The Arch Conjuror of England (32 page)

Rudolf responded mildly, because he deeply believed in his messianic destiny to destroy the Ottoman Empire, and because he was accustomed to hearing universalist prophecies. He had also been taught by Philip II to
enhance his majesty by suppressing public displays of emotion. However, when Dee revealed God's command that Rudolf should read the angelic conversations and see ‘the holy Vision’ in the stone, he evaded the offer. Though Dee thought he heard Rudolf's offer of protection, ‘he spake so low’ that the audience petered out into awkward silence until Dee belatedly realised it was over.

Dee felt the anticlimax keenly. God alone knew, he told the angels later that day, how his words had affected Rudolf. It later emerged that Rudolf had understood them as Dee's personal rebuke for his sins, not God's admonition. But before this confusion could be remedied, the damage had been done.
¹³
The angels, offended by Kelley's recent drunkenness, refused to help. They did, however, reaffirm Dee and Kelley's superiority, as God's chosen prophets, over the Catholic clergy. They also confirmed the popular forecast of the world's end in the ‘year eighty eight’. Dee felt confident about Elijah's return on that ‘great day of the Lord’. Adding Christ's lifespan to 1588, he thought Christ's kingdom would return in 1621, unorthodox speculation that he justified with numerous scriptural passages emphasising divine revelation.
¹⁴

Bolstered by angelic assurances, Dee tried through San Clemente to show Rudolf the records of the angelic conversations. Rudolf delegated the task to his confidant Jacob Kurtz. Dee anxiously asked the angels whether he should include Kurtz and Rudolf in their ‘actions’. Disturbed, for once Dee actually felt the presence of ‘my good Angel’ and the ‘wicked tempter’, Pilosum. At this point, Kelley's fragile psychological state produced the first of many angelic instructions to reconcile himself to Rome, despite his criticisms of its clergy.
¹⁵

The angels permitted Dee to show Kurtz his Latin translations of eighteen books of revelations. For six hours on 15 September, Dee guided Kurtz's skimming through the books and showed him the crystal brought by the angels. Kurtz claimed to know Dee's scholarly fame in Germany and he promised to report favourably to Rudolf. Yet, thanks to Kelley's ‘scrying’, Dee soon became convinced that Kurtz was slandering him at Court as ‘A bankrupt Alchemist, a Conjuror, and Necromantist’, who had been defrauded by Laski and intended to con Rudolf.

Kurtz's high standing encouraged someone to throw these accusations in Dee's face at San Clemente's table. Though the ambassador defended him, Dee again had to protect his ‘name and fame’, this time at the premier court of Europe. Unfortunately, he and Kelly were again penniless and desperately waiting for money from Laski. Kelley wanted to leave for England, while Jane Dee was pregnant and seriously ill. Somehow Dee learned ‘of the Queen's displeasure for my departure’ and that Aylmer, the rigorously conformist Bishop of London, intended to accuse him of conjuring with the ‘secret assistance’ of the Devil.

No wonder the angels commanded Dee to offer Rudolf the philosopher's stone, ironically confirming those recent slanders.
¹⁶
By early October, broke and disheartened, Dee abandoned hopes of becoming ‘Caesar's philosopher and mathematician’, and they all left for Hungary. His sense of his prophetic importance had again clashed with the ruthless competition at princely courts. For over two months he disappears from view, because one of the angelic books seems to be missing.
¹⁷

In late December, Dee suddenly reappeared in Cracow, somehow able to afford a coach and horses to take his entire household, including Kelley, to Prague. At New Year 1585 he rented a house there in Old Town. He also wrote to San Clemente and Kurtz, re-energised to confront the slanders and prove his value to Rudolf.
¹⁸
As so often Dee's financial affairs remain mysterious, though he probably made his brave re-entry to Prague on borrowed money. In mid-January, Kelley began to see alchemical visions promising the philosopher's stone. Even Dee wondered how pursuing transmutation fitted their mission to proclaim reforms leading to the end of time. Moreover, he had no idea how to make the stone. The angels promised inspiration but now warned him against Rudolf and Kurtz.
¹⁹

The following confused ‘actions’ marked two important changes. First, Kelley embarked on alchemical work that eventually seemed to succeed in making gold, and princes who once ignored Dee would soon compete to employ his former scryer. Secondly, the Catholic hierarchy began demanding they prove their orthodoxy. They were repeatedly questioned about transubstantiation, receiving Communion in the wafer only, and
veneration of the Host, all disputed issues in Bohemia.
²⁰
Fortunately for Dee and Kelley, the angels supported Catholic teachings on the Mass, since, like Man himself, the Host was an alchemical creation. Accordingly, the angels promised revelations about the philosopher's stone once they were reconciled to the Catholic Church.
²¹

By late February the angels were commanding that Dee and Kelley embrace the Church's rigorous new confession and the priesthood's power to absolve sins. This raised Dee's stress levels, so that during an action on 23 February he again felt a spiritual presence, ‘a heavy moving thing’ on his head. The angels confirmed ‘some treachery was devised against me’.

Days later Dee and Kelley suddenly panicked, pawned their belongings and fled south. At nearby Limburg, Kelley claimed to see angelic visions outside the show-stone, announcing that Stephen Bathory would replace Rudolf within a year, because Rudolf had refused the angelic revelations. God also encouraged Kelley's alchemy. Thus reassured, they returned to Prague.
²²
Remarkably, two weeks later Dee's son Michael received Catholic baptism in St Vitus Cathedral, sponsored by San Clemente and two senior courtiers.
²³

By mid-March the angelic revelations had become exceptionally erratic. The angels either failed to appear or uttered such impenetrable mysteries that even Dee and Kelley sat looking blankly at one another. In late March, after the Pope's Nuncio accused them of challenging the Church's authority, Kelley refused to proceed until he had confessed to a Catholic priest. His anxieties, and Dee's increasing focus on the philosopher's stone, reflected their dire poverty, which was now common gossip. Jane Dee could no longer buy food on credit and petitioned the angels to relieve their wants. God alone could restore ‘the credit of the actions’ against the ‘wicked slanders’ of Prague's citizens.
²⁴

The angels promised the stone would restore their reputation and provide an entry for ‘supernatural force and wisdom’. However, their recipe for the stone, called ‘Darr, in the angelical language’, followed surprisingly traditional methods, using the solid residue in fortified wine barrels to tint metals golden. Yet, even this unpromising beginning
prompted Dee into a flurried week of letter writing to the English Court, in hopes of being rescued.

Dee requested that Elizabeth send ‘an expert, discreet, and trusty man’ to Bohemia to witness ‘what God had sent unto me and my friends’. Dee suggested his friend the mathematician Thomas Digges, whose alchemical interests have been forgotten until recently.
²⁵
Kelley sent a sample of transmuted metal. Yet Elizabeth ignored Dee's ‘faithful letters’. Nor would the angels provide news from England, and he could make nothing of the seal and angel of Britain, ‘Tedoand’ in the Book of Enoch. Dee again wrote fruitlessly to the Queen and Privy Council in November.

One reason the Court ignored them was gossip about Dee's real attitude towards his English patrons. From Prague these stories spread through the German courts, whence correspondents gleefully relayed them to those concerned. In January 1586 Stephen Powle, whose father had accompanied Dee to Lorraine, and who had visited Dee at Mortlake, reported malevolently to Burghley. According to Powle, when asked why he had left England, Dee had blamed Burghley's niggardly patronage in many ‘vile speeches’, intended to ‘dishonour … your Lordship’. Powle promised to repeat these speeches personally to Burghley, who pretended to bear patiently with attacks on his ‘monopolising’ power in England. However, his vigorous defence on this occasion reveals that Dee's own philosophical self-confidence partly explains his lacklustre Court career. Burghley denied forcing Dee and Kelley's departure. He did not know Kelley, but ‘Mr Dee I know well, who seldom came to me’ to pay court. Like many intellectuals Dee mistakenly assumed that pure intellect would gain him reward, not appreciating that in the Court, that most human of institutions, personal relationships carried more weight than mere intellectual worth. Burghley would take his revenge for Dee's criticism and neglect, after he employed his philosophical abilities one last time in 1591.
²⁶

Worse still, as Dee later realised, ‘I was chief Governor of our Philosophical proceedings’ only until March 1585. From then on, Kelley's alchemical expertise enabled him to dominate their relationship. First the Bohemians, then the Italians and finally ‘some of my own countrymen’
plotted to marginalise Dee, until he separated from Kelley and made his slow, disconsolate return to England.
²⁷

More immediately, God sent them back to Cracow in April, after Laski finally replied to their begging letters. By now Stephen Bathory and Laski had reconciled. Within days of Dee's arrival Laski secured a royal audience, where Stephen offered his protection. Perhaps anticipating better luck, Dee now labelled the recipe for the philosopher's stone ‘Mysteria Stephanica’.
²⁸

Prolonged debate with Kelley and pressure from the Catholic hierarchy had persuaded Dee to reconcile himself to Rome at the new Gregorian Easter. That year Easter Sunday fell on 21 April, ten days later than the Julian Easter. He chose a congenial confessor, the Franciscan friar and professor of divinity, Hannibal Rosseli. He had recently begun publishing an enormous edition of the
Corpus Hermeticum
. The second volume, just out, dealt with the Holy Spirit and Angels. Dee, like almost everyone, believed that Hermes Trismegistus had been contemporary with Moses. Hermes gave ancient sanction to the calling of spirits. How much did Dee tell Rosseli about the angels, under the seal of the confession that Good Friday?
²⁹
The next day, Saturday 20 April, Dee received the Sacrament from the Observant Franciscans. Kelley also confessed, to a Jesuit, and ‘very devoutly’ took communion on Easter Monday, to Dee's ‘unspeakable gladness and content’. Did Dee still believe in the Sacrament as a magical medicine against the evil spirits that troubled Kelley? Dee confessed and received the Sacrament twice more that Easter.
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Having established their orthodoxy, Dee might have expected more stability from Kelley. Yet although the angels now exalted Stephen Bathory's prospects, Kelley soon turned against Laski, who had never paid his promised annuity, and demanded that they return to Prague. When Dee demurred, his ‘friend and partner’ Kelley broke out into terrifying blasphemies. This dispute reflects the shifting psychological balance in their relationship, for the angels now forbade Dee to require their presence, until Stephen had been rebuked for his sins.

When Kelley resumed scrying on 20 May, the angels threatened to kill Dee's son Michael, because Dee kept the angelic knowledge from Stephen.
Keeping Dee off balance, once Laski had joined them, Kelley switched to prophesying Laski's triumph over Stephen ‘for his wickedness’.
³¹
The next day, 23 May, Stephen gave Dee an audience. A devout Catholic, Stephen emphasised his doubt that God would secretly visit men nowadays. Dee responded with the Catholic doctrine that the Holy Spirit permeated the universe, like Christ in the Mass. He offered to demonstrate it from their twenty-four books of godly instructions, exhortations and prophecies.

Stephen consented to join an angelic action on 27 May, when the angels demanded that he purge his sins. Then Bohemia, that is Rudolf, would be afflicted and Stephen exalted. On 28 May prophecies of the imminent Apocalypse left Stephen unmoved, since Kelley delivered them in English. The angels then instructed Dee to offer Stephen the philosopher's stone. A brief note of Dee's speech records their utter failure to persuade the King. In early June the angelic revelations again stuttered to a halt, so we lack the ‘divine orders’ that sent Dee and Kelley to Prague in July.
³²

However, we do know that Dee returned to Prague with Francesco Pucci, whose erratic psychological state resembles Kelley's. Ordained a Catholic priest in Florence, Pucci's spiritual quest had covered much of Europe, including England, where he proceeded M.A. at Oxford in 1574. Dee first mentioned him at Cracow in July 1585. Pucci enthusiastically participated in the actions, believing that the ‘renovation of all things’ by God's chosen vessels would create a new world in 1600.
³³

On 6 August Pucci heard Kelley's visions of the end of time, that the Holy Spirit always guided the Church, and that Luther and Calvin roasted in hellfire. The angels confirmed Pucci's special calling, once he reconciled to the Church. However, he became convinced that to obtain papal forgiveness he must betray Dee and Kelley to the Jesuits.
³⁴
The main record of the angelic conversations then suddenly breaks off until 30 April 1586. But we know what unfolded during the intervening period because Dee wrote a Latin pamphlet for a cosmopolitan European audience, defending himself and Kelley against Jesuit accusations of necromancy. He claimed that their treatment would scandalise ‘all pious and true Catholics’.

Dee's pamphlet tried to establish their innocence by recounting dramatic angelic confirmation of the same angelic books that aroused Jesuit suspicions. These events also confirmed ‘the great catastrophe overhanging the world’.
³⁵
Dee described how the new Papal nuncio, Malaspina, revived suspicions about Dee and Kelley's angel magic once they returned to Prague in July 1585. Malaspina began requesting a ‘friendly conversation’. Dee politely stalled, pointing out England's conflict with the papacy and hinting that Malaspina planned to ambush them.