The Arch Conjuror of England (30 page)

Leicester invited himself and Laski to dine with Dee two days later, perhaps to investigate the rumours. Embarrassed, Dee confessed that without selling plate or even pewter he could not entertain them, so Leicester quickly persuaded Elizabeth to send Dee £20. This grant, however, could not restore his long-term fortunes. The next day someone sent John Halton, a London clergyman with a deformed left hand, whom
Dee considered ‘a wicked spy’, to greet Kelley, his fellow Worcestershire native. Dee ‘feared nothing being an innocent’, which meant he was not, but realised that ‘he was sent to E.K.’ to gather information about the angelic conversations.
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As sinister forces began gathering around the house at Mortlake, at Court on 7 August William Borough, Dee's former pupil and friendly collaborator on northern voyages, ‘passed by me’. Like Burghley's cutting Dee in October 1580, this gross breach of etiquette signalled Dee's diminished status. By attaching himself to Laski he had sunk beneath the Court's notice. No wonder the ‘Diary’ petered out on 18 August with a brief glimpse into a deeply stressed household, in Dee's veiled Latin note recording Kelley's furious anger with his wife.
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Dee's last hopes in England had gone.

The four weeks before their departure proved busy in both mundane and cosmic matters. Their decision to leave meant Jane Dee had to dismantle a domestic economy she had spent five years organising. Dee also had to close his domestic alchemical research institute, dismantle the paraphernalia for his angel magic, make arrangements for his students, and pay off a large household and research staff, about which we get only fragmentary glimpses.
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Laski was broke, so Dee also had to hire two ships to transport the Mortlake household, much of his library, and Laski, his servants and horses. Dee selected eight hundred printed books and almost a hundred manuscripts to take with him, enough to fill several large carts. In Europe this entourage required up to four coaches, at hideous expense. Dee therefore borrowed £400 from his brother-in-law, Nicholas Fromoundes, secured by his only assets: his house, its four gardens and its ‘goods and chattels’, including his remaining books.

Then he employed Andreas Fremonsheim, his London bookseller for European books, to catalogue the library. Dee still owed Fremonsheim £63 for some of those books.
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He could only reward him with his copy ‘Of Famous and Rich Discoveries’, which later passed to Robert Beale, Secretary to the Privy Council. This gift signalled that Dee was severing his ties with the Court and exploration voyages.
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Meanwhile, the apocalyptic deadline loomed. On 2 September a spectacular meteor shower lit the night sky above London, provoking the inevitable pamphlet demanding repentance, because Nature's decay heralded the Second Coming.
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Dee was too busy to comment on heavenly chaos, but on 6 September he began making a fair copy of Fremonsheim's catalogue. All this contributed to a heady atmosphere, in which the following day a profound event sealed Dee's departure with Laski. At 10 a.m. on 7 September God made a covenant with Laski, promising him kingship over three wicked nations, a promise solemnised by Kelley's vision of an angel holding a crown above Laski's head.
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We merely glimpse this scene momentarily, through Dee's later recollection. However, it convinced Dee to depart.

Despite angelic predictions of imminent global alteration, Dee obtained passports valid until mid-1585. On 21 September in a carefully planned flit, the household took boat, met Laski on the Thames, and quietly slipped through London ‘in the dead of the night’ to avoid their creditors. They found their ships moored below Gravesend. After five days windbound on the coast of Kent, they finally escaped towards Holland.
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According to hoary legend, a furious mob, incensed by Dee's conjuring, immediately sacked his library at Mortlake, destroying his books of magic, smashing his delicate alchemical equipment and expensive navigational instruments. In fact, no such riot occurred. Dee's associates, some of them thwarted creditors, removed many of the books. Some pillaged with Nicholas Fromoundes's compliance. The navigator and occasional pirate John Davis, who as a boy had ‘scryed’ for Humphrey Gilbert, chose books randomly. Nicholas Saunder, a student at the Inner Temple in 1583, removed large numbers.
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He probably gained access through Fromoundes, because Saunder belonged to a prominent Catholic family at Ewell, Surrey, about ten miles south of Mortlake. Jane and Nicholas Fromoundes's recusant relatives lived at Cheam, barely a mile from Ewell. The families moved in the same local Catholic circles and appeared on the same government recusancy lists.
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Saunder was currently squandering his inheritance on the way to turning pirate, and his access to Dee's books indicates Fromoundes was seeking a quick return on his loan. Dee
complained that Fromoundes ‘unduly sold’ his house contents as soon as he departed.

Dee's angry creditors also besieged Fromoundes for Dee's unpaid debts. Fremonsheim sued Fromoundes in the Court of Requests in November, when Charles Sled filed a Chancery suit for his £56. Sled's connections to Walsingham's spy network may explain how the angels at Lübeck in mid-November could twit Dee about Fromoundes's troubles. Sled and Fremonsheim both claimed that Dee had entrusted Fromoundes with his goods to clear his debts. Though Fromoundes had in fact been selling Dee's goods and receiving his rents, he defeated both suits. Dee only began repaying Fremonsheim in late 1595, and Sled's debt remained outstanding in 1598.
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Fromoundes informed Dee in April 1584 that Sled, Adrian Gilbert and Fremonsheim had used Dee ‘very ill’.
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Probably all three helped themselves to Dee's collections. Gilbert seized Dee's alchemical instruments and remaining alchemical books with Fromoundes's help. Fromoundes sold Dee's alchemical equipment for about 80 per cent of its value, including vessels that Dee had brought from Lorraine in 1571.
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While vultures circled at Mortlake, the angels continually urged Dee and Laski forwards. Their arduous winter journey traversed the Netherlands and northern Germany to Silesia. Dee constantly fretted about his decision to leave. Even when windbound off Kent he had had second thoughts, nervously questioning the angels about the Queen and Council's reaction. A cold coming they had in Germany, with small towns such as Bochum unfriendly and the English merchants at Hamburg hostile, itching to return the notorious conjuror under arrest to England.
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The angels revealed that England considered Dee a renegade who despised his prince. There seemed no alternative to the travellers pressing on, though money ran short. In late October they kicked their heels in Bremen for a week while Laski touched the Earl of Friesland for a loan.
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They finally limped into Lübeck on 7 November, where they took a month to recuperate, appropriately lodged at the ‘Angel Michael’. A week later Kelley transmitted revelations that the Privy Council had interrogated Fromoundes about Dee's secrets, seized his books and planned to
burn his house. This backfired when Dee asked for confirmation of God's command to accompany Laski, only to receive thundering angelic rebukes.
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While Dee's party struggled along the dismal winter roads of northern Germany, making short journeys from Lübeck to Rostock to Stettin, with long pauses for recovery, Laski travelled in style between noble households. To silence Dee's doubts, an evil angel several times attacked them for presuming to seek perfect divine knowledge. In mid-January at Stettin the angels resumed the apocalyptic tone familiar to Dee's generation. The Books of Esdras and Revelation, they announced, prophesied these actions. All rulers would be overthrown by January 1587, when Antichrist would be revealed, the Turk replaced by Satan and the prophets Elias and Enoch returned to earth. Kelley would become ‘a great Seer’ and supreme alchemist, ‘looking into the Chambers of the earth: The Treasures of Men’.
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When the group finally staggered into Lasko in western Poland on 2 February 1584, the angels reassured Dee that God had chosen them for this ‘end of harvest’. They would receive instruction in the angelic language, ‘that holy mystery’ and ‘CABALA of NATURE’ that underpinned Creation itself. This would establish Christ's Kingdom on Earth, and ‘then cometh the end’. Dee therefore ordered a new Holy Table for the reflective obsidian show-stone, the crystal, and other paraphernalia.
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However, money problems soon re-emerged. Laski's heavily mortgaged estates could not support the Lord's labourers, and his Italian wife made it clear that she resented these threadbare intruders. On 18 February (Julian calendar) the angels commanded them to move to Poland's ancient capital Cracow, for the end times would soon bring bloodshed to Lasko.

Yet they needed money to reach Cracow. Four days later, racked by fever, Dee's questions reflect their desperation and their harsh welcome. He asked for remedies for his sickness and how long Lady Laski would live. Laski had expected Kelley's alchemy to solve his financial problems, but Kelley had failed. Dee therefore asked how to use the ‘red powder’ that Kelley claimed the angels had led him to in England. He asked them instantly to transport buried Danish treasure they had been promised in
England, to save Laski's estates and political credit. Above all, appalled by their sufferings, he now wanted to abandon Laski and asked whether Elizabeth or her Council ‘do intend to send for me again’.

The angels confirmed their move to Cracow but emphasised the bloody future, describing England's coming civil war and the insignificance of worldly treasures beside ‘the wisdom that judgeth NATURE’. Kelley had failed because the red powder was not the whole philosopher's stone. Days later the angels vaguely confirmed their promise that Laski would rule over Moldavia, though his financial problems were overwhelming his political ambitions.

By mid-March Dee and Kelley had somehow scraped together a year's rent on a house at Cracow.
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The city had long sheltered unorthodox religious thinkers.
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The Jagiellonian University's European reputation for Paracelsian alchemical learning attracted Kelley.
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Dee sought to join the university community, presenting the library with a manuscript of Boethius in November 1584, which remains there today.
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After almost a month of silence, in mid-April the angels returned to dictating the angelic language, vouchsafing forty-eight invocations.

Derived cryptologically from the tables of the
Liber Logaeth
revealed in 1583, these ‘Natural Keys’ would open the ‘Gates of understanding’, enabling Dee to invoke specific angels to reveal the secrets of Nature. This knowledge would be complete before 1 August, to comfort the world against Antichrist's assaults.
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The angelic language was so powerful that the calls had to be dictated backwards, lest ‘all things called would appear’, as had happened once before. The angels selected letters individually from grids, a process Dee soon found tedious, baffling and prone to numerous errors. The angels also had to teach exact pronunciation of the words, vital for their desired effect. The first call took three days to deliver.
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Despite these problems, that summer Dee became convinced that Kelley's ‘scrying’ gave him better contact with God's messengers than the Old Testament prophets had enjoyed. He believed that ‘these Actions’ finally taught the wisdom he had prayed for since his youth. Kelley reinforced this conviction by refusing to ‘scry’ after the first few calls, claiming
evil spirits deluded them. This forced Dee to demonstrate the orthodoxy of the revelations. Once Kelley consented to return, the angels explained the superiority of the angelic language over human language.

The difference involved manipulating letters and numbers in the ‘CABALA of NATURE’. Human language garbled the letters of God's original creative language. Therefore, they must be kabbalistically restored to their original place by being assigned numbers. Every letter signified part of the substance of which it ‘spoke’. When properly reorganised, the words they composed signified both that substance's essence and a greater number, kabbalistically derived from the original divine word. The first ‘secret and unknown forms’ of things were easily distinguished by their numbers, which signified letters, which made words, ‘signifying substantially the thing that is spoken of in the centre of his Creator’. Just as ordered speech persuaded man's mind, so were God's creatures ‘stirred up in themselves, when they hear the words wherewithal they were nursed and brought forth’ by God, their true names.

Adam before his Fall spoke this language with God and the angels. Sharing God's power and spirit, he therefore knew all things ‘and spoke of them properly, naming them as they were’. But when ‘Coronzon’, Satan's true angelic name, seduced Adam he lost ‘his understanding’ of the angelic language. Therefore, he spoke the first Hebrew, through which his posterity learned ‘of God and his creatures’. However, modern Hebrew lacked ‘the true forms and pronunciations’, and therefore the power, of Adam's language. Still less could Hebrew now compare with the angelic language, hidden from man ‘till now’. Through this ‘tongue of power’ God would give true wisdom.
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Dee found this angelic language compelling. His
Monas
had proposed that the letters of the ancient alphabets derived mathematically from the hidden structures of Creation. The angels who had taught Abraham now taught Dee and Kelley the secret keys to Creation, the root of all languages.
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The excitement of grasping this root distracted Dee's attention from Kelley's ongoing problems with alchemy. By 21 April Kelley believed that his projections proved the red powder to be the philosopher's stone, though Dee received no angelic confirmation.
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Therefore,
they pressed on with the angelic calls. When translated these revealed Kelley's deep familiarity with the solemn cadences of Old Testament prophecy. Even so, Kelley's invention was exhausted, and from early May 1584 the dictation occurred only on Mondays, interspersed with enigmatic visions in the stone.
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