The Arch Conjuror of England (18 page)

J
OHN DEE'S
reputation for inventing the concept of an American ‘British Empire’ is only part of the story. He did coin the term, which to him meant the restored Empire of Arthur, King of the Britons. However, to uncover the full story we must set Dee's writings about an Atlantic ‘British Empire’ in the context of Elizabethan Court politics and contemporary European events.
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That context enables Dee's
General and Rare Memorials Pertaining to the Perfect Art of Navigation
(1577) and his manuscripts, ‘On the Limits of the British Empire’ and ‘Of Famous and Rich Discoveries’, to shed new light on the Elizabethan Court and Dee's contemporary world. For those writings were actually advice aimed at Elizabeth and her Privy Councillors on how to deal with a domestic and international crisis in the 1570s and 1580s, which would determine English history for centuries to come.

Those intervening centuries have persuaded the modern world to associate the British Empire with the spread of forward-looking Protestantism, first through American discovery and colonisation, and then throughout the globe.
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There was, however, nothing very Protestant about Dee, or his ‘British Empire’, which looked back to the ancient past. He used civil-law arguments to reassert Elizabeth's sovereignty in America, because he believed that Arthur's colonies still existed there. However, influential Protestant courtiers found far more interesting Dee's coherent arguments
for Elizabeth's rights to recover Arthur's lost British Empire in Europe. Putting Dee's ‘imperial’ writings into their proper historical context also shows that they emerged less from legal and political theories than from his fascination with occult philosophy. Nor did Dee's ‘imperial’ writings have much to do with Martin Frobisher's contemporary search for the North-West Passage in 1576–8.
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Neither the Queen nor her Privy Councillors respected theoretical limits when Frobisher's discoveries suddenly required flexibility in making actual policy.

We can observe Dee's mind working through theories of empire in his copy of Ferdinand Columbus's
History of the Life and Deeds of the Admiral Christopher Columbus
(1571). As so often, Dee turned the book into an organiser for his own ideas, busily jotting notes and comments in the margin.
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He confuted Ferdinand's claims for Spain's sovereignty over America, based on his father Christopher's discoveries, legal arguments and ceremonies ‘establishing’ possession. Dee denied Columbus's priority. In Ferdinand's descriptions of Indian customs and languages Dee found support for his pet theory that the Welsh prince Madoc ap Owen Gwynedd had discovered America in 1170. Moreover, Welsh-speaking Indians confirmed his descendant Elizabeth's prior claims. Madoc featured prominently in Dee's own genealogy.
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Dee also denied the Pope's authority to grant the New World to Castile.
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Dee read Ferdinand Columbus alongside Giovanni Battista Ramusio's great collection of
Navigations and Voyages
in 1577–8, the very time of Frobisher's second and third voyages. Allegedly searching for the North-West Passage, these voyages really sought American gold.
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Dee's marginalia reveal that he read Ramusio to discover the rights and rites of possession in new-found lands.
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Dee's interest in ‘the customs of acquiring dominion’ stemmed from his obsessive search for traces of Madoc hidden within Spanish descriptions of America.
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For, since ‘1. Discovery 2. Conquest 3. Quiet possession’, as Dee summarised it, conveyed sovereignty, Madoc had bequeathed his descendant Elizabeth the Caribbean and Mexico.
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The Pope, Dee scribbled angrily in the margins of Ramusio's book, had no intrinsic authority to award America to Spain, for he ‘was chosen arbiter: he could not make himself so’. Therefore, ‘If the ancient
title were good’, then England did not need the Pope's licence. ‘But’, he concluded with a flourish, ‘that is nought and ours more certain, therefore our Title is more truth than the King of Spain his title’, whichever way the Pope claimed to divide the world.
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Dee's patriotic conclusion supported his other marginalia in Ramusio's publication about the North-West Passage to Cathay.
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He heavily marked evidence of the Indians’ cultivation of fertile soils and European level of civilisation. Dee found most exciting reports of ‘white men arrayed with cloth as in France’. These confirmed his belief that Arthurian colonies still survived along the North-West Passage, confirming Elizabeth's inherited rights over that gateway to the fabulous East. In early 1578 he used these pages in ‘Limits of the British Empire’.
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Yet Dee was not writing simply to promote Frobisher's voyages.
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Nor was he merely applying his Louvain education, using civil-law definitions of imperial ‘Dominion’ to place new English discoveries under Elizabeth's absolute prerogative.
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Those were not sufficient reasons for important politicians and courtiers, such as Edward Dyer, Leicester, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Sir Christopher Hatton, Sir Philip Sidney and Sir Francis Walsingham to see to it that Dee obtained audiences with Elizabeth, merely to persuade her to grant Letters Patent empowering Frobisher to settle territory in America.
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Elizabeth did not depend solely on Dee's legal expertise. If the Queen needed advice about civil law she could turn to experienced civil lawyers on her Privy Council, such as Walsingham and Thomas Wilson. Nor did Tudor concepts of ‘empire’ depend solely on Dee's writings. Elizabeth believed her Atlantic sovereignty rested on her Crown's inherent prerogative.

Philip and Mary had asserted as much in Letters Patent of 1555, granting the Muscovy Company the power to ‘subdue, possess and occupy’ and ‘get the Dominion’ over all lands ‘of infidelity’. These privileges, confirmed by Parliament in 1566, covered all northern seas. Richard Hakluyt printed both texts in his
Principal Navigations
(1589). Contemporaries believed long before Dee wrote that the Crown's imperial power and the authority of statute law controlled overseas trade and new-found lands. Dee knew this through his close connections with the
Muscovy Company. When he petitioned in 1583 to monopolise the North-West Passage, under the Muscovy Company's patent, he expected to make laws there modelled on ‘the religion and laws of this realm’.
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Dee's audiences with the Queen discussed more than her Atlantic imperial titles. At Windsor in late November 1577 Dee declared Elizabeth's ‘title to Groecland [believed west of Greenland], Estotiland, Friseland’.
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This had no connection to Frobisher's Letters Patent, issued six months later,
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because Dee went to Windsor primarily to reassure ‘men of no small account’ that, despite their fears, the great comet of November 1577 would not harm the Queen. His drawing of the comet still streams across the top of this page in his manuscript ‘Diary’. His reference to Elizabeth's Atlantic titles seems to have been added later. He recalled in 1592 that, after three days closeted with him, Elizabeth promised to defend him against attacks on ‘any my rare studies and Philosophical exercises’. This clearly refers to his magical and alchemical practices. Dee's astrological expertise, not his civil-law training, persuaded influential courtiers to rush him into an audience with Elizabeth. His alchemical ‘exercises’ shared with the Queen also remind us that, like other occult writers, Dee's ‘imperial’ treatises addressed more than they appeared to on the surface. Dee believed, for example, that the philosopher's stone would recreate Elizabeth's empire.
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The Elizabethan ‘state’ did not decide on a single policy and then co-opt Dee to justify it intellectually. Policy emerged through vigorous debates among Elizabeth's Privy Councillors, and between them and the Queen, which required courtiers and politicians to draw upon accumulated wisdom both in and outside the Court. Leading Privy Councillors daily consulted intellectuals and men of practical experience, using their expertise to shape detailed policy in response to events.
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This process had stimulated Dee's earlier writings on British ‘empire’ and economic development. In 1566, at the request of the knowledge-broker Edward Dyer, he wrote ‘Atlantical Discourses’. Just then Humphrey Gilbert and Anthony Jenkinson were seeking backers for voyages to Cathay via the North Atlantic, while the Muscovy Company was asking Parliament to
confirm its exploration monopoly.
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In 1570 at Dyer's request Dee rewrote his 1565 outline of ‘commonwealth’ reforms, ‘A Synopsis of the British Republic’.
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Nor did Dee's advice follow modern understandings of political calculation. When a supernova appeared in the constellation Cassiopeia in 1572, Dee told Edward Dyer that it might ‘signify the finding of some great Treasure or the philosophers stone’, a prediction he felt confirmed by Frobisher's apparent discovery of gold in 1576.
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We need to remember such occult connections when assessing Dee's ideas about empire. Intellectuals could also submit uninvited papers on current events to the policy-making process, as when Dee dedicated the 1576 manuscript of ‘Memorials’ to Dyer. However, the influence these ‘devices’ had on actual policies depended on how Privy Councillors responded to events, sometimes at odds with the Queen.

The chief evidence for the case that Dee wrote exclusively about American empire is his involvement in the Frobisher voyages. Yet the processes of Elizabethan government make it unlikely that Dee wrote ‘Memorials’ in August 1576 to support Frobisher's first voyage. By then Frobisher had long disappeared over the horizon. Dee wrote ‘Memorials’ to address more pressing current issues than a possible Arthurian empire in the north-west.
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After Frobisher returned in October boasting about his route to China, Burghley's draft charter gave the ‘Company of Cathay’ a monopoly over that trade but notably failed to mention occupying American territory. Dee's belief in an Arthurian America was irrelevant to Burghley's policy.
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However, in early 1577 claims by alchemists to have found gold in a stone brought back by Frobisher transformed the government's agenda. Burghley's March 1577 instructions for Frobisher's second voyage now required him to fortify places for ‘possessing of the Country’ and its presumed gold mines.
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The Privy Council claimed a territorial empire in America without Dee's input. In fact, his ‘Memorials’ dealt only tangentially with Arthur's American empire. We shall see that the powerful politicians who read ‘Memorials’ and persuaded Dee to rewrite it were only interested in its solutions for domestic and European problems.

Therefore, we need to reassess Dee's connection with the Frobisher voyages. Dee became increasingly involved in organising the later voyages, thanks partly to his geographical knowledge about Arthur's empire. Yet others possessed that same knowledge, and new evidence reveals other reasons behind his increasing prominence in organising the voyages. The common assumption that Dee cooperated with Frobisher and Michael Lok, the chief financial backer of the first voyage, seems based on Dee's earlier involvement with the Muscovy Company. He devised his ‘Paradoxal Compass’ in the 1550s for the Company's pilot William Borough, who drafted the two ‘round charts’ listed amongst Frobisher's navigation equipment.
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However, Lok and a dissident group of Muscovy merchants were using political connections to circumvent their own Company's statutory monopoly over northern exploration.
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Lok teamed up with Frobisher in early 1574, but by Lok's account Dee learnt of their plans only sixteen days before Frobisher sailed in June 1576.
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Dee tried to hijack the arrangements, offending Lok's possessiveness about his cherished venture. In May 1576 Sir Humphrey Gilbert had published his supportive
Discourse for a new Passage to Cathay
.
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Lok claimed he appreciated Gilbert's support, but ‘without giving any offence’, he said – before doing precisely that – everything Gilbert had written was ‘known to us long before’. Dee also spotted flaws in Gilbert's
Discourse
, but outlined ‘another voyage of Discovery’ superior to Lok and Frobisher's: ‘God send them good speed’.
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Then, tactless as ever, Dee sought out Lok to announce his ‘18 new and very strange Articles of Consideration’. Lok took his revenge in November 1581. By then incarcerated in the Fleet prison for huge debts run up by the voyages, he naturally blamed everyone else for the disaster. Even so, he still denied that Dee made any contribution to the first voyage, instead claiming full responsibility for his own Atlantic research.
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Lok's denial reminds us that the sheer bulk of Dee's surviving writings, books and manuscripts have created the false impression that he alone amongst Elizabethans knew about Atlantic geography. Lok remembered Dee breezing into his house on 20 May 1576, expecting his erudition to dominate. However, for once Dee had to listen silently while Lok ‘laid
before him my Books and Authors, my charts and Instruments’, encompassing Christendom's knowledge of New World navigation, gathered at huge expense over twenty-five years – but now entirely lost.
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