The Arch Conjuror of England (38 page)

Nevertheless, Whitgift's campaign expanded the definition of the lunatic fringe almost to include Dee. In response, Dee laid low. From 3 August to 3 December 1591 his ‘Diary’ records little beyond a few weather notes. Then suddenly, at 10 a.m. on 14 December, we find him in the Lord Treasurer's secure offices at Whitehall, hearing ‘a very gentle
answer’ from Burghley to his latest request for patronage. Six days later came another ‘gentle answer’, that ‘the Queen would have me have something at this promotion of bishops at hand’, meaning the Mastership of St Cross. What had suddenly enabled Dee to overcome Whitgift's obdurate resistance to his promotion?

Basically, Dee solved the problems facing Burghley in late 1591. Burghley was not an innovative thinker. He relied on familiar solutions to political difficulties. In 1591 he needed to prepare the realm against the anticipated Spanish invasion, defend the Presbyterians against Whitgift and Hatton, and scotch that duo's attempt at de facto toleration for English Catholics. He addressed all three problems with a Proclamation against Catholic seminary priests and Jesuits, who seduced English subjects from their obedience. He drafted it in mid-October but only published it in late November.
¹⁴
That delay had significant implications for Dee.

The Proclamation created a far more rigorous system than the existing county commissions against Catholic recusants. From late November 1591 the usually haphazard Tudor government machinery minutely enforced it, under constant badgering from Burghley. Over the next few years the imprisonment, torture and execution of Catholic priests and lay recusants reached unprecedented intensity. The Proclamation justified this persecution because Catholic missionaries advanced Philip II's ambition to dominate Christendom, especially by an Armada against England, ‘greater for this year to come than ever’.
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These ‘fugitives, rebels and traitors’ were recruiting a Fifth Column to support the Spanish invasion. Traitorous exiles such as Cardinal William Allen and the Jesuit Robert Parsons had organised foreign seminaries and had cited English Catholic support to encourage Philip II's invasion. Burghley announced familiar solutions in his Proclamation: diligent preaching of the Gospel to instil obedience, the strengthening of the navy and the mustering of land forces.
¹⁶

The Proclamation included one relatively new remedy for the ‘secret infection of treasons’. It ordered commissions ‘in every shire, city, and port’ to detect disguised priests or their supporters. Each head of
household must register the origins, occupation and church attendance of residents for the previous year. Suspects had to be brought before local commissioners, and those of high rank before the Privy Council.

Anyone encountering missionary priests must inform the commissions, on pain of abetting treason. No exceptions were permitted ‘for any respect of any persons, qualities or degrees’.
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Abundant evidence from many counties confirms that parishes appointed teams of searchers who went door to door, interrogated their neighbours and reported recusants to commissions, which in turn sent quarterly reports and prisoners to the Privy Council.

Burghley in effect created a Tudor police state. He added bureaucratic instructions for effective questioning, targeting not just male but, for the first time, female recusants. A Catholic lifestyle became an offence. County commissions should arrest not just those who refused to attend church but anyone ‘that probably by their behaviour and manner of life or otherwise may be suspected’ to be ‘Seminaries, Priests, Jesuits or Fugitives’.

Burghley issued set questions for the commissioners, which previously had been aimed at trapping hard-line traitors and missionaries, but now were to be put to all suspects. Recusants suspected of supporting the Spanish had to answer under oath a question carefully drafted to discover who had led them astray. Then followed the so-called ‘bloody questions’ designed to unmask disguised seminary priests and Jesuits.
¹⁸

Burghley's motives for writing this Proclamation have been controversial ever since it appeared. Catholics denounced his allegations of invasion plots as threadbare justifications for perpetuating his power beyond Elizabeth's reign. Therefore, the Catholics alleged, the Privy Council licensed Richard Topcliffe and Richard Young to use torture to confirm the plots.
¹⁹
Topcliffe and Young certainly tortured some of the three priests and four Catholic laymen executed in early December.
²⁰

Catholic propagandists denounced ‘the new
Cecilian Inquisition
’, as the parochial teams searched house to house throughout the summer of 1592, particularly in London.
²¹
Topcliffe and Young relentlessly hunted down priests and laymen.
²²
Commissioners obeyed the Proclamation's
refusal to exempt Catholic noblemen. In late January 1592 Viscount Montague, the Catholic magnate in strategically vital Sussex, had to swear his loyalty before the Sussex recusancy commission ‘if the Pope or the King of Spain’ offered ‘to invade this realm, for any cause’.
²³

Burghley had always been paranoid about an international Catholic conspiracy against Elizabeth. The 1591 Proclamation repeated arguments he had made in mid-1559, long before the first English overseas seminary and a generation before the first English Jesuit mission in 1580. Burghley organised events into a providential pattern that produced the same response to all later crises. By 1591 the pattern had become reality.
²⁴

Publicly, Robert Parsons dismissed Burghley's Proclamation as a panicky response to his own successful Valladolid seminary, founded in 1589. He scorned Burghley's hysteria about a Spanish invasion, which he said was invented to manipulate Elizabeth's fears for his own advantage.
²⁵
Privately, William Allen conceded to Parsons that the Proclamation had indeed been inspired by Spanish invasion plans revealed ‘by their secret messengers’, recently captured, who ‘have confessed the same’.
²⁶

Allen especially blamed two captured English Valladolid seminarists examined by Burghley, John Cecil alias Snowden and John Fisher or Fixer, who ‘have discovered all they knew, and perhaps added somewhat of their own more than they knew’. In early January 1592 Allen confirmed to Parsons ‘that they have betrayed all indeed’. Their information enabled Burghley's Proclamation to blame the predicted Spanish invasion on the traitorous subversion of Allen and Parsons.
²⁷

In fact, Snowden and Fixer played down Spain's ability to invade England.
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Fixer claimed that Philip presided over a ruined economy and demoralised society.
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Snowden assured Burghley that ‘the King's forces are not to be feared for many years’.
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Because they failed to confirm Burghley's obsession with Catholic invasion, he dismissed their ‘vulgar and trivial intelligences … to no great purpose’.
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His conviction that the missionaries presaged an imminent Spanish invasion came from elsewhere.

Everyone knew Philip II's determination to revenge the Armada defeat of 1588. Yet effective defence required precise information about where and when the next Armada would strike. The Privy Council faced
challenges that modern intelligence systems still fail – distinguishing the signal from the ‘noise’ of conflicting information. In August 1590 they had expected an invasion of England or Ireland in spring or summer 1591. However, without exact information, they could do little.
³²
Burghley omitted threats of a Spanish invasion from a Proclamation prohibiting English merchants trading with Spain.
³³
Why then did his Proclamation against Jesuits and seminaries emphasise the invasion?

It did so in part because Renaissance governments often used peace negotiations strategically, to weaken enemies while building up their own strength.
³⁴
For several years Elizabeth's regime had been secretly negotiating with Philip's viceroy in the Netherlands, the Duke of Parma, through English Catholic exiles around Parma's Court at Brussels. Elizabeth had offered both to marry Parma's son to the Catholic Arabella Stuart, who had plausible claims to succeed her, and to allow de facto toleration of English Catholics.

If Parma took the bait he might fail to support Philip's invasion. Offered the hope of a Catholic succession, English Catholics and the Pope had less reason to support Philip. If Parma balked, leaks about the negotiations would undermine Philip's confidence in him.
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It would also further divide some English Catholics in the Netherlands, still dreaming of reconciliation with Elizabeth's regime, from hardliners who dismissed empty promises of toleration.

By October 1591 promising discussions led the Privy Council to offer the Catholic exile Charles Paget safe conduct, to negotiate with Hatton and Whitgift about religious liberty for English Catholics. As Allen informed Parsons, Paget naively believed that Hatton and Whitgift would ‘become Catholics, by which you may see what kind of practises these goodfellows … have in hand, and with whom they deal’.
³⁶
Radical Protestants considered Hatton a crypto-Catholic. Whitgift's suppression of Protestant dissent never undermined his Calvinist suspicion of Rome's profound errors. Hatton and Burghley differed over domestic religious policy.
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With his ingrained suspicions about an international Catholic conspiracy, Burghley feared that the negotiations would surrender fundamental Protestant positions.

Burghley's Proclamation scuttled the peace negotiations. By hounding even politically quiescent recusants for their lifestyle, it squashed all prospect of tolerance. The Proclamation's curious publication chronology supports this motivation. Drafted in mid-October and printed by the 18th, it remained unpublished.
³⁸
This delay indicates disagreement within the Privy Council over whether to counter Philip by deceptive negotiations or by Burghley's thoroughgoing Reformation. Hatton's death on 20 November meant Burghley won by default. Catholic informants in England certainly attributed the delay to Hatton's opposition and claimed that the Proclamation appeared the day after his death. This also explains why the Privy Council's hurried letters setting up the commissions on 23 November had to be rewritten and reissued a week later.
³⁹

Forcing the Proclamation through also enabled Burghley to defend the Presbyterians by diverting Whitgift's energies. By focusing the Queen's attention on the inherent political threat of Catholic recusancy because it supported a Spanish invasion, Burghley took the wind out of Whitgift's sails. Despite Whitgift's intransigent opposition, the Presbyterians gradually wriggled out of prison by the summer of 1592. By then, Burghley had busied the Ecclesiastical High Commission with persecuting Catholic recusants, further diverting Whitgift's aggressive energies from zealous Protestants.
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But Burghley needed compelling reasons for Elizabeth to publish his Proclamation, which went against her political prejudices and Whitgift's policy.

Burghley had previously used an imminent Spanish invasion to shift Elizabeth's policy. However, an anticipated invasion in 1591 had not forced her to alter course. How did Burghley sway the Queen away from the ‘peace’ policy in late November? What was different now?

The answer lies in Dee's petition to James I on 5 June 1604, where he defended himself against the ‘English traitor’ who on 7 January 1592 slandered him as the Privy Council's conjuror. This previously elusive publication was not a book, but William Allen's letter to Robert Parsons of that date, printed in Parsons's
Apology in Defence of Ecclesiastical Subordination in England
(1601). Allen's letter also included a sensational claim that Dee concealed from James in 1604, that Burghley's
Proclamation owed much to ‘Doctor Dee their conjuror or Astrologer [who] is said to have put them in more doubt, for that he hath told the Council by his calculation, that the Realm indeed shall be conquered this Summer, believe him who will’.
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This was not invented propaganda. Allen had reliable informants at Elizabeth's Court, and this private letter first appeared in print seven years after his death. His claim did not appear in published attacks on the Proclamation. Parsons in exile received excellent intelligence from England, so by printing Allen's letter he could use Dee's deteriorating reputation in 1601 to smear the surviving Privy Councillors from 1592.

Moreover, Burghley knew Elizabeth's deep belief in Dee's ‘philosophy and alchemy’ and in his astrological predictions, for Burghley accepted them himself. Dee had used magic to support Elizabeth in 1555. She had defended his alchemical
Monas hieroglyphica
in 1564.
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Dee's ‘British Empire’ depended partly on alchemical research producing the philosopher's stone.
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He had explained to her the imperial significance of the comet of November 1577. In return she had promised her protection, reiterated in December 1590, when she engaged in alchemy with Dee.
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Burghley had accepted Dee's timetable for the new calendar for the apocalyptic ‘secret matter’.
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Therefore, Burghley could reasonably expect that Dee's astrological prediction would alarm Elizabeth into reversing course and publishing the Proclamation.

Plotting Dee's rising Court career alongside the graph of Catholic persecution also confirms Allen's accusations. The two lines run parallel, except where Whitgift could intervene against Dee. In mid-December 1591, as the Council began cranking up the persecution, Burghley gave Dee his ‘gentle answers’ about the Mastership of St Cross, once the existing Master, Robert Bennett, had been promoted from St Cross to a bishopric.

Bennett seemed certain to be promoted. Whitgift had introduced him to Burghley, who appointed him his chaplain before presenting him to St Cross in 1583.
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A learned, staunch anti-Romanist, soon after his appointment he began bombarding Burghley with letters begging for further promotion.
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However, he mysteriously failed to become a bishop in December 1591.