The Arch Conjuror of England (28 page)

Burghley's letter of late February summarising Dee's ‘Plain Discourse’ for Walsingham to read to Elizabeth prompted Walsingham to connect calendar reform with Grindal's disgrace. The letter also revealed that Grindal had agreed to resign on 25 March, obeying Elizabeth's recent demand.
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Walsingham thus chose to send his peremptory letter of 18 March to Grindal in the hands of John Dee. Superficially this seemed
logical, since Dee could explain his ‘Discourse’. However, it would also remind Grindal that the reformed calendar was a power-play by the Antichristian papacy and would underline the insidious conjuring forces Rome deployed.

This was why Walsingham's letter suggested that Grindal consult ‘him of Lincoln’, meaning Thomas Cooper, Bishop of Lincoln. Again this appeared reasonable, because Cooper had published a universal
Chronicle
and therefore presumably knew something about chronology.
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Yet Cooper was also industriously reforming his clergy by rooting out closet Catholics, whom he despised for their ‘Necromancy’ and ‘Apparition of spirits’ to confirm their Antichristian doctrines.
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This included John Dee. On 20 August 1576 Cooper's officials recorded the verdict on Dee's ministry at Long Leadenham: ‘does not reside; neither is he in holy orders; vehemently suspected in religion; an astronomer [astrologer], not a theologian’. Therefore, Cooper demanded Dee's proof of holy orders, and a properly signed dispensation for also holding Upton-upon-Severn, against the canon law.
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Dee could hardly admit his Catholic ordination to Cooper, who detested those priests who under Mary had ‘revolted from Christ to the
Mammon
their Mass’ and who also revered Philpot's memory.
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Worse, although Elizabeth had told Hatton to write in support, Grindal had refused Dee's dispensation in late 1576. His reluctance probably reflected Dee's conjuring reputation. Grindal's diocesan visitations attacked clergy using ‘charms, sorceries, enchantments, witchcraft, soothsaying, or any such like devilish device’. He had demanded ‘extraordinary punishment’ for a Catholic priest using ‘magic and conjuration’.
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Lacking his dispensation, Dee exploited the labyrinthine appeals process until 1581.
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He again petitioned for his dispensation in June 1582. Grindal's sequestration invalidated any document he signed and sealed, so Dr William Aubrey acted as his administrative vicar-general. Luckily for Dee, Aubrey was his cousin, and though sickness that summer allowed Grindal to procrastinate further, Aubrey sealed the dispensation in late 1582.
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Ironically, reforming the calendar so preoccupied Dee that he missed the deadline to secure Elizabeth's Great Seal ratifying the
document.
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The process ground on until Dee was finally deprived of Long Leadenham on 15 June 1584.
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In March 1583 Dee escaped an embarrassing confrontation with Cooper, who had left London. However, he still had to face Grindal, who resented the pressure over Dee's dispensation. Certainly, Dee blamed personal animus by ‘the Bishops’ for his consequent loss of £1,000 in rent from his two rectories.
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The deprivation does seem vindictive, especially since, unusually for the Elizabethan Church, his long-standing curate at Long Leadenham, Richard Lange, became rector.
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As for his calendar work, ‘I had small thanks at their hands … nay, great hindrance’. He connected that refusal with Grindal's foot-dragging about ‘her Majesty's absolute intent’ for his dispensation.
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For Walsingham well knew that Grindal had intimate knowledge of Dee's persecution of Philpot in 1555. He had carefully scrutinised Philpot's account smuggled out of England, before passing it to John Foxe.
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Therefore, Grindal knew about Dee's Catholic orders, his chaplaincy to the hated Bonner, his reputation as the ‘Great Conjuror’, and the scandal whipped up by Murphyn's forgeries. The frail, blind archbishop's reaction to Walsingham's commands – that he must both accept Dee's ‘Plain Discourse’ from its author and use his assistance in approving the revised calendar – can be imagined from the vehemence with which Grindal and his fellow bishops rejected the innovation as Antichristian.
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Their reply on 4 April 1583 deplored the hasty imposition of the new calendar. Because the change particularly affected ‘the service of the church’, their opinion should prevail, especially since accepting the Pope's device would split the English and European reformed Churches. Such profound alteration in God's worship required careful discussion, not only with Convocation but also with all the foreign reformed Churches. Moreover, only another Church general council could alter Nicaea's Church calendar. The popish Council of Trent had excluded much of Christendom. Parliament must also revise the Book of Common Prayer legislated in 1559.

However, the bishops mainly rejected Gregory's innovation because of its origins. Obeying 2 Corinthians 6, they refused to communicate in
anything with ‘the Church of Antichrist’. Nothing could be received from Antichrist without making it appear that England would receive other papal innovations. They particularly wanted to avoid the impression that they feared the Pope's Bull threatening to excommunicate anyone who refused the Gregorian calendar. Giving that impression, when papal Bulls had presumptuously excommunicated Elizabeth, would encourage English papists and ‘offend the weak brethren’. Nor could any pretence that Elizabeth acted independently avoid the implication that she merely obeyed the Pope.

We can only speculate how much Grindal's knowledge of Dee's compromised past encouraged this focus on Antichrist's wily subversion. But in one respect the bishops directly rebutted Dee's justifications. His insistence that the new calendar must be enforced before the Apocalypse in November they simply turned on its head. Dee might have astrological grounds for his fears, but since ‘the latter day’ indeed approached, the new calendar was of ‘no great importance’ because there could not be much further alteration ‘in the order and course of the year’. Dee wanted to harmonise time with Nature, but the bishops faced the Apocalypse with dismissive contempt for worldly concerns: ‘the Pope might very well have spared his labour’.
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Unlike her crushing response to Grindal's resistance about the ‘exercises’, Elizabeth quickly backed down over the calendar. She probably dismissed the appeals to international Protestant opinion and vapourings about Antichrist's wiles. The need for parliamentary changes to the Prayer Book probably hit home. Her fury against the ‘exercises’ had been partly because the Prayer Book had not authorised them. Therefore, she accepted the need to legislate for a new calendar, though an attempt in 1585 became bogged down in attacks on Archbishop Whitgift's authoritarian stewardship of the Church.
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In April 1583 Walsingham could shift the Queen's attention to the complex negotiations around Grindal's resignation, which were still incomplete when he died on 6 July.
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Elizabeth dropped the new calendar within a week of Grindal's reply, destroying Dee's hopes of reward. On 11 April he complained to the angels that ‘her Majesty will not reform it in the best terms of Verity’.
Worse still, she had refused the privileges for Adrian Gilbert's voyage. The angels tried to use his collapsing Court reputation to confirm Dee's Elect status: ‘Whom God commonly chooseth, shall be whom the Princes of the Earth do disdain’. Dee's guardian angel, Raphael, revealed the unsurprising fact that Court flatterers ‘have dissembling hearts, and privily do they shoot at thee, with arrows of reproach’. Yet when the prophesied miseries descended on England in late summer, Dee would prevail ‘yea even against the mightiest’.
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Energised by confirmation of his special status, but more critically £300 in debt and desperate, Dee sought Elizabeth's help through Walter Raleigh, currently enjoying the most spectacular rise to favour that seasoned courtiers had ever seen.
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As the Queen mounted her horse at Richmond on 18 April, Raleigh, Adrian Gilbert's half-brother, spotted Dee hovering behind a crowd of courtiers and drew him forward. She allowed Dee to kiss her hand but merely said ‘what is deferred is not refused’. In contrast, the angels that afternoon assured him he was ‘chosen by God to an end’ and relayed divine commands to leave England before the Apocalyse.
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What Elizabeth referred to remains mysterious. The north-west venture was now defunct.
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Dee's lease of Devon mining rights from the Company of Mines Royal did not require royal approval. His belief that the ‘extraordinary working of God’ secured this lease suggests he expected to find the buried treasure that the angels now promised him.
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More likely, Elizabeth had deferred Dee's suit for a pension. Since he promised Edward Kelley £50 a year from this for ‘scrying’, he probably asked for £200, the enormous sum he also required in 1592.
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This totally unrealistic suit epitomises the contrast between Dee's exalted sense of his prophetic importance, stoked by Kelley's angelic ‘scrying’, and his much lower actual value amongst hardheaded politicians. By 1 July Elizabeth had refused his petition, accelerating Dee's alienation from Court. In part this resulted from Walsingham's use of Dee's dubious past to provoke Grindal's resistance.

Even in death, Grindal's long friendship with Foxe enabled him to remind the world of Dee's real activities under Queen Mary. The 1583
Acts and Monuments
added the Privy Council's record from 1555 that ‘John D.’ had been released under bonds for good behaviour. However, it reversed the impression given in 1576 that Dee had suffered persecution for true religion, for the Council record correctly attributed his arrest to ‘lewd and vain practices of calculating or conjuring’.
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By early summer 1583 Dee's declining hopes enabled his increasing trust in the angels to overpower his limited political grasp. When Kelley transmitted angelic commands to accompany the ambitious but impoverished Polish nobleman Albrecht Laski to his dazzling destiny, Dee had no alternatives left. In September he would follow Laski to the millennial grounds of eastern Europe.

J
OHN DEE
could be forgiven for believing that God had sent Laski, the Palatine of Sieradz in Poland, in answer to his prayers. On 18 March 1583, like Elizabeth, Leicester and Burghley, he received Laski's letter announcing his imminent arrival.
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Laski had known Philip Sidney since 1573 and carefully nurtured relationships with Leicester's circle, so he knew about Dee's angel magic and alchemy.
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Laski's flattering testimony to Dee's European reputation fostered a relationship that was to wreck Dee's career at Elizabeth's Court.

For months the angels had been commanding Dee to flee England before the prophesied Apocalypse. But in April he still lacked money and faced huge debts. Kelley fed Dee's belief in his prophetic importance, which encouraged Dee's assumption that God had sent Laski to restore his reputation and finances.
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Kelley merely had to connect Laski with the prophesied Apocalypse in eastern Europe.
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Unfortunately, Dee's belief in Kelley's revelations exacerbated his curious blind-spot about Court politics. He attributed his misfortunes to the malicious envy of his critics, not to the political calculations of his hoped-for patrons. Tying his fortunes to Laski ensured his failure, because Laski's English sojourn became an embarrassing problem for Burghley. When Burghley finally removed that embarrassment, Dee suffered accordingly.

Laski had written an elegant Italian letter to Burghley as early as December 1581. He already enjoyed a European reputation as a warrior-humanist. Idolised by patriotic Polish poets, he published in Latin on warfare and religious politics.
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However, his letter received in March 1583 worried Elizabeth. He called her ‘the refuge of the disconsolate and afflicted’, implying that he was a disgruntled exile from Stephen Bathory, King of Poland. Elizabeth's government expected years of careful diplomacy to soon pay off in a treaty whereby Poland would protect England's vulnerable source of strategic naval supplies in the Baltic. Welcoming Laski might derail those delicate negotiations. Therefore, Elizabeth asked Burghley about Laski's ‘quality’ and reason for visiting.
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After consulting Leicester, Burghley reassured Elizabeth about Laski's high status, ‘such as few are subjects to any Monarch in Christendom’. A sovereign prince, he ‘carried great authority’ under King Stephen. Burghley and Leicester recommended that Elizabeth should receive Laski like royalty and lodge him in a palace.
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Persuaded by Burghley and by court gossip about Laski's magnificent open-handedness, Elizabeth put Winchester House in Southwark at his disposal. She received him with princely salutes of artillery. The Venetian ambassador in Paris reported on the seemingly endless round of expensive entertainments that followed. Presumably relying on Sidney's recommendation, Leicester immediately became Laski's bosom friend.
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