The Arch Conjuror of England (35 page)

When Dyer's servants returned in November to recall Kelley, Dee had to pretend the invitation included him, though after Dyer's report only Kelley's alchemy interested Elizabeth. Dee replied to the Queen in a formal letter, carefully written in his exquisite italic hand. He naturally omitted the information that Kelley had no intention of returning. He rejoiced at Elizabeth's Armada victory and alluded to the apocalyptic language of
Memorials
, happy to obey ‘a most secret beck of the most mighty Lady, Opportunity’. He praised her clemency in calling ‘me, Mr Kelley, and our families’ home ‘into your British Earthly Paradise’ and promised to ‘untangle ourselves’ as soon as possible.
³¹

Dee even spent Rozmberk's rewards on a new coach for the journey. Yet he knew he could not return without Kelley. By December Kelley had begun to attract alchemical devotees and was offered great friendship and money for ‘two ounces of the thing’ – the philosopher's stone.
³²
Kelley now gave Dee the mercurial water they had been working with, perhaps because he found the powder a more direct route to transmutation.
³³
The gift signalled their imminent parting.

In early December, desperately trying to curry favour, Dee gave Kelley his perspective glass, a primitive telescope that ‘could make things far off, to seem near, small things to seem great’. Symbolically, Kelley
immediately handed this to Rozmberk, who presented it to Rudolf, who had long coveted it for his
kunstkammer
, his enormous collection of curiosities. It purchased Kelley's readmission to Rudolf's favour.
³⁴

Dee began to postpone his departure in letters to Rozmberk, who would not hear of him staying. In January 1589 Rozmberk told Kelley that Dee must depart. In fact, Kelley reported, cruelly twisting the knife, Rozmberk now wished ‘that I should not have come hither, from the very beginning of our coming’.
³⁵
Dee kept dragging his feet, so Rozmberk abruptly gave him forty days to leave and took Kelley away. On 4 February Dee symbolically acknowledged Kelley's alchemical superiority, handing over ‘the powder, the books, the glass’ for Rozmberk. On 16 February Dee watched Kelley ride away, accompanied by the majority of their servants.
³⁶
He never saw him again.

Once more outmanoeuvred in the patronage stakes, Dee had few options in his apparently bleak future beyond returning to England. He left Trebon with his family in mid-March, heading northwest through Germany. If he were to secure new patronage he had to protect his European reputation, whatever the cost of keeping up appearances. The family travelled in some state in Dee's new coach and four. Two other coaches for the servants followed, with Rudolf's military escort to ensure they left. Behind them toiled wagons groaning with Dee's library, their household goods and clothes. The convoy wound its way via Kassel to Bremen near the German coast. Dee later claimed the whole journey cost the staggering sum of £600.
³⁷

They arrived at Bremen on 9/19 April 1589, Dee's use of both Gregorian and Julian dating systems suggesting his divided loyalties. His last hope was that Kelley would relent and come back to him, so that they could return to England together. He rented a house in Bremen in May, intending to sit tight until Kelley remembered where his true allegiance lay. Located on the fastest route from Prague to England, through the nearby port of Stade, Dee could theoretically monitor Kelley's communications with England and correspond quickly with him. The presence of the notorious conjuror disturbed the Bremen city council until Landgrave Wilhelm wrote Dee a testimonial.

Dee tried to ingratiate himself with Walsingham by becoming a listening post on affairs in the Low Countries.
³⁸
He reported on the ‘Archtraitor’ Christopher Parkins, a Jesuit sent from Rome to assassinate Elizabeth, whose schemes ‘my great friend’ Edward Kelley had uncovered at Prague. This must finally silence the old canard that Dee somehow spied for Walsingham. Parkins had abandoned the Jesuit order and was actually Elizabeth's accredited diplomatic agent in Germany, Poland and Bohemia.

In August Dee heard the bitter news that Rudolf had created Kelley a Baron of Bohemia. He relayed this to Walsingham, again accused Parkins of treason and analysed Low Countries politics. He remounted his hobby horse of the
Memorials
, insisting once more that Elizabeth should be ‘Queen over all their Provinces’.
³⁹

All this was merely marking time until Kelley reappeared. Dee kept from Walsingham the decision he had already revealed in a letter to Richard Young, that he had by now given up on Kelley and intended to return before winter, because Jane was three months pregnant.
⁴⁰
In mid-September she complained bitterly about their poverty. Dee sulked, in ‘low spirits’ because of her ‘ingratitude’. Their landlord gave them notice, probably for unpaid rent, and yet another of Dee's servants departed to seek better fortune with Kelley.
⁴¹

Kelley meanwhile, judging from the stream of messengers through Stade recorded by Dee, had been haggling with Elizabeth over the conditions for his return. By early November, Walsingham's letters gave Dee some reason to hope that Kelley might actually reappear. He still hoped to intercept him at Stade. Instead, on 17/27 November 1589 he encountered Edward Dyer at the port, again hurrying to Prague, either to persuade Kelley to return or to learn from the alchemical master. Clearly the game was up. Dee and his family took ship for England two days later. They landed on 3 December (Julian calendar), after more than six years in Europe.
⁴²

B
ROKE YET
again, Dee went straight to Richard Young's house at Stratford, east of London. Beyond their family connection, Young had political clout, as the Privy Council's chief investigator of Catholic subversion. As a Customs official who lent out the monies he collected before accounting for them to the Exchequer, he also possessed the ready cash Dee needed. The boxes and trunks of books we have already seen inventoried in Young's house in 1595 may be Dee's travelling library, deposited as security against a loan that was never redeemed.

In some respects England seemed unchanged, because while Elizabeth lived Dee could still seek her crucial patronage. Rested and restored, he gained an audience at Richmond on 9 December 1589, when he complained about the despoliation of his Mortlake library. The Privy Council appointed four commissioners to help trace his missing books and materials. He also mentioned his inability to provide for Christmas, so Elizabeth promised £100. Typically, he only received £50 and never discovered ‘what is become of the other fifty’. More importantly, Elizabeth told Burghley to ask John Whitgift, now Archbishop of Canterbury, to find Dee some lucrative sinecure in the Church.

Her generosity signalled not so much her esteem for Dee as her hope that it would persuade Kelley to return. Dee no doubt implied that Kelley was on his way. On 10 December, his Court reputation somewhat
restored, Dee borrowed £100 to rent his former Mortlake house from his brother-in-law Nicholas Fromoundes, since he could not repay the £400 mortgage. Five days later John and a heavily pregnant Jane returned to a devastated house, stripped of goods and furniture, the alchemical laboratories bare, and over five hundred books missing from the bookshelves.
¹

The Queen's favour encouraged others to apologise for Dee's losses. Adrian Gilbert offered unlimited compensation for the stolen goods and Dee's share in the Devonshire mines. A week later Thomas Kelley brought news that his brother Edward would return. Dee instantly borrowed £10 from Thomas. In mid-January Dee agreed compensation with Fromoundes for his purloined goods and damages. By the time their daughter Madimi, named after a young female angel, was born on 25 February 1590, John and Jane could believe that they were rebuilding some sort of normality.

This seemed established in late March when Walsingham, who believed in transmutation but not in every adept, consulted Dee about two London alchemists alleged to have made the philosopher's stone. However, tragically for Dee, ‘Good Sir Francis Walsingham died’ on 6 April.
²
Three days later Ambrose Dudley, Earl of Warwick, was buried. Leicester had died in September 1588. Death had transformed the political calculations of the Elizabethan Court, depriving Dee of powerful patrons at a time when war, economic crisis and the Crown's financial problems had vastly increased competition amongst courtiers and aspirants for diminishing rewards.

Dee's hopes of patronage now depended largely on the aged and overworked Burghley, who forgot nothing, including Dee's criticisms about him uttered in Prague. Dee's hopes of advancement would also founder on the Lord Treasurer's cautious accommodation with a new order in State and Church. While Dee had been abroad a profound cultural counter-revolution, which partly aimed to suppress the occult philosophy that Dee represented, had transformed the Court. The frustrations of Dee's later career provide an object lesson in the consequences of a deliberate conservative campaign to change late Elizabethan culture.

That campaign originated in the ecclesiastical politics of Elizabethan England, whose implications for Dee's later life have never been explored. The campaign's roots stretch back to 1576, when Burghley encouraged Hatton's rise as Elizabeth's personal favourite to counterbalance Leicester. Hatton retained Elizabeth's trust because he shared her instinctive desire to enforce obedience to the Elizabethan Church established in 1559, thus stonewalling further reform. As Hatton's star rose, hopes of progressive reform of the Church sank.
³
His closeness to the Queen on Church matters increased Hatton's influence over the appointment of a new generation of bishops unsympathetic to agitation for reform, especially John Aylmer as Bishop of London in 1576. Hatton gave Aylmer Elizabeth's instructions: ‘to cut off (even as her Majesty termed it) and to correct offenders on both sides which swerve from the right path of obedience’.
⁴
Aylmer zealously followed his orders, but his appointment foreshadowed the appearance of a far more formidable figure in the Church, whose influence would be felt for generations.

On 23 September 1583, while Dee, Kelley and Laski lay windbound on the coast of Kent, a few miles away John Whitgift was installed Archbishop of Canterbury with heraldic pomp. Bishop of Worcester since 1577 thanks to Hatton's patronage, he had administered Canterbury province following Grindal's suspension. Revolting against his former radicalism, Whitgift made his reputation by attacking the Presbyterians, partly for their reliance on spiritual inspiration that resembled Dee's belief in angelic revelations.

Criticising the Presbyterian leader Thomas Cartwright, Whitgift had stressed human learning and training against ‘gifts and graces miraculously’ poured into the Elect. Learning and wisdom did not come ‘by inspiration only’.
⁵
Whitgift suspected that Presbyterian claims to divine illumination and charismatic authority merely cloaked a desire for ‘popularity’ with the foolish multitude, as a prelude to subversion.

Even before Whitgift became a Privy Councillor in February 1586, Elizabeth habitually backed his harder line against Presbyterians. Burghley considered Elizabeth's a ‘mixed’ monarchy, limited by the enduring interests of the political elite. Whitgift, however, shared Elizabeth's exalted
conception of her imperial authority in Church and State matters, the basis for the powerful Ecclesiastical High Commission, which he used to suppress both real and imagined challenges to the establishment.
⁶

Whitgift's influence as Archbishop of Canterbury enabled others in Elizabethan society, such as Reginald Scot, to condemn radical Protestants’ desire for ‘popularity’ through spiritual illumination. Spiritual hysteria about further Church reform threatened social conflict. Within months of Whitgift becoming archbishop, Scot published his
Discovery of Witchcraft [and] the knavery of conjurors
(1584), dedicated to the Archdeacon of Canterbury and Dean of Rochester. Like other conformists Scot wanted to marginalise Presbyterianism from political society, by connecting Presbyterian claims to spiritual illumination with politically suspect forms of magic amongst the lower orders.

Scot argued that God revealed the future to ‘the wise, the rich, the learned’, not to the poor.
⁷
He attacked radical reformers who wanted a new Church to advance ‘their magical words and curious directions’.
⁸
His rational attack on magical beliefs drew in Dee's occult philosophy. Miracles and prophecies had ceased with the Apostles, and all angelic revelations since Christ were impostures. The ‘allegorical games’ of the Kabbalah allowed ‘atheists’, meaning anyone Scot despised, to claim ‘power over angels and devils’. Reports of seeing angels in crystals were counterfeit and popish.
⁹