The Arch Conjuror of England (4 page)

As a Mercer, Roland prospered sufficiently in the cloth trade to enrol John in Chelmsford Grammar School, where as the first in his family to move into the world of learning, John mastered the elements of Latin grammar. Besides funding his son's education, Roland's trade gave young John an appreciation of the power of ‘vulgar’ numbers, as he later called them, in contrast to those divine ‘formal’ numbers by which God created the world. To succeed, his father had to calculate speedily and accurately the size and number of cloths, customs dues, exchange rates, and profit-and-loss margins.

Also, merchants looked beyond England's borders. The Mercers dominated the export cloth trade, their customs duties providing much of the Crown's income. Roland Dee's rising status amongst the guild made John appreciate the importance of naval power in the Narrow Seas to protect England's dominant outlet through the great port of Antwerp. Naval power also supported the strategic priorities of King Henry's ‘empire’.
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Both numbers and empire would bulk large in John's life.

Roland followed his kinsmen in becoming a ‘gentleman sewer’ to Henry VIII. He superintended the table arrangements, seated the guests and served the dishes at the King's lengthy feasts. Roland's title marked his rise into the gentry. His coveted position ensured close personal access to Henry, offering opportunities for influence peddling. It placed Roland alongside useful contacts such as Richard Cecil, and it was to his son William that John Dee would repeatedly turn for patronage.
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Roland exploited his opportunities, for the 1541 tax assessment rated him as worth £100. This placed him amongst the richest half dozen merchants in St Dunstan's.
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The Mercers acknowledged his success by taking him into the exclusive Livery of the Company on 19 February 1543.
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Roland would reach the peak of his fortunes the following year, only to crash disastrously in 1547 (see p. 13).

Roland's position close to the King gave John access to the Court. By now Henry was a bloated caricature of the dazzling young prince on whom many Renaissance humanists had pinned their hopes. Yet his
major palaces such as Hampton Court, Greenwich, Windsor and Westminster still provided a backdrop of immense wealth for his swaggering kingship. Stuffed with costly furniture, carpets, tapestries, mirrors, maps of the world, of England, Rome, Jerusalem and other cities, embroidered hangings, statues and clocks, these palaces also offered the young John his first encounter with celestial and terrestrial globes, and perhaps astronomical instruments like astrolabes. He later owned a manuscript by the King's astronomer, Nicholas Kratzer, featuring his famous fixed and portable sundials, which John would also construct. Henry also employed as chaplain and alchemist one Robert Broke, who toiled in the steamy distilling houses at Westminster making the many essential oils and tinctures that the King's decaying body required.
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Roland's rise depended on Henry VIII, who liberally rewarded his intimate servants for their services.
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In return he relied on their personal loyalty in crucial positions. England's kings had always struggled against Customs fraud. Henry's free-spending ways required him to maximise his Customs revenue. By 1534, when the King's break with Rome left England internationally isolated, his need for money had become gargantuan. His chief minister Thomas Cromwell, who was personally familiar with corruption in the cloth trade, in 1534 reminded himself to speak to Henry about ‘the packer of London’. Henry later appointed a Privy Chamber servant as King's Packer, to oversee the packing and weighing of merchandise, preventing the City's own Packer from conniving with merchants to defraud the Customs.
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By May 1544, needing even greater sums for his French war, Henry intensified Customs oversight by appointing his trusted personal servant Roland Dee as Packer to the Strangers. Roland's experience and loyalty qualified him to oversee the City's Packer, assessing customs on exports by foreigners, and charging fees for packing them.
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The Packership probably brought Roland £400 a year.
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(Under Elizabeth I, Customs reformers were to consider Roland's appointment a model for a Queen's Packer whose ‘skill and judgement’ would enhance Crown revenues.)
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A year later, in 1545, Flemish merchants officially complained that Roland's charges hindered their trade.
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Roland's increased income enabled him six
months later to join a Mercer syndicate speculating in former monastic lands. Eventually these vast land sales impoverished the Crown and would make John's quest for royal patronage much harder.
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Yet more immediately, his father's new wealth supported the Cambridge education that would prepare John for royal service.

Dee entered St John's College, Cambridge, in November 1542, when freezing north-easterlies sweeping off the Fens at least moderated the stench from the dung heaps and open sewers befouling the little market town's narrow streets. Barely thirty years old, St John's contained nearly a quarter of the University's student body crammed into its single court, four or five students sleeping on truckle beds in their tutors’ spartan rooms. That constellation of intellectual stars, split by regional, factional and religious tensions, had already begun an enduring tradition of backstabbing and skulduggery in Fellowship and Scholarship elections.

St John's Elizabethan reputation for breeding evangelical Protestants has obscured the importance of its Catholic humanists in Dee's time. Several St John's Catholics had already decamped to Louvain in the Habsburg-controlled Netherlands, unable to stomach Henry's schism from Rome. Soon more would choose deprivation, imprisonment and exile rather than accept the Edwardian and Elizabethan Reformations.
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All the teachers Dee gratefully remembered fifty years later belonged to the conservative humanist Catholic faction in St John's.

At fifteen Dee studied simplified Aristotelian logic with the outspoken Catholic, John Seton. After taking his Bachelor's degree in 1546, he would teach logic and sophistry for two years in the University Schools, before graduating Master of Arts in 1548. In the 1590s he still valued two treatises on logic and sophistry he had written as a young teacher, which mixed medieval scholastic methods with Renaissance humanism in Seton's conservative style. Seton would dispute with the Protestant martyrs Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley in 1554 and die in exile from the Elizabethan Church in 1561.
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Dee learnt his Aristotelian philosophy from Robert Pember, who became Greek Reader at Trinity College in December 1546, with Dee as his Under-Reader. Pember remained a lifelong committed Catholic.
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Years after he left Cambridge, Dee complained to Gerard Mercator that the university's deficiencies had forced him abroad to pursue advanced study in mathematics, in which he made his major claims to originality. St John's statutes increasingly emphasised mathematics and Euclidean geometry, supplementing the University's teaching. This emphasis contributed much to England's mathematical apprenticeship.
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The college statutes also prescribed cosmography and perspective for undergraduates, and perspective for M.A. students. Nonetheless, Dee had some grounds for doubting Cambridge's commitment to mathematical education. In his advice book
The Schoolmaster,
Roger Ascham, a Fellow of St John's who lectured to the university on mathematics in 1539–40, dismissed excessive devotion to such
manual
studies, which rendered gentlemen ‘unapt to serve in the world’. He warned that ‘all the geometry’ in Euclid, to which Dee was particularly attached, could not teach the judgement and eloquence that gentlemen gained from literary studies.
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The university and college curricula did not mention occult philosophy, but Dee's occult studies began at Cambridge, where such knowledge appeared to be a natural continuation of Aristotelian philosophy. Aristotle's text
On Coming-to-be and Passing Away
gave immense authority to the belief that all matter shared one fundamental substance. Matter differed externally only through varying combinations of the four elements: earth, water, air and fire. Therefore, by alchemically manipulating those elements, any kind of matter could be transmuted into another. The conjunction of all elements would produce the philosopher's stone.
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During Dee's time at Cambridge, everyone knew that leading intellectuals such as Thomas Smith, William Cecil and Richard Eden avidly pursued the search for the philosopher's stone.
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Under Queen Elizabeth, Smith and Cecil would lead the Court's fascination with alchemy.

Dee's alchemical studies at St John's therefore prepared him for later service at Court. In 1570 his ‘Mathematical Preface’ to Euclid's
Geometry
conventionally described alchemy as ‘terrestrial astrology’. It cited Aristotle's
On Coming-to-be
, as well as his
Physics
and
Meteorology
, which discussed the stars, to prove that the rays emanating from heavenly bodies
shaped alchemical changes on Earth. Dee's mathematical studies at Cambridge applied perspective and geometry to measure these astrological forces, laying the foundation for his Louvain training in exact astrology, which began in 1547.
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Dee's Cambridge studies in perspective also laid the groundwork for his later summoning of angels into crystals through light rays. As an undergraduate Dee befriended John Hatcher, a Fellow of St John's who practised angel magic. Dee's ‘Mathematical Preface’ defined perspective as an element of natural philosophy that demonstrated how both light rays and unseen, occult rays could be measured and manipulated. Perspective therefore underpinned all natural philosophy, especially astronomy and astrology, and the magical effects of ‘Catoptric’, or divination using light reflected from polished surfaces.
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Dee also believed that Christ had supernaturally directed him to the study of perspective.
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As a consequence Dee, like many of his fellow students, avidly sought out writings by the thirteenth-century Franciscan friar and natural philosopher Roger Bacon, including magical treatises falsely attributed to him.
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In Bacon's view, man's intellect required divine aid to understand the world, which was why ‘the holy patriarchs and prophets, who first gave sciences to the world, received illumination within and were not dependent on sense alone’. Bacon apparently believed his intuitive insights into Nature were divine revelations, beyond what could be learned from studying ordinary astrology or commonplace alchemy. He asserted that since the time of Christ ‘divine inspirations’ had illuminated the purest souls, perfecting their understanding of all sciences, but without false magical conjurations.
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God's inspirations revealed nature's secrets through knowledge of the past, present and future, creating wonderful works.
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Dee's Cambridge contemporaries understood Bacon to mean that these revelations came through conjuring spirits. Dr John Caius, who returned to Cambridge while Dee studied there, owned a manuscript in which ‘Bacon's experimental art’ included using a young boy as a ‘skryer’ of visions in reflective surfaces. It also taught magicians how to command angels into crystals to reveal in an instant the secrets of God's ‘marvellous works’, and how to conjure a spirit guarding buried treasure.
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Yet during Dee's time at Cambridge, magic was losing its grip on the world. In 1536 reformers had changed Church doctrine to remove magical power against demons from the ‘sacramentals’ – holy water, bread, candles, ashes and palms. They were only reminders of spiritual teachings. Some bishops even attacked the cult of saints and their wonder-working images as ‘superstition’. After disturbances between reformers and traditionalists amongst the laity, Henry VIII imposed a messy compromise in May 1543, reaffirming the role of ?'sacramentals’ in traditional ceremonies but denying that they had any protective power – except for those unlearned laypeople who continued to believe in them.

In this emerging world of scepticism, exploring magical avenues to knowledge and wealth increasingly attracted accusations of demonic conjuring. This would create problems for Dee, who from his student days followed Bacon in seeking divine revelations. Nearly forty years later he reminded God that ‘I have from my youth up, desired and prayed unto thee for pure and sound wisdom and understanding of some of thy truths natural and artificial’, hidden ‘in the frame of the world’. Such ‘radical truths’ could not be learned through study but only by ‘thy extraordinary gift’, through angelic revelations ‘of thy Secrets’. But soon after Dee wrote these words the devout Protestant William Harrison, whose close friend Christopher Carye had studied with Dee in the 1550s, denounced Bacon as a sorcerer, ‘whatsoever John Dee our countryman either hath or will write in the defence of Bacon to the contrary’.
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In February 1546 Dee took his Bachelor's degree.
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The increasingly dominant Protestant faction at St John's, encouraged by attacks on magical Catholic beliefs by reformers at Court and in the Church, then refused to elect him as a Fellow. However, Henry VIII made Dee a founding junior Fellow of Trinity College in December 1546, where he became Under-Reader in Greek.
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Henry was enjoying one of his fits of conservativism. Besides Dee, all five Fellows chosen from St John's proved vigorous defenders of Catholic orthodoxy.
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To deceive his critics, in 1570 Dee tried to attribute his reputation for ‘conjuring’ to ‘vain reports’ about his stage production of Aristophanes's
Peace
in Greek soon after entering Trinity. In fact Dee's use of pulleys and mirrors to create the illusion of
‘the Scarabeus [beetle] flying up to Jupiter's palace, with a man and his basket of victuals on her back’ derived from rediscovered classical treatises. Precisely because he could explain these stage effects naturally, Dee used them to distract attention from the real source of his reputation, his ‘conjuring’ magic on behalf of Princess Elizabeth in 1555.
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