The Arch Conjuror of England (26 page)

Dee also had to contend with increasing scepticism about King Arthur's conquests. Frobisher's failure to discover remnants of an Arthurian civilisation shattered Dee's assumptions about the North-West Passage. He failed to mention Arthur in July 1582, when Sir George Peckham asked about ‘the title for Norombega [Labrador] in respect of Spain and Portugal parting the whole world’.
²¹
Peckham financed Humphrey Gilbert's second American voyage to find a site for colonisation.
²²
After Gilbert's death in September 1583, Peckham tried to revive his plans by publishing a
True Report
of Gilbert's recent discoveries. Peckham echoed Dee's belief that Gilbert's plantations would restore ‘her Highness ancient right and interest in those Countries’, yet did not claim those rights began with Arthur. Like Dee, he now relied on Prince Madoc and the Cabot voyages under Henry VII to prove Elizabeth's title southwards to Cape Florida by ‘prescription of time’.
²³

In June 1578 Dee had assured Richard Hakluyt the elder that ‘King Arthur and King Malgo’ had conquered ‘Friseland’ in the north-west. However, the younger Hakluyt's
Divers Voyages
(1582) urged Englishmen to possess ‘those lands, which of equity and right appertain unto us’ without reference to Arthur, despite reprinting the entire travel story of the Zeno brothers to the North Pole, which to Dee proved Arthur's conquests.
²⁴
Hakluyt's ‘Discourse of Western Planting’ in 1584 based Elizabeth's title on Madoc. Not until 1589, after Elizabeth committed troops to the Netherlands, did Hakluyt's
Principall Navigations
include ‘Flanders’ amongst Arthur's traditional conquests. Hakluyt also found in ‘Famous and Rich Discoveries’ Gerard Mercator's letter to Dee, quoting a text Mercator assigned to one Jacobus Cnoyen and printed on his great world map of 1569, which text he then lost. According to Mercator,
Cnoyen mentioned Arthurian colonists amongst the northern islands, suggesting English rights by prior conquest.
²⁵
However, even Dee's friend Thomas Blundeville, a popular writer on navigation, dismissed Arthur's northern conquests as ‘mere fables’.
²⁶

The final blow to Dee's Arthurian empire came from George Abbot, later one of Dee's scholarly correspondents.
²⁷
In 1605 Abbot, a rising star in both Church and Court, dismissed ‘one of some special note’ who awarded Elizabeth sovereignty over America through her descent from Arthur. Abbot's patron was Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, who had served in Elizabeth's Privy Chamber in the 1570s, when Dee often visited, and who was also a client of the Cecils. It seems Abbot learned from Buckhurst that ‘the wisdom of our State hath been such, as to neglect that opinion’ because built upon ‘fabulous foundations’.
²⁸

Excluded from Leicester's schemes and Elizabeth's presence, Dee nevertheless continued to advise explorers. In May 1580 he worked with William Borough, advising Arthur Pet and Charles Jackman on their north-east voyage to Cathay. Borough taught them practical navigation, using Dee's ‘Paradoxal Compass’ or ‘plat of spirall lines’. Dee, in contrast, obsessed about Pet and Jackman measuring known landmarks by ‘the distances and points of the Compass’. This required surveying on a heroic scale, and like many of Dee's suggestions worked better in his imagination than in practice.
²⁹
Also in 1580 Dee prepared a chart, showing the entrance to the North-West Passage, perhaps connected with Michael Lok's attempt to restart the venture.
³⁰
Dee's continuing fascination with north-west discovery persuaded him to join Humphrey Gilbert's company in December 1582. He drew another polar projection map for Gilbert, which was decorated with his imperial Monad.
³¹

Dee's Court reputation seemed to be recovering. Yet in 1583 he would fall victim to two Court machinations. One concerned reforming the calendar, the other concerned Albrecht Laski, a Catholic Polish prince whose relationship with the Queen would raise the hackles of Protestant Privy Councillors. The results of both would be calamitous for Dee.

D
EE'S EXCLUSION
from the Queen's counsels did not sever his Court connections – he still found godparents for his children amongst second-rank courtiers and the Queen's intimate servants. He continued to discuss exploration with navigators and travellers, to be consulted as an interpreter of dreams, and to have some success in alchemical projection with salts of metals, which were early stages towards the great elixir itself.

However, in March 1582 a new relationship pushed Dee's life in an ultimately disastrous direction. He had continued to consult angelic spirits, using Bartholomew Hickman and Barnabas Saul as ‘scryers’. In May 1581, when prompted, he even believed he saw a spirit in a crystal. A record of his angel magic with Saul survives from December 1581, but on 6 March 1582 Saul suddenly announced that he had lost his spiritual insight. He was probably under some pressure from one Edward Talbot, who wanted to join Dee's household. Talbot's mysterious previous career has attracted all sorts of legends, but he later confessed that an unnamed person had originally sent him to trap Dee in ‘dealing with wicked spirits’. There was certainly less difference between Dee's earlier angel magic and common ritual magic than Dee liked to pretend. He believed that specific angels would ‘answer’ to his crystal stone, burnt the names of evil spirits with brimstone, stood in magic circles, used magic seals, and received from the angels a very traditional ‘Solomon's Ring’ to summon spirits.

Talbot's name certainly resonated with Dee, who cherished his distant kinship with the Talbot earls of Shrewsbury. But Talbot appealed more directly to Dee's vanity by revealing ‘from a spiritual creature’ that Saul, like Murphyn, had been slandering Dee behind his back. Dee therefore began using Talbot as a ‘scryer’ on 10 March. Dee's second wife Jane disliked Talbot on sight, and when he was unmasked as Edward Kelley in May, she was incandescently furious, fearing that Kelley was a spy, but Dee was already so dependent on him that he continued to believe in Kelley's cosmic significance. He claimed that the 1572 supernova in Cassiopeia had foreshadowed Kelley's revelation of the philosopher's stone, which would ‘astonish the world’.

At first glance Kelley did appear an unlikely harbinger of apocalyptic global reform. At twenty-six already running to fat, he used a staff to support a crippled leg and carefully covered his ears, which had been cropped in punishment for forgery. Yet though prone to drunken rages, Kelley could concoct for the angels, out of the English Bible and magical texts, the most sonorous, majestic, apocalyptic language, sufficient to overawe Dee's occasional doubts. The fact that sometimes Kelley became psychologically disturbed enough to believe he actually
saw
angels also helped to convince Dee. However, Kelley's weak grasp of political realities meant that at crucial moments the angels’ commands he transmitted badly misled Dee in dealing with the powerful.
¹
For example, in late 1582 the Elizabethan government co-opted Dee to advise on the reformed Gregorian calendar. Applying his previous expertise in measuring time, while also advising on the North-West Passage, Dee temporarily boosted his Court career in early 1583 but failed to appreciate the real situation.

Pope Gregory XIII's calendar reform aimed to reassert papal authority over Christendom by establishing a single date for Easter. The sun's orbital year was actually slightly shorter than the Julian calendar year, so that, minute by minute over the fifteen centuries since Christ, eleven extra days had accumulated as the sun failed to keep up with the calendar. For political symbolism, Gregory removed just ten days, counting solar time back only to the Council of Nicaea in 325. The papacy claimed to have guided that first general Council of the Church, which had decreed the
formula to calculate Easter. Many European scholars agreed with Dee that eleven days should be removed.
²

Before the Privy Council consulted Dee in December 1582, several Catholic countries had already obeyed the Pope. France and the Low Countries omitted the last ten days of December, thus foregoing Christmas. That month Dee observed the change in his ‘Diary’, renumbering the 15th the 25th of December. However, calendar reform provoked decades of Catholic-Protestant strife. Most Protestant states retained the Julian calendar, symbolically denying papal authority.
³

Elizabeth seriously considered adopting the papal calendar in 1582–3. Dee's part in its eventual rejection reveals much about the Elizabethan Court, how his calendar work became entangled with his requests for patronage, and his dubious reputation in Church circles. Above all, the story exemplifies how Elizabeth's ministers sometimes thwarted her commands while ostensibly fulfilling them and used Dee for that purpose. Control over time had been part of the Royal Supremacy since Henry VIII purged ‘superstitious’ saints’ days in the 1530s.
⁴
However, the Gregorian reform needed careful handling, because its growing European adoption meant it could not be ignored. The problem therefore preoccupied Walsingham, Burghley and Elizabeth herself.

The government's need for Dee's expertise rescued him from ongoing financial crisis. On 16 November 1582 Dee asked the angels, in another very traditional invocation, to help him find ‘some portion of Treasure hid, to pay my debts withal and to buy things necessary’. Though rebuffed, on the 22nd Dee revealed his growing alienation from Elizabeth's Court. He sought angelic help to ‘have the King of Spain his heart to be inclined’ to receive Dee's Latin treatise of 1581 on evangelising the American Indians, a treatise in part dedicated to Philip II. The angels advised commonplace ritual magic to secure his patronage.
⁵

Through Kelley they also promised Elizabeth's increased favour, because ‘thou shall do wonderful and many benefits (to the augmenting of God's glory) for thy country’.
⁶
Even so, two nights later Dee experienced an appalling prophetic nightmare. His disembowelled body talked with many, including Burghley, ‘who was come to my house to seize my
books’ and ‘looked sourly on me’.
⁷
Dee's anxiety about seeking Philip's favour had provoked visions of a traitor's death, though the source of that anxiety, his scholarly library, would soon appear his salvation.

In turning to Dee, the Privy Council once more tapped intellectual expertise to solve a policy problem. Dee's mathematical studies at Louvain had trained him in the exact measurement of astronomical bodies for astrological and horological purposes. At any location the precise length of the solar year, and the times of solstice and equinox, varied through irregularities in the earth's orbit, and could only be determined by multiple observations of the sun's height at that meridian.

Beginning in London in 1553–5 Dee had made thousands of observations, recorded in a lost
Ephemerides,
using the five-foot-long quadrant of his close friend the navigator Richard Chancellor.
⁸
After Chancellor drowned on a Muscovy voyage in 1556, Dee kept this quadrant until 1583. He also used a ten-foot-long
radius astronomicus
, set in a frame that enabled precise ‘heavenly observations’, timed by a clock accurate to the second. He taught his mathematical student and friend Thomas Digges with these instruments, and together they published mathematical treatises on measuring the nova of 1572. In December 1582, therefore, Dee defined the Gregorian change as adjusting to ‘the sun's place’ in its annual revolution.
⁹

Dee's obsession with astronomical time explains his collection of books on horology, all now lost, including the Jesuit Christopher Clavius's massive
Eight Books on Sundials
(Rome, 1581), which he had acquired about 1582.
¹⁰
Clavius had driven the Gregorian reform. His peerless calculations of the solar year still astonish modern scientists. Dee's horological books brought him paying pupils in ‘dialing’, or constructing sundials, a thriving luxury trade in an age with few and very expensive clocks.
¹¹
Dee's advice to Elizabeth summarised his reading about earlier attempts to reform the calendar.
¹²
Walsingham supplied the perpetual Gregorian calendar, published at Venice in 1582 and listed amongst Dee's books in 1583, as well as ‘the summary of the order of the Pope's new corrected calendar’ sent from Paris on 4 November 1582.
¹³
Dee worked closely with Walsingham and Burghley through January, while also negotiating with them about his north-west plans.

On 26 February 1583 Dee presented Burghley with a sixty-two-page illustrated ‘Plain discourse and humble advice for our Gracious Queen Elizabeth’, allegedly completed in just twenty days.
¹⁴
Typically, Dee used his so-called ‘Plain discourse’ to display his voluminous learning, taking thirty-two pages just to reiterate that the calendar had advanced eleven days ahead of the true solar years since the time of Christ. After more copious display he concluded from Copernicus's calculations that exactly eleven days and fifty-three minutes should be removed. He pointed out that the Gregorian reformers also used Copernicus, though he passed over the astronomer's heliocentric hypothesis.
¹⁵
However, Rome's ten days were only acceptable for ‘public or vulgar accounts’. Rome must accept Dee's calculation of eleven days as astronomically more accurate, ‘will they, nill they’.