The Arch Conjuror of England (24 page)

Dee's ‘Limits’ therefore addressed Leicester and Walsingham's central preoccupation in that summer of 1578 – the sovereignty of the Netherlands, which they feared Anjou would seize. Anjou used marriage negotiations to reassure Elizabeth that he would protect her interests in the Netherlands, nullifying Leicester's interference. So although Dee claimed to have written ‘Limits’ at Elizabeth's command, Leicester probably floated the idea. Dee believed that ‘Limits’ demonstrated her sovereignty over foreign kingdoms ‘and provinces’, meaning ‘Zelandia, Brabantia, Flandria, et Picardia’, once possessed by Arthur.
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Despite Walsingham's incessant warnings from the Netherlands in July, when Dee wrote the last section of ‘Limits’, Elizabeth remained blind to Anjou's ambitions. However, by 9 August Walsingham's startling news that Anjou would shortly become sovereign over the provinces reached the Court, on its summer Progress at Bury St Edmunds. Leicester seized upon the nightmare prospect of the French controlling England's economic lifeline through Antwerp to panic Elizabeth into immediately agreeing to send him with an army.
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No one, especially Leicester, trusted Elizabeth to maintain this policy, as Catholic courtiers immediately regrouped to reverse it and advance the Anjou marriage.
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Therefore, Leicester again turned to Dee, at one of the most crucial moments of the reign. The tensions over policy between the Queen and her Privy Councillors had never been greater, the decisions never more pressing. No Privy Councillor could be certain how seriously Elizabeth took the marriage negotiations, though Protestants feared the worst. With Anjou busily stirring the pot, events in the Netherlands looked more than usually chaotic. Grindal still languished. Above all, the current Progress daily exposed the Court to disobedient subjects, both Catholic and ‘puritan’. The Queen initially favoured an equally hard line against both.
¹⁹
Privy Councillors desperately tried to muzzle the ‘puritan’ preachers, to
make Elizabeth focus on the popish threat. By the time they reached Norwich in mid-August, they had compiled a hit list of disobedient Catholic recusants requiring severe punishment.
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But would Elizabeth allow this partisan approach?

The Privy Council were lucky. Dee left Mortlake with ‘Limits’ on 15 August to meet the Court at Norwich.
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Leicester probably hoped that Dee's demonstration of her Arthurian inheritance would help solidify Elizabeth's intervention in the Netherlands. Dee could also thwart Anjou's courtship by reminding Elizabeth how the marriage threatened her prospective European empire. But when Dee rode into Norwich, weary and mud-stained after a hundred miles of almost incessant rain, things had changed again. The French ambassadors had soothed Elizabeth's anxieties before Dee gained an audience, and Leicester's Netherlands ambitions dissipated.
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The Privy Council now had more urgent need of Dee's magical learning. In mid-August the commissioners charged with London's security uncovered three wax images under a dunghill, one inscribed ‘Elizabeth’ and two, according to Mendoza the Spanish ambassador, dressed like Privy Councillors. All three were ‘transfixed with a quantity of pig's bristles’, apparently witchcraft meant to kill, as the dunghill's gentle heat melted the images. On 15 August the commissioners sent them to Norwich, Dee arriving just afterwards. Mendoza claimed that this ‘augury’ disturbed Elizabeth.
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The panicking Privy Council demanded that Dee speedily ‘prevent the mischief’ they ‘suspected to be intended against her Majesty's person’.
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That morning Dee, ‘in godly and artificial [technical] manner’, did something he never defined. Contemporary magic included charms against witchcraft and questionary horoscopes to identify malevolent witches. Of the badly spooked Privy Council, only Secretary Thomas Wilson found the courage to observe Dee's ‘godly’ magic and report to Elizabeth.
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Dee's activities over the next few months brought him great influence, because he was meeting Leicester's need, to find evidence of Catholic sorcery against Elizabeth, which he could use against his Catholic rivals at Court. The Progress had already turned up evidence of Catholic idolatrous ‘superstition’ in East Anglia. Now Privy Councillors could put a
potent anti-Catholic ‘spin’ on events, especially for contemporaries increasingly willing to identify Catholicism with ‘conjuring’. This justified hard measures against Catholic recusants and forced conservatives such as Hatton back towards the political centre. The ironies here, given Dee's Catholic orders and ‘conjuring’ history, are best left to himself.

On 20 August the Privy Council demanded that the London commission hunt down likely suspects. Two days later they sent Dee hurrying back to London to assist. Meanwhile, the Privy Council at Norwich used the wax images to justify punishing their hit list of Catholic recusant gentlemen.
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Elizabeth still balked at helping the Dutch, but correspondents reported that ‘by good means’ the Queen had been persuaded to revise her opinion of ‘zealous and loyal’ Protestants in Suffolk and Norfolk, and to countenance the papists’ disgrace.
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If Dee had not yet guaranteed Elizabeth would follow a thoroughly Protestant policy, he had certainly raised the hopes of Privy Councillors.
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A week after Dee's return to the capital the London commission arrested the young Catholic Henry Blower.
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The Privy Council demanded more results. On 10 September the commissioners arrested the Catholic Henry Blower the elder, and moved his son to the Tower.
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Under harsher interrogation there the younger Blower accused Thomas Harding, the Protestant Vicar of Islington, of making the wax images.

Harding had form. The previous April he had been accused of conjuring, though in those more relaxed times investigators found insufficient proof. The commissioners had arrested him by 18 September, trying to placate the increasingly grumpy demands of the Privy Council.
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By late September the interrogators had lost patience with Harding's refusal to confirm Blower's accusations, especially regarding his secret papistry, and had begun torturing him. The sufferings of the prisoners over the following weeks demonstrate Leicester's commitment to uncovering a Catholic conspiracy. The Privy Council used the putative conspiracy to press Elizabeth into tougher measures against papists, ordering the bishops to apprehend Catholic missionaries seducing the people from their allegiance.
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However, ultimately the prisoners’ predicament originated in Dee's occult abilities. While the screams of the tortured echoed through the
Tower dungeons, Dee's stock at Court rose higher than ever. Secretary Wilson briefed Elizabeth about Dee's contribution to the investigation at Richmond on 28 September.
³³
Dee used her gratitude not to advocate an American empire but, as a civic humanist, to solve a domestic problem raised in
Memorials
. That very day, Wilson summoned the Lord Mayor, the City's Commissioners of Sewers and its water bailiff, before the Privy Council. The Council now demanded that the weirs in the Thames beside Richmond Palace ‘be put down forthwith’. The City's indirect strategy of using Dee had worked.
³⁴

Three days later the Privy Council conveyed Elizabeth's anger that the Lord Mayor had failed to destroy the weirs. He quickly replied that ‘the officers and purveyors for her Majesty's household’ had thwarted the City's efforts. In 1569 they had imprisoned the water bailiff for destroying their weirs. Since then successive mayors had done all they could ‘or dare’. In 1574 household officers had threatened the Lord Mayor and his officers, while declaring fourteen weirs inviolable. However, by September 1578 many more had been erected to supply eels for the Court.
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Echoing the words they had inserted in Dee's
Memorials
, the City complained that the weirs destroyed ‘the brood and fry’ of fish and blocked navigation. Having with the Council's authority silenced the household officers, in early October the water bailiff, accompanied by a flotilla of Aldermen, destroyed thirty-three weirs, but left the Queen's.
³⁶
Typically of Tudor government, this intervention failed to end the matter.

Meanwhile, in early October the Privy Council tried to tie the conspiracy to the Catholics by arresting John Prestall, four years after releasing him under bonds for good behaviour. Were they ‘rounding up the usual suspects’, or was Dee settling old scores? Earlier in the year the Council had ignored accusations of coining against Prestall. But on 8 October Dee enjoyed a two-hour audience with Elizabeth after a week when pain had incapacitated her. On 13 October he marked another audience in his ‘Diary’ with an ‘E’ surmounted by a crown, which usually denoted some magical practice for the Queen.
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About then someone reminded the Privy Council about Prestall's 1571 indictment for treasonous
conspiracy to kill Elizabeth by necromancy. The Council badgered Burghley to hunt down any surviving papers.
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In this highly charged political atmosphere Prestall's track record of ‘magical devices’ against Elizabeth encouraged Leicester to stake his political credit on proving a popish conspiracy.
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That would prejudice the Anjou match, advance the ‘Protestant cause’, and provide a deadly weapon against Catholic courtiers. Leicester spread rumours that Anjou's supporters were using ‘amorous potions and unlawful arts’ to make Elizabeth fall in love with him. The Queen's ill-health since the summer made accusations of witchcraft more likely to stick. She felt unwell in mid-September and by early October was suffering constant facial pains that defied diagnosis by London's best physicians.
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Everyone remembered the wax images that had killed King Charles IX of France in 1574.
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Only weeks later did some doctors blame her rotting teeth and infected gums.

Two days after Dee performed magic for her, Elizabeth commanded Leicester ‘to examine these fellows at the Tower’. The Earl, dressed immaculately and expensively as usual, personally interrogated the suspects: his cold hauteur, revealed in the dark, heavy-lidded eyes which stare out of his portraits, was unmoved by their agonised writhing on the rack.
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Was Dee coordinating with Leicester? Though the Earl now desperately needed to prove Prestall's involvement in a Catholic conspiracy, after a month of torture Secretary Wilson had to admit defeat.
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The Privy Council then sent for Prestall's brother-in-law, Vincent Murphyn. Whether Dee or Prestall provided his name remains unknown.
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By then Dee had left for Germany. He had attended Elizabeth for her illness in late October. Her diagnosis remained unclear, so in early November Leicester and Walsingham dispatched Dee on an arduous mid-winter journey to consult the Paracelsian physician and alchemist Leonhard Thurneysser at Frankfurt on the Oder. They quickly provided £100, the kind of income for which Dee vainly petitioned throughout his life. He spent it in travelling fifteen hundred miles before he returned in February. Such elaborate precautions enabled Leicester and Walsingham to milk the crisis for all they could against the Catholics.
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Dee politely omitted from his later account the important detail that Leicester and Walsingham had entrusted him with a flask of Elizabeth's urine. Thurneysser had invented a famous device to diagnose by urine distillation. This consisted of a square glass bottle divided into twenty-four horizontal bands, each corresponding to a part of the body. When filled with the urine and set in a lukewarm bath, steam settled on the band corresponding to the diseased part. This and other magical inventions had brought Thurneysser a huge salary from the Elector of Brandenburg. Dee sought but never achieved such patronage.
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After meeting Thurneysser, on 4 January 1579 Dee consulted the angels about Elizabeth but did not describe their response.
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By now Leicester had used pamphlets and ballads to stir up a national scandal against the Catholics and their ‘conjured images’.
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The French lawyer Jean Bodin gave the affair European publicity in his
On the Demon-mania of Sorcerers
.
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The Privy Council began seeing conspiracies everywhere. In January 1579 they obsessed over some Windsor witches, worryingly close to the Court, who used wax images like those used against ‘her Majesty's person’.
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For the Privy Council had still not established who made them. Leicester had both Harding and Prestall condemned to death for high treason in early 1579.
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However, in April the Privy Council quietly moved the younger Blower from the Tower and released him altogether in July.
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This change of heart reflects Leicester's eclipse after Anjou's supporters revealed his secret marriage to the Countess of Essex, which accelerated Elizabeth's marriage negotiations with Anjou. Her increasing interest in Anjou and disinterest in the ‘Protestant cause’, or supporting the Dutch, almost brought Catholic courtiers onto the Privy Council by October.
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The Privy Council also eased the younger Blower out of the picture at least partly through embarrassment that innocent men had been tortured. The conspiracy, Catholics gleefully recalled, ‘being a little too foolishly handled by the accusers at the beginning, was for very shame in the end, let fall and sink away’. Leicester lost all credibility when the notorious conjuror Thomas Elkes confessed that he had created the wax images to enable a wealthy young client to obtain a woman's love.
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Elkes became a
marked man, condemned to death in November 1580 for conjuring buried treasure and stolen goods. Someone, probably a Catholic, obtained his reprieve from the Queen.
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Dee suffered from the fallout. The Court knew about his angel magic, for in June 1579 Hatton sent him a new ‘scryer’, Bartholomew Hickman.
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What courtiers thought of Dee's error we do not know. The implications for his imperial advocacy are clearer – he became vulnerable to Vincent Murphyn's revenge.