The Arch Conjuror of England (23 page)

Current events also explain why Dee insisted on the special relevance of
Memorials
to ‘these dangerous days’, when Elizabeth's empire to the ‘south and east’ must be recovered by closing the sea lanes and rolling back the Spanish tide in the Netherlands.
⁵⁴
For he later recalled that other hidden political reason for publishing the
Memorials
in September 1577, when sophisticated politicians had great hopes of Elizabeth as the Last World Empress, ‘Imperial Governor of all Christian kings, princes, and states’ – especially states where the English could easily land or who must trade through ‘any of her Majesty's appropriate and peculiar Seas’.
⁵⁵
Leicester seems to have envisaged Elizabeth recovering her Netherlands empire preparatory to becoming the Last Reforming Empress.

The recovery of Elizabeth's ancestral European empire required Dee's writings to become increasingly explicit in describing Arthur's empire. However, besides historical doubts about Arthur's existence, such claims invited opposition, because Leicester identified himself with Arthur. In July 1575 Leicester staged elaborate Arthurian pageants for the Queen at Kenilworth, where poets celebrated him as Arthur's descendant. Edmund Spenser's
Faerie Queene
echoed these pageants. Spenser's Arthur receives Mercilla/Elizabeth's immediate permission to rescue ‘Belge’ and her ‘seventeen goodly sons’, or provinces (V, x–xi), before achieving her imperial destiny.
⁵⁶
Leicester's triumphal entries into Netherlands towns in 1586 drew heavily on Arthurian themes.
⁵⁷
Such claims made some Protestants nervous about their European implications. William Patten satirised the Kenilworth fantasies in
Laneham's Letter
(1575). Patten shared his patron Burghley's worries that foreign adventures could imperil the defensible Protestant ‘Empire’ of the British Isles.
⁵⁸
Some Court opinion, therefore, opposed Dee's increasingly detailed claims for Arthur's European empire.

Memorials
merely alluded to Arthur's empire beyond the British Isles, referring to ‘Discoveries’, which claimed that Arthur had ruled ‘Hollandia’.
‘Limits of the British Empire’ more explicitly added for the inner circle ‘Zelandia, Brabantia, Flandria, et Picardia’ as parts of that British Empire to be reclaimed ‘where no Christian Prince hath presently possession, or Jurisdiction Actual’ – that is, where Spanish control had collapsed after 1576.
⁵⁹
‘Limits of the British Empire’ therefore implicitly supported Elizabeth becoming ‘Imperial Governor of all Christian kings’. Though unnamed advisers urged peace with princes who had ‘usurped your Majesty's ancient royalties’, this disgraced ‘your Majesty's honour Imperial’. Dee therefore fervently begged Elizabeth ‘by entry and reentry to recover again’ the British Empire in Europe.
⁶⁰

Dee believed that ‘within these few years’ Elizabeth would rule a global empire through God's ‘Gracious Direction, and Aid thereto’, already begun ‘by means not yet published’. This meant sudden apocalyptic change, angelic direction and the ‘cosmopolitical’ philosopher's stone. Even so, Elizabeth must seize her opportunity: whether she would depended on the constantly shifting contexts for Elizabethan policy debates.
⁶¹
Elizabeth hoped to reconcile the Netherlands provinces to Philip's obedience while restoring their ancient liberties, demilitarised and free from French interference. This blithely ignored years of bloody, brutalising warfare. Herself flexible in her religious attitudes, she also underestimated Philip II's messianic fixation on imposing Catholic orthodoxy in the provinces.
⁶²

However, more often Elizabeth oscillated between cutting off support to the Dutch, joining a defensive international Protestant league, confronting Spain by militarily supporting the Dutch, or in the last resort accepting their sovereignty.
⁶³
Depending on international religious politics, courtly struggles between conservatives and zealous Protestants to influence her thinking, and the daily tide of events, Elizabeth flirted at any moment with all of these policies. Timing therefore decided whether or not Dee's imperial writings would prove influential. For Dee remained a client, subordinated to the interests of the powerful. Even his belief in the apocalyptic truth of his imperial ideas could not overcome that reality.

M
EMORIALS
EMERGED
in early September 1577, in seemingly propitious circumstances. Under increasing military pressure, the Netherlands States-General had begged Elizabeth to send an army under Leicester.
¹
In mid-September Leicester was confident he could overcome Elizabeth's resistance to his departure. Court gossip expected Hatton, Thomas Wilson and even Dyer to be sworn as Privy Councillors, along with several lawyers to manage Elizabeth's extended sovereignty. Yet at the last moment she cancelled the promotions.
²
Burghley's return to Court partly explains this cautious turn of events.
³
However, the latest French war of religion had concluded in early September, closing the window of opportunity, and releasing both the French King's younger brother, the Duke of Anjou, and his rivals the Catholic Guise family, to intervene in the Netherlands. Protestants believed this made intervention even more vital, but Elizabeth's Catholic courtiers used it to counsel inaction. They could argue that dishonourable support of rebels would now unite France and Spain against England.
⁴
In these circumstances Dee's vision of Elizabeth as Empress of Europe became confrontational, so Elizabeth prevented Dee from distributing
Memorials
.

However, Leicester continued to bring Dee into audiences with Elizabeth at crucial moments for his policy, sometimes taking advantage of Burghley's absence. For the next few years Dee became closely
identified with an aggressive Netherlands policy and opposition to Elizabeth's proposed marriage to the Catholic Duke of Anjou. This explains the timing of Vincent Murphyn's continuing slanders against Dee. It also explains why
Leicester's Commonwealth
, written in bitter defeat and exile by Catholics in 1584, insisted that Leicester had kept the ‘atheist’ Dee for ‘figuring and conjuring’.
⁵

This charge held some truth for the next few years while the Court obsessed over the Anjou marriage negotiations, linked with Grindal's fate and Netherlands affairs. The very few public events Dee noted in his ‘Diary’ included several key moments in Anjou's courtship.
⁶
In mid-October the Privy Council began hurriedly surveying Catholic recusants, to quantify the popish fifth column it believed the Anjou negotiations were encouraging. Some Privy Councillors assured Grindal of his release, expecting that the survey would demonstrate the need to restore him to lead the Church. On 12 November the Council decided to execute Cuthbert Mayne for treason, with maximum publicity.
⁷

Yet the ‘forward’ Protestants met resistance. To overcome it they needed to exploit Elizabeth's receptiveness to Dee's occult philosophy. By November, Anjou had guaranteed to protect Elizabeth's interests in the Netherlands, and, on the day the Privy Council decided Mayne must die, she made Hatton her Vice-Chamberlain and a Privy Councillor. Hatton's promotion rewarded his reversion to Elizabeth's cautious tactic of using Anjou as her surrogate in the Netherlands, though Elizabeth still vacillated about sending Leicester with an army. Dee now contributed passages to Humphrey Gilbert's ‘Discourse how her Majesty may annoy the King of Spain’ that repeated his attacks in
Memorials
on the same ‘doubtful friends’ and again urged Elizabeth to exploit Spain's temporary weakness.
⁸

Murky manoeuvres stirred up ‘a sudden contrary tempest’ on 26 November when Elizabeth ordered Grindal to appear before the Star Chamber three days later. Only illness prevented his submission and probable condemnation.
⁹
Leicester used Dee to try to fend off this prospect. Dee spent a week at Windsor countering ‘great fear and doubt’ spread by ‘Men of no small account’ about a comet whose tail pointed to
the Netherlands, presumably Catholics anxious to discourage Elizabeth from intervention in that direction. He advised the Queen on the 22nd, again on the 25th, the day before Grindal's summons, and the 28th, the day before his scheduled appearance. Dee demonstrated the extent of Arthur's empire, including the North-West Passage, and perhaps reassured Elizabeth about the Last Days, signalled by the comet. At least she courageously faced up to another comet in 1580. On 30 November he spoke with Walsingham and on 1 December with Hatton, when Elizabeth knighted both men.

Dee never recorded these conversations. But during his audiences Elizabeth promised Dee her protection against anyone seeking ‘my overthrow’ because of ‘my rare studies and philosophical exercises’. This suggests that Dee's occult advice implicitly criticised the Anjou match by emphasising Elizabeth's apocalyptic imperial destiny. He thus confirmed his reputation amongst Catholic courtiers.
¹⁰
Several pamphlets, one by Dee's friend the Kent physician Thomas Twyne, claimed that the comet signalled miraculous alterations in Netherlands politics, but the crypto-Catholic Lord Henry Howard was probably thinking about Dee when he criticised even ‘the better sort of Princes’ for consulting ‘Astrologers and Conjurors’.
¹¹

Dee's place in the midst of these important political consultations explains how he came to marry Jane Fromoundes on 5 February 1578. Just months after Katheryn Dee died on 16 March 1575, Dee had obtained letters from Elizabeth, Leicester and Hatton supporting a marriage proposal. Jane was then twenty, a gentlewoman servant to Lady Katherine Howard, Elizabeth's closest female friend to the end of her life. So Jane was a well-placed member of the Court and probably the object of Dee's proposal. The fact that Dee sought traditional character references not from friends but from the Queen, her favourite, and Leicester suggests that he expected some resistance.

So it proved, for Jane's father, Bartholomew Fromoundes, was a Catholic recusant, who married his children amongst other recusant families. He clearly resented the demand that he allow Jane to marry a lapsed priest. His will, dated 3 August 1577, when Dee was basking in Leicester's
favour and no doubt fancied his chances of marrying Jane, provided £100 for his other daughters at marriage, but not a penny for her. The following months, when Leicester made heavy use of Dee's occult philosophy against Catholic interests, only increased the pressure to accept the ‘conjuror’, and one can imagine Bartholomew's feelings when Dee finally married Jane on 5 February 1578, just days before the prohibited season of Lent. Bartholomew died of a stroke the day after Arthur, their first child, was born.
¹²

Let us return with Dee to the Court and its problems. Recognising the apocalyptic significance of the Netherlands conflict helps to highlight Dee's intentions in ‘Limits of the British Empire’. He began writing ‘Limits’ by November 1577, expanded it before 4 May 1578, when Anjou's marriage negotiators arrived, and again before 22 July 1578, when negotiations resumed. Dee's involvement with Frobisher's voyages from November 1577 onwards might lead us to expect that ‘Limits’ justified Elizabeth's ‘Arthurian’ empire in the north-west Atlantic. Part of it does. However, most of the manuscript asserted Elizabeth's sovereignty over Europe, particularly the section written in July 1578 detailing Arthur's European conquests. Neither the third Frobisher voyage, long departed, nor Humphrey Gilbert's Letters Patent for colonising America, already issued in June, needed Dee's support.
¹³
Dee remained astonishingly ignorant about Gilbert's real objectives in August, believing that Gilbert aimed ‘toward Hochelaga’, now Montreal, rather than his real objective, the West Indies.
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The contents and timing of ‘Limits’, like the occasion when Dee tried to present it to Elizabeth, fit much better with Leicester's attempts to subvert Elizabeth's marriage negotiations. Leicester's pressure behind Dee's writing emerges in an important contradiction. Dee's contemporary annotations in Ferdinand Columbus's
History
and in Oviedo's
Navigations
firmly denied the Pope any authority to award Castile the New World. However, ‘Limits’ now accepted the Pope had this authority, because Dee dramatically concluded that work with the assertion that Elizabeth was ‘the Lawful successor of Castile’. Her Plantagenet ancestors had been illegally deprived of that crown centuries before. Elizabeth's pedigree thus
redoubled her right to the Netherlands and entitled her to America – another imperial angelic revelation concealed within
Memorials
.
¹⁵
Contemporary politicians took genealogy very seriously. Hence the stress before the 1576 Parliament on Elizabeth's inherited right to the sovereignty of Holland and Zealand.