The Arch Conjuror of England (27 page)

Dee appealed to the Privy Council's prejudices, explaining how the Gregorian error reflected Rome's growing corruption until today's ‘hideous and monstrous … mass of misbegotten time’. The Incarnation marked the true epoch, therefore Elizabeth could lead Europe into a truly Christian calendar reform.
¹⁶
Dee described this opportunity in words echoing the apocalyptic expectations of
Memorials
. Elizabeth could again grasp the ‘most beautiful flower of opportunity’ as the Last Reforming Empress restoring harmony to Christendom by reforming time. He concluded with verses describing her as ‘Caesar's peer, our true Empress’, and ‘ELIZABETH, our Empress bright’, who ‘made the truth to come to light, and civil year with heaven agree’.
¹⁷

As in
Monas
, Dee saw calendar reform as another divine gift, part of the required reform of all knowledge, and as in
Memorials
, historical parallels beckoned, like the thirteenth-century Catholic calendar reformers Simon Bredon, a Welsh subject of ‘the British Sceptre Royal’, and especially Roger Bacon, whose name before he took religious orders, Dee believed, had been David Dee. He quoted Bacon extensively, concluding that reformed time would truly reform religion, lived ‘in newness and sincerity of life’.
¹⁸

Dee offered two revised almanacs. One removed eleven days from May to September 1583 without affecting Church festivals or the law terms.
The other, ‘Queen Elizabeth's perpetual Calendar’, would guide Christendom for centuries.
¹⁹
Based on the London meridian, this offered her control over time itself, just as Dee's earlier writings offered her control over Arthur's empire. Harmonising human with divine knowledge served the greater cause of Elizabeth unifying Christendom. However, Dee wrote with even greater apocalyptic urgency than in 1577. His ‘Mathematical Preface’ quoted from Genesis 1:14 that God had ordained precise astronomical study from the Creation. Astronomy enabled ‘high Mystical Solemnities holding’ and the ‘Consideration of Sacred Prophecies’.
²⁰
The former might mean both astral magic and settling the date of Easter, but his belief in sacred prophecies drove his calendar reform.

His opening flourish about sundials illustrated all time since Adam as a sundial face, leaving a tiny sliver after 1583 until the circle closed.
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Burghley, whose Protestant sensitivity to prophetic signs, like his alchemy, has been underestimated, shared Dee's awareness of a looming Apocalypse.
²²
Burghley noted that Dee's calculations ‘may serve for a hundred or two hundred years … if the sins of the world do not haste a dissolution’.
²³
Like Dee, Burghley expected imminent dissolution. Dee begged Elizabeth to reform the calendar before November 1583 ‘upon a very weighty consideration’. After hearing Dee's reasons, Burghley agreed that ‘a secret matter’ required calendar reform ‘before November’.
²⁴
Why this urgency?

Dee and Burghley shared the widespread expectation that the conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter in Aries in March 1583 heralded dramatic changes. This great conjunction, seen only six times previously, always signalled a cosmically significant event, including Noah's Flood and the Ten Commandments. Contemporary astrology divided the twelve zodiacal signs into the fiery, earthy, airy and watery ‘trigons’. The conjunction in March 1583 paralleled Creation, which had occurred in the first moment of Aries, the first sign in the ‘fiery trigon’.
²⁵
Only once every millennium did Jupiter and Saturn re-enter the fiery trigon in conjunction. The common belief that the world would end after a week of millennia made this seventh such conjunction appear even more ominous.

Dee's copy of the influential book
On the Great Conjunction
(1564) by the Bohemian astrologer Cyprian Leowitz still shows where he underlined many prophecies of Habsburg and Bohemian apocalyptic events. Leowitz prophesied the revelation of Antichrist in eastern Europe and the Second Coming. Dee's friend James Sandford plagiarised Leowitz's expectations for 1583: ‘undoubtedly new worlds will follow, which will be inaugurated by sudden and violent changes’.
²⁶

The angels assured Dee in 1582 that he would begin ‘new worlds, new people, new kings, and new knowledge of a new government’. Dee's astrological students, the brothers Richard and John Harvey, reveal that Dee and Burghley expected these cataclysmic changes in November 1583.
²⁷
Richard foresaw political tumults in eastern Europe that November, creating ‘a new world, by some sudden, violent and wonderful strange alteration’.
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Early in 1583, while Dee hurried to reform the calendar, John published
An Astrological Addition
to Richard's work, foretelling the coming Turkish Antichrist and the Elect's final battle under the Last Emperor, when ‘a great new Monarchy’ would enthrone one pastor to preach ‘the true Gospel of the kingdom … throughout all the world’. John combined this with an idea from Dee's reading of Trithemius's
On the Seven Secondary Intelligences
, foreseeing the third age of the angel Gabriel, when God would punish the neglect of His truth.
²⁹

Such prophecies explain Dee's willingness in September 1583 to follow the impoverished Polish nobleman Albrecht Laski to Poland. Yet to this apocalyptic pull the calendar reform added considerable push, for it became combined with Dee's attempt to revive exploration of the North-West Passage. Despite Frobisher's failure, Dee convinced himself that north-west discoveries could restore his finances. In fact, the combination of enterprises destroyed his standing at the Elizabethan Court.

On 23 January 1583 Walsingham found Dee discussing the North-West Passage with Adrian Gilbert, another member of his brother Humphrey's company. The next day Dee, Gilbert and John Davis met Walsingham at the house of Robert Beale, Secretary to the Privy Council. There ‘all charts and rutters [sailing maps] were agreed upon in general’.
From them Dee wrote a ‘Geographical or Hydrographical Description of the Northern Hemisphere’ supporting the project.
³⁰
Walsingham backed Adrian Gilbert, Dee and Davis's application to sublease the Muscovy Company's exploration monopoly over the North Atlantic.
³¹
Dee drafted a grant of discovery to the north of ‘Atlantis’ for ‘The Collegiate of the Fellowship of new Navigations Atlantical and Septentrional’.
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Dee's service in advising on calendar reform helped to gather official support for the voyage. His spectacular recovery from recent poverty and neglect was marked by another visit from Elizabeth in early February. She privately asked about the Duke of Anjou's future. Dee pronounced he was ‘Biothanatos’, born for a violent death.
³³

The voyage and calendar reform became linked when Dee presented his ‘Plain Discourse’ on 26 February. Burghley discussed it with him and condensed its arguments into a letter for Walsingham to read to Elizabeth, including the threatening prophecy about November.
³⁴
Burghley acknowledged the need to remove eleven days but persuaded Dee to accept ten ‘for conformity with the rest of the world’, so long as Elizabeth retained the option to lead ‘the Romanists and other parts of Christendom’ to remove the extra day. Burghley checked Dee's calculations with leading mathematicians. Yet the looming Apocalypse in November gave ‘great cause to have this conference accelerated’, either to remove the days from March to November, or all immediately.
³⁵

On 17 March the Privy Council summoned Dee to explain his almanac and ‘Queen Elizabeth's Calendar’ the following week. Burghley reported on 25 March that the mathematicians agreed that eleven days should be cut but accepted ten. He also recommended Dee's plan to drop several days each month between May and November, to protect the Church and legal calendar.
³⁶
That same day Walsingham summoned Dee to Richmond Palace to advise Burghley when he consulted the judges about the law terms. They accepted the plan, but from this moment both the north-west scheme and Dee's calendar reform began to fall apart. The increasing disparity that resulted between Kelley's angelic revelations about Dee's momentous future and his floundering Court career would help to provoke their departure from England.
³⁷

Walsingham's summons included an ominous postscript asking to discuss the Muscovy Company's grant to Adrian Gilbert. The letter also passed on Burghley's response to Dee's request for a ‘privilege’ for the voyage. Burghley would grant the request ‘in substance’ but ‘in some other form’. He meant that Elizabeth refused to allow Dee and Gilbert freedom from customs duties and to charge fees for sharing in their discoveries.
³⁸
This eliminated the potential profits of the ‘Collegiate of the Fellowship’ and made it impossible to attract investors.
³⁹

This disappointment further increased the tension between divine revelation and successful Court politics. Adrian Gilbert may have been the problem – courtiers universally disparaged him as a fool. When the angels announced on 26 March that Gilbert should hear their revelations and that he was God's choice to measure the ‘straits of the earth’, even Dee doubted Gilbert's abilities ‘in common external Judgment’. Eventually he submitted to God's power to make ‘the dumb’ reveal His glory, and felt angelically inspired to prophesy that Gilbert ‘shall carry the name of Jesus among the Infidels’. However the Queen and Court thought otherwise.
⁴⁰

A similar contrast emerged about calendar reform. On 26 March, the day after Dee showed his almanac to the Privy Council, the angels confidently prophesied that ‘Time shall be altered’.
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Yet some of the goings-on at Elizabeth's Court might have puzzled even God. It might be thought odd that Burghley and Walsingham supported the hated papacy's calendar reform. Always anxious about papist subversion, Burghley's
Execution of Justice in England
in December 1583 condemned the ‘tyrant’ Gregory XIII, whose ‘vermin’ Jesuits and seminary priests aimed to extend the Pope's ‘absolute authority over all Princes and Countries’ to England.
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Therefore, wrote Burghley, Elizabeth had excluded papal bulls, and though monarchs for political reasons ‘can endure the pope to command’ where they pleased, they forbade papal usurpation over ‘any part of their dominions’.
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The Royal Supremacy included control of the ecclesiastical calendar. Walsingham exhibited even greater paranoia about popery. Why then were they both so ‘uncharacteristically naïve’ in trying to stampede the bishops into this reform?
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The answer was the Queen herself. Elizabeth's most perceptive biographer has described her as ‘pre-Protestant’, venerating the cross that many of her Protestant subjects denounced as a popish idol. She had made no bones about outwardly conforming to the Mass under her sister Mary.
⁴⁵
Like Dee, Elizabeth lacked Burghley and Walsingham's visceral fear of Antichristian popery.

She could also impose her will when she chose. Walsingham probably told Archbishop Grindal the literal truth on 18 March, that ‘her majesty thinking it meet’ to accept the calendar reform, had personally decided to consult Dee and publish his ‘new calculation’.
⁴⁶
The kudos of ‘Queen Elizabeth's Calendar’ may have attracted her, but her decision raised problems for Burghley and especially for Walsingham. Burghley might have accepted the prophetic need to change the calendar before November, but he still hated popery. Walsingham may have wanted no part of the popish calendar, but as Elizabeth's Secretary he had to execute her commands.

The Privy Council's dilemma appears in the draft proclamation of the new calendar in late March.
⁴⁷
Its very drafting shows that Elizabeth accepted Dee's proposal. Burghley had recommended to the Council that once the Queen made her decision the reform should be proclaimed ‘as thereto advised and allowed’ by the bishops, who had always determined ‘the causes belonging to ecclesiastical government’.
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The draft ignored the Pope and instead claimed Elizabeth's own connection to Nicaea through her ancestor the Emperor Constantine, who convened that Council. It justified the change as aligning the principal Church feasts with the ‘course of the Sun’, and facilitating England's European trade. While noting Dee's protest about the eleven days, it stated that Elizabeth had ordered his almanac to be published, removing ten days from late May to late August while preserving the Church and legal calendars. It further claimed that Elizabeth had consulted both astronomers and bishops, the matter ‘being partly ecclesiastical’, and that they had accepted the need for reform.

This would have surprised the bishops, whose agreement had obviously been anticipated.
⁴⁹
Indeed, Walsingham's dealings with the bishops
seem carefully calculated to provoke their resistance. As with his earlier failure to suppress the ‘exercises’, this enabled him to be apparently carrying out Elizabeth's instructions while actually sabotaging them. He began by carefully framing the issue for Grindal on 18 March. Announcing that Elizabeth had decided to reform the calendar using Dee's calculations, he acknowledged that the Church of England's Convocation would normally debate ‘things of this nature’. Yet he asked for the few bishops currently near the Court – Grindal, Aylmer of London, ‘and him of Lincoln if he be not departed’ – to rubber-stamp the change quickly because the Privy Council meant to proclaim Dee's calendar before 1 May.
⁵⁰

After eleven days of ominous silence from the bishops, Walsingham again demanded their expected agreement to keep to this schedule.
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Walsingham knew what buttons he was pushing. Grindal's archiepiscopal authority had been sequestered since 1577 over precisely this kind of boundary dispute. He had refused to suppress the ‘exercises’ because they were apostolic, even if unauthorised by the Royal Supremacy. Grindal consciously modelled himself on Bishop Ambrose, who had resisted the Emperor Theodosius's encroachments on the autonomy of the Church. Daringly, Grindal had asked Elizabeth not to pronounce ‘so resolutely and peremptorily’ on matters of faith such as the ‘exercises’. He demanded that she not merely consult her bishops for form's sake but obey their decisions about doubtful matters concerning ‘discipline of the church’.
⁵²
Walsingham now re-emphasised that the bishops lacked autonomy in such essential ecclesiastical matters as when to observe Easter. Once Elizabeth had pronounced, they must simply submit, even on matters ‘partly ecclesiastical’ in the proclamation's words. Walsingham's other actions, however, suggest he expected and welcomed the bishops’ vigorous response.