The Arch Conjuror of England (14 page)

Dee's immediate response to his failures in gaining patronage and countering Court gossip accurately reflected his diminished prospects – he decided to marry in 1565. As an ordained Catholic priest, Dee could not have lightly abandoned his oath of celibacy. If Catholicism returned to England he would face the heavy punishment that married priests had endured under Mary. Dee's marriage certainly scandalised English Catholics in Rome, who later warned everyone against helping ‘John Dee, a married priest, given to magic and uncanny arts’.
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Dee's choice of wife reflects his lowered expectations, for she could hardly be considered a suitable companion for the descendant of Welsh princes. Katheryn Constable, a respectable City matron, lacked the polish and pedigree to appear at Court with Dee. Her first husband Thomas Constable, a general trader whose business and parish careers resembled Roland Dee's, had been closely associated with him.

Thomas had served as churchwarden of St Dunstan's-in-the-East beside Roland.
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The parish audited his accounts with Roland's in 1552, suggesting they were business partners. However, after Roland fled to Gravesend, Thomas remained active in the parish until October 1562.
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Thomas must have died before September 1563, when the parish register refers to ‘Mistress Constable's’ house.
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Dee possibly lodged with the Constables in 1555. Katheryn brought a modest legacy, including a house in Marlborough and some lands in Wiltshire.
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She may have been older than Dee, who was already thirty-eight in July 1565, because Constable had made her sole executrix of his will, and she died in March 1575 without bearing children by Dee. They initially settled at Long Leadenham in Lincolnshire, where in 1565 Dee rebuilt part of the Rectory for his new wife. He inscribed over the lintel a significant verse from Psalm 88:2, notably choosing the Latin Vulgate text over
Protestant versions. The verse alluded to his angelic magic: ‘O Lord God of my salvation, I have cried day and night before thee’.
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Dee spent part of the year in his mother's house, which was more convenient to get to Court, since his legal cases described him as ‘of Mortlake’ about 1565. It soon became a landmark for the magical underworld. Jane lived very simply, for as late as 1576, the year before she died, she paid minimal tax compared to her neighbours. Her property probably included the rambling house and two adjoining gardens that Dee mortgaged in 1583. Dee established his library there, but also sued to recover relatively small amounts from Thomas Constable's debtors across East Anglia and Lincolnshire.

Dee's career was going nowhere. The Queen's support could not counter Murphyn's cunning slanders against the ‘conjuror’, provoked by the contest between occult philosophers. Moreover, from the moment of Elizabeth's accession, the destabilising claims of Mary Queen of Scots to her throne helped to intensify this occult rivalry, to an extent the modern world seems to have forgotten. The Protestant preacher William Harrison firmly believed that Mary practised sorcery and that she hastily married Lord Darnley in 1565 partly because ‘witches and sorcerers’ had yet again promised that Elizabeth ‘is but a dead woman and to end her life before the last of July’.
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Ironically, such beliefs enabled Mary's Catholic supporters to use Dee's established unsavoury reputation amongst godly Protestants to denigrate his abilities. In 1569, by which time she had fled Scotland for what amounted to an English prison, Mary's claims to succession helped create the deepest political crisis of Elizabeth's reign. Several overlapping conspiracies swirled around the imprisoned Queen and Thomas Howard, fourth Duke of Norfolk. The crisis of one of these failed conspiracies in the summer of 1569 provoked Murphyn and Prestall to intensify their slander campaign against Dee. His claims to non-conjuring forms of occult wisdom did enable him to counteract their attacks, particularly during the craze for alchemy that swept through the Court in the 1570s. However, he never entirely succeeded in shaking off his conjuring reputation, partly because he failed the Court as a practical alchemist.

T
O UNDERSTAND
the fluctuations in Dee's career we need to appreciate the Elizabethan Court's deep interest in occult philosophy, particularly alchemy. That interest explains how Prestall, imprisoned in the Tower for high treason in 1564, soon won his release. Almost immediately he began to outshine Dee as an occult philosopher. In fact, Dee struggled to make headway not so much because of his reputation as a ‘magus’ but rather because the particular kind of occult knowledge he offered did not meet the Court's practical alchemical needs. His rivals claimed that they could meet those needs.

Dee's
Monas
offered the dazzling prospect of reforming the world through the philosopher's stone, but the Court showed more interest in solving its chronic financial problems by transmuting base metals into gold and silver. Despite his intellectual aura, Dee's practical alchemical skills proved ordinary. But his rivalry with alchemists making bolder claims, particularly Prestall, explains why Vincent Murphyn's slander campaign persisted. The dark thread of their rivalry runs through the glittering fabric of early Elizabethan politics.

Elizabeth's celebrated education made her fluent in several languages, adept in humanist belles-lettres and a model of evangelical piety. Yet she also set the tone for her Court in her pursuit of alchemy, thanks to the prominence of Sir John Cheke and Sir Thomas Smith amongst her
brilliant teachers. Cheke's contemporaries knew of his fascination with alchemy and astrology, while Smith's almost frenzied quest to find the elixir added lustre to his Cambridge and Court career in the 1540s.
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After Elizabeth's accession in 1558, her knowledge of ‘all parts of Philosophy’ and ‘favour for science’, including alchemy, became known throughout Europe. Alchemists dedicated books to her, and she received at least one New Year's gift of an alchemical book. Later a flattering emblem built into a Whitehall palace window described her as the ‘true elixir’. That acknowledged her investment in distilling houses at Hampton Court, which were run throughout her reign by William Huggons, Robert Dudley's relative, and a Cambridge contemporary of Cecil, Thomas Smith and Richard Eden. Millicent Franckwell also distilled in her Privy Chamber for an equally generous £40 per annum. Their products included what alchemical recipe books described as ‘the Queen's medicine’ and ‘Queen Elizabeth's potion’, a purgative she used twice a year.
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Elizabeth openly revelled in her reputation for philosophical profundity, wide-ranging enough potentially to conflict with evangelical religion. Speaking from the throne, dressed in her jewel-encrusted finest as the Virgin Goddess, she told the 1585 Parliament that ‘I am supposed to have many studies, but most philosophical. I must yield this to be true that I suppose few (that be no professors) have read more’. She quickly emphasised that she observed scriptural limits to her enquiries, thus implying their occult direction.
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To the end of her life courtiers appreciated how to use her alchemical interests to manage the Queen's moods: ‘I was all afternoon with her Majesty’, Sir Thomas Stanhope wrote to Robert Cecil in 1598, ‘and then, thinking to rest me, went in with your letter. She was pleased with the philosopher's stone, and hath been all this day reasonably quiet’.
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In this context Elizabeth's carefully controlled iconography suggests previously unnoticed alchemical significance in her ‘Pelican’ and ‘Phoenix’ portraits, painted by Nicholas Hilliard between 1573 and 1576. Hilliard later made remarkable artistic objects from alchemically transformed mercury, claimed a secret process for making the brilliant enamelled colours in his miniatures, and intervened to save his workman Abel
Fecknam from execution for alchemical coining.
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His portraits began a fashion for associating the pelican and phoenix images with Elizabeth. After Lady Mary Dudley Sidney's gift in 1573 they repeatedly featured in New Year's jewels.
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This sudden innovation in the Queen's iconography has never been explained, but it coincided with the period from which we know much about Elizabeth's alchemical interests. Conventionally, the pelican symbolised Elizabeth's charitable care for her people, since the pelican allegedly fed its young with blood from its breast.
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However, to many the pelican also symbolised the penultimate stage of making the philosopher's stone, when the potency of the red elixir was multiplied a thousandfold by repeated dissolution and coagulation, using a vessel resembling a pelican piercing its own breast.
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In 1572 Elizabeth's secretary Sir Thomas Smith continually recycled his distillations in ‘the pelican’ vessel.
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This meaning of the imagery became widely known. Many Londoners believed in 1599 that the pelican kills its young and then ‘tears open its breast and bathes them in its own blood’ to restore them to life, recalling the circular processes of putrefaction and regeneration central to alchemy.
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The red phoenix, a Renaissance emblem of the uniqueness and self-renewal of hereditary monarchy, also represented the red powder, or elixir, the last of the four colour changes during the Great Work to create the philosopher's stone. It thus represented the stone itself.
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In 1574 several courtiers presented Elizabeth with rich jewels featuring a phoenix.
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In 1577 Dee's friend and Elizabeth's ‘servant’ Samuel Norton wrote from St John's, Cambridge, offering her, as one well practised alchemist to another, a complicated method of making the stone. He expected her to achieve it.
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Hilliard probably understood such resonances in his portraits.
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Dee's preface to Maximilian II in
Monas
described the promise of his philosophy as a metaphorical phoenix, ‘from the wings of whose charity alone we have extracted with fear and love all those speculative feathers against the nakedness brought down on us by Adam’.
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Elizabeth's alchemical learning attracted attention from English alchemists outside Court circles. Thomas Charnock offered from remotest
Somerset to transmute gold for her and in 1566 presented Cecil with a book on the philosopher's stone dedicated ‘unto the Queen's majesty’.
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Charnock envisaged himself as ‘the Queen's philosopher’, a title sometimes claimed for Dee. Charnock hoped to follow other royal alchemists, such as Thomas Norton under Edward IV, and his own uncle, another Thomas Charnock, philosopher to Henry VII.
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His book shares Dee's apocalyptic expectations, which are often depicted as drawn from a more purified, exalted philosophy. They both struck their neighbours as ‘no better than a conjuror’.
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Charnock pretended to attack the common belief that perfecting the stone would show ‘that the end of the world is at hand’, when ‘all secrets shall be opened’. Yet the Last Judgement ‘shall be by my astronomical judgement’ about 1581 – an accurate forecast of his own death.
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Charnock read widely in the kinds of occult knowledge found in Dee's library, rising from ‘false’ alchemy through face-reading and palm-reading to astrology, cosmology and medicine, which like Dee he practised, and ultimately to the true natural philosophy of the stone.
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Therefore, Charnock praised the ancient royal pursuit of the philosopher's stone by adepts steeped in the wisdom of Roger Bacon, George Ripley, Albertus Magnus and Raymond Lull.
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According to Charnock, Henry VII had possessed the purest stone by 1504.
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Charnock staked his head on making the stone and pure gold for Elizabeth in seven years. It would prolong the Queen's life and restore her coinage to its medieval quality, when monarchs had coined pure alchemical gold.
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He offered Elizabeth two copies of his treatise, and later believed that one copy had been placed in her library.
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In fact William Cecil kept it, another sign of his alchemical interests. It joined an English translation of Geber and other essential alchemical texts, still in Cecil's library at Hatfield House.
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Elizabeth and Cecil refused Charnock's offers of alchemical riches only because, he claimed, ‘the Queen and her council had set one a work in Somerset place in London before I came and had wrought there by the space of one year’.
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Charnock had been forestalled by Cornelius de Lannoy, or de Alneto, from a prominent Low Countries family. De Lannoy promised Elizabeth almost instant riches, yet ironically it was
Dee's highly intellectual
Monas
that introduced the Queen and Cecil to ideas that persuaded them to accept his rival's offers.
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Dee's
Monas
promised that his alchemical Theorem XXI about the ‘great secret’ hidden in the Monad would please the
Voarchadumicus
. This alluded to Joannes Pantheus's description of the philosopher's stone in his book
Voarchadumia
. De Lannoy wrote to Cecil from Bruges in December 1564, offering his thirty years’ experience in the art of ‘Boarhchadamia’ derived from the ancients. He also signed himself ‘Boarchado’ to Elizabeth, which would have seemed nonsense to her unless he assumed she knew what that meant.
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