The Arch Conjuror of England (39 page)

Politically naive, in November 1592 Dee remained mystified why Bennett, ‘very worthy and sufficient to be a Bishop’, had not been promoted to relieve Dee's ‘incredible distress’. Bennett also missed out in another round of episcopal promotions in mid-1594.
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That November, Bennett complained bitterly to Burghley about the humiliation of seeing even his former students promoted over his head.
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Whitgift kept Bennett at St Cross to deny the appointment to Dee. This became particularly necessary after May 1594, when the bishopric of Winchester fell vacant. Elizabeth could now grant Lord Cobham, a long-standing patron of Dee's mother's family, the Wildes of Gravesend, the right to appoint Dee to St Cross immediately Bennett resigned.
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Significantly, once Dee had been sidelined as Warden of Manchester Collegiate Church, Bennett prospered. In 1596 he acquired the lucrative Deanery of Windsor, and finally resigned St Cross on becoming Bishop of Hereford in 1603.
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Dee's next promise of patronage in early 1592 coincided with rising anxiety about a Spanish invasion. After spies reported Spanish plans to seize an English port, the Privy Council began fortifying Plymouth.
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In early February, London parishes prepared street barricades and troops against ‘the coming in of the Spaniards’.
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In March clearer information about threats to ports prompted Burghley to devise plans for imprisoning leading recusants.
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Meanwhile the recusancy commissions kept up their local searches.
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In April another Catholic pamphlet attacking the Proclamation urged a Spanish conquest, followed by Richard Verstegan's attack on the ‘Cecilian Inquisition’.
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By then Dee's credit was drying up. His work for Burghley remained secret, so he needed some public sign of Elizabeth's ‘gracious favour towards me’ to restore his credit ‘with all men generally’. Therefore, in March, Elizabeth granted Dee's cousin William Aubrey the rights of presentation to five absentee sinecure rectories in the diocese of St David's in Wales, where the extremely corrupt bishop had been suspended. Officially worth £75 altogether, their real income was probably double that, almost as much as Dee had been seeking for years. Aubrey exercised authority in St David's as vicar-general to Archbishop Whitgift, so he could now present Dee to all five livings.
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As so often for Dee, things went awry. One wonders how much Whitgift knew about those rectories. Two turned out to be already occupied. Three other men all claimed to be rector of the third. The Rector of Angle in south Pembrokeshire was Richard Meredith, bishop of the impoverished Irish see of Leighlin. Meredith, imprisoned for running foul of Burghley, cut a deal with Dee for the rectory. Sometime in 1592 he assigned his house in St Brides, London, to Dee.
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Then the deal went sour, and on 31 December 1592 Meredith started proceedings against Dee. In February they quarrelled furiously in the Tower, both insisting they were Rector of Angle. Meredith sneered that Dee was merely a ‘conjuror’. However, when Whitgift deprived Meredith of the Rectorship in 1594, he appointed another rector and subsequently resisted all Dee's claims.
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Dee finally secured the fifth rectory, Tenby, worth £50 a year, only in March 1601.
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Although Elizabeth's public patronage temporarily bolstered Dee's credit, he could not keep his creditors at bay for long. Therefore, in 1592 he hired out his occult learning. Despite the 1563 Witchcraft Act he took money for work usually associated with lower-order ‘cunning folk’, casting horoscopes to identify robbery suspects, finding buried treasure, and exorcising the possessed. Nevertheless he had to borrow money, rent out rooms and take in pupils to continue his ‘philosophy’.
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In July 1592 he turned sixty-five, claiming ‘incredible want’, and still hoping that the Countess of Warwick would persuade the Queen to give him the living at St Cross.
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The regime's rising anxiety over the prophesied Spanish Armada helped. In late May, Elizabeth worried about foreign threats and domestic tensions. Serious Jesuit plots to assassinate her began that month.
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In June ships from the Azores warned of a powerful Spanish Armada ready to sail, and Catholic prisoners in London buzzed with rumours of its arrival. The Privy Council, worried about invasion through Milford Haven, extended the recusancy commissions into strongly Catholic Wales.
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In mid-June, overwhelmed by local commissioners’ success in arresting recusants, the Privy Council delegated their management to Whitgift's
High Commission, whose experience with Protestant dissent increased the persecution.
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In late July the Privy Council began disarming all Catholics, because the exiles bragged about ‘the assistance of those that are backward in religion’.
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Whispers that predominantly Catholic Lancashire might be the invasion bridgehead raised suspicions about the local magnate, the Earl of Derby.
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The crisis peaked in August, the Armada season. So did Dee's hopes of patronage. On 6 August he went to ‘Nonsuch to the Court’, alerted by the Countess of Warwick about Elizabeth's ‘gracious speeches for St Cross’. He should certainly have it, ‘if it were fit for him’. Whitgift sniffed the wind, repeated Elizabeth's words to Dee, and unblinkingly confirmed that the Mastership ‘is a living most fit for me’. Three days later Burghley invited Dee to a family dinner, which was repeated on the 10th. There Lord Cobham, the Wilde family patron, asked Burghley ‘to help me to St Crosses, which he promised to do his best in’. Ten days later Dee spent two days with Cobham in London, pressing home his advantage.
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With such support, what could prevent Dee obtaining the place?

Everyone seemed convinced by Dee's prediction about the invasion. Burghley discounted his own agent's intelligence denying that Philip could send an Armada that summer.
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On 7 August the Privy Council ordered all leading recusants returned to prison.
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Six days later they arrested lesser figures.
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They imprisoned every prominent Catholic lawyer in London, where virulent plague exacerbated the crisis atmosphere.
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Elizabeth departed on Progress towards Oxford, her itinerary avoiding coastal areas vulnerable to sudden Spanish landings. As the plague increased, so did Armada sightings. Lord Admiral Howard wrote near midnight on 29 August ordering the Lord Lieutenant of Sussex to ready the militia, reporting a ‘great fleet of tall Shippes discovered at Sea being Spaniards’ heading for the Sussex coast.
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Within days, still trying to penetrate the fog of war to identify the real Spanish landing, the Privy Council obsessed over a complicated Lancashire invasion plot. This preoccupied them through mid-September, when they again harried the county commissions to arrest recusants.
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Burghley's
anxious memos in mid-October about preventing ‘the general revolt of the Recusants of the realm, and particularly in Lancashire’ increased the tension. Days later the Privy Council finally gave Burghley what he had sought since 1558 – they purged all Catholic justices of the peace.
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This completed Burghley's triumph over Whitgift, marked by the release of the Presbyterian leaders and even of Henry Arthington, Hacket's disciple, in early August.

Dee's role in all this remained secret. Until he obtained public reward his cash crisis would persist. After three years at Mortlake, by autumn 1592 he owed £500 to friends, besides their gifts of food and clothing. He had pawned all his plate and Jane's jewellery and had borrowed upon bonds with promises to repay. All told he owed £833, many times the annual income he sought. Worse still, in July household suppliers cut off credit and began shaming Dee, demanding their money in public.
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Why had Dee's public reputation, as opposed to his secret status at Court, plummeted in July?

The answer resolves a long-standing controversy. At the end of May Sir Walter Raleigh fell spectacularly from Elizabeth's favour, when enemies revealed his secret marriage to her Maid of Honour, Elizabeth Throckmorton, and the birth of their son. Devilishly handsome, extremely learned, a dashing but often brutal soldier, Raleigh seemed the complete Renaissance courtier, except for his arrogant assumption that Elizabeth had fallen for his carefully managed image. Raleigh's attempt to bluff it out infuriated the Queen almost as much as his insincere play-acting at contrition throughout June and July, when she kept him under house arrest. On 7 August, the day after Dee went to Nonsuch about St Cross, she sent the offenders to the Tower.

Since his spectacular rise to Elizabeth's favour in 1583 Raleigh had patronised Dee.
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Contemporary opinion evidently connected the notorious pair more than Dee's ‘Diary’ suggests, so that Raleigh's fall dragged down Dee's political and public credit in July. Now Raleigh could defend neither himself nor his clients. His many enemies included Richard Verstegan and Robert Parsons, Catholics who were furiously attacking Burghley's Proclamation. In August 1592 Verstegan published an English
summary, or
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, for Parsons's forthcoming full-blooded Latin
Response
to Burghley's Proclamation. The
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included perhaps the best-known libel in Elizabethan history:

This so-called ‘School of Night’ was polemical slander against a leading anti-Spanish courtier, not historical fact. Yet we can now firmly identify the ‘Conjuror’ and trace the creation of this fiction.
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Catholic polemics routinely branded all leading Protestant politicians as atheists, particularly Burghley. Verstegan used this commonplace in a March letter to Parsons, criticising Burghley's rumoured plan to marry his eldest grandson to Arabella Stuart, for ‘The young youth is as prettily instructed in atheism as the Lady Arbella is in puresy [Puritanism], for he will not stick openly to scoff at the Bible, and will folks to spell the name of God backward’.
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Before the
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was completed in August, Raleigh's fall enabled Verstegan to mount a similar attack on the fallen favourite, and thus the general mores of Elizabeth's Court. In the light of Allen's letter of 7 February 1592 describing Dee's conjuring for the Privy Council, it is now clear that amongst Catholic exiles, including Verstegan, only one man qualified as the ‘Conjuror’ at that Court – John Dee.
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Circumstances left Dee even more vulnerable to such assaults by the time Parsons published his
Response
in October. For the panic over an Armada abruptly subsided. The arrival of the autumnal Atlantic gales enabled the Privy Council to stand down the beacon watch on 23 October, later than normal.
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An experienced observer noted three weeks later that in Court and Privy Council ‘now, there is no stirring at all’. Burghley left on Elizabeth's Accession Day, 17 November, when the same observer counted the Privy Council attendance as the smallest ‘I have
seen on that day’.
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The reduced Spanish threat persuaded many recusancy commissions to slacken their efforts.
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By early October the failure of Dee's prediction of an invasion had destroyed his political influence, enabling the ‘atheism’ accusations to gain traction amongst Raleigh's many Court enemies. Attacking Dee hindered Raleigh's rehabilitation. The interview Dee sought with Whitgift on 13 October dates this development precisely and indicates that the influential Archbishop was very willing to take the atheism accusations seriously. Dee tried to demonstrate his orthodoxy by showing Whitgift ‘two books of blasphemy against Christ and the Holy Ghost … desiring him to cause them to be confuted’.
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He forgot to mention that he had owned them for years, and that in 1587 one of the blasphemous authors, Christian Francken, assured Dee that he had recanted his errors.
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When Parsons's
Response
appeared shortly afterwards, it further blackened Dee's reputation. Parsons promised that if Raleigh became a Privy Councillor, his education in the necromancer's school of atheism would produce a proclamation from that ‘Magician’, published in Elizabeth's name, abolishing divinity and the soul's immortality, and denouncing as traitors any objectors to the sweet reasonableness of libertinism.
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Allen's letter informing Parsons about Dee's conjuring for Burghley means we can identify Dee as Parsons's necromancer. Furthermore, Parsons's confidant in Spain, Sir Francis Englefield, once considered the author of the
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, had investigated Dee for his magic against Queen Mary in 1555, revealed by Englefield's servant Prideaux, who had died in exile at Madrid in 1591.
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By early November 1592, Dee's political and financial credit seemed destroyed, shattering his hopes of advancement. Burghley had effectively used Dee against Whitgift. Having rescued the Presbyterians, derailed the negotiations with the Duke of Parma, harried the recusants, and purged Catholics from the commissions of the peace, Burghley now ruthlessly took his revenge for Dee's slanders at Prague about his niggardly patronage.

In Burghley's chamber at Hampton Court on 6 November, Dee reminded him of Elizabeth's promises about St Cross. Burghley responded
with words and gestures that Dee meticulously recorded, because he knew they meant the death of his hopes. Burghley ‘with his hand very earnestly smitten on his breast’ told Dee ‘By my faith, if her Majesty be moved in it by any other for you, I will do what I can with her Majesty to pleasure you therein.’ Dee realised that if Burghley declined to take the initiative, no courtier dared challenge the triumphant Lord Treasurer. Dee rode home disconsolately, wryly concluding in his ‘Compendious Rehearsal’: ‘And so I thanked his Honour humbly’.
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