The Arch Conjuror of England (25 page)

E
LIZABETH EXCLUDED
Leicester and Walsingham from Court until early 1580. Leicester could not promote Dee's access to Elizabeth until later that year – leaving him vulnerable to Murphyn's accusations. Murphyn certainly had strong motives this time, apart from his own arrest and interrogation. Following his torture and condemnation, Prestall remained in the Tower under sentence of death until July 1588. He later claimed he was prepared three times for execution.
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Therefore, in 1580 Murphyn accused Dee of being involved in a complicated Catholic plot, which mingled distorted memories of the Pole plot of 1562 with elements from the Northern Rebellion of 1569. Murphyn wanted to revive Dee's reputation as a Catholic ‘Arch-Conjuror’, which the 1576
Acts and Monuments
had attempted to bury.

This story emerges from a previously overlooked letter from Murphyn to Burghley. Ultimately, Murphyn aimed to incriminate the Hastings family, often targeted by Catholic propaganda because of their Yorkist claim to the throne. The godly Henry Hastings, Earl of Huntingdon and Leicester's loyal brother-in-law, had been Leicester's preferred successor to Elizabeth when she contracted smallpox in October 1562. On that occasion Prestall narrowly escaped Cecil's net. Huntingdon's younger brothers, Sir George and Walter Hastings, both discreet Catholics, avoided politics.
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Murphyn's accusations connected Dee with the
Hastings. They also connect to Huntingdon's stealthy, protracted and ultimately successful attempt to take over Lord Mountjoy's copper deposits at Canford, Dorset. Murphyn's claims add something to the belief that Dee participated in the industrial alchemy there.

During the late summer of 1580 suspicion began building about a Catholic plot involving coining. Hurried investigations led to the arrest in London in late August of the Irish alchemist Richard Stanihurst. These developments triggered Murphyn's allegations, forcing Dee to clear his name by initiating legal proceedings against Murphyn on 14 September 1580. Politics took an exceptionally dangerous turn that September. The recent peace between French Catholics and Huguenots, and Anjou's treaty with the Low Countries, revived Elizabeth's fears about France controlling the Netherlands. Leicester played upon those fears, pressing her to send English troops. Dee's evidence for her rights to a European empire formed the capstone of this campaign, so Murphyn may have been a stalking-horse for Leicester's Catholic opponents.

Some measure of the heightened tensions at Court can be gained from Elizabeth's well-known visit to Dee three days after he began his case against Murphyn. Doubtless encouraged by Leicester, she declared her confidence in Dee by giving him her hand to kiss and by pointedly commanding him to ‘resort oftener’ to her Privy Chamber, thereby both showing him her support against Murphyn and reviving hopes for Leicester's ‘forward’ policy. Over ten years later Dee could still vividly recall the details of this significant visit.
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Dee's conflicts with Murphyn over the following weeks counterpoint disagreements within the Privy Council over how best to respond to the rapidly changing situation in the Netherlands. On 22 September Dee put his ‘declaration’ against Murphyn into the London Guildhall court. His hand had been forced because Murphyn had told anyone who would listen that Dee had practised traitorous magic against the Queen and Privy Council. The next day Murphyn responded from prison by writing to Burghley. Murphyn sent his letter through his fellow prisoner William Herle, Burghley's agent in the murkiest depths of the Elizabethan political underworld. Herle forwarded Murphyn's letter on 26 September, calling
it ‘the discovery of certain ill practices’ by ‘men of some note … shrewdly affected to her Majesty's person, and … dealers against the state’.
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The letter claimed that Dee sought £666 in damages through his court action, which revealed the ‘spite and malice’ of a man whom, Murphyn protested, ‘I never knew in all my life’. He asked to meet Burghley to reveal ‘the winking eye of Achitophel’ a reference to King David's traitorous counsellor, declaring he would only reveal that ‘insolent conspiracy’ personally.
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Murphyn's letter carefully kept the plot vague. Some details can be reconstructed from his interrogation in August 1582, after he renewed his allegations. Murphyn then admitted that in late 1579 he had begun plotting with Sir George Hastings, Walter Hastings, the Earls of Desmond and Westmoreland, and many unnamed Catholic noblemen and gentlemen. They recruited Murphyn to coin money in Ireland by alchemy. The money would raise an army to invade the north of England, deliver Mary Queen of Scots from captivity, unite with Sir George Hastings's English army at Nottingham and march on London, already secured by an odd collection of London merchants and Catholics, including Richard Stanihurst and other financial backers of Murphyn's alchemy. After murdering the Queen and Privy Council, Sir George would marry Mary, becoming the first King of the restored house of Pole, from which the Hastings brothers descended. Murphyn later claimed that Sir George used him to conjure whether he would outlive the Earl of Huntingdon and become King, and had shown him an old book prophesying all these events.
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Murphyn's story resembles, especially in its magical aspects, the allegations that Cecil had unblinkingly presented against Prestall in 1563 and had later reused against other Catholics as a generic Popish Plot when he needed one.
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Contemporaries would therefore have found it quite plausible, which gave Murphyn another reason for using it against Dee, ‘the Great Conjuror’. According to Murphyn, Dee's action for slander itself confirmed the conspiracy's existence. Murphyn claimed that in 1580 he escaped to London to reveal the plot, pursued by the conspirators. When he survived their assassination attempts they ‘suborned false accusers
against him, whereby he was indicted and arraigned at London’.
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In Murphyn's account, Dee's prosecution proved that Dee was secretly a Hastings stooge. Murphyn claimed that he had revealed the entire story in court against Dee ‘when he was arraigned in the Guildhall’ in October 1580.

Those Guildhall trial records have disappeared, but such incendiary testimony might explain why the jury found for Dee only after ‘much ado’, and why, if Murphyn had told the truth for once, Dee demanded £666 in damages but only ‘had by my jury at Guildhall £100 damages awarded me against Vincent Murphyn the cozener’. Perhaps Dee's lingering conjuring reputation inclined the jury to believe some of Murphyn's story.
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Moreover, Murphyn did get to tell his story to Burghley, who in this tense period could not overlook the unlikeliest security threat. Their interview took place during a crucial week when, prompted by Leicester, Elizabeth wrote to Dee desiring ‘to understand … her title to foreign countries’. At Richmond early on Monday, 3 October, Dee presented her with two large vellum rolls, a draft of ‘Limits of the British Empire’ describing her genealogical claims to Arthur's extensive European empire. That afternoon he continued his imperial lecture in the Privy Chamber. However, this time Burghley made sure to attend. From his immense genealogical learning he immediately doubted ‘the value of the work’, questioning Elizabeth's Arthurian ‘Title Royal’ in Europe, and particularly her claims to Castile and Leon. In part he did so because Dee had compiled the work without his knowledge. Yet he also feared the costly foreign-policy implications of Dee's claims.

At Elizabeth's command, on Tuesday and Wednesday Dee continued to explain the evidence to Burghley, who ‘used me very honourably’ and who took notes from Dee's treatise. But he could not be moved from his belief that, genealogically, Philip II had a stronger claim to descend from the House of Lancaster than Elizabeth.
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However, when Dee returned on Friday, 7 October, Burghley, ‘being told of my being without, and also I standing before him at his coming forth’, simply brushed past Dee and ‘would not speak to me, I doubt not of some new grief conceived’. The most likely ‘new grief’ to make the normally courteous Burghley cut Dee
dead was Murphyn's allegations. For although they eventually ‘fell out to be but cozenage’, at first sight they might well have given him pause for thought about Dee, given Burghley's own knowledge of his activities since 1555.
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Elizabeth tried to smooth things over at Mortlake the following Monday, passing on what she said was Burghley's praise for Dee's historical arguments.
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Though perhaps a polite fabrication, Dee would have especially welcomed her clear signal of support after his public humiliation, and he recalled it in detail in 1592. A few weeks later Burghley patched things up with a gift of venison, perhaps a sign that he no longer believed Murphyn.
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Indeed, when political conditions changed Burghley would find Dee's ‘Limits’ more persuasive. In 1585, after the assassination of William of Orange, the Dutch again offered Elizabeth their sovereignty. Burghley's secretariat drew up ‘Declarations of the Reasons of granting aid to the Low Countries’, quickly rushed it through the redrafting process and then into print.
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In the first draft Burghley interlined the claim that Elizabeth could show ‘some good pretence of title by lawful descent to some of our progenitors to some part of the low countries’. He included this in the second draft text. But though Elizabeth agreed to send an army, she declined the offer of sovereignty, so he deleted it before publishing the book.
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This was the closest Dee ever came to seeing his imperial advice enshrined in policy. In 1589 he still insisted that the Low Countries owed Elizabeth ‘due and true obedience’.
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Elizabeth may even have joined Dee's action against Murphyn, for two years later Murphyn claimed he had been falsely arraigned ‘for slanderous speeches against the Queen’, not just Dee. Burghley also kept Murphyn under close observation. Dee's Guildhall judgement sent Murphyn to the City's debtors’ prison, the Counter in Wood Street, until he paid up. Dee never saw his £100 and claimed to have released Murphyn on 9 February 1581, calculating that the daily fees demanded from prisoners in the Counter had sufficiently punished ‘the cozener’. By March 1581 Burghley had removed Murphyn to the King's Bench prison. After August 1582 he would disappear from history.
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Elizabeth and Burghley awarded Dee something of a consolation prize in October 1580. Burghley again called the Lord Mayor and Aldermen in to upbraid them about the state of the Thames. The City reported twenty-five weirs still standing. Burghley blamed them for the mess. The weirs had particularly incensed the Queen because her barge had just run aground on one. Elizabeth vaguely recalled Dee's criticism in
Memorials
of ‘Trinker-men’ and their ‘Trink-boats’, so Burghley commanded the City to remove ‘certain things which her highness called Trinkers’. Burghley clearly had no idea what she meant. The Lord Mayor and Aldermen also shrugged their shoulders and looked blankly at one another. They ordered the water bailiff to report, ‘And for the matter of Trinkers he shall … certify this court of the quality of those Trinkers’.
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In the long run private interest would always trump civic humanism.

October 1580 was the high-water mark of Dee's imperial advice to Elizabeth. In late 1580 the tide went out, taking Dee with it. As he spoke to Elizabeth and Burghley early that month, news reached London that Philip II had marched into Portugal, made himself King, and added that empire's resources to his vast inheritance. His was the first empire on which the sun never set, and Spanish power backed the new English Jesuit mission carrying the Pope's Bull of excommunication. In Scotland, Morton, the English-backed Regent, fell from power, again exposing England to Catholic invasion from the north. Inept English diplomacy fumbled an alliance with the German Protestant princes, ensuring Elizabeth would not become Dee's imagined ‘Imperial Governor’ over Christendom. The Duke of Parma continued his inexorable advance in the Netherlands.
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These changes left Elizabeth dependent on France, so handing the initiative to the Duke of Anjou.

Therefore, in late 1580 Leicester and Walsingham began to covet a French political alliance. Eventually, they reluctantly agreed to the French price – Anjou's marriage with Elizabeth. Anjou then demanded a free hand in the Netherlands and became ‘Defender of Belgic Liberties’ with Elizabeth's implicit approval. Elizabeth and Leicester welcomed his inauguration as sovereign of the Netherlands in early 1582 through gritted teeth. So from late 1580 Leicester no longer needed Dee's European
British Empire and abruptly dropped him. By August 1582 Murphyn felt Dee was weak enough to be attacked again, though he overplayed his hand by also attacking the powerful Hastings brothers. Until the 1590s Dee recorded no more discussions with the Queen about alchemy, magic and his apocalyptic imperial vision. When Leicester sponsored Edward Fenton's unlucky voyage to the East Indies in 1582, he ignored Dee's erudition about that region but welcomed other Frobisher veterans.
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