The Arch Conjuror of England (21 page)

Dee's first surviving angelic ‘action’ of 22 December 1581 shows that the missing pages of ‘Discoveries’ applied Trithemius's angel magic. Dee began with a traditional invocation, asking God to send his ‘holy and mighty Angel, named Anael’, the ‘steward of the orb of Venus: and also Chief governor General of this great period, as I have Noted in my book of Famous and rich Discoveries’.
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Clearly, Dee began ‘Discoveries’ by announcing Elizabeth's global leadership in the current Age of Venus. However, another ‘secret’ in ‘Discoveries’ required that Elizabeth establish her empire soon. For in a manuscript neglected until now Dee reveals the ‘secret’ in ‘Discoveries’: the imminent, abrupt shift to the Age of Jupiter. The spirit ‘King Bynepor’ told Dee, ‘Thou beginnest new worlds, new people, new kings, and new knowledge of a new government.’ Dee responded in the margin, ‘New Worlds: perhaps a new period doth begin, as I have set down in the Volume of famous and rich Discoveries’ where the ‘great period’ of Jupiter followed Venus. Elizabeth, however, would hardly welcome such threatening news, which Dee omitted from subsequent drafts.
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A late marginal addition to
Memorials
shows how Dee used the imminent Age of Jupiter to press Elizabeth to exploit England's temporary imperial opportunity. For the incredible ‘Privilege by God, and Nature, Appropriate to this British Monarchy’ will only last ‘for a While’. Dee saw himself as the prophet of this ‘Incredible Political Mystery’, the coming new age. He scattered his Jupiter symbol throughout his books and manuscripts, including an account of Frobisher's third voyage.
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Dee felt apocalyptic pressure to warn Elizabeth about her prophetic imperial role. His angelic revelations and offer of the philosopher's stone, would not have alienated Elizabeth. On the contrary, she always proved receptive to his occult philosophy. Whether Dee would gain an audience to tell the Queen what God and His angels had revealed depended on other factors. Most importantly, it depended on how politicians could exploit the other hidden messages in his writings on the ‘British Monarchy’ to advance the ‘Protestant cause’.

O
N
1 A
UGUST
1576 Dee began dictating his ‘Memorials’ to an amanuensis. We can imagine him every inch the magus, striding up and down between the packed shelves of his library at Mortlake in his black robe and skullcap, his long beard waving, his arms gesticulating as he groped for the right expression. We can still hear his pauses in the occasionally impenetrable prose, full of fractured phrases, incomplete allusions and digressions. In six days of dictation he never even broached his ostensible subject, the art of navigation. Dee believed that ‘Memorials’ solved current political and strategic problems. He hardly mentioned Frobisher. When he finally stopped talking, he dedicated the text to Edward Dyer.
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Dee expected Dyer to take his proposals to the Privy Council. In the short term he would be disappointed. In the medium term ‘Memorials’ would have a curious life, exemplifying the struggles that more Protestant Privy Councillors had in convincing a conservative Queen of the dangers she faced.

Busy Privy Councillors received policy advice while dealing with a stream of contingent events. As social subordinates, writers of advice had to accept that circumstances determined the reception of their ideas.
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Therefore, whether anyone applied Dee's ideas to policy depended on how well ‘Memorials’ fitted the specific policy needs of Elizabeth's government in August 1576. For Dee's treatise grappled with the latest in the
unremitting economic, political and military crises spinning out of and feeding into the larger, perpetual crisis we now call the Revolt of the Netherlands. Elizabeth's government faced multifaceted geopolitical problems in north-west Europe: warfare in the Low Countries, the recurrent French Wars of Religion, the shaky authority of England's clients in Scotland, and simmering Irish unrest.

Persuading Elizabeth to deal with these challenges exacerbated domestic political tensions between politicians of varying opinions, from convinced Protestant to open Catholic, because they differed widely over what the Queen should do in fluid circumstances. So did she. Dee's reputation, badly tarnished by Murphyn and Foxe's 1570
Acts and Monuments
, depended upon how successfully his advice addressed these difficult challenges, in the midst of constantly shifting debate over policy.

This explains why ‘Memorials’ addressed European and domestic problems, not an American empire. Dee's dictation turned into eighty printed pages, which in part explained how to fund, supply, organise and deploy a ‘Petty Navy Royal’, not an ocean-going fleet but sixty ships for patrolling home waters. This was not a new topic for Dee, somehow stimulated by Frobisher's voyage. His ‘Synopsis of the British Republic’, started about 1565 and rewritten for Dyer in 1570, outlined how reforms could ‘make this kingdom flourishing, triumphant, famous and blessed’. Later he retrieved the manuscript from his files, scratched out ‘kingdom’ and inserted ‘British Monarchy’. Strength, he wrote in 1570, required a coastguard of fifty ships, half the Queen's and half hired merchant vessels.
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By 1576 he considered a royal coastguard of sixty ships the ‘onely Master Key, wherewith to open all Locks, that keep out, or hinder, this Incomparable British Empire’ from power, peace and prosperity.
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Now Dee's navy would address the problems filling the State Papers and Privy Council register for these years: prevent foreign invasions; protect English merchant ships from piracy; train more navigators and seamen; stop the illegal export of victuals and munitions; suppress domestic rebels; selectively recruit English pirates; protect that nursery of seamen, the English fishing industry; and force foreigners to respect the English Crown and merchants. Dee's navy would enforce ‘the Royalty and
Sovereignty of the Seas … environing this Monarchy of England, Ireland, and (by right) Scotland, and the Orkneyes also’, because that naturally belonged to ‘the Imperial Crown of these British Islands’.
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Applying his civil-law training, Dee extended Elizabeth's authority to ‘the Middle Seas over’. Eventually, he suggested still wider sovereignty for Elizabeth, because her Arthurian and Plantagenet descent entitled her to claim substantial parts of Europe.
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Dee believed that enforcing Elizabeth's sovereignty over the Narrow Seas would solve political problems reaching crisis point by August 1576. Public order depended on reliable food supplies, so the unlicensed export of food was illegal.
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However, the poor harvest of 1575 drove prices sky-high, encouraging more and more English and Dutch profiteers to smuggle expensive victuals into the Netherlands war zone.
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They also carried munitions, which encouraged a little piracy on the side, now that the Netherlands Revolt and French wars of religion had destroyed government control over the north-west European coast. By 1576 county piracy commissions had failed to suppress piracy.
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The English fishing industry struggled against the more technologically advanced Dutch.
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However, Dee's solutions for these
chronic
policy problems do not explain his insistence that ‘Memorials’ directly addressed the
acute
political crisis facing Elizabeth on 1 August 1576. He emphasised the hurry in typically breathless phrases. Right now there existed ‘a Little lock of Lady Occasion, Flickering in the Air, by our hands, to catch hold on: whereby, we may, yet once more (before, all, be utterly past, and for ever) discreetly, and valiantly recover, and enjoy, if not all our Ancient and due Appurtenances, to this Imperial British Monarchy, Yet, at the least, some such Notable Portion thereof, As … this, may become the most Peaceable, most Rich, most Puissant, and most Flourishing Monarchy of all else (this day) in Christendom’.
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Dee symbolised this end-of-times imperial moment in his hand-drawn title-page illustration, showing Empress Elizabeth steering the ship of Christendom, supplicated by the British Republic, ‘to arm ourselves with a war machine’ that will ‘guard our security against all enemies’. Dee's navy would produce incredible commodities, unto which God had provided
‘even now, the Way and Means’, because militarily ‘our Friends are become strong: and our Enemies, sufficiently weak’, ‘though their accustomed Confidence, in Treason, Treachery and Disloyal Dealings, be very great’.
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This last directly responded to current events, for after completing the main text on 6 August, Dee wrote this comment on a slip of paper inserted between the manuscript's pages. It allowed him to put a cosmic prophetic ‘spin’ on the recent collapse of Spanish power in the Netherlands. Philip II had unilaterally rescheduled his debt repayments in September 1575. That instantly destroyed his credit, so by July 1576 armies of mutinous unpaid Spanish troops had begun looting the provinces. The Netherlands Council of State declared them enemies of the state on 26 July.
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Days later this news reached London, sparking Dee's decision to begin dictating ‘Memorials’ on 1 August.

Less obviously, Dee's weak ‘Enemies’ referred to the current confrontation with the rebellious provinces of Holland and Zealand over the piratical Sea Beggars of Flushing. Dee's ‘Petty Navy Royal’ would not just force the Spanish to respect English merchants.
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The Sea Beggars also challenged Elizabeth's maritime sovereignty.
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More importantly, they had threatened England's economy by seizing the Merchant Adventurers’ wool fleet bound for Spanish-held Antwerp. Escalating reprisals stymied negotiations, and Elizabeth ostensibly commanded the Privy Council to blockade supplies to the Dutch on 1 June, and again in early July.
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This pragmatic order closed international waters, by a fleet enforcing Elizabeth's sovereignty over the Narrow Seas.
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On the day Dee began dictating ‘Memorials’, the Privy Council ordered that fleet to sweep the Flushing pirates from the English Channel. They toughened these orders on 6 August, the day Dee stopped dictating ‘Memorials’.
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Apparently, the angels were inspiring Dee to advise Elizabeth how to enforce her current policy more thoroughly. More likely, Dee's ‘scryer’ transmitted angelic ‘revelations’ inspired by Court gossip about that week's decisions. Therefore, ‘Memorials’ argued that the ‘Petty Navy Royal’ would force ‘France, Flanders, Holland, Zealand, Denmark, Norway, Scotland, [and] Spain’ to observe ‘their sworn, or pretended Amity’.
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Unfortunately for Dee, the Privy Council's posturing to defend Elizabeth's honour was all bluff.
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None of the Council seriously wanted to weaken Holland and Zealand, assisting a Spanish reconquest that would inevitably prelude the invasion of England. Burghley emphasised this consequence while meticulously demolishing the case for blockading the Dutch. He insisted that public statements of outrage against the Sea Beggars should accompany secret negotiation with William of Orange.
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The Privy Council's anti-piracy orders carefully exempted ships holding William's commission, and they barely enforced the embargo on supplies.
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Since March Walsingham had been secretly coaching William through negotiations with Elizabeth, despite the embarrassments caused by the lawless Sea Beggars. On 7 August, after Dee had completed ‘Memorials’, Walsingham and Elizabeth secretly advised Orange of her terms for a settlement.
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The Privy Council quietly countermanded its orders before the punitive fleet sailed in August.
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Edward Dyer would have found ‘Memorials’ hard to broker to the Privy Council, hence it initially failed as a ‘politic plat’.
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In this version, perhaps appropriately given his religious upbringing, Dee's advice most resembled the programme of Catholic courtiers, who when Dee wrote ‘Memorials’ believed they ‘possess the Queen's Majesty's ear, to egg her on to the utter ruin of the Protestants beyond the seas’.
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The Earls of Arundel, Surrey, Northumberland and Rutland, Lord Henry Howard and Charles Arundel, shared deep attachment to the old religion, close family relationships, and burning resentment against the upstart Leicester. Modern hindsight too easily underestimates their influence at Court. With their friends such as the erratic Earl of Oxford, they enjoyed privileged access to Elizabeth through their female relatives in the Privy Chamber.
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They appealed to Elizabeth's ingrained aristocratic and anti-puritan prejudices by portraying the upstart Dutch and the Sea Beggars in the worst possible light. Burghley, Walsingham and Leicester barely preserved secret support for the Dutch from Elizabeth's public outrage and demonstrations of naval strength. This suggests that Dee had been ‘stirred up’ and ‘ordered’ to write the treatise by a scryer connected to conservatives at Court.