schemes had required a licence ‘for to make gold of other metal (which I can do) as is well known’.
⁴⁷

Dee may have failed to fulfil the Earl of Pembroke's alchemical demands, for Pembroke took up Prestall's case. Over the next eighteen
months he repeatedly petitioned Cecil and Elizabeth for Prestall's pardon, undertaking Prestall would keep his alchemical promises. Pembroke claimed to be motivated by Prestall's ‘great offer’ to restore Pembroke's declining health through alchemy, but Cecil knew better. Prestall's pardon of 6 January 1567 for treason, conspiracy and ‘all conjurations of evil spirits’, Cecil drily noted, represented the Queen's New Year's gift to Pembroke after ‘Prestall's offers by Ar[migall] Wade to convert silver into gold’. By that time, de Lannoy's refusal or inability to keep his agreement with Elizabeth made Prestall seem a plausible alternative.
⁴⁸
Dee evidently felt unable to compete with Prestall in making gold, for he responded to Pembroke's patronage of his bitter rival by once again addressing his
Monas
to Maximilian II.

By 27 January 1567, within weeks of Prestall's release, Dee had translated the 1564
Monas
into German, including the long dedication to the now Emperor Maximilian. Dee intended this previously unknown manuscript as a presentation copy, since the book was written out in a careful German hand. Its current location in Heidelberg suggests that Dee sent the manuscript to the Emperor, though there is no record of any response.
⁴⁹

Later in 1567 Dee therefore revised his
Propaedeumata aphoristica
, exploiting the current vogue for alchemy by inserting key alchemical ideas from his
Monas
into
Propaedeumata
, which had focused on the measurement of occult rays. His additions included an example of kabbalistic
notarikon
from Pantheus's
Voarchadumia
, which he claimed would be understood by ‘pyrologians’, or alchemists.
⁵⁰
He also added a discussion of talismans and of how catoptrics, the science of mirrors, could concentrate the ‘hidden virtues of things’ to advance alchemy. He referred to his
Monas
to explain all the alchemical symbols enclosed in the Monad.
⁵¹
He also re-emphasised the correspondences between supercelestial, celestial and terrestrial events. He cited Biblical numerology to sanction the sevenfold purgations and compoundings by which the ‘Holy Art’ made the philosopher's stone, explaining the added hint about prolonging human life.
⁵²
Altogether the revised
Propaedeumata
shows how the alchemical focus of Dee's
Monas
had increased his belief in the celestial influences.

Dee hoped that the revised book would secure him patronage by addressing the current Court fascination with alchemy. It appeared on 9 January 1568, and the next day Dee hurried to present the first copy to Cecil. Again his timing was off, since the de Lannoy fiasco had temporarily dampened Elizabeth's interest in alchemy and ‘Voarchadumia’. So Cecil cleverly suggested that Pembroke should present a copy to the Queen. Three days later Pembroke assured Dee that Elizabeth had liked the book. Yet she was in no mood to reward his efforts, and he had to make do with £20 from Pembroke.
⁵³

The revised book did, however, bring Dee to Elizabeth's notice again, and late in February they had ‘very gracious talk’ in the Privy Chamber at Westminster. This exceptional access also seems connected with alchemy. Dee's European travels had acquainted him with Nicolaus Nicolai Grudius, former secretary to Charles V, who now administered the Order of the Golden Fleece, a symbol laden with Habsburg alchemical resonances. According to Dee, his conversation with Elizabeth concerned ‘the great secret for my sake to be disclosed unto her Majesty’ by Grudius.

Undoubtedly this unexplained ‘secret’ concerned alchemy. Yet ‘God best knoweth’, complained Dee, what caused the whole scheme to fall through. In fact, Grudius was in deep financial trouble, and like de Lannoy probably saw Elizabeth's money as his solution. However, badly burnt by de Lannoy, Elizabeth issued no invitation. Later that year Grudius fled to Venice to escape his creditors, leaving the finances of the Order in chaos.
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Dee's attempts at securing patronage for his intellectual version of alchemy never quite succeeded, though he would persist, even when the greatest political crisis of the reign soon revived slanders against him.

I
N
F
EBRUARY
1570 Dee complained in his ‘Mathematical Preface’ about Vincent Murphyn's intensifying slanders. This reflects Dee's involvement with high politics in the previous year. When Mary Queen of Scots escaped to England in June 1568, she further destabilised a Court already worried by Elizabeth's reluctance to marry and by the threat of an uncertain succession. Cecil still schemed to exclude Mary, but Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk, imagined he could solve Britain's dynastic problems by marrying her, expecting that their children would rule the united British Isles.
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