The Arch Conjuror of England (44 page)

In response, Dee lent him Johann Wier's book
On the Deceits of Demons
.
⁶
Wier had demolished most contemporary beliefs in witchcraft and demons, supplying arguments for Scot's
Discovery of Witchcraft
that Whitgift and Bancroft had used against the Presbyterians. In April, by contrast, Dee lent Hopwood Girolamo Menghi's recent book describing elaborate Catholic exorcism rituals, which Harsnett later condemned. In August, Dee lent him the infamous witchcraft tract the
Malleus Maleficarum
, or
Hammer of the Evildoers
.
⁷

Whitgift certainly saw Dee as a credulous believer in the dangerous Darrell. After speedily exorcising the Lancashire Seven, Darrell arrived in Nottingham in November 1597 for another exorcism.
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By April 1598 he had divided Nottingham society between his godly supporters and their conservative opponents, seemingly a dress rehearsal for the religious warfare that Whitgift and Bancroft feared.
⁹
Unfortunately for Dee, the living of Upton-upon-Severn fell vacant again in February 1598, amidst this scandalous turmoil. If Whitgift had ever contemplated relenting, his knowledge of Dee's collaboration with Darrell, gleaned from Dickons's manuscript, sealed his fate. Though Dee immediately petitioned for Upton, within weeks he learned ‘of the Lord Archbishop his hard dealing’.
¹⁰

Worse happened after Dee departed for London in mid-summer 1598. Ostensibly, he pursued the College law suits there for the next two years. But he also hoped to save what remained of his reputation. Whitgift had imprisoned Darrell in April, while Bancroft and Harsnett constructed a High Commission show trial. They pressured three of Darrell's demoniacs into confessing their frauds, screened out witnesses who might support him, and intimidated others. In October Darrell smuggled out two accounts of his Lancashire exorcisms. One emphasised the political ramifications of Whitgift's persecution. Darrell claimed that Fulke Greville, the representative at Court of the powerful Earl of Essex while the Earl served in Ireland, had intervened with Elizabeth on his behalf.
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The other account again justified his exorcisms, denied any claims to miraculous powers, and insisted that he only intervened when invited by Starkie and unnamed gentlemen.
¹²

Darrell's manuscripts circulated in London that winter, for he later claimed that the public debated his case in both ‘the streets and Taverns’ and the ‘Seats of Justice’.
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What people said about Dee is lost. However, Dee's despair at Whitgift's opposition and the need to disassociate himself from Darrell explain his response in January 1599. He finally published the
Letter Apologetical
he had written to Whitgift in January 1595.

The title page depicted Dee resting on hope, humility and patience, a sheep attacked by the ravening wolf of envy and the many-headed monster of slander. Dee's fervent assertions in this pamphlet that his magic expressed orthodox Christian faith did not convince everyone. The witty, gossipy John Chamberlain, friend of Dee's critic Stephen Powle, dismissed it as ‘a ridiculous babble of an old imposturing juggler’.
¹⁴

In late May 1599, while Dee lived at Mortlake, Whitgift and Bancroft presided over Darrell's show trial in London. Harsnett prosecuted. The predictable verdict declared Darrell a counterfeit exorcist, deposed him from the ministry and committed him to prison until further punishment. However, Darrell really did enjoy support at Court and was released within two years.

Whitgift and Bancroft's contemptuous response to Dee's
Letter
appeared in November 1599, in a book begun by Bancroft and finished by
Harsnett. Both emphasised Dee's involvement to discredit Darrell. Bancroft opened by alleging that Darrell was ‘sent for into Lancashire by one Master Starkie, upon the report of Master Dee his Butler, who told the said Master Starkie what Master Darrell had done’ in exorcising his brother, Thomas Darling. The Presbyterian replies only gradually conceded this more detailed story, suggesting their unease about any association with Dee. Their first response merely admitted that ‘Master Starkie going to Master Dee for his counsel, was advised by him, to call for some honest and godly preachers, with whom he should consult’.

More tellingly, Bancroft could add from Dickons's seized manuscript that Dee had both advised Starkie and invited Darrell to Manchester. He put Dee's letter in the worst possible light. Bancroft related how, ‘Hartley the Witch, did afterwards tell Master Starkey’ that ‘there must be two or three at the least, with fervent and hearty prayer’ to cure his children. Therefore, when Darrell arrived in response to Dee's letter he ‘fulfilled the devil's words’. Dee, Bancroft pointed out, aligned himself with enthusiasts who believed Darrell ‘to be such a man, as if he met with the devil, he was able to curb him’. Harsnett also criticised Dee for contributing to Darrell's personality cult.

In response, Darrell and his collaborator George More tried everything to distance themselves from Dee. More, writing in December 1599, even tried to rehabilitate Dee. He omitted Dee's letter to Darrell, reported his advice to consult godly preachers, and for the first time mentioned Dee's sharp reproof to Hartley. Later Darrell conceded that Dee had written to him but denied that he went to Lancashire ‘upon Mr Dee his letter’. He emphasised that Dee's letter arrived ten weeks before his departure for Lancashire in March 1597, when he responded to letters from local justices. He needed to disassociate himself from Dee, because now Lancashire papists were also calling Darrell a ‘conjuror’, his prayers and fasting being merely charms against demons.
¹⁵
Under continuing pressure, however, Darrell finally divulged more details about Dee's involvement.

This enlarged account repeated the previous stories but added that Starkie ‘requested Master Dee his letter unto me (though unacquainted) and obtained it, wherewith he sent his own also, which prevailed not with
me’.
¹⁶
Bancroft and Harsnett had gradually forced Darrell to acknowledge that Dee had invited him to Manchester in December 1596. Bancroft and Whitgift evidently knew about that letter when Whitgift refused to countenance Dee's return to Upton in February 1598, because Dee's involvement with Darrell epitomised the subversive potential of his occult philosophy.

Dee's two years in London on College affairs did not repair his reputation amongst the Fellows back in Manchester, who while godly Protestants seem not to have been Presbyterians. After his return to Manchester in June 1600, the Fellows petitioned the Bishop of Chester to investigate Dee. They stacked the commission with local godly preachers. It would be instructive to know whether they were concerned about the College's finances or Dee's connection with Darrell, but Dee answered all their complaints verbally, and no records survive. Though in November Carter again grumbled about Dee, and unspecified ‘quarrels’ broke out on 18 December, the Fellows allowed Dee's house rent at the annual audit.
¹⁷

The Earl of Essex's failed rebellion in February 1601 made it still harder for Dee to protect himself against the opprobrium the conformists heaped on magic. Whitgift and Bancroft used the rebellion to tie magic, Darrell and the Presbyterians to insurrection. Cracking down in all directions, the government ordered the Stationers’ Company to burn Darrell's
True Narration
. In August 1601 the zealous John Deacon and John Walker, encouraged by Bancroft, underlined the connection between Essex and the exorcists in
Dialogical Discourses of spirits and devils
. They claimed that the Presbyterians covertly worked to advance ‘some mighty Magnifico [Essex] in their secret assemblies’.

Their follow-up
Summary Answer
(1601) argued that Presbyterians used prayer and fasting like charms and enchantments. Their ‘Cabalistical conceits’ not only confirmed ‘the wizards of the world in their wicked opinions’ but like Hacket scandalised the Church and subverted the State. Following Bancroft, Deacon and Walker denied the reality of witchcraft and demonic possession. Bancroft now interfered in witchcraft cases to promote medical explanations of symptoms of possession as being simple hysteria.
¹⁸
He drafted canons in 1604 forbidding exorcism by prayer and
fasting, on pain of expulsion from the ministry.
¹⁹
To the extent that conformists managed to connect magical beliefs with subversion, their cultural counter-revolution undermined Dee's remaining years.

Dee also faced problems in Manchester, where his inability to preach increasingly alienated the town's godly power brokers, led by Sir Nicholas Mosley. In November 1600 they petitioned the Privy Council for permission to remedy their chronic lack of preaching by raising funds for a lectureship. Whitgift disapproved of ‘popular’ lectureships, which too often encouraged tumultuous preaching. He therefore denied their proposal and made sure that the Bishop of Chester held that line.
²⁰
The godly pressed ahead anyway, justifying Whitgift's worst fears.

In February 1603 the civic leaders repeated their petition to Sir Robert Cecil, the Queen's Secretary. Now they complained that ‘Mr Dee … being no preacher’ and only one of the Fellows bothering to reside, the College utterly failed to provide preaching. They had raised money for William Burne to lecture. Yet another graduate of St John's College, Cambridge, Burne had refused to accept Whitgift's 1583 articles prescribing liturgical practice.

If anything, this recommended Burne to the Manchester godly, who planned to replace Dee with him. They would support Burne financially until he obtained a vacant Fellowship, which Dee could not deny him if Cecil supported Burne. Beyond that, they wanted Queen Elizabeth to grant Burne the Wardenship when Dee died. They finally obtained both objectives on 30 September 1603, when the new monarch James I ordered Dee to appoint Burne to a Fellowship, and granted him the next Wardenship.
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By then Dee had reached the advanced age of seventy-six. Manchester's canny businessmen evidently planned for his successor because of his age, diminishing financial credit and declining social standing. The chaotic College finances meant that within a year of arriving in Manchester, in February 1597, Dee had to borrow money for ordinary housekeeping. He even pawned his daughter's christening tankard.
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His two years attending the London courts failed to improve his cash flow, because five days before Christmas 1600 he pawned plate for £10, which was still
unredeemed in May 1603. He pawned more plate for £5 in January 1601.
²³
A bleak Christmas indeed, and no cheering gift from the Queen.

The fact that Dee needed collateral for such small loans indicates his declining creditworthiness amongst his shrewd neighbours. Worse still, their assessment proved correct. Although he finally secured his rector's income from Tenby in 1601, in July 1602 Dee had to obtain a protection under the Great Seal preventing his creditors taking legal action to recover their loans. That month his son Arthur consulted the psychological and spiritual healer Richard Napier about his ‘discontentment for wants and griefs touching his father’.

By this time also Dee's physical and mental health seems to have been breaking down under the constant administrative and financial strain, compounded by religious and personal conflicts. In late June 1597 he experienced heavy bleeding from the anus, a symptom of some serious disease, which reappeared at intervals until his death. During the night of 19 October 1597 he experienced the first of several bouts of ‘grief’, perhaps an anxiety attack connected to depression, which recurred in December, January and February.
²⁴
The fact that he stopped recording them does not mean they ceased. For the College's convoluted, expensive litigation dragged on, and Dee's depression perhaps provided a topic when he met Napier in 1604.

His own psychological problems may have given Dee new insight as a ‘physician of the soul’. He again spent the autumn law term of 1602 in London. That year Darrell's latest books had appeared, which finally acknowledged that Dee had helped bring him to Manchester. Dee's role may have been greater than we know, for in early November 1602 John Chamberlain picked up rumours that ‘Dr Dee hath delivered the Lady Sandes of a devil or some other strange possession’. Demonic possession was extremely topical. The notorious case of Mary Glover had fascinated the capital since the spring.
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That month exorcism again came under official attack. Dr Thomas Holland inserted into his showcase sermon on covetousness at St Paul's Cathedral an otherwise irrelevant swipe at those who ‘have gone about to show the truth of religion by casting out devils’.
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Dee's exorcisms only confirmed his national reputation as a magician. The severe outbreak of plague at James I's accession in March 1603 provoked speculation about its astrological causes, particularly that a planet would fall to earth. If it fell on dry land the plague would increase, but if in the sea it would cease. Some Londoners attributed this theory to the well-known astrologer Edward Gresham. Like Dee, Gresham based his astrology on accurate astronomical measurements, warded off charges of atheism, practised medicine and magic, and narrowly escaped accusations of witchcraft. Gresham knew ‘that grave man and thrice great Clerk Dr Dee’, an allusion to the ‘thrice great’ Hermes Trismegistus. Gresham reported that ‘most men’ considered Dee the author of the planetary theory, which ‘mightily suspended the minds not of the rude multitudes only but even of the better sort’. Dee believed that momentous events would occur every ten years after the supernova in November 1572. Hearsay garbled this prophecy into a prediction of the traumatic plague.
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The ‘better sort’ possibly included James I. The intellectual King kept an open mind about spirits. His patronage of natural philosophy included occult philosophers, just as he tolerated varied religious and political beliefs to establish his regime. Dee's reputation for prophecy in 1603 may therefore be connected with his undocumented claim to have become mathematician to the King on 9 August 1603.
²⁸
That might have consoled him for missing out again at St Cross. When Robert Bennett finally became Bishop of Hereford in April, ‘divers Scots both ministers and laymen’ clamoured for the Mastership, though it went to an Englishman, Arthur Lake.
²⁹
Dee's appointment as the King's mathematician suggests that he spent part of the summer of 1603 in London, thus further encouraging the Manchester godly to replace their increasingly impoverished, absentee warden. How Dee felt about Burne waiting for him to die we do not know, but we do know how Dee felt about the last great challenge of his public career, the Witchcraft Act of 1604. He believed that it threatened his execution.