The Arch Conjuror of England (6 page)

This precise method of astrology so excited Dee that he made thousands of ‘observations of Heavenly Influences (to the Minute of time)’ between 1547 and 1555, using instruments created at Louvain.
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Later he would teach these methods to his students, including the well-known supporter of Copernicus, Thomas Digges. Mercator and Gemma tested their ideas by trying to measure the effects of the heavens on meteorology. Gemma left decades of weather notes. Immediately upon arriving in Louvain, guided he believed by Christ, Dee imitated this practice. We therefore owe to Mercator and Gemma's teachings that tantalising document often called Dee's ‘Diary’. In August 1548 he picked up a medieval Arabic work on horoscopes, and in its blank pages started scribbling down notes about the weather.
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Dee soon realised that he could more conveniently correlate the celestial influences to his weather observations by writing them in Johann Stoeffler's
Ephemerides
. Each opening of this book showed a month's worth of daily celestial positions, in the shorthand notation used by astrologers. The whole book covered many years, and in it Dee entered weather observations until 1556.
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More controversially, Mercator and Gemma traced human fates to the celestial influences prevailing at conception and birth. Gemma, who was also a physician, filled two vast volumes with nearly thirty years of astrological medical cases.
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Dee's annotations in Ptolemy's
Four Books
also emphasised the geometric rules underlying the celestial influences on the human body.
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He wrote that the moment of birth affected not only the
future of the body but even of the soul. According to Dee, the changing angle of impact of celestial rays at different latitudes affected human reproduction.
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Thus, when contemporaries referred to ‘Doctor’ Dee, they meant that he applied astrology to medicine, just as Gemma used the most refined instruments to measure celestial influences for horoscopes.
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Many Cambridge students combined medical studies with mathematical astrology, and it gave Dee another string to his bow when seeking Court patronage. Therefore, he did not object to being described as ‘Doctor and Mathematician’ some years later, in published congratulations to Maximilian II on his coronation as King of Hungary in 1563.
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Gradually, Dee added to his weather notes records of nativities, which finally broadened into astrological interpretations of important and trivial events in his life, as well as of the mental and physical health of family, friends and clients. In accordance with Gemma's theories he carefully recorded his wife's periods and the times of their sexual intercourse, so that he could calculate the planetary influences when their children were conceived. He used three successive
ephemerides
in this way. Only the last two survive, their scattered marginalia since gathered and published several times as Dee's ‘Diary’, but not connecting occurrences to the astrological influences that Dee considered so important.
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When Dee finally returned to England in October 1551, he tried to advance his career by writing no fewer than three hundred ‘astrological aphorisms’ about this Louvain application of mathematics to astrology.
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Dee also claimed to have taught the English courtier and diplomat Sir William Pickering in Louvain, ‘in the use of the Astronomers staff, the use of the Astronomer's Ring, the astrolabe’, and Mercator's globe. Like Dee, Pickering had studied at St John's, Cambridge, and was close to the Wyatts and Dudleys. His confidential servant Wyatt Wylde may have been related to Dee's mother.
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Considered the handsomest English man of his time, Pickering lived very lavishly as Edward VI's ambassador to Charles V at Brussels. Dee ‘began to eat’ in Pickering's house there on 7 December 1549. Dee insisted that his teaching had made Pickering ‘for skill in the Mathematical Sciences … the Odd man of this land’. Unfortunately for Dee, early in Elizabeth's reign Pickering would withdraw from Court to
husband his estates, so he could not advance Dee's Court career.
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When Pickering died on 4 January 1575, unmarried and immensely rich, his house overflowed with luxurious clothes. He bequeathed Dee a mirror that produced optical illusions, another source of Dee's necromantic reputation, and the ‘Glass so famous’ that would draw Elizabeth to visit Dee on 16 March 1575.

In July 1550 Dee travelled to Paris. Clustered within its walls, particularly around the ancient and famous University, were some of the leading mathematicians in Europe. He carried Mercator's letters of introduction, but Dee had a knack for making intellectual friendships, amongst them now the renowned mathematical philosopher Pierre de la Ramée, or Ramus, who later sent his ‘singular friend’ Dee his 1567
Introduction to Mathematics
. Dee later claimed to have made a splash by lecturing on Euclid's
Elements of Geometry
to an audience pressed against the windows and overflowing into the street. He demonstrated Euclid's first few definitions using paper models, like those in some copies of the
Elements
published in 1570 and described in his ‘Mathematical Preface’ to that book. He probably did not know that the University required all students to attend lectures on Euclid on those infrequent occasions when they occurred.
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More importantly for the development of his later occult philosophy, Dee encountered that miracle of learning, Guillaume Postel, also perhaps the most eccentric scholar in Europe. Postel had just returned from a tour of the Near East, where he had studied several Semitic languages. They confirmed his previous speculations that the profound mysteries of God's original language lay concealed within the alphabets, the very letter shapes of the ancient languages. While Dee lived in Paris, Postel began developing these kabbalistic theories about the mystical construction of Hebrew letters from ‘points, lines, and surfaces’. Postel published his theories in broadsheets that Dee acquired. In his marginal comments on these, Dee accepted Postel's kabbalistic theory. He later used points, lines and circles to construct his mysterious Hieroglyphic Monad.

Postel's ideas appealed to Dee partly because Postel derived all the Hebrew letters, and eventually all languages, from the triangular letter
‘Yod’, the fourth letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Dee constantly harped on the triangular fourth letter of the Greek alphabet, ‘delta’, as the first letter of his name. It also signified alchemical fire. For Postel the number four connoted God, and Dee often Latinised his name as ‘Deus’.
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Dee also visited the Court of Henri II, who had been trying to suppress Protestant heresy while maintaining the royal tradition of bountiful magnificence. Dee claimed that he refused a stipend of 200 crowns ‘to be one of the French King's Mathematical Readers’. However, though Henri and his Queen, Catherine de Medici, notoriously relied on astrologers such as Nostradamus for political advice, the promise of a stipend seems as lightly given as any that Elizabeth I later made to Dee.
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It may have been a polite compliment to the enormous, glittering English embassy to Henri II that summer, which included Pickering, Dee's patron, and young John Dudley, the Earl of Warwick's son and the great hope of his family, whom Dee met on this occasion.

Dee returned to Louvain and then embarked for England in the autumn of 1551. He braved the grey, chilly North Sea with a sense of triumph, exulting in Mercator's celestial globe and astrological disc carefully stowed in his luggage. One wonders how much credit he claimed for designing the disc when he returned to Cambridge.
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Dee may have refused Henri's offer because he expected a place at Edward VI's Court. The downfall of Lord Protector Somerset in October 1549 soon led to the dominance at Court of John Dudley, Earl of Warwick. By October 1551 Dudley monopolised access to Edward, sparking dark legends about his lust for power. To mark Somerset's final disgrace, on 11 October John Cheke, William Cecil and Henry Sidney were knighted, Dudley became Duke of Northumberland, and William Herbert became Earl of Pembroke. The rest of Dee's life would be entangled with the Cecil, Sidney, Dudley and Herbert families.
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But in the autumn of 1551 he faced more immediate financial challenges. As on many later occasions, he was broke. Weeks after being feted and flattered at the dazzling French Court, Dee returned to his spartan scholar's cell at Trinity College so poor that on 31 October he had to borrow £4 in advance from his Fellowship.
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Edward VI's Court offered
an obvious solution. The Seymour affinity's influence at Edward's accession had dashed Dee's father to the dust. Maybe the rise of the Dudleys could now restore his son's fortunes. Opportunely for Dee, Edward's tutor, John Cheke, had become a Fellow of Trinity before Dee left for Louvain.
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Cheke centred the young King's education around mathematics, astronomy and astrology, inviting leading Cambridge specialists to teach him. Yet Dee had many rivals for that opportunity, and after Henry VIII's lavish expenditure the Court chronically lacked money.

Dee bypassed these obstacles by attracting Cheke's, and in turn William Cecil's, attention with a new approach to a hoary astronomical subject – measuring the size of the universe. Dee applied Gemma's and Mercator's training to determine the distances of the planets, fixed stars and clouds from the centre of the earth, along with their arrangement and magnitude. Dee's treatise impressed Cheke when he read it in October, as Dee learned through their mutual friend, the Exchequer official Peter Osborne. Two long months crawled by before Osborne, Cecil's talent-spotter, invited Dee to meet Cecil, who had left St John's before Dee arrived. Barely thirty years old, Cecil wore his beard long and dressed in the bureaucrat's long black gown to add gravity to his enormous capacity for absorbing administrative detail. That and his sensitive political antennae had already made him indispensable to Edward's government, as he would be for Elizabeth's.

Thus began the long, tortuous relationship between Cecil and Dee, for despite his evangelical Protestantism, Cecil believed deeply in occult philosophy. Forty years later Dee still remembered Cecil's appreciation for his mathematical astrology at that first meeting. Later Cecil would find uses for Dee's astrology and alchemy, though when Dee's learning failed to serve his political agenda, he could just as easily dismiss it. He may also have been mending fences with the now-powerful Dudleys when he agreed to meet Dee, because Cecil was Sir John Thynne's lifelong friend, had worked closely with him in Somerset's administration, and knew what he had done to Dee's father.
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In fact the regime probably accepted Dee because of Roland's connection with the Dudleys, which was so close that it would finally ruin him in 1553. Between 1551 and 1553, while residing in Trinity, Dee became an
occasional intellectual consultant at Edward's Court.
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To keep up his profile he bombarded the King and the interlinked political families surrounding him with manuscripts on a variety of astronomical, astrological and cosmographical subjects. At some unrecorded date Edward rewarded Dee with a pension of £25.
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Little evidence survives about Dee's time in Edward's household. He may have met Henry Sidney, the King's childhood friend brought up with Edward alongside Robert and Mary Dudley. Sidney was one of the principal Gentlemen of Edward's bedchamber and married Mary Dudley, Northumberland's daughter.
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Both Henry and Mary later patronised Dee's alchemy, and Mary Dudley Sidney would be one of his conduits to Elizabeth's Privy Chamber. Their son Philip Sidney would study alchemy with Dee, though behind Dee's back Sidney joked to his smart friends about Dee's magical pretensions.
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Northumberland did not employ Dee, despite his interest in astronomy. He could not afford the household he already employed. Dee again met John Dudley, Northumberland's eldest son, lately made Earl of Warwick. Dee later noted Warwick's military and humanistic training for service ‘both in England and France’ and drew a vivid character sketch in his ‘Mathematical Preface’. According to Dee, young Warwick condensed classical and modern rules for marshalling soldiers into a parchment of ‘Rules, and descriptions Arithmetical’ worn in a golden case around his neck. This detail suggests that Dee had some role in Warwick's mathematical education. John Cheke tutored the Dudley sons, another entrée for Dee into their household. Dee's ‘Mathematical Preface’ described the geometrical application of ‘Stratarithmetrie’ to arranging armies, and, more interestingly, to the military use of primitive telescopes or ‘perspective glasses’. Even the perennially enthusiastic Dee admitted the latter needed improvement.
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Despite Dee's access to the royal and Dudley households, he actually entered the service of ‘Black Will Herbert’, Earl of Pembroke, on 28 February 1552. That day Pembroke buried his first wife, Anne Parr, sister to Henry's last Queen, Katherine, with a stately funeral in the echoing gothic gloom of St Paul's Cathedral. Pembroke took the
opportunity to reshape his household staff.
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Dee's claims to practise a new kind of precise mathematical astrology appealed to this avaricious, tough and violent soldier, not noted for scholarly curiosity. Even by contemporary standards Pembroke was an unprincipled opportunist, perennially anxious to back the right political horse. He needed all the foresight he could get. Dee noted the birth dates of Pembroke's daughter Anne, and his second wife, Anne Compton (née Talbot), whom he married in May 1552. In both cases Dee supplied the astrological assurances Pembroke demanded.
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Dee's Louvain training in precise measurement also enabled him to act as a navigational and geographical consultant at Edward's Court. Dee claimed that he advised Richard Chancellor on navigating the North-East Passage to Cathay in 1553. Thanks to his study of Mercator's 1541 globe, a splendid example of which Dee had brought back to England, he possessed important new knowledge that could solve the problems of navigation. A ship following a fixed compass bearing, or rhumb line, will create a ‘loxodrome’ that spirals into the pole the further north or south one sails, as the distance between degrees of longitude becomes compressed. Pedro Nuñez, with Portuguese experience of these paradoxes of high-latitude navigation, persuaded Mercator to draw correct spiral loxodromes on his 1541 globe. At sea loxodromic navigation required flat charts showing the spirals, and at Louvain Nuñez had possibly taught Dee how to draft them, centred on the North Pole.