The Arch Conjuror of England (36 page)

Scot dismissed invocations to angels such as Dee's, especially that they ‘may give me a true answer of all my demands’. By publishing the seals used by adepts to trap angelic spirits in crystals, Scot hoped to debunk magic's mystique. He equated conjurors with witches and both with deluded alchemists. Thanks to Whitgift's protection, Scot could even take a concluding swipe at Leicester for protecting another deceitful conjuror in 1582, which touched Dee's own notoriety as Leicester's ‘conjuror’.
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Many contemporaries disagreed with Scot's sweeping scepticism, but he exercised disproportionate influence over the conservative, conformist clergy grouped around Whitgift.
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Amongst them, Aylmer tried to prosecute Dee for conjuring with the Devil in September 1584. Leicester's death freed Whitgift's protégés Richard Bancroft, Richard Cosin and
Samuel Harsnett to criticise the Presbyterians for their magical claims. They frequently cited Scot against the Presbyterian exorcist John Darrell's use of prayer and fasting to cure the demonically possessed, and they would gleefully exploit Dee's involvement with Darrell in Manchester some years later.

Books published by Dee's former pupils, John and Richard Harvey, demonstrate the increasing conservative pressure to exclude Dee's kind of prophetic politics. Both Harveys had publicised Dee's apocalyptic interpretations of the 1583 Great Conjunction and other cosmic signs of the end of time. Yet in early 1588 John retracted his predictions about the coming year. He defended natural magic, which he had learned from ‘John Dee, a man sufficiently known for his long study, and skill in such matters’. But he now denounced angel magic as ‘devilish negromantical practices’, and took special pains to dismiss Trithemius on the angelic control of history, as ‘erroneous reckonings, and fabulous traditions’.
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John Harvey acknowledged Hatton as chief instigator of this work, indicating Hatton's increasing conservatism since the time when James Sandford had publicly linked his name with prophecies for 1583 and 1588.

Richard Harvey's new conservative tone reflects the same pressure. Richard had dedicated his
Astrological Discourse
on the Great Conjunction of 1583 to Bishop Aylmer of London.
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That was foolish. He failed to appreciate how much his excited predictions of abrupt political transformation conflicted with Aylmer's tough line against Presbyterian appeals to the inner spirit. Aylmer soon put him straight, denouncing Richard's predictions from England's most important pulpit at St Paul's Cathedral.
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By the time Dee returned to England in late 1589, Richard had abandoned his former astrological beliefs and now condemned the Presbyterians to boot. Mixing conservative astronomy and politics, Richard predicted that if they succeeded the kingdom would descend into ‘anarchy, with a moving earth … in Copernicus guise’. Copernicans subverted the natural order of the heavens, just as Presbyterians threatened ‘to lift fools on horseback and set kings on foot’.
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The late 1580s economic crisis stiffened resistance to the impoverished Crown's rising demands for money to fight Spain. This provoked an
authoritarian reaction, strengthening Whitgift's and Hatton's suspicions that religious nonconformity would generate popular revolt.
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The dominance of their ‘little faction’ drove their Presbyterian opponents into desperate eschatological hopes, comparable to Dee's angelic predictions. In February 1589 Hatton opened Parliament by warning Members of Parliament against innovation, except to control ‘papists or puritans’. Dee's alchemist friend Thomas Digges complained that Hatton had effectively redefined sincere Protestants as ‘troublers of the state’.
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Days later, Bancroft, successively Hatton's and Whitgift's chaplain, proclaimed this new hard line in his
Sermon Preached at Paules Cross the 9 of February
. Robustly defending episcopacy, he smeared the Presbyterians as ‘false prophets’, fellows with ‘Arrians, Papists, Libertines, Anabaptists and the Family of Love’, who pretended inspired insights, ‘despise government’, and ‘speak evil of them that are in dignity and authority’.

Bancroft criticised an enthusiastic manuscript prophecy ‘that Elizabeth now Queen of England is ordained of God to be Queen of Jerusalem’, which was uncomfortably close to Dee's belief in a restored Israel.
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Presbyterians responded through ‘Martin Marprelate, gentleman’, who employed satirical street language to mock the pompous lordly bishops.
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Whitgift enlisted Thomas Nashe to reply in kind, beginning in
An Almond for a Parrot
(1589), which echoed Whitgift's earlier attacks on popular prophetic gullibility. ‘Visions are ceased’, Nashe insisted, ‘all extraordinary revelation ended … wherefore broach no more heresies under colour of inspiration.’ At Whitgift's bidding, Nashe later ridiculed mystical prophets, especially when Dee lost political influence in 1592.
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Bancroft hired John Lyly to produce popular musical playlets. Lyly lampooned astrologers using Richard Harvey's
Astrological Discourse
, attacked alchemists from Scot's
Discovery
, and created the Stage Puritan immortally satirised in Ben Jonson's
The Alchemist
, which ridiculed Dee and Kelley's magic. At some point Jonson acquired Dee's ritual magic treatise by Honorius of Thebes.
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About the time that Bancroft preached in February 1589 appeared the cheap pamphlet
The History of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus
, attacking another astrologer, mathematician and conjuror who sought to perfect
human knowledge by conjuring angelic revelations. It could soon be bought for fourpence. Between 1589 and 1594 a rash of plays against Devil-invoking magicians appeared on the London stage, beginning with Christopher Marlowe's
Doctor Faustus
in 1589.
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Whitgift's suspicions about magic are evident in his response to Elizabeth's command in December 1589 to find Dee some sinecure. He questioned Dee's activities in Poland and Bohemia, so that Burghley had to provide a testimonial ‘favourably interpreting’ Dee's European journeys.
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In the coming years, wherever Dee sought preferment or to regain his rectories, Whitgift blocked him, determined to reassert episcopal authority over Church appointments and appalled by the ‘evil bishops and deans’ appointed through Leicester's patronage. Dee again ‘made motion’ for the Deanery of Gloucester in 1594.
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Hatton had appointed Dee's replacement at Upton-upon-Severn, which illustrates the forces now ranged against him.
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Fortunately, Dee still had a few cards to play. After Dyer returned to England without Kelley in mid-March 1590, Dee was able to use his continuing correspondence with Kelley as leverage.
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Kelley kept tantalising Burghley with promises to return. Burghley's reply in May studiously avoided naming alchemy but stated he believed Dyer's reports. He confirmed Elizabeth's letters of protection because ‘this felicity’ is ‘only by you … expected’, despite criticisms around the Court, which he felt compelled to pass on, that Kelley was a fraud, a traitor, a Catholic and an impostor.
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Knowing Kelley's desirability nonetheless, Dee exploited their connection that early summer. News of Dee's rising Court reputation even reached distant Long Leadenham in Lincolnshire. His former curate and successor as rector there, Richard Lange, thought it politic to send him £6 in early May. On 20 May Dee took Richard Young with him to press Whitgift about restoring his rectories. As an aggressive enforcer for Whitgift's High Commission, Young's presence reminded Whitgift of Dee's family connections and his political leverage. Accordingly, he ‘used me well’. The next day Dee tried to convince Aylmer of his orthodoxy by warning him about a planned bacchanalian feast at Brentford.
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Dee also used his alchemical learning to cultivate influential courtiers such as the explorer Richard Cavendish and Sir George Carey, Marshal of Elizabeth's household. In late May they petitioned Elizabeth and Whitgift for Dee to be made Provost of Eton College. The position seemed to be his, until a week later his rivals spread ‘terrible ill news’ of Kelley's ‘open enmity’ against Dee and consequently ‘of the higher powers their ill opinions conceived of me’.
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The provostship went elsewhere.

Dee's dependence on his correspondence with Kelley to counteract Whitgift's drive against magic reappears in July 1590. Days after receiving Kelley's latest letter, Dee went to Whitgift and ‘talked with him boldly of my right to the parsonages, and of the truth of Sir Edward Kelley his Alchemy’. Two days later, Elizabeth ‘disclosed her favour to me’ at Court, and the day after Dee began ‘my alchemical exercises’.
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He had resumed the angelic ‘actions’ in April with Bartholomew Hickman ‘scrying’. These actions, of which Dee left no records, prompted him to reread the angel Uriel's promise in September 1584 that England would be spared destruction for Dee's sake. He added in the margin: ‘God will give me England, that is to say, spare it from destruction for my sake.’ Dee's inflated sense of his prophetic importance would certainly have reminded Whitgift of those subversives he was trying to suppress.
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Even worse, Dee that summer tried to exorcise his children's mentally ill nurse, Ann Frank, whom he believed was demonically possessed. He devoutly prayed for ‘virtue and power’ and Christ's blessing on the ‘holy oil’, an alchemical product with which he repeatedly anointed her, just as Catholic priests in his childhood had used consecrated oil as an exorcist's charm. Even if Dee no longer considered himself a priest, Jesuit missionaries in Catholic households were currently using similar rituals, according to a manuscript that fell into government hands in 1594. During exorcisms at Sir George Peckham's house at Denham, Whitgift learned, servant women derived devils’ names from ‘very strange names written upon the walls … under the hangings’. Dee had visited Denham and had advised Peckham on American colonisation in 1583, as the Court well knew.

Ann Frank finally succeeded in killing herself in late August 1590. The coroner's inquest would have revealed Dee's exorcism, contravening
Whitgift's attempts to suppress this charismatic practice. Such association with ‘devil-conjurors … reputed to carry about with them, their familiars in rings and glasses’ would damage Dee in Whitgift's opinion.
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Continuing public fascination with Dee's occult activities helped spread such stories. He later complained to Whitgift that ‘untrue fables’ about his ‘studies philosophical’ immediately spread over ‘all the Realm’.
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Despite this disingenuous complaint, Dee was actually collaborating with magicians from deepest Essex who knew him by reputation, and perhaps with others. In September 1590 Edmund Hunt of Maldon, Essex, ‘being long time troubled in his mind’ about buried treasure at nearby Beeleigh, consulted Thomas Collyne, a ‘cunning man’, but also the town policeman of Maldon. Collyne told Hunt to bring earth from Beeleigh. In October, Collyne promised to take it ‘to Doctor Dee, and if he should judge to be any money there’, Dee ‘would make suit to the Queen's Majesty to have a license to dig’.

In October 1574 Dee had petitioned Burghley for such a licence, after being approached by clients whose recurrent dreams pointed towards buried treasure. He would judge the earth by the forces of ‘sympathy and antipathy’. The Witchcraft Act of 1563 had made conjuring for buried treasure a felony without royal permission, because powerful magic was required to control the demons commonly believed to guard the treasure. Collyne probably knew Dee long before he first mentions him at Mortlake on 8–9 June 1591. In 1578 Collyne had saved his neck by informing against a group of fellow conjurors, including Thomas Elkes, who knew Dee's house at Mortlake, conjured love magic, invoked spirits to reveal buried treasure, and enclosed spirits in a ring. More dangerously, they predicted that a naval gunner, Robert Mantell, who they claimed was really Edward VI, would soon reclaim his throne. Mantell was subsequently executed.
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Dee did not request another licence for treasure, a reticence reflecting both Collyne's dubious connections and Whitgift's increasing pressure against magical practices.

Elizabeth continued to protect Dee because alchemy fascinated her. She had written to Kelley in early 1590, promising great rewards for ‘the gifts that God has given’ him. In May she commanded Burghley to repeat
her promises to Kelley, who should ‘have regard to her honour’ and return to England.
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When Dee resumed his alchemy in July, after arguing with Whitgift about the truth of Kelley's alchemy, he lent Richard Cavendish the treatise by Denis Zacaire on the philosopher's stone, a treatise he had used with Kelley in Bohemia. He imposed elaborate conditions to preserve its secrecy, knowing that Cavendish regularly discussed alchemy with Elizabeth.
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Meanwhile Elizabeth and Burghley had sent Dyer back to Prague to persuade Kelley to return or at least to obtain some of the philosopher's stone for the Queen to use herself. Kelley had written to Burghley in late July describing Emperor Rudolf's immense rewards. At that time he still remained Elizabeth's subject. However, in October, Dyer found Kelley sworn to Rudolf's Privy Council, having renounced his English allegiance, and therefore less inclined to give Dyer ‘some medicine to have satisfied her majesty by her own blissful sight’.
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Elizabeth and Kelley, moreover, had been carrying on their own correspondence, now unfortunately lost. Kelley pretended that Elizabeth and Burghley's refusal to make specific promises to him made Bohemia more attractive.
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Dyer spent the winter in alchemical work with Kelley and later reported how Kelley used ‘a very small quantity of medicine’ to transmute ‘perfect gold’.
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