The Arch Conjuror of England (33 page)

In late March 1586 Malaspina lost patience and, through Pucci, commanded their attendance at his Prague residence. On 27 March Dee and Kelley finally obeyed, ostensibly to discuss the state of the Church. The nuncio lamented its current weakness. God's revelations to pious Catholics provided no remedy, being only private counsels of reformation. Dee and Kelley must disclose any angelic revelations that would rescue the Church.

Dee admitted that God's angels instructed them, but he avoided Malaspina's trap by denying they received angelic advice about reforming the Church, a topic beyond his authority. He felt great joy at receiving many divine mysteries, a million times greater than humans could imagine. Yet God commanded them to keep these private. According to his pamphlet, he then loudly protested his loyalty to Elizabeth.

However, Kelley immediately launched into the dominant theme of their recent actions – the contrast between the Catholic clergy's faith and its works, which required speedy reformation. They must learn to ‘teach and live Christ’. Malaspina smoothly agreed, though Dee later learned that he had wanted Kelley killed on the spot (by defenestration, a Prague tradition).

According to Dee, in early April, Kelley's Jesuit confessor then demanded that Kelley confess the ‘very great crime’ of conversing with God and his angels. Kelley denied that the Church Militant could judge angels of the Church Triumphant and defended their Catholic orthodoxy. He refused to hand over ‘our introductory lessons in a celestial school’. He also denied that they were accounted ‘very odious’ in England. The
confessor eventually barred Kelley from the Easter Sacrament and the angels then forbade any ‘action’ for six months.
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Dee's pamphlet now described the most dramatic of the angelic conversations, on 10 April 1586. After reiterating that God revealed His mysteries to the lowliest, the angels promised destruction for the Catholic clergy. Dee and Kelley must give external obedience to the Church but internally obey the spirit. To the nuncio's demand to see their revelations, the angels answered that restoring the Church meant extirpating a devilish priesthood, unable to judge the angelic revelations. Obedience to God demanded disobedience to earthly rulers. Kelley would foretell the final harvest of Revelation 14:15, Dee would write the revelations, but Pucci would preach the apocalyptic news.
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The angels then demonstrated their awesome power. They reminded Dee and Kelley how they had rescued them ‘from the accursed tribe’ of ‘innovators’ in England, who resisted Christ's Holy Church. They had instructed them in ‘the science of all things’, revealing matters hidden even from the Church. Yet more remained.

The angels ordered Dee to gather the angelic conversations, starting with Kelley's appearance four years earlier, manuscripts that still exist.
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They filled twenty-eight folio volumes, ‘four times seven’ as Dee could not resist kabbalistically noting. They included one that God held more valuable than the world; the forty-eight angelical calls; a short book of the still unexplained ‘Mystery of Mysteries'; and Enoch's wisdom, in sum ‘all sacred books, full and perfect’.
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The angels ordered Kelley to burn all of these, together with their two books of alchemy, and the ‘powder’, the philosopher's stone given by God, in the large tiled stove next to Dee's oratory. With Dee in the next room, in Dee's narrative Kelley suddenly saw an angel walking amongst the flames, collecting the books and powder. Dee later sacrificed loose charts and papers to the fire.
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The angels finally promised to prove that only God's Elect received heavenly mysteries, by miraculously restoring the books. Dee and Kelley should dismount their show-stones and hang up their holy table as a memorial. The angelic conversations had ceased.
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Dee probably wrote his pamphlet soon after these events, because it ended with a peroration on God's power but omitted the astounding restoration of all the books on 29 April. That afternoon Kelley observed a ‘gardener’ pruning trees below, who invited Dee to come down before mounting up to Heaven in a biblical ‘great pillar of fire’. They searched the garden and found three of the books they had ‘burnt’, untouched by the flames, as they appear today.
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The spiritual ‘gardener’ reappeared, apparently visible to Dee, because as the angel led Kelley back into the house ‘his feet seemed not to touch the ground by a foot height’, and the doors opened before him. Reaching into the stove, the angel passed most of the books over his shoulder to Kelley, before disappearing in ‘a little fiery cloud’. Kelley returned the books to Dee, still waiting in the garden.
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Other books and the ‘powder’ were returned on an unrecorded occasion.
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Of all the episodes in these manuscripts, the sixteenth-century's most remarkable account of angelic magic, this most defies historical explanation. History cannot account for what Kelley did and what Dee believed he saw. It can only describe the consequences. The next day the ‘actions’ abruptly began again when Dee requested that Vilem Rozmberk should be admitted to their holy fellowship.

Fifty years old, as Burgrave of Bohemia, Rozmberk held extensive but vague powers. Though a devout Catholic, he supported a broad-minded, moderate and anti-papal religious policy, as did his Protestant brother, Peter. With other culturally cosmopolitan magnates, they considered toleration the only basis for national solidarity, given Bohemia's complexities. Dee had again found patrons religiously and intellectually open to the possibilities of angel magic. Rozmberk had been friends with Dee's idealised Maximilian II, avidly collected alchemical, kabbalistic, astrological and apocalyptic books, and probably read Dee's pamphlet.
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For decades Rozmberk had employed alchemists in Prague, on his southern Bohemian estates, and in Silesia, all places that Dee and Kelley visited.

The fact that Rozmberk's participation appears so unheralded emphasises that the angelic records give only a limited insight into Dee and Kelley's relationship with Rudolf's Court. On the same day the angels
restored the books, the Papal nuncio reported that Dee and ‘the cripple’, Kelley, were creating ‘a new superstition, not to say heresy’ known ‘to the Emperor and all the Court’.
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The Venetian ambassador reported from Prague that though Dee ‘did not profess a Christian life’ but claimed angelic revelations, ‘he has a following’.
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The papal attacks themselves indicated how much their apocalyptic reform drive, verified by their alchemical successes, strongly impressed the Court, Rozmberk and even the Emperor, despite gossip against them in Prague.

Just how strongly can be seen from the angelic action of 30 April. God promised a covenant with Rozmberk, who would purify the Empire where Maximilian and Rudolf had failed. On May Day 1586, Dee revealed this offer to Rozmberk, who devoutly promised to reform himself and Rudolf through the angelic instructions. Rozmberk also prayed that Rudolf would grant Dee another audience and be ‘restored to the favour of God’. He promised to protect Dee, having been made his patron by God.
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Believing his place in Bohemia to be secure, Dee travelled to the famous glasshouses at Valkenaw, renowned for producing alchemical vessels, and then on to the great trading city of Leipzig in Saxony. He hoped to find replies to his letters sent to England in November 1585. Disappointed, he wrote to Walsingham on 14 May 1586, intending his message also for Elizabeth. He acknowledged that his previous letters might have been ignored ‘for the strangeness of the phrases’ and because many Englishmen construed his godly actions ‘to a contrary sense’. Dee carefully wrote nothing about his reconciliation with Rome. Seeking Walsingham's attention, he alluded to a vague Catholic alliance against England, and claimed that he had sent Malaspina packing to Rome ‘with a flea in his ear’ that terrified ‘the whole State Romish and Jesuitical’. He again asked Walsingham to send Thomas Digges to witness their alchemical success, because God had not yet ‘utterly cut off’ his merciful purposes from Elizabeth.
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For obvious reasons, Dee pretended to be the victim of popish tyranny. However, for once his predictions came true. On 23 May, after Dee and Kelley's return to Prague, the new nuncio, Filippo Sega, announced that
during their absence he had denounced them to the Emperor Rudolf for heresy, ‘necromancy and other prohibited arts’. On 26 May they appealed to Rozmberk, but he intervened too late. The irresolute Emperor had crumbled under heavy papal pressure and decreed their banishment on 29 May. Sega had demanded Dee and Kelley's condemnation during his first audience, meaning that Pope Sixtus V had personally targeted them. Sega insisted they be sent to Rome, where Dee's dabbling in forbidden arts had been censured twenty years earlier. Despite second thoughts Emperor Rudolf could not rescind the order. Dee and Kelley had six days to leave the Habsburg lands.
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B
EFORE
D
EE
and Kelley left, all states had been warned against Dee's ‘religious innovations’. The city of Erfurt in Thuringia refused them leave to stay, despite Rozmberk's request.
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Pucci trailed behind them, beseeching them to submit to the Pope, under the nuncio's protection. Dee's repeated failures in Court politics show how poor he was at reading character. Only on 11 July 1586 did he realise that Pucci, as the angels had warned, was conspiring with Sega. Dee eventually persuaded Pucci to return to Prague on 17 July, taking with him a letter to Sega restating their orthodoxy and another to Rozmberk.
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Dee and his household turned west, towards the Court of Landgrave Wilhelm IV at Kassel, on the direct route from Prague and Erfurt to England. Dee had visited there in 1563–64 and later corresponded with Landgrave Wilhelm, yet another princely mediator between religious extremists. He corresponded on natural philosophy with Dee's intellectual circle, patronised mathematicians, and maintained precise instruments for astronomical observations like Dee's.

Dee owned several technical treatises by Wilhelm's experts. The landgrave shared Dee's belief that the 1572 supernova appeared in the sphere of Venus and portended great changes. He had also made careful calculations about the 1584 Great Conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter, believing it presaged global cataclysms. Dee arrived at Kassel to find the Landgrave
and his research team preoccupied with using Tycho Brahe's improved instruments for an enormous series of solar and stellar observations, like Dee's of the 1550s. They would eventually catalogue a thousand stars.
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Wilhelm showed less interest in alchemical medicine and the philosopher's stone. Dee knew he dismissed the ‘infinite numbers of sophists’ who promised ‘mountains of gold’. However, Dee still found his reception at Kassel that summer disappointing.
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Within months Stephen Powle relayed to Walsingham gossip he had picked up at Kassel about Dee's pretensions and apocalyptic notions. These raised further questions about Dee amongst conservatives at Elizabeth's Court.

Years later Dee claimed that he had hired a single coach for his family. But he arrived at Kassel, Powle maliciously related, in a train of four coaches. Trying to save face after his expulsion from Prague, Dee claimed to have abandoned Rudolf because of his ‘slender entertainment’. To ‘show his greatness’, sneered Powle, Dee also asked official permission to stay at Kassel, an unnecessary ostentation.
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Powle informed Walsingham that Dee publicly claimed he lived on Elizabeth's financial support, and again attributed his departure from England to the ‘envy of some of the nobility’. Worse still, Dee gave the impression that he was possessed by a ‘proud and fanatical spirit’.

Dee presented Landgrave Wilhelm with his new Latin pamphlet ‘About God's Secrets and Mighty Works, called in the Apocalypse Alpha and Omega’. This described the nuncio's tyranny and defended the angelic revelations about ‘the great catastrophe overhanging the world’. It showed how Dee kept returning to the kabbalistic and apocalyptic preoccupations of his
Monas
. The first page bore the Monad symbol, with the same alchemical verse from Genesis 27:28 that appeared on the title page of the
Monas
: ‘May God give thee of the dew of heaven and the fatness of the earth’.

Powle reported that Dee blasphemously signed the work ‘Deus Londinensis’, taken to mean, ambiguously, Dee or Saint or God of London. Overall, Powle assured Walsingham, Dee disliked all religions. He proclaimed an alternative apocalyptic vision, allegedly revealed by the angel Gabriel, that ‘there must forthwith be a restorer of the house of
Israel’ to its former terrestrial glory. This exceeded even the revelations at Prague but recalls his expectation in
Monas
about the conversion of the Jews, the Joachimite prophecy that Elizabeth would rule from Jerusalem, and Dee's exchanges with the mystical prophet Roger Edwards in July 1580, when they agreed on the ‘paradoxal Restitution Judaical’ of Israel. Dee was always drawn to paradox.
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