The Arch Conjuror of England (7 page)

Dee instructed Chancellor in an early form of this ‘paradoxal compass’ he claimed to have invented in 1552 and perfected by 1557. Despite its name, Dee's ‘compass’ was not an instrument but a circular polar projection chart, fifty inches across, which ‘paradoxically’ turned the supposedly straight rhumb lines into spirals.
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The chart relied much more on Nuñez's ideas than Dee cared to admit. According to Dee's student John Davis, the ‘paradox’ meant it confounded belief, ‘that such lines should be described by plain horizontal motion’. Davis, who as a boy attempted to contact spirits, would join Dee in a North-West venture in 1583 and would end as one of England's greatest explorers.
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Dee also advised Chancellor on stellar navigation.
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Dee's pension of £25 may never have been paid, for a financial crisis in late 1552 forced rigid economies on Edward's government. As usual the government tried to shift the burden onto the Church. In March 1553 Edward appointed Dee as Rector of Upton-upon-Severn, Worcestershire, a rich living normally reserved for clerical high-flyers.
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Dee's appointment while still a layman owed much to young John Dudley, Earl of Warwick and Lord of the Manor of Upton.
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The appointment also precipitated a typically convoluted episode of Tudor ecclesiastical skulduggery that would cost Dee much time and money. The Crown obviously believed that it could present him to Upton-upon-Severn. On 29 March Edward's Letter Patent presented Dee, and two days later the Privy Council ordered John Hooper, Bishop of Worcester, to admit him to the Rectory.
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Unfortunately for Dee the right of presentation actually belonged to Bishop Hooper, notoriously stubborn over issues of principle. Hooper insisted that only those ‘called and sent of God … to the edifying of the Church’ could be ministers. Patrons who appointed ‘such as cannot, or will not, feed with the word of God … shall die eternally’.
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Political appointees such as Dee aroused his particular anger, for laymen could not be pastors of souls. Moreover, Hooper considered ‘calculation by astronomy’ the ‘greatest and abhominable evil’, violating the First Commandment, ‘Thou shalt worship no God before me’.
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In Hooper's view, those who attributed power over human lives to the stars worshipped them as deities. Still worse for Dee, Hooper remained in London, enabling him to lobby against Dee's appointment more effectively.
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The bishop's opposition probably explains why Dee's presentation does not appear in Hooper's Register. A second Letter Patent dated 19 May seemingly forced Dee's presentation to the Rectory over Hooper's protests.
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Dee immediately rented out the Rectory's lands and tithe income for £30 a year.
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His first tenant left a year's rent unpaid. The next caused even bigger problems. In May 1559 Dee leased the Rectory's income for sixteen years to Richard Smyth of Upton, at a rent of £27 a year. Smyth eventually refused to pay and withheld possession from Dee, forcing him to take a Chancery case for recovery. Smyth could refuse payment because
Dee remained a stranger in the county, where Smyth was ‘greatly friended and allied’.
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Within months of being presented to Upton, Dee had to deal with more pressing issues. King Edward's unexpected death aged sixteen on 6 July 1553 precipitated another political crisis for the Dee family. When the King died, Dee's father Roland was at Gravesend, hiding out in a former chantry chapel that his wife's family had converted into a substantial dwelling house. He may have retained some Customs office, since the Port of London legally extended to Gravesend, where searchers examined all ships.
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When that July the Privy Council mounted a desperate coup against Mary Tudor in favour of Queen Jane Grey, Roland Dee, Northumberland's man, occupied a politically crucial strategic position. Situated on a high ridge surrounded by the Thames marshes, Gravesend controlled both the quickest sea connection to Calais and the easiest access to the Dover road to Europe. Henry VIII's twin fortifications at Gravesend and Tilbury across the Thames, linked by an important ferry, commanded the sea approaches to London. The English commanders appreciated the position's importance in 1588 when they placed Elizabeth's army there to face the Armada.

More significantly, Northumberland had built his political power base just south of Gravesend in the Weald of western Kent. He had cemented the Sidney family's support by giving them substantial spoils from Somerset's fall, including their main Penshurst estate. They acted as his loyal lieutenants around Gravesend, which Sir Henry Sidney dominated politically. Roland's dependence on Sir Henry's and Northumberland's protection helps to explain John Dee's connection to the Sidney and Dudley families during Elizabeth's reign.

Roland's actions during Northumberland's coup remain unclear because it was hurriedly thrown together at Edward's death, and it left few documents. However, though the Duke's military effort suffered from lack of money, numbers and clear purpose, one fact consistently emerges – Northumberland's chain of command relied heavily on his personal supporters.
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Roland may have assisted the Dudleys and Sidneys in what limited local preparations they had previously made, such as transferring
cannon from Gravesend to the Tower in June 1553.
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He could also have proclaimed Queen Jane in Gravesend, offending the robustly orthodox Catholics there.
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He may even have helped Northumberland militarily. The Protestant Weald supplied many of Northumberland's troops. As the Duke headed towards Norfolk in pursuit of Mary, the most direct route from the Weald to his assembly point at Newmarket in Suffolk lay via the Gravesend-Tilbury ferry, a crossing that substantial armies used in the Civil War.
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After Northumberland's army collapsed at Cambridge, he and his officers had been imprisoned in the Tower on 25 July. A second group seized by Mary's army arrived on the 26th. Roland played a prominent enough role to be imprisoned in the Tower the very next day, along with Sir John Cheke, John Dee's friend and Queen Jane's Secretary, accompanied by the Chief Justice of the King's Bench and the Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, who had ratified Edward's deathbed testament in favour of Jane. Those arrested with Roland on the 27th seem to have been in London and the surrounding area.
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His subsequent treatment confirms that he had made powerful enemies, for he remained in the Tower until 1 September, when the Privy Council, including Pembroke, John's ever-nimble patron, examined and discharged him under strict conditions. Roland may have breathed the air of freedom deeply, but the odour of treason still clung to him like the prison stink to his by now ragged clothes.

According to Protestant critics, Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, who targeted a long list of Dudley supporters, ensured that Mary specifically exempted Roland and others from her coronation pardon. As the Protestant chronicler Richard Grafton complained about his own exemption, ‘they that needed the same most, took smallest benefit thereby’.
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The Privy Council established special commissions to purge the rebels from the body politic. Roland appeared before one such commission in the Dean of St Paul's house, at the west end of the great Gothic cathedral that loomed over the City, close enough for his aggrieved former neighbours to walk over from St Dunstan's to savour his ritual humiliation. Doubtless dressed in his finest, Roland had to listen while
the grim-faced commissioners seized all his property for the Queen and imposed heavy fines. He was further charged the considerable sum of £13 to buy the Queen's pardon. His credit ruined, he took until 15 December 1553 to scrape this sum together, one of the slowest to purge his guilt.
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Roland then disappears from history and probably died long before 1574, when John Dee reminded Cecil about the ‘hard dealing’ that broke him.
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By late 1553 John Dee faced multiple problems. Mary's regime was already purging the Church of married, Protestant or otherwise undesirable clergy. As a layman, Dee's claim to Upton-upon-Severn looked particularly shaky. The Catholics considered Hooper an illegal usurper and all institutions to churches under his episcopate legally void. Further darkening the outlook, Roland's actions had associated the family with treason, raising suspicions at a Court abuzz with rumours of plots and hypersensitive about political and religious loyalties.
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John Dee's Dudley connections automatically increased those suspicions.

To make matters worse, if that were possible, Dee's patron the Earl of Pembroke had been deeply implicated in Northumberland's plot. Though as soon as Dudley's back was turned Pembroke had led the other Privy Councillors in turning their coats for Mary, she remained suspicious even after restoring him to the Privy Council. By then, Pembroke had so ostentatiously reinvented himself as a loyal Catholic that a Protestant pamphlet described him as a ‘hardened and detestable papist’.
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Pembroke began to allay Mary's suspicions when he supported her plan to marry Prince Philip of Spain. The Earl finally earned her trust when, in contrast to several vacillating noblemen, he played a decisive part in defeating Sir Thomas Wyatt's Kentish rebellion in early February 1554. Pembroke's restored reputation made it correspondingly more pressing to tidy up some embarrassing connections with Northumberland's regime. One of them was John Dee. Quite apart from Roland's treason, through his mother's family John retained close connections with the Wyatts, at a time of heightened paranoia at Court. John's need to ingratiate himself with Mary's regime coincided with his patron's requirement for conspicuous orthodoxy amongst his servants. So with Pembroke's active encouragement, John Dee took the necessary step of becoming a
Catholic priest. His ordination has been overlooked, although Dee appears in Edmund Bonner's ordination register. Pembroke paid £20 towards Dee's taxes to the Pope. By taking Catholic orders Dee acknowledged that in the prevailing climate of rigid orthodoxy even Pembroke's influence could not preserve Upton for him if he remained a layman. He thus forestalled the danger posed to his income when Mary finally deprived Hooper of his bishopric on 15 March 1554.

Dee's ordination also conspicuously displayed his loyalty, as it took place during the week when Mary's government, badly shaken by Wyatt's rebellion, executed not only Wyatt but also Jane Grey, her husband Guildford Dudley, and her father the Duke of Suffolk. At some level Dee may also have been acting out of genuine conviction, judging by his upbringing and his close relationships with Catholics at St John's College and Louvain. The circumstances of his ordination signal an existing friendship with Edmund Bonner, the restored Bishop of London who possessed a keen nose for heterodoxy. Very unusually, Dee took all the six degrees from first tonsure to the priesthood on a single day, 17 February 1554, which required Bonner's personal approval.
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Bonner may have pulled strings because he and Dee believed they were distantly related. Bonner's relatives the Bostocks of Cheshire had married Dees who bore the same coat of arms that John Dee acquired in 1576 and printed on several of his publications. In November 1555 Bonner publicly acknowledged Dee as his chaplain, though when he attained that position is unrecorded.
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As he knelt to accept the chrism on his freshly tonsured scalp, and then rose to don the priest's pure white alb and amice, the green chasuble, the stole, cincture and maniple, Dee must have believed that he had begun to restore his family's fortunes. In the short term he did, but in the longer term the connection his critics would draw between his priesthood, his magic and Bonner would prove disastrous.

T
HE UNCERTAIN
political ground under Dee shook again in September 1554, when Queen Mary, desperate to produce a Catholic heir, convinced herself that she was pregnant at the advanced age of thirty-eight and began proudly showing off her unlaced stomacher in the Presence Chamber at Whitehall. Mary's marriage to Prince Philip of Spain (later Philip II) in July had created complex succession issues for the English political elite. Their marriage treaty specified that Philip could not interfere in the succession if Mary died childless, thus implying Elizabeth's succession. The announcement of Mary's pregnancy therefore transformed Philip's and Elizabeth's political prospects. Dee's patron, the Earl of Pembroke, an enthusiastic supporter of the Spanish Match, now tried to engage Philip in the daily management of government, seeing a future role for himself as a loyal chief minister.
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Philip's supporters introduced a Bill into the House of Commons in late 1554, proposing to give him guardianship of Mary's children in the event of her death. More importantly, in the event that Mary died without issue, his supporters even wished to make Philip king, thereby breaking the marriage contract and sidelining Elizabeth. After much debate, in January 1555 Parliament compromised, permitting Philip to govern the realm during the minority of Mary's child if the Queen died but reasserting English control over the succession under the marriage treaty. So in early
1555 Mary's conviction that she was about to provide England with a Catholic heir threatened to divide the political elite. By May Philip's English supporters needed the birth of that child to give him true royal authority.
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