The Arch Conjuror of England (40 page)

These events finally explain why Dee had to write his remarkable ‘Compendious Rehearsal’. The sudden catastrophe compelled Dee to appeal directly to Elizabeth over Burghley's head. Even the timing of his appeal was dictated by Burghley's absence from Court. On 9 November, three days after his disastrous interview, Dee wrote a supplication to Elizabeth. The Countess of Warwick immediately showed it to her. She persuaded Elizabeth to grant Dee's request for two commissioners to assess his justifications for royal reward.

It was no coincidence that this occurred at Hampton Court while Burghley sat in the Exchequer Chamber at Whitehall. Nor was it coincidental that the commissioners, Sir John Woolley, Elizabeth's Latin Secretary, and Sir Thomas Gorge, a household official, waited until Burghley was preoccupied with the law term at Hertford north of London before riding to Mortlake on 22 November.
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At their suggestion, Dee had spent the intervening twelve days compiling an account of his service to Elizabeth. In his library, still missing many books, he arranged a table for the commissioners. Before it he set two ‘great tables’, one covered in the letters, records and testimonies accumulated during the exactly fifty years of study since he entered St John's College in November 1542. On the other he spread his manuscript and printed writings. He planned, as he read his ‘Compendious Rehearsal’ aloud, to support his case by handing the commissioners the relevant documents.
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Dee's contemporaries would have found many aspects of his ‘Compendious Rehearsal’ commonplace. The commissioners’ advice to write it reflected their long experience with desperate Crown servants trying
to squeeze rewards from their parsimonious royal mistress. By the 1590s the huge costs of the Spanish war further constrained Elizabeth's never abundant willingness to reward her servants. At the same time, competition had increased as more educated men tried to enter royal service.

Dee's presentation differed only in his elaborate stage-setting and the sheer length of his personal account, a measure of his desperation. A few weeks earlier the ex-Jesuit Christopher Parkins, about whom Dee had mistakenly warned Walsingham, had begun bombarding Burghley with requests for reward. Like Dee, he discovered that rivals snapped up promised places. His diplomatic service in Europe eventually overcame Whitgift's resistance to his promotion, securing him a pension.
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While Dee wrote, Robert Beale scrambled to retain his secretaryship of the Privy Council by reminding Burghley of his lengthy services.
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Even the Queen's comptroller and Privy Councillor, Sir James Croft, felt he must ballast his appeals for patronage with detailed autobiography.
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Similarly, after reciting almost thirty years’ service to Elizabeth, Sir John Smith could tally very little beyond fair words and empty promises.
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Sir Henry Killigrew's account of his labours also echoes Dee's detailed, complaining tone.
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The ‘Compendious Rehearsal’ particularly resembled these other autobiographies being written at the same time because it carefully selected self-serving information. Dee described his Cambridge career in considerable detail, but hurried past his time at Catholic Louvain. He spent several pages emphasising his considerable international reputation but omitted his Catholic ordination and service as Bonner's chaplain. His version of his activities in 1555 insisted he suffered imprisonment at Hampton Court alongside Elizabeth, faced treason charges in the Star Chamber, and was sent ‘to the examining and custody of Bishop Bonner’ with Barthlet Green.
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He recalled that he might have served five emperors, but omitted his expulsion from Emperor Rudolf II's lands. He listed amongst his many services his counter-magic against the wax images in 1578, though he did not mention the embarrassing collapse of that ‘conspiracy’. He carefully described how his rivals had subverted Elizabeth's promises to him,
through ‘worldly policy, subtle practice, and rigorous advantages’, since that helped his case.
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However, other aspects of the ‘Compendious Rehearsal’ were unusual. Dee's vivid descriptions of Elizabeth's repeated promises to support his philosophical studies provide a remarkable insight into her passionate interest in occult philosophy, which has been consistently overlooked by her biographers.

Dee also included an idiosyncratic chapter listing thirty-six ‘books’ written since 1550. Like many job applications this included some padding, since two were the ‘Compendious Rehearsal’ itself and a one-page appendix. Others varied from a few manuscript pages to a printed dedication, up to the
Propaedeumata aphoristica
and
Monas hieroglyphica
. More impressively, he described the books, manuscripts, instruments, globes, compasses, clocks, title deeds, ancient seals, alchemical vessels and distillations that had been embezzled during his absence. He calculated £2,306 in lost rents from his rectories, his costs in returning from Europe, and his stolen books, plus his current debt of £833.
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He ended by petitioning for the Mastership of St Cross, to solve his financial and logistical problems. In 1574 Dee had believed Elizabeth had granted him the next vacant position there.
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Though Burghley inserted Bennett instead, Dee still nursed dreams of transforming St Cross into a European centre for alchemical research and publication.

Within its substantial early Tudor buildings, which still survive, St Cross administered then, as it does today, two medieval charitable trusts.
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Dee intended to convert the charities into a larger version of his ‘Hospital for itinerant philosophers’ at Mortlake. At St Cross he could collaborate in alchemy with many foreign scholars and their ‘Mechanical servants’. Mortlake, on the popular river route between Elizabeth's palaces, could not keep ‘some rarities’ secret ‘from vulgar Sophisters’.

As Master of St Cross, Dee's newly enhanced reputation would attract occult ‘special men’ from throughout Christendom, ‘loath to be seen or heard of publicly in Court or City’. Landing discreetly on the south coast, they could work ‘under her Majesty's inviolable protection’. Dee also planned to use St Cross to print rare ‘historical and philosophical’ texts
with his own esoteric works. He would also copy ‘philosophical’ manuscripts for Elizabeth's library, as he had promised Queen Mary. Dee naturally assumed that Elizabeth would embrace the chance to enhance his European reputation, since that would also enhance her ‘Monarchical diadem of fame’.
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To circumvent Burghley, Woolley and Gorge waited for ten days to report Dee's utter destitution. On 1 December Elizabeth immediately confirmed that Dee should have the Mastership of St Cross when she elevated Bennett to a bishopric. Meanwhile she wondered aloud about providing his desired pension of £200 from the already ransacked revenues of the vacant Bishopric of Oxford. She sent Dee £66 in loose change via Gorge. Elizabeth's close friend Lady Katherine Howard also sent her old servant Jane Dee £3.
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Then for six weeks Elizabeth kept Dee at arm's length. He daily attended Court, but she excluded him from the Privy Chamber, despite his wish to express his thanks personally. This shows remarkable exertion by Whitgift against the powerful influence of Mary Scudamore and the Countess of Warwick, who both had the Queen's ear, and through whom Dee applied for access. Not until 15 February 1593 could the Countess take in a short Latin note, to which Elizabeth promised to grant ‘any suit meet for me’.
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Significantly, Elizabeth did not mention St Cross. The Queen's sudden cooling towards Dee reflects her close relationship with Whitgift. She knew that Dee would use any interview to remind her about St Cross and probably calculated that making Bennett a bishop over Whitgift's resistance was too high a price to pay.

Dee's exclusion reflected other tensions within Elizabeth's Privy Council. Burghley and Whitgift disagreed profoundly over whether radical Protestants or papists represented the greatest threat to the Elizabethan Church. The Parliament called for February 1593 would address this issue. There Whitgift shifted attention back to radical Protestants who believed in occult spiritual forces. Whitgift knew that Burghley had used Dee's prophecy of a Spanish invasion to frighten Elizabeth into publishing his Proclamation. Now Whitgift exacted his
revenge. Abandoned by Burghley, Dee fell victim to Whitgift's constant reminders about the dangers in tolerating claims to spiritual illumination.

The ‘Compendious Rehearsal’ therefore failed to rehabilitate Dee's career. For the next two years he clawed his way back into favour by assiduously cultivating influential courtiers through occult philosophy. Eventually, Elizabeth would nominate him to a prominent place in the Church. This so alarmed Whitgift that, ironically, he would ensure that Dee became Warden of Manchester. But in November 1592 that seemed an impossible dream.

D
EE NEVER
again mentioned Burghley, whose opening speech to Parliament in 1593 emphasised Philip II's planned invasion through Scotland, a rumour that originated with his agents, not Dee's astrology. Parliament cracked down harder against recusants.
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In contrast, Whitgift and his chaplain Bancroft emphasised Presbyterian subversion. Bancroft published
A Survey of the Pretended Holy Discipline
for the opening of Parliament, attacking Presbyterian ‘illuminated devices’ that threatened social disorder.
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Soon afterwards his
Dangerous positions and proceedings, published and practised within this Island of Britain
depicted William Hacket's ‘rising’ in the summer of 1591 as an abortive Presbyterian coup. Bancroft cited Coppinger's claim to ‘an extraordinary calling’ by a divine spirit that commanded him ‘to bring the Queen to repentance’, with ‘all her Council’.
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This closely resembled Dee's magic, as did Coppinger's desire for God's ‘extraordinary graces and gifts’. He imagined, like Dee in his ‘Discoveries’, that he was carried into Heaven.
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Bancroft deliberately confused radical separatist sects with the Presbyterians, claiming that both fomented popular insurrection.
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Using such arguments, Whitgift's clients steered through Parliament an ‘Act to retain the Queen's subjects in their Obedience’, the first Elizabethan statute punishing Protestant conscientious objections to the Episcopal
Church. While Parliament debated these bills in April, Richard Young interrogated Protestant separatists in the morning and Catholic recusants in the afternoon.
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This repressive atmosphere meant Dee could make little headway at Court. Soon after his message of thanks finally reached Elizabeth in February 1593, he had to borrow £10 from his former student and friend Thomas Digges. He had already begged Laski in vain for his pension arrears. In mid-March he dreamt that Kelley had returned to Mortlake, because Dee had returned to alchemy to solve his financial problems. Therefore, he again revived his angel magic. His ‘scryer’ Bartholomew Hickman began warning of cosmic changes that would occur in late September 1600.
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Alchemy gradually restored Dee's finances and gained him valuable connections at Court. On 17 March 1593 his alchemical colleague Thomas Webb introduced him to Sir Thomas Chaloner, who had published on alchemy. That day Francis Nichols made a £300 down payment to learn ‘the conclusion of fixing and taming of silver’. They quarrelled about Dee's lessons a year later, though Nichols would follow Dee to Manchester.
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Further instalments from Nichols enabled Dee in late May to offer £32 for the house next door in Mortlake, which he finally purchased in September. On 18 October he also repurchased ‘my cottage’, previously sold for £12 in cash. In August, Dee dined several times with Sir John Puckering, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, who controlled vast ecclesiastical patronage. Puckering spent a day at Mortlake, interrupted by Thomas Webb and an unnamed French ‘philosopher’. Puckering sent a New Year's gift of £10 to Jane Dee in January 1594 and a horse to John.
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Dee's alchemical reputation enabled him to cultivate the highest levels of the nobility. Through Richard Cavendish he met the intellectual Margaret Clifford, Countess of Cumberland, younger sister of the Countess of Warwick and Cavendish's collaborator in alchemy. In October 1593, Dee was astonished to hear her preacher Christopher Shutt ‘despising alchemical philosophers’. This did not prevent the Countess from visiting Dee to have her horoscope cast in December. That day
Peregrine Bertie, Lord Willoughby, who had visited Kelley at Prague with Dyer, supported Dee's search for the philosopher's stone with £20. Dee maintained these relationships throughout his years at Manchester.
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However, a few weeks later alchemy threatened to derail Dee's recovery. Thomas Webb introduced Dee to alchemical patrons, assisted with his alchemy, and kept a room in Dee's house.
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Yet Webb's Prague mission to rescue Dyer cost him dearly. Between November 1591 and July 1592 he had borrowed at least £48 from Richard Young.
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Webb also needed to maintain appearances at the ruinously expensive Court. To support his ambitions he took to alchemical coining and dangerous politics.