The Arch Conjuror of England (9 page)

As Elizabeth's star rose, her auditor, Benger, and Dee's helper, John Field, disappeared from the Privy Council's books. Because Philip recognized Elizabeth's new status as heir apparent, a carefully stage-managed appearance in the Star Chamber cleared all the accused of treason, removing the stain from Elizabeth's reputation. The conjuring accusations remained, but Gardiner had no particular objection to conjuring – indeed, one of his chaplains practised it. On 29 August 1555 the Council released Carye and Dee on bonds for good behaviour until Christmas.
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J
OHN
D
EE
had jumped ship too early to benefit from Elizabeth's improved political status. His activities in Bonner's household later that year further distanced him from Elizabeth, her Dudley supporters and her household loyalists. They also severely damaged his long-term reputation amongst Protestants during Elizabeth's reign. By aligning himself with Bonner, Dee committed himself to the Dudleys’ implacable enemy. Under Edward VI they had organised Bonner's mistreatment in the Marshalsea prison, an experience that was later used to excuse his violent assaults on Protestant martyrs.
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Dee may even have tried to ingratiate himself by helping Bonner finally to distance Catholicism from the world of charms and spells that had provided countenance for Dee's magic. In July 1555 Bonner wrote
A profitable and necessarye doctryne, with certayne homelies
‘with my chaplains’.
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This comprehensive document of the restored Catholic Church in England condemned ‘witches, Conjurors, enchanters’ who forsook God by ‘conjurations, to raise up devils’ for ‘any manner of cause’. That effectively condemned Dee's recent activities, despite his attempt to distinguish between his intellectual ‘optical science’ and vulgar necromantic ‘mechanicians’.

However, Bonner went further, trying to defend Catholicism from Protestant attacks by distinguishing the folk religion in which Dee had
grown up from the religion of the educated. Bonner silently dropped the power of the ‘sacramentals’ to ward off evil, as did all the Catholic primers issued under Mary, and cracked down on midwives using charms at childbirth, a practice formerly tolerated. He ordered his book to be read repeatedly, chapter by chapter, from every pulpit in London diocese, and Cardinal Pole enforced the same teaching programme for the rest of England.
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Now that the Catholic religion was determined to see the decline of magic, conjurors such as Dee would be increasingly left out in the cold, exposed to Protestant criticism.

Bonner did, though, share Dee's love of books and could ooze charm when he tried, especially for handsome young men.
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By September, Dee considered Bonner ‘my special friend’. Despite the storm of vituperation that fell on Bonner's head after Elizabeth's accession in 1558, when Bonner died in prison in 1569, Dee still called him ‘friend’.
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Under pressure from Mary and her Privy Council, Bonner had reluctantly begun prosecuting Protestant heretics in 1555. On 19 November Dee participated in his friend's seventh examination of John Philpot, the former Archdeacon of Winchester. Confutation of heretics normally fell to episcopal chaplains, though Dee proved theologically underpowered for that task. In Mary's first Church Convocation, Philpot had doggedly defended the Edwardian Protestant liturgy. His political and social prominence generated enormous public interest in his examinations: he ranked behind only bishops Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley in Protestant martyrology.
⁶

Philpot smuggled accounts of his examinations to his supporters in wealthy, well connected London Protestant families. The leading Protestant exile Edmund Grindal read them at Strasbourg by late December, and in August 1556 John Foxe published them. At Elizabeth's accession these families’ political influence and outrage against Bonner explain why Pembroke and Robert Dudley felt it necessary to stand beside Dee when recommending him to Elizabeth's service.
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That occasion has the curious air of a strayed sheep being returned to the fold. At least one imagines Dee looking rather sheepish.
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Grindal, by then Bishop of London, republished Philpot's story in 1559, which did not help Dee's later search for patronage.
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Worse still, in
1563 Foxe incorporated this text into
Acts and Monuments
, giving Elizabethan critics of Dee's ‘conjuring’ fresh ammunition, as we shall see in later chapters. Though Dee's service to Bonner would eventually blight his reputation under Elizabeth, his time in Bonner's bibliophile household stimulated Dee's desire to collect manuscripts and printed books. By late 1555 Dee owned sixty-eight printed books and eight manuscripts that survive, though many other books he then possessed have disappeared. Dee had purchased books for his undergraduate studies, his teaching as a Regent master, and especially for his advanced studies at Louvain from 1548. In Louvain, Antwerp, Paris and London, Dee seriously began collecting classical, Arabic, medieval and modern texts in astronomy and astrology, the related fields of angel magic, optics, geography, alchemy, and some Neoplatonic philosophy. They became the core of the largest library in Tudor England, though we still cannot explain how he found the money.

Analysing Dee's books hardly measures his restless intellectual ambitions. A new project suddenly appears on 15 January 1556, when he allegedly ‘exhibited’ a ‘Supplication to Queen Mary for the recovery and preservation of ancient Writers’ and manuscripts. Bonner doubtless arranged this royal audience, but the Court would not have found Dee's plan entirely novel. In the previous twenty years many scholars had complained that when Henry VIII suppressed the monasteries he enabled the destruction and dispersal of many precious libraries.

Henry had established a Royal Library, partly to compete with Francis I of France in collecting rare and magnificent books, and partly to collect monastic texts supporting his divorce and Royal Supremacy. The King showed little interest in the scholastic philosophy that Dee would later pursue, much of which disappeared. Henry had commissioned John Leland in 1533 to collect the finest monastic manuscripts. Leland chose chiefly British writers and British history, texts that Dee would scour for evidence about King Arthur and his own genealogy. Sadly, after Henry's death in 1547 privileged courtiers quickly filched Leland's choice selection from the Royal Library. The collection, roughly a thousand printed books and 450 manuscripts at Whitehall, a tiny fraction of former monastic
glories, shrank further when the Privy Council purged ‘superstitious’ books in 1551.
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Obviously, when addressing the Catholic Mary, Dee took a completely different tack from Leland's plan to expose popish fables, corrupt doctrine and usurped authority.
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Dee began by assuring Mary he worried that the loss of monastic manuscripts would undermine Catholic theology, and lamented the loss of classical texts, so dear to Cardinal Pole's heart. However, his actions soon revealed that he really coveted the manuscripts of scholastic philosophy, which everyone else had ignored. Dee promised Mary he would stop the unending destruction of the ‘liberal sciences’ by craftsmen who stuffed monastic manuscripts into the linings of hats, clothes and pie dishes. He sought her Letters Patent to procure copies of these manuscripts for a Royal Library.

Unlike Leland's historical texts, Dee envisaged the Royal Library as a national repository for natural philosophy. Since he would select which manuscripts to copy, occult philosophy would naturally dominate. Such
arcana
needed to be locked away from the vulgar gaze. In some ways Dee's outline for a Royal Occult Institute foreshadows Humphrey Gilbert's later proposal for alchemical teaching at ‘Queen Elizabeth's Academy’, Dee's own library ‘for Itinerant Philosophers’ at Mortlake, and Dee's plans to turn the College of St Cross near Winchester into an esoteric research centre. Grandiose paper schemes littered Tudor England, but Dee's proposal for a new national
scriptorium
seems particularly half-baked. He seemed oddly uninformed about the centralised Royal Library already at Whitehall. His ideas for funding also anticipated a lifelong pattern: he wildly overestimated contemporary willingness to invest hard cash in occult knowledge. Given three months, Dee insisted, he could collect enough sample manuscripts to persuade Cardinal Pole and the Church synod planned for May 1556 to finance a national scheme.
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Mary and Pole remained unmoved. However, with Bonner's assistance Dee started borrowing manuscripts through his academic contacts. Instead of presenting his scheme to the synod in May, however, Dee travelled to Cambridge.

There, on 6 May, Peterhouse lent him four manuscripts. Within their massive bindings lay Dee's vast range of interests, from arithmetic to perspective, medicine, alchemy, crystals and occult divination.
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Walking a few hundred yards north, he entered the familiar gates of St John's, pausing perhaps to wonder yet again at the ‘yales’ supporting the college arms, with their elephants’ tails, antelope bodies, goat heads and opposing horns. There he borrowed works on perspective, astronomy, meteors, urines and Euclid's geometry from his friend the Regius Professor of Physick, John Hatcher, who would die owning two crystals for magic.
¹⁴
Dee then rode to Oxford, where on 12 May Bonner's secretary John Morren and Christopher Carye persuaded Queen's College to lend Dee a scientific manuscript. He also borrowed an Oriel College collection of medical, astronomical and geometrical works.
¹⁵

Back in London by 18 May, in the sale of Leland's vast library, instead of items of history he bought five manuscripts of astronomy, astrology and alchemy. He also purchased a manuscript of Roger Bacon's alchemical works.
¹⁶
Dee listed all these amongst ‘ancient written books’ he possessed in 1556, which he had begun copying. Despite his protestations to Queen Mary and Cardinal Pole, his forty-five manuscripts included no history, theology or classical literature, but they do indicate what Dee considered to be a proper Royal Library: heavily focused on mathematics, geometry, Arabic and medieval perspective, astronomy, astrology and other forms of divination, alchemy and even ‘the Art of Sintrillia’.
¹⁷

After his exhausting journeys to rescue occult philosophy, Dee spent July 1556 sequestered in Bonner's household, absorbed in trying to reconcile the obscure imagery and cryptic instructions of fifty-five tracts on alchemy. Developing his Cambridge studies, he aimed to master an entire field of occult philosophy, from his newly acquired classic alchemical texts onwards. Some derived from the
Emerald Tablet
by Hermes Trismegistus. Most sixteenth-century scholars revered Hermes as the original alchemist, contemporary with Moses. However, Dee's reading course shows that he created his own alchemical synthesis from many ancient traditions.
¹⁸
The resonant names of Aristotle, Arnold of Villa Nova, Avicenna and Geber, founder of Arabic alchemy, gave authoritative
weight to these complex, enigmatic descriptions of how to transmute metals and create the philosopher's stone. That astonishing universal elixir would restore mankind's physical and spiritual purity, which had declined since Adam's Fall.

Dee's reading included Bacon's popular
Mirror of Alchemy
, which described how Nature created the hierarchy of metals, from iron to gold, by varying combinations of two fundamental principles, mercury and sulphur. The elixir would rebalance those principles to purify imperfect metals into gold, remedying Nature's defects through a process imitating its own creative force.
¹⁹

Dee connected his alchemical studies to his increasing fascination with optics, the mathematical measurement of celestial rays, and astrology. His synthesis pursued Bacon's vision of a comprehensive science explaining the unity behind Creation. Bacon believed that prolonged study, plus God's illumination offered to the virtuous, would restore the complete understanding of Creation that God had revealed to Adam, and which Adam's descendants taught to Aristotle. At one level, explaining Creation entailed understanding light's creative power, measured both optically and astrologically. At a still deeper level, recovering God's original wisdom required the adept to fathom the hidden grammatical reasons behind the ancient alphabets.
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Dee was following Bacon when he ventured into these dark speculative thickets, beginning to decode the Monad, a universal symbol Dee believed he received by God's direct revelation.
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Over the next few years he used the Monad to pursue Bacon's ideal of unifying and rectifying all learning. Dee progressed from the optical measurement of astrological forces to the religious contemplation of the hidden grammar behind all languages – the geometrical Kabbalah hidden in alphabets.
²²
This shift reflected Postel's ideas and also Dee's increasing acceptance of Neoplatonist claims that emanations from the Godhead sustained all Creation. Like Bacon, Dee believed that beneath the superficial babble of human languages could be heard whispers of God's original language, which communicated a unified revelation in the Monad.