The Arch Conjuror of England (16 page)

By February 1569 an aristocratic group supporting Norfolk, including Leicester, and under his influence Pembroke, appeared ready to press this solution, which would break what they considered Cecil's monopoly over Elizabeth's counsels. Elizabeth, appreciating that such a marriage threatened her authority and survival, faced down Cecil's opponents. The immediate crisis passed. Yet in that turbulent summer of 1569 Mary's supporters, the Earls of Northumberland and Westmoreland, began gathering their followers.
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Prestall became caught in the middle, just like Pembroke, the patron he shared with Dee, though it seems unlikely that Pembroke ordered Prestall to help the rebels.
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Official propaganda later accused him of practising a ‘great treason with certain persons’, suggesting he joined Mary's English Catholic partisans in madcap plans to seize the
Tower and overthrow Elizabeth.
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However, with the rising tension over the succession, Prestall's abilities in divining the future again came into play. He seems to have made yet more predictions about Elizabeth's imminent death, which were quickly taken up in political prophecies designed to encourage the rebels. Years later, William Camden, one of the few to mention Prestall in print, explained that in response loyal courtiers began the glittering Accession Day Tilts on 17 November 1570, to defy the ‘light-believing Papists’ who swallowed the illusory predictions of ‘Wizards’ such as Prestall. Under pressure, in late 1569 Prestall again had to flee abroad just ahead of Cecil's agents, this time to Scotland.
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However, he left behind many who believed in his prophecies. In September 1569 Lord Wentworth, the Privy Council's eye on the Duke of Norfolk at his power base around Norwich, informed Cecil that Richard Cavendish, Leicester's go-between to Mary, had been spreading rumours that ‘it is concluded by Astronomy that the Scottish Damsel shall be Queen, and the Duke the Husband’.
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After Elizabeth disgraced Norfolk in 1571, Cecil's investigators pursued this line with the Duke and his intimate servants. They asked whether Norfolk's servants had heard of Englishmen ‘who travailed by Astronomy, or Art Magic … to understand what should become of the Scottish Queen, of her marriage, or of the Person that should succeed the Queen's Majesty that now is’. The answers prompted the Privy Council to ask Norfolk himself ‘What Prophecy or Writing have you seen’, that ‘
The moon [Mary] shall be exalted and the Lion [Elizabeth] cast down?
’ Though Norfolk dismissed ‘foolish Prophecies’, he admitted he had seen ‘above sixty’ of them.
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This blizzard of political prophecies, connecting Norfolk with the Earls of Northumberland and Westmoreland's Northern Rebellion of November 1569, continued to worry senior royal servants. Investigators questioned one of the diehard rebels, seeking to learn ‘What Books of Prophecies hath he seen touching the late Rebellion, and the Duke's Imprisonment?‘
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In Scotland, Prestall obtained protection from Lord Maxwell, Mary's devoted supporter and a key figure behind the Northern Rebellion. Cecil considered Prestall enough of a threat to contemplate a cross-border raid to seize him. However, Prestall ingratiated himself by coining alchemical
gold and silver, not only buying Maxwell's protection but that of Maxwell's enemy the Regent, the Earl of Moray, normally Cecil's ally against Mary.
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Northumberland and Westmoreland's disorganised rebellion quickly collapsed, sending them with many of their Catholic supporters across the border to join Prestall. All were condemned in their absence in early 1570, and the following June, threatened by repeated English raids across the border against Maxwell, Prestall fled with other rebel leaders to Spanish-controlled Antwerp.
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Dee's role in forcing Prestall into another embittered exile remains murky. He could have informed Norfolk about Prestall's plots through Pembroke and especially Edward Dyer, who corresponded with Norfolk during the latter's imprisonment in the Tower in 1569.
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Norfolk tried to buy himself some goodwill with Elizabeth by revealing Prestall's designs. Dyer remained Dee's most important knowledge broker to the Court for the next thirty years.
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Vincent Murphyn seemingly blamed Dee, perhaps again hoping to deflect attention from Prestall. George Ferrers, who had accused Dee of sorcery in 1555, remained an active partisan of Mary in 1569, suggesting another possible reason for Murphyn to redouble his verbal slanders against Dee.
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He used the line favoured by later Catholic propaganda. Alleged plots against Elizabeth had been invented by Cecil and Leicester, the real ‘conjurators’ or plotters, whose ‘conjuration’ bewitched the Queen by ‘sorcery’, so that even she, ‘of so rare wisdom, for a woman’, failed to penetrate their self-interested policies.
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Similarly, barely six months after Prestall fled, Dee's ‘Mathematical Preface’ complained how ‘the Common peevish Prattler’ and ‘malicious scorner’, Murphyn, forged slanders ‘by Word and print’ that Dee was ‘A dangerous Member in the Common Wealth: and no member of the Church of Christ’ but followed the Devil.
¹⁵

Unfortunately for Dee, the death in prison of his former friend and patron Edmund Bonner on 5 September 1569 revived memories of the Marian persecution right in the middle of the crisis. An immediate wave of publications excoriated Bonner's bloody cruelty. For a while he became a stock monster on the popular stage.
¹⁶
Murphyn was riding this wave for all he was worth. Foxe's 1570
Acts and Monuments
not only retained Philpot's contemptuous dismissal of Dee's theological learning but
included a new marginal comment that ‘M[aster] Dee slippeth away’, emphasising his learning in ‘other things’.
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Although Foxe retained Green's mention of Dee's friendly treatment, he still included amongst Philpot's pastoral letters the contradictory view of ‘Doctor Dee the great conjuror’ in Murphyn's forged anonymous letter.
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If memories of Dee's actions under Mary had ever faded, this republication brought them to the attention of a new generation of Protestants and explains Dee's vehement self-defence in the 1577
Memorials
.

Dee's search for patronage through his occult philosophy also became more complicated. Prestall remained in exile, plotting to assassinate Cecil and Elizabeth by magic, trying to persuade the Spanish to invade England, or selling out his fellow exiles to curry favour with Cecil.
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Pembroke died in March 1570, leaving Dee without an obvious patron. His indirect response again places some well known features of Elizabethan Court culture in a new light.

About 1570 the courtier-explorer Humphrey Gilbert proposed the ‘Erection of an Academy in London for education of her Majesty's wards and other the youth of nobility and gentlemen’. Besides the traditional rhetorical and physical exercises, the teaching of humanities and letters, Gilbert proposed practical training for future Crown servants. These included applying arithmetic and geometry to fortification and gunnery, cosmography and astronomy, ‘the art of Navigation’, and the ‘rules of proportion and necessary perspective and mensuration’ for drawing maps and charts. Dee had taught all of these and more to students at Mortlake since 1566 and had advocated their use in his ‘Mathematical Preface’ to Euclid's
Elements of Geometry
in February 1570, which helped to advertise his teaching. The connection between Gilbert's suggestions and Dee's advocacy has not been noticed before. Such parallels might be expected, since Dee advised Gilbert on his scheme for exploring the North-West Passage to Cathay in 1567, and they remained close.
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Moreover, Gilbert proposed staffing his ‘Academy’ with a natural philosopher and physician, two of Dee's many roles. They would teach alchemy, and Gilbert may have been trying to create a job for Dee. Gilbert's confidence that training in alchemy would prepare the next
generation of England's leaders seems so alien to the modern world that historians have ignored it, but Gilbert was part of a large network of nobility and gentry who avidly pursued the philosopher's stone. He therefore expected a positive response from the alchemical devotee Cecil, who just happened to be Master of the Queen's Wards, to the idea that, like Elizabeth, they would ‘by the fire and otherwise … search and try out the secrets of nature’. The alchemical teachers would write annual reports on ‘their proofs and trials’, ‘without Equivocations or Enigmatical phrases’. Most importantly, they would record both successes and failures, to enlighten others about ‘both the way of their working and the event thereof, the better to follow the good and avoid the evil’. This important step towards a scientific method would ‘bring great things to light if in Alchomistery there be any such things hidden’. Gilbert fully expected the adepts to transmute metals into gold.
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Gilbert's alchemical reporting exactly parallels one of Dee's few surviving alchemical notebooks, for July to October 1581. Dee's notes reflect the mathematical element in his alchemical thinking, buried under the cosmic allusions of the
Monas
. He later complained to Landgrave Moritz of Hessen-Kassel that ‘Mathematical studies are certain’ and follow ‘a plausible method’, but that vulgar alchemical studies require us to grasp ‘enigmas and metaphors’. His alchemical diary therefore records precise quantities and avoids enigmatic, metaphorical descriptions of substances. It thus marks Dee's belated recognition of the Court's utilitarian requirements. He plainly named and quantified his materials, the dates and times of putting them to the furnace to assess the astrological influences upon them, their changes in appearance, and his procedures. Just as the ‘Academy’ proposals required, Dee reported both successful and unsuccessful experiments, and attempted to explain his failures.
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Projected annual running costs of £3,000 meant Gilbert's ‘Academy’ remained another paper gathering dust in Cecil's bulging files. However, it indicates the Court's general acceptance of alchemy. The ‘Academy’ would have enabled Dee to expand his practical alchemy further at Mortlake, which required three alchemical laboratories by 1583. The ‘Academy’ would also have provided Dee with the institutional
independence from patronage that he would seek at St Cross College, Winchester, in the 1590s, where his ‘works Philosophical’ under Elizabeth's protection would attract ‘special men’ from all over Europe.
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The year after Gilbert's proposal, Dee undertook alchemical work for Henry and Mary Sidney. His connection with the Sidney clan had possibly begun at Gravesend. Henry had discussed alchemy at length with Cornelius de Lannoy in November 1565, when Sidney's finances were more than usually chaotic.
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Twenty years later Dee still kept Mary (Dudley) Sidney's ‘many letters’ from 1571 ‘inviting me to Court’. Mary gave Elizabeth a pelican jewel in 1573, and her alchemical experiments, assisted by Adrian Gilbert, Humphrey's brother, were common knowledge. Adrian became notorious as ‘a great chemist, and a man of excellent parts’, though ‘very sarcastic, and the greatest buffoon in the nation’. Adrian later assisted Mary's daughter, Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, with her alchemy. Her brother Philip Sidney studied alchemy alongside Edward Dyer under Dee.
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That did not prevent Philip from privately sneering at Dee's belief in his hieroglyphic monad.
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Until 1573 the Sidneys controlled extensive ironworks in the Weald and Wales. Dee had amassed a complete modern library on ironworking.
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Like Pembroke, Cecil and Leicester, Henry Sidney held shares in the Mines Royal, from which Dee later leased mines.
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However, in late March 1571 Henry returned to Court from Ireland facing political and financial ruin from his failure as Lord Deputy. He had won the position by offering to subcontract the government of Ireland on the cheap. Unfortunately, his strategic and political blunders provoked rebellion, which the Crown only suppressed at staggering expense, devastating Sidney's fortunes. Mary Dudley Sidney had already complained of poverty and debt, and in May 1572 Henry felt too poor to accept Elizabeth's offer of a peerage.
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Mary's several letters to Dee, now lost, probably discussed her hopes of restoring her family's financial and political fortunes by alchemy.

However, as de Lannoy had complained, English glass makers could not produce the specialised clear-glass vessels that Dee needed to observe the successive colour changes of alchemical processes. So within weeks of
Henry's return to Court, Dee left for Lorraine, guided to specialised manufacturers there by skilled workers from Lorraine recently settled in London. He returned via Paris, where on 31 May 1571 he purchased two of Guillaume Postel's books on mankind's first language.
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Elizabeth supported the journey with a generous passport. Dee travelled with her highly regarded Chancery clerk, Thomas Powle, a venerable fifty-seven years old. They returned with cart-loads of ‘purposely made vessels’ of pottery, metal and glass, some intended for the Queen.

When Dee returned seriously ill, Elizabeth sent her own physicians with Mary Sidney to check on his condition and the success of his mission. By now Dee was notorious enough for rumours of his death to reach distant Worcester by June, from where a client of Leicester's begged for Dee's living of Upton-upon-Severn.
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Twenty years later English alchemical vessels had improved, for Dee would seek appointment to St Cross partly to be close to the glasshouses of Sussex for ‘my exercises in Perspective and other works Philosophical’.
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Dee's illness may have prevented him from performing alchemy for the Sidneys; no evidence about it survives. Nonetheless, they probably enlisted Dee's expertise, since at the time other leading courtiers were investing in what came to be called ‘The Society for the New Art’. This promised great riches by performing alchemy on an industrial scale. The intrigues that surrounded the ‘Society’ explain Vincent Murphyn's continuing attacks on Dee as the ‘Arch-Conjuror’ in the 1570s. For Murphyn's circle attacked the ‘Society’ through the same words and methods he used against Dee. Murphyn's accusations about Dee's ‘conjuring’ are part of wider disputes amongst Elizabethan occult philosophers, which have been forgotten until now.