The Arch Conjuror of England (29 page)

Laski certainly looked the part. Tall and handsome, his hosts thought he had ‘an English complexion’. He dressed spectacularly in red, while his yellow boots with curling toes evoked Chaucer's time to his hosts. He was sinfully proud of his gigantic white beard, worn tucked into his belt.
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Elizabeth was charmed by his royal lineage, military reputation, physical prowess, intellectual attainments and splendid display.
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However, once settled, Laski wanted angelic revelations about his political future. On 5 May Dee asked the angels how to deal with this ‘victorious captain’. They prophesied great journeys for Dee and Kelley. Dee finally met Laski in Leicester's chambers at Greenwich Palace on 13 May. Ten days later he put Laski's questions to the angels. Would Laski succeed Stephen Bathory, and would he rule Moldavia?
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The angels promised
Laski a kingdom within a year. By 28 May Laski's dazzling courtly reception and his ‘great good liking of all States of the people’ convinced Dee that Laski would ‘suppress and confound the malice and envy of my countrymen against me’, restoring his personal and financial credit.
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This conviction epitomises how Dee's belief in the angels’ pronouncements prevented him from hearing the subtle undertones of Court politics. By now the Pole's reputation at Court was already coming under attack. Despite Burghley's assurances to Elizabeth, nagging questions remained. Spanish and French diplomats described the Court's puzzlement about Laski's motives for visiting England.
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Within days of Laski's arrival, the ever suspicious Walsingham asked for a briefing from Lord Cobham, Elizabeth's ambassador in Paris, where courtiers of Henri III, briefly elected King of Poland 1573–5, knew Laski well.

Cobham's reply arrived in mid-May and devastatingly exposed Burghley's embarrassing blunder. Laski had enjoyed great wealth and power in Poland, reported Cobham, but squandered both in bids for the Polish throne. While in Paris to conduct Henri to Poland, he married ‘a young Italian woman of mean condition and bad reputation’. When Henri fled Poland for the French throne in 1574, Laski supported the Habsburg Emperor Maximilian as his successor. In retaliation the successful candidate, Stephen Bathory, seized Laski's estates. Laski fled to Italy, where he revealed himself as ‘a Papist’, sponging on a succession of princes. Only in 1581 had Stephen restored him to favour, returning his lands and relieving him with money, though insufficient to maintain his profligate lifestyle.
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Much of this information lay in Burghley and Walsingham's files, if they had bothered to check.
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In London, Laski attended Mass with his Italian servants, and his March correspondents had included the imprisoned Mary Queen of Scots.
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Therefore Laski's ‘popularity’, which so impressed Dee, alarmed the Privy Councillors, who were currently negotiating conditions for Mary's release while, to entrap Elizabeth's remaining Catholic courtiers, covertly encouraging Francis Throckmorton's plot to kill the Queen.

Cobham's letter forced Burghley to reverse his earlier advice and now try to persuade Elizabeth to see Laski as a dubious renegade exile. When
Laski returned from staying with Dee on 19 May, Hatton sent the informer William Herle to enquire rather pointedly whether Laski would attend the imminent Polish Parliament. Elizabeth also sought his intentions.
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However, even though Laski broke his promise to depart, Elizabeth now refused to listen to his critics and in early June she staged a jousting tournament in his honour.
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Such public splendour masked Burghley's private struggle to change the Queen's opinion. It may therefore have deceived Kelley into revelations that turned Laski from a courtly embarrassment into a political threat. Laski arrived claiming descent from the medieval English Lacy family and bearing what he called their ancient arms. Thus he implicitly claimed political power. Dee's library contained hundreds of medieval deeds relating to the Lacys’ Irish lands. These stimulated Kelley's angelic utterances on 28 May connecting Laski with the Earls of Chester and Lincoln, through a Peter Lacy who allegedly migrated to Poland generations earlier.

Moreover, said the angels, though ‘many witches and enchanters, yea many devils’ threaten ‘this stranger’, Laski, Dee and Kelley would prevail, for ‘your names are in one book’.
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Further angelic promises on 2 June, coinciding with Elizabeth's tournament, that Laski ‘in Election … shall govern him a people’, being called ‘to a King's office’, further stirred this heady mixture of ambition, magic and politics.
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Laski's prophesied royal status would certainly have appealed to Dee, whose struggles had made him acutely sensitive about his own reputation.

For two weeks the angels fell silent about politics, while Laski enjoyed fashionable entertainments. They included a state visit to Oxford University. Rowed up the Thames in the royal barge under Elizabeth's cloth of state and heralded by the Queen's trumpeters, a glittering retinue of courtiers, including Sidney, surrounded Laski. Oxford put on fireworks, orations, exercises, plays (including special effects such as Dee's at Trinity College, Cambridge), and academic disputations about astrology. The gaudy procession broke the return voyage at Mortlake on 15 June.
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That evening the angels again forecast England's troubles, but Dee was more interested in whether Laski had ‘prevailed to win me due credit: and
in what case standeth my suit’ for a pension?
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Their answer pushed deeper into dangerous territory. Dee would recover, because Laski would govern twenty-one kingdoms and be King within a year. However, ‘his Counsel shall breed Alteration of this State; yea of the whole world’. Even more audaciously, the angels prophesied two kingdoms for Laski: Poland ‘and the other he seeketh as right’. Dee then drew an imperial crown in the margin. His next question suggests this signified the English Crown. The angels had previously prophesied an invasion, and Dee asked whether Laski should return to Poland or remain in England during ‘the troubles of August next’.
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By now willing to believe anything of Laski, Walsingham and Burghley likely learned of these dangerous ambitions through Charles Sled, currently in Dee's household. Sled, a self-proclaimed ‘gentleman’, had earlier spied for Walsingham at the English College at Rome. In November 1581 his testimony had condemned the Jesuit Edmund Campion and his companions for treason.
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Dee first mentioned Sled in September 1582 as someone who knew international finance and could influence the Customs searchers, suggesting he knew about his intelligence work.
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Sled abused Kelley at Dee's table in April, and Dee later had to lecture him on ‘virtue and godliness’. Sled's pressure may reflect an attempt by Walsingham to blackmail Kelley into spying on Laski, through false accusations of coining. Sled's continuing presence and rivalry with Kelley owed something to the fact that ‘he used the crystal, and had a very perfect sight.‘
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It owed more to Dee's poverty. His household depended for its daily survival on the £56 he had borrowed from Sled over the year to September 1583. Dee left with the debt unpaid. Significantly, Sled enlisted Walsingham's support when trying to recover it from Nicholas Fromoundes, Dee's brother-in-law and trustee.
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Whether or not Sled informed Walsingham about Laski's English claims, when Laski returned to Mortlake on 19 June the angelic conversations took a dramatic turn. Kelley offered to conjure evil spirits for Laski, but Dee forbade it. The angels then told them that they must ‘hide nothing from him, for you belong unto him’.
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Laski now revealed his long experience of living on princely handouts, for he had detected, despite the
endless courtly junketing, growing resentment that he had outstayed his welcome. He informed Dee that Burghley's increasing grudge against him would poison Court opinion. Therefore, he wanted to know whether he should return to Poland. Dee asked the angels whether Laski could be present at the next ‘scrying’ hours later.

Burghley's animus owed much to Laski's combination of Catholicism with unprincipled political adventuring. But it also reflects Burghley's chagrin at his initial error, which fuelled the Court's growing uneasiness that Laski had failed to match his advance billing for noble open-handedness and ‘great revenues’. He had refused the Queen's initial offers of money, but his profligacy outstripped his credit. The longer he stayed the faster his reputation declined. In fact, Laski was penniless. Camden later recalled how Laski eventually fled in secret, leaving mountainous unpaid bills.
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In itself this might not have counted against him. Flashy coves such as Laski survived on their wits at all the courts of Europe, and courtiers who habitually lived beyond their means, relying on credit and the forbearance of their tailors, could hardly complain.

However, an increasingly desperate Laski had dangerously politicised his grandiose ambitions, misguided by the angels. He persuaded a young Inner Temple lawyer, John Ferne, to trace the Lacy genealogy in a Latin treatise. Ferne later claimed he had also been enticed ‘by a worshipful friend and alliance of mine’. This was Dee, whose library contained those Lacy deeds. Ferne certainly accepted Dee's Arthurian theories, proclaiming his loyalty to the ‘mighty Empress of Great Britain, and the north Islands’. Unfortunately for Ferne, Burghley's mastery of genealogy enabled him to recognise the threat in Laski's claims, for the Lacy lands had descended to Elizabeth's Plantagenet ancestors in 1321.
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Laski was therefore claiming a blood relationship with the Queen, which gave a new and sinister meaning to his practice of wearing royal crimson every time she received him. This embarrassing connection was bad enough, but Laski had a record of raising private armies to pursue his ends.
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He also sponsored propaganda trading upon his ‘popularity’. In early July, Dee bought several pamphlets printed in London praising Laski.
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Critics began to slander Ferne's ‘wandering affection’, finding his research ‘sinister’. Rumours multiplied that he had invented genealogical evidence for Laski, a politically lethal charge. He later protested that his treatise contained nothing ‘which might give so strange a guest, occasion or colour, to challenge a kindred’. When finally printed, his book conspicuously omitted the two hundred and fifty years after 1321, and any Polish connections.
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Therefore, when Kelley and Dee brought Laski into their angelic conversation on that critical evening of 19 June, the revelations shifted to Laski's European destiny. Laski learned about his guardian angel, ‘Jubanladaec’, who prophesied that within a year Laski would lead the Cross to victory over the infidels. Jubanladaec anointed Laski and confirmed that Burghley ‘hateth him unto the heart, and desireth he were gone hence’. In contrast, Elizabeth ‘loveth him faithfully’ and quarrelled with Burghley about him, while Leicester merely ‘flattereth him’.

Jubanladaec then instructed Dee and Kelley, ‘When this Country shall be invaded, then shall you pass into his Country’, to make ‘his Kingdom be established again’. The Second Coming would soon make Laski ‘wonderful’.
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The prophesied invasion may reflect Kelley's awareness of Catholic invasion plans for Lancashire, the core of the former Lacy estates, plans well known to Walsingham and Burghley.
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No wonder Herle kept tabs on Laski for Walsingham, and Walsingham tried to insert his agent Thomas Watson into Laski's household. Also, Henry Howard's
Defensative Against the Poison of Supposed Prophecies
attacked Dee that summer. Howard deplored traitorous prophets who presumed to forecast ‘how long the Prince shall reign’, ‘who shall succeed and by what mean’ and ‘what houses shall recover or decay’.
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Laski began spending longer at Mortlake and on 26 June addressed the angels in his soldier's Latin. They predicted Stephen Bathory's imminent death and that Laski would rule Poland and Moldavia.
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Dee's dawning understanding that by attaching himself to Laski he had ruined himself increased his willingness to accompany Laski to eastern Europe. On 1 July, Dee learned that his suit for a pension of £200 had been rejected. The next day the angels confirmed his shocked realisation that Walsingham
was ‘marvellously alienated’. They had overheard Walsingham agreeing with Burghley that Dee ‘would go mad shortly’. They both meant to trap him on charges of treason and would search his house once Laski, now labelled ‘inwardly a Traytor’, left England. Kelley was pressurising Dee, but real grounds existed for these warnings. On 6 July Walsingham noted that Laski still postponed his departure, ‘which is found strange’. Though a skilled courtier of ‘many good parts’, his excuse that he came merely to see the sights was wearing thin.
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Laski then announced plans to depart in mid-August, but lacked money to travel. The angels could not conjure up cash, but did offer a magical talisman to destroy his enemies.
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Dee had exhausted his credit by 4 July, when the angels evaded his question about future patronage from Burghley, Walsingham and Raleigh. They wisely clammed up about Laski's dangerous genealogy. Dee now feared that Kelley meant to abandon their scrying and leave with Laski.
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There follows a gap in the manuscript of the angelic conversations until after 21 September, when Dee, Kelley and their household accompanied Laski to Poland. Later evidence reveals that all three considered the angelic conversations of these weeks crucially important. They may have gathered them in a special volume, now lost. On 12 July Laski promised Dee 200 dollars annually, very roughly £50, but twice as much to Kelley, the first sign of a power-shift in their relationship. By 30 July Dee found both his financial and political credit at rock bottom. That day Elizabeth passed by Mortlake, but unlike previous critical moments for Dee she made no public demonstration of support, merely waving distantly to him. The next morning, despite receiving Raleigh's written reassurances about Elizabeth's ‘good disposition’, Dee raced to Court to salvage his reputation, calling first on Leicester.
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