Read the book: «The Queen’s Conjuror: The Life and Magic of Dr. Dee»
THE QUEEN’S
CONJUROR
The Life and Magic of Dr Dee
BENJAMIN WOOLLEY
Copyright
Flamingo
An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 77-85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
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First published in hardback by HarperCollins 2001
Copyright © Benjamin Woolley 2001
Benjamin Woolley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780006552024
Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2011 ISBN: 9780007401062
Version: 2014-10-17
‘He cometh unto you with a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney corner.’
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY, DEFENCE OF POESY
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION
THE FLIGHT OF THE DUNG BEETLE
I
II
III
IV
THE LORD OF MISRULE
V
VI
VII
VIII
THE MOST PRECIOUS JEWEL
IX
X
XI
THE UNDISCOVERED LIMIT
XII
XIII
THE FIERY TRIGON
XIV
XV
XVI
BRIGHT SQUADRONS
XVII
XVIII
XIX
THE PRINCE AND THE JUGGLER
XX
XXI
XXII
CAESAR’S COURT
XXIII
XXIV
XXV
RAVISH’D BY MAGIC
XXVI
XXVII
XXVIII
THE LONG JOURNEY
XXIX
XXX
EPILOGUE
KEEP READING
NOTES
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
CHRONOLOGY JOHN DEE
INDEX
About the Author
Praise
About the Publisher
PREFACE
For clarity and consistency, the spellings used in quotations have generally been modernised. I have also adopted the Gregorian calendar for dating events, including those occurring when the old style Julian calendar was still in use. The Gregorian system or ‘new style’ was introduced on 4 October 1582, making that month ten days shorter. It also standardised 1 January as New Year’s Day. England continued to use old style dates, celebrating New Year on Lady Day, 25 March. This means, for example, 1 March 1584 old style converts to 11 March 1585 new style. Where an old style date identifies an original document (such as a letter), it has not been converted.
Following Dee’s example, I have also anglicised the names of some of the people and places he encountered during his travels.
The primary source material for this book is a collection of diaries written by Dee. The personal diaries are preserved in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, the diaries recording his angelic ‘actions’ at the British Library in London. Selections have been published by Casaubon in True and Faithful Relation, Halliwell in The Private Diary of Dr. John Dee and most recently Fenton in The Diaries of John Dee (see the Bibliography for complete references). I would like to thank Edward Fenton for allowing me to quote from his book, and also for his help with my researches and writing.
For help with researches in Bohemia and Poland, thanks go to Michal Pober, György Szônyi and Yustyne Kilianćzyk, who accompanied me during my travels, and to Václav Bužek, Vladimir Karpenko, Lubos Antonin, Lubomir Konecny and Denisa Kera. For suggestions, corrections, contributions and translations, thanks go to Robin Cousins, Michal Pober, William Sherman, Stephen Clucas, Darby Costello, Alan Stewart, Stephen Clucas, William Stenhouse and Anke Holdenried. I should also like to acknowledge the authors whose recent scholarship has been invaluable in the compilation of this work, particularly Michael Wilding, Deborah Harkness, Julian Roberts, Andrew Watson, Christopher Whitby and Jim Reeds.
Personal thanks go to Arabella Pike, Anthony Sheil, Asha Joseph and Matthew Woolley.
INTRODUCTION
One day in 1642, Robert Jones, a confectioner living at the sign of the Plough in London’s Lombard Street, decided to go with his wife Susannah to Addle Street, a lane running up from Casde Baynard, the great Norman fort on the banks of the Thames.1 The street was lined with joiners’ shops, and Mr and Mrs Jones were out to buy some ‘household stuff’. Their eyes alighted on a ‘Chest of Cedar wood, about a yard & a half long’. The lock and hinges were of such ‘extraordinary neat work’, the chest ‘invited them to buy it.’
They discovered from the shopkeeper that the chest had come from the household of Thomas Woodall, a royal surgeon.2 Woodall had apparently inherited it from his father, who was also a surgeon. Mr and Mrs Jones bought it and took it back to Lombard Street, where it remained undisturbed for twenty years.
In 1662, they decided to move the chest. When they lifted it, they heard a rattle ‘toward the right hand end, under the Box or Till thereof, & by shaking it, were fully satisfied it was so.’ Mr Jones decided to investigate further. In the base of the box, he discovered a ‘small crevice’ or slit. He stuck a knife into it, and a hidden drawer popped out. Inside he found a collection of books, papers and a small casket containing a necklace of beads made of olive stones, from which dangled a wooden cross.
The Joneses leafed through the books and papers but could make no sense of them. They had Latin titles such as 48 Claves Angclicae (The 48 Angelic Keys), and contained gibberish, word squares, hieroglyphs and tables. They put the pile to one side.
When their maid found the papers, she thought them particularly suitable for the lining of pie tins and ‘other like uses’. She had worked her way through about half the pile before her employers noticed. They put the surviving documents back in the chest, and forgot about them once more.
Mr Jones died in 1664. Two years later, the Great Fire of London broke out. As panic spread through the surrounding streets, Susannah Jones gathered together as many possessions as she could carry and took them to safety in Moorfields, north of the City wall. Too heavy to move, the chest was left to burn along with her home. However, she decided to remove the mysterious papers from the hidden drawer and take them with her.
Soon after, she remarried. Her new husband was Thomas Wale, a warder at the Tower of London. She showed him the papers, and, though he could make no sense of them either, he recognised their potential value. He knew of a man with an interest in such works, a lawyer and collector called Elias Ashmole.
Ashmole was an expert in astrology, alchemy and other occult matters. He was also one of the most important antiquarians of the seventeenth century, his collection forming the basis for Oxford’s magnificent Ashmolean Museum. On 20 August 1672, while he was at the country house of his friend the astrologer William Lilly in Hersham, Surrey, his servant Samuel Story turned up with a parcel containing the preserved papers. Thomas Wale wondered if Ashmole would be prepared to swap them for a volume on the Order of the Garter.
When Ashmole unwrapped the parcel, he could barely contain his excitement. These were papers he had spent years searching for, and had assumed to be destroyed. He arranged to meet Mr Wale’s wife a week later at the Excise Office in Broad Street, where he worked. When she told him the story of how the papers had come into her possession, his hopes were confirmed. John Woodall, the father of the former owner of the chest, had been one of the last known custodians of the effects of Dr John Dee.3 These volumes were the surviving remnants of Dee’s Liber Mysteriorum, his book of mysteries. According to the man in whose hand they were written, they contained the secrets of the universe.
THE FLIGHT OF THE DUNG BEETLE
My mind to me a kingdom is Such perfect joy therein I find, That it excels all other bliss That world affords or grows by kind.
EDWARD DYER,
‘MY MIND TO ME A KINGDOM IS’
I
There is official record of the moment John Dee entered the world. He is not listed in any parish register or private correspondence. There is no birth certificate or diary entry. There is only a series of numbers, a cosmic coordinate: 1527 July 13 4h.2’ P.M. Lat. 51°.32’.
The data are inscribed on a mysterious document among his papers at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.1 A square containing a series of numbers and astrological symbols is sketched on parchment. It is a horoscope, drawn up in the ancient manner, showing the heavens at the precise time and place of Dee’s birth.
He was born at 4.02pm on 13 July 1527. His birthplace was 51 degrees and 32 seconds north of the equator, roughly the latitude of London.2 Latitudes, which specify how far north or south a location is on the earth’s surface, were absent from maps of early or mid sixteenth-century England (there were barely any maps anyway; the earliest to survive of London is dated 1558).3 However, the information could be found in tables of astrological data. One set compiled by Dee is to be found among his papers; it identifies the location of cities and landmarks across the world, from Paris (49° 10’, 150 miles from London) to the ‘Lake of Sodome’ (31° 10’, 2,404 miles from London).4 In that table, Dee gives London’s latitude as that shown on his birthchart, which – according to modern measurement – falls just outside the wall marking the city’s northern limit.
Following contemporary practice, Dee did not record the longitude of his birthplace. There was no standard meridian at the time, and the methods of measuring longitude were extremely unreliable. However, from the date and the position of the Sun plotted on the birthchart, it is evident that Dee’s birthplace was within a few degrees of the modern Greenwich meridian. The most likely location for Dee’s birth is the City itself. His father Roland, of Welsh descent, was a textile merchant and member of London’s powerful guild of ‘mercers’. His mother Jane, was the daughter of William Wild. Roland married her when she was fifteen. Born three years after the wedding, John was apparently their first and only surviving child.5
Roland was recorded as being resident in Tower Ward, the area immediately west of the great Tower of London, and within sight of Tower Hill, where, as the Tudor surveyor John Stow put it, ‘is always readily prepared at the charges of the city a large scaffold and gallows of timber, for the execution of such traitors and transgressors as are delivered out of the Tower’.6
In later years Roland would find himself a ‘transgressor’ and spent time in the Tower. But in the 1520s, he was on the threshold of a promising career, which drew him in the opposite direction, towards the City’s teeming square mile.
Many merchants in Tower Ward lived along Thames Street, close to Billingsgate Docks, where the quays bustled with barques and barges bringing herring, wine, wool and timber into the capital. Next to Watergate, which was a lane leading up from the river, stood ‘Wool Wharf’, which had been used for the ‘tronage’ – public weighing – of wool imports ever since the reign of Richard II.7 Roland Dee was later to perform a similar job, so he and his son were likely to have visited, and may have even occupied, the rickety riverside house, as bulbous packets of wool were heaved into its weighing room and dropped on the official scales or ‘tron’.
East of Thames Street lay the imposing parish church of St Dunstan’s. Its fabric was lavishly maintained by local merchants, whose bequests were rewarded with opulent sepulchres in its nave and cemetery. Dunstan was then one of England’s most revered and popular saints (another church is named after him in the west of the city). Much associated with Glastonbury and early British nationalism, his name would feature prominently in the life of the boy who was being brought up within the church’s precincts.8
Surrounding St Dunstan’s were bustling inns and narrow streets whose very names spelled commerce: Lombard Street, just north of the church, named after the merchants of Northern Italy who settled there in the twelfth century; the Three Cranes, which got its name from a timber crane used to unload lighters loaded with casks of Bordeaux, and the chosen venue for French tradesmen brokering deals with English vintners; Threadneedle, Milk and Friday Street, where tailors, dairymen and fishmongers plied their trades; Cheapside, the thoroughfare for London’s main market or ‘cheap’ which was lined with grocers and apothecaries; Ironmongers Lane, where among the clanking wares hanging from shopfronts, Roland would go to meet his fellow Mercers at their handsome Hall.9 This was the world that shaped Dee’s formative years: a place filled with the babble of foreign tongues and complex numbers, of ready ‘reckonyngs’ and tricky deals.
However, the City was not the only focus of Roland Dee’s career, and it is just possible that John was born just a few miles up the Thames, on the Greenwich meridian itself. Greenwich Palace stood on the bank of the Thames, Greenwich Hill rising up behind.10 It was King Henry VIII’s birthplace and his main residence. Roland had a position in Henry’s court as a ‘gentleman sewer’.11 His role, like so many court positions at the time, hovered between the ceremonial and the functional. It is unlikely Roland would have been expected to stitch the King’s clothing, but he may have been involved with buying and maintaining the innumerable fabrics that furnished the King’s palaces and person.
That summer of 1527, events were taking place within the confines of Henry’s private apartments at Greenwich which would prove momentous in English and European history. Just three weeks before John Dee’s birth, the King, desperate both for a male heir and to consummate his infatuation for Anne Boleyn, accosted his wife Catherine ‘in her closet’ and, reviving arguments about their union violating Biblical law, suddenly announced that their marriage was invalid.12
In the drama that followed, a key role was played by a colleague of Roland’s, another gentleman sewer in Catherine of Aragon’s retinue, Felipez. Catherine was desperate to get news of her predicament back to her nephew and Catholic guardian, Charles V of Spain, the Holy Roman Emperor and most powerful monarch in Europe. She told Felipez to go to Henry and protest that the Queen had cruelly refused him passage home to Spain, where his mother was dangerously ill. Catherine knew Henry would contradict her and dispatch the apparently disgruntled servant back home, where he could then make contact with Charles.
However, Henry was prepared for such ‘dissimulation’ and ‘did also dissimulate’. He granted Felipez a licence to leave the country while arranging for agents to waylay him en route. But Felipez managed to give them the slip and reach the Emperor at Valladolid, where he broke the news of Henry’s plan.13 These revelations precipitated Henry’s break with Rome and the turmoil of the Reformation, seismic events that would shape English politics for generations to come, and bring danger and conflict into the life of the infant son denied to Henry and Catherine, but so recently born to Roland and Jane.
While the world around was in turmoil, the heavens above presented a picture of serene certainty. Standing in the pastures and playing fields that surrounded the City’s walls, gazing at a vivid canopy of stars yet to be diminished by light or atmospheric pollution, John Dee beheld a universe that had apparently remained unchanged since the Creation.
Common wisdom was that the earth stood at the centre of the cosmos; the sun, the moon and the planets revolved around it, fixed to the perimeters of a series of concentric spheres. The outermost sphere carried the stars, and beyond lay heaven. Historians of science call the modern view of the universe mechanistic, but the ancient one was as mechanical as a clock. In a state of constant movement, the system was regulated by immutable laws. Change was possible only within the space between the earth’s surface and the orbit of the moon. This was the sphere of fire and air, the domain of such ephemeral astronomical phenomena as comets and meteors.
Where the modern universe is infinite, the size and age of this nest of glistening orbs was far more modest. Genealogies in Genesis and elsewhere in the Bible showed it to be less than six thousand years old. As for its size, the fifteenth-century printing pioneer and encyclopaedist William Caxton wrote:
If the first man that God formed ever, which was Adam, had gone from the first day that he was made and created twenty-five miles every day, yet should he not have comen thither, but should yet have the space of seven hundred and thirteen year to go at the time when this volume was performed by the very author. Or if there were a great stone which should fall from thence unto the earth it should be an hundred year ere it came to the ground.14
This, then, was the cosmos that Dee beheld: stable, fixed and finite. There were disputes over details, but the overall view had not changed significantly since the Egyptian astronomer Claudius Ptolemy had established the mathematical laws by which the universe operated in the second century. Ptolemy had invented a series of hypothetical entities such as ‘epicycles’, ‘deferents’ and ‘equants’ which made it possible to work out with a high degree of accuracy not just the motions of the planets in the past, but their positions into the distant future, accounting even for such astronomical gymnastics as retrograde motion, when a planet appears to stop, backtrack, and then continue onwards.
Many tables of planetary positions were compiled using Ptolemy’s formulae. These showed how each planet moved in relation to the stars, in particular the constellations of the zodiac. Such almanacs or ephemerides were among the most popular books to be produced in these early days of printing, and Dee would eventually accumulate more than fifteen different sets in his library. It was one of these that he used to work out his birthchart.
Exploiting the mathematical nature of these heavenly motions, he could plot the positions of the planets at the moment of his birth with far more certainty and precision than the flapping scholars his father passed in the Greenwich Palace corridors could determine the legitimacy of Henry VIII’s matrimonial manoeuvres.
Birth charts are now circular, but Dee’s was drawn up as a square, a form which went back to the ancient Egyptians. The information it contains is very similar to that of a modern chart, except that the as yet undiscovered planets Uranus, Neptune and Pluto are missing. Dee managed to map the position of each heavenly body in the sky to within a few minutes of arc (a minute being one-sixtieth of a degree), with the exception of Mercury, nearly two degrees adrift. The ascendant, which marks the position of the sign of the zodiac rising on the eastern horizon, is out by almost one degree.
The twelve triangles represent the most synthetic elements of any birthchart, the position of the ‘houses’. These are purely astrological (as opposed to astronomical) entities, determining how the planets influence the subject’s appearance, temperament, property, relationships and so on. As the signs of the zodiac are tied to the rotation of the celestial sphere, the houses are tied to the rotation of the earth, the two becoming enmeshed by the moment of birth.
Dee left no interpretation of his own chart. He rarely committed his findings to writing. Such works could be dangerous, particularly when the subjects were of aristocratic or royal status, which many were. Dee’s only interpretation of any length that survives concerns his pupil, the glamorous poet and soldier Sir Philip Sidney, for whom Dee drew up a sixty-two page nativity which made several tentative predictions. He foretold that Sidney would enjoy a wonderful career between the ages of fifteen and thirty-one. Then he faced mortal danger from a sword or gunshot injury which, if survived, would inaugurate even greater glories and a long life. Sidney was killed in battle in the Low Countries on 17 October 1586, aged thirty-one.15
Dee’s own chart depicts similar tensions. The two most powerful influences, the Sun and the Moon, the two ‘luminaries’, are in opposition – a common enough configuration, but one that suggested conflict. More notable was the position of Jupiter, which basked with the Sun in the ‘serene and warm’ sign of Cancer, where it was exalted. In his copy of Ptolemy, he marked the observation that Jupiter’s distance from the ascendant (the sign rising on the eastern horizon) indicated that he would be skilled in philosophy.16 ‘If he should be lord alone,’ Ptolemy had written, Jupiter would also promote ‘honour, happiness, content and peace.’
Unfortunately, in Dee’s chart, Jupiter was threatened by Mars, so his benign influence was seriously compromised. The same passage in Ptolemy that promised scientific proficiency also warned of isolation and condemnation. Other disturbing signs include the presence of the star Antares together with the planet Mars. Also known as the ‘Scorpion’s heart’, Antares appears in the middle of the constellation of Scorpio. Mars is a troublesome presence in any chart, causing ‘mischief and destruction’, as Ptolemy put it, and Antares was traditionally seen to have a similar influence, so the presence of the two apparently acting in unison, and within the sign ruled by Mars, must have struck Dee as a threatening combination.17
Dee’s chart thus revealed the cosmic setting of the life he was about to lead, one of schisms and oppositions, of sunshine and moonshadow, jovial humanity and Martian malevolence.
II
The first sign that there might be something magical about John Dee came in 1547. He was nineteen years old and a reader in Greek at Trinity College, Cambridge. The college had been set up by Henry VIII as one of the last acts of his reign. His effigy stands over the main gate to this day, reminding the many students who have passed beneath – including Isaac Newton, Byron and Stephen Hawking – of his benefaction.
Dee’s selection as one of Trinity’s founding Fellows very much reflected his success as an undergraduate at the neighbouring college of St John’s. When he had arrived in Cambridge in 1542, the university was in confusion. Henry VIII’s reforms had deprived it of two chancellors in under a decade – John Fisher in 1535 and Thomas Cromwell in 1540 – and enrolments had fallen to their lowest ever levels, an average of just thirty students a year.
But it was also a time of scholastic reform, with figures of the stature of Sir John Cheke, Dee’s Cambridge teacher, Sir Thomas Smith and Roger Ascham encouraging the adoption of the ‘new learning’ which had been introduced to the university by Erasmus. The domination of Latin texts and Roman numerals over the curriculum began to yield to Greek philosophy and Arabic arithmetic. A whole body of ancient writers who had been ignored or forgotten for centuries, such as Plato and Pythagoras, were translated and studied. There was a new emphasis on teaching the ‘quadrivium’ to undergraduates, the four of the seven ‘liberal arts’ which dealt with geometry, arithmetic, harmonics and astronomy.1
Dee thrived there. He was so eager to learn, he later recalled, so ‘vehemently bent to study’, that he worked for eighteen hours a day, allowing just four hours for sleep, and two for meals.2
Mathematics was his passion: although as a subject, it was regarded in some circles with suspicion. The seventeenth-century antiquarian John Aubrey reported that the Tudor authorities had ‘burned Mathematical books for Conjuring books’.3 Mathematics was still popularly associated with the magical ‘black arts’, the term ‘calculating’ (sometimes corrupted to ‘calculing’) being synonymous with conjuration. Pythagoras, a semi-mythical figure hailed as one of its founding fathers, was himself considered a magician. It was he who argued that numbers had inherent powers, pointing out the creative vitality immanent in the first four integers, 1, 2, 3 and 4. They expressed not only the most basic elements of geometry (the point, the line, the triangle and the solid) but also the harmonic ratios underlying both music and cosmic proportions. Such ideas inspired subsequent thinkers to search for other significances; assessing the meaning of the number of elements and planets; contemplating the precedence of the number nine over ten; constructing numerical hierarchies; and counting the number of angels on a pinhead. Even later figures such as Kepler and Newton, the founders of modern cosmology, allowed such numerological considerations to shape their work. Kepler believed that the planets must be spheres because of the trinity of centre, radius and surface; Newton decided to break with tradition and assert that there were seven colours of the rainbow because there were seven planets and seven notes in the musical octave.4 Like these men, Dee found the cosmic combinations thrown up by mathematics irresistible, and at the (numerologically-named) Trinity College, the young, ambitious Fellow undertook an extraordinary experiment to demonstrate their power (as well as make his mark).
He mounted a production of Aristophanes’ play Peace. First produced in 421 BC, it is a comedy, in style and humour much like Aristophanes’s better known Lysistrata. Peace, which (as its name suggests) explores a pacifist theme, is about Trygaeus, a ‘vine dresser’, who wishes to consult Zeus about the military fortunes of his fellow Athenians.
The opening scenes concern Trygaeus’s attempts to reach Zeus’s heavenly palace. He first attempts to do this using ladders, but they keep toppling over. So, like the mythical hero Bellerophon who slew the fearful Chimera, he calls on the services of a flying creature to carry him up to the Olympian heights.
However, where Bellerophon had the mighty steed Pegasus, Trygaeus is sent a dungbeetle, a giant ‘scarab’, which takes him on a ride so terrifying, he nearly ‘forms food’ for the creature.
Dramatically, it is a marvellous moment, but one, in the middle of Trinity’s main hall, virtually impossible to realise. Nevertheless, Dee was determined to find a way to bring his giant dungbeetle startlingly to life, and he turned to mathematics for a solution.
In his Mathematicall Praeface to Euclid’s Elements (1570), probably his most influential book, Dee discussed an ‘art mathematical’ he called ‘thaumaturgy… which giveth certain order to make strange works, of the sense to be perceived and of men greatly to be wondered at.’ The etymology is obscure: the OED dates the word’s origins to nearly a century after Dee’s first use, by which time it had become synonymous with magical trickery.
For Dee, however, it was mathematics not magic that offered the key to thaumaturgy. The examples he gave were feats of engineering such as the ‘dove of wood’ built by the Greek mathematician and reputed founder of mechanics, Archytas, which could apparently fly unaided, or the ‘brazen head’ attributed to the German monk Albertus Magnus, ‘which did seem to speak’. Dee recalled seeing such a ‘self moving’ automaton at Saint Denis in Paris. ‘Marvellous was the workmanship of late days,’ he continued,
for in Nuremberg a fly of iron, being let out of the Artificer’s hand did (as it were) fly about the gates… and at length, as though weary, return to his master’s hand again. Moreover, an artificial eagle was ordered to fly out of the same town, a mighty way… aloft in the air, toward the Emperor coming thither, and following him, being come to the gate of the town.5
Dee believed such artificial marvels showed that, with mathematics, man could achieve miracles to rival God, and with Peace he had his first opportunity to prove it.
On the day of the performance, the benches of Trinity’s main hall were packed with students and academics, even possibly a scattering of courtiers from London. The pitch lamps were ignited and the stage was set. Trygaeus made his entrance and mounted the insect. ‘Now come, my Pegasus,’ he cried. ‘Come, pluck up a spirit; rush upwards from the earth, stretch out your speedy wings and make straight for the palace of Zeus; for once give up foraging in your daily food.’ Then to the audience’s amazement, the creature leapt from the stage.
‘Hi! you down there, what are you after now?’ called Trygaeus, as he was lifted towards the eaves of the hall. ‘Oh! My god! It’s a man taking a crap in the Piraeus, close to the whorehouses. But is it my death you seek then, my death? Will you not bury that right away and pile a great heap of earth upon it and plant wild thyme therein and pour perfumes on it? If I were to fall from up here and misfortune happened to me, the town of Chios would owe a fine of five talents for my death, all because of your damned arse.
‘Alas! how frightened I am! oh! I have no heart for jests,’ the beetle’s rider cried, adding, while peering offstage, ‘Ah! machinist, take great care of me.’6
Dee’s coup de theatre had its intended effect. A ‘great won-dring’ spread through the audience. Dee gave no clue as to how he actually made his creature fly around the stage but the mechanisms mentioned in his Praeface include pneumatics, mirrors and springs. He also wrote a paper on the use of pulleys.7 An account of Trinity College’s theatrical expenses for 1546 and 1547 survive, but provide little clue, merely listing such commodities as pitch, ‘cressets’ (iron vessels in which pitch-soaked tapers were burnt for stage lighting) and costumes. The only ‘extraordinary item’ listed is a ‘great Rownd Candlestick for the stage in the hall’ which cost four shillings and sixpence.8
‘Many vain reports’ soon began to circulate speculating on how the effect had been achieved.9 Some believed such an act of levitation could not have been realised by stagecraft alone. Another, possibly diabolical force must have been deployed.
A scene in Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale echoes Dee’s experiment. Paulina tells King Leontes that she is about to bring what he believes to be a statue of his dead wife to life:
Quit presently the chapel, or resolve you
For more amazement. If you can behold it,
I’ll make the statue move indeed, descend,
And take you by the hand, but then you’ll think –
Which I protest against – I am assisted by wicked powers.10
Dee was similarly accused of being assisted by wicked powers, and he too protested. In the ‘Digression Apologeticall immediately following the passage in the Praeface that discussed thaumaturgy and theatrical effects, he wrote:
And for these and such like marvellous Acts and Feats, Naturally, Mathematically, and Mechanically wrought and contrived: ought any honest Student and Modest Christian Philosopher be counted & called a Conjuror? … Shall that man be (in hugger mugger) condemned as a Companion of the Hellhounds, and a Caller, and Conjuror of wicked and damned Spirits?
The answer, he was about to discover, was ‘Yes’.
III
In 1547, the year of his dramatic debut at Trinity, Dee noted that at 10pm on 10 August he and a ‘Master Christopherson’ heard the nocturnal song of ‘whistlers’. This is the earliest surviving entry in Dee’s private diary. It is no ordinary journal. Diaries and calendars of the modern sort were not yet invented. The nearest equivalent, printed ephemerides, contained astrological tables plotting the positions of the planets for each month of the year. Dee used these to record notable events, each entry being scrawled next to the row tabulating the heavens’ disposition for the relevant period or day. It is likely he was thus trying to identify links between his personal life and celestial events. The result is a uniquely intimate diary of Elizabethan life. Unfortunately, his often illegible notes are frustratingly terse and have been patchily preserved. For the years 1547 to 1554, just six entries remain, only surviving today because the antiquarian Elias Ashmole happened to copy them down over a century later.
The entry concerning the whistlers is a typical one. The presence of Master Christopherson is unexplained. Even his identity is a mystery, though he may have been John Christopherson, later Catholic Bishop of Chichester between 1557 and 1558, who in Queen Mary’s reign Dee would encounter during interrogations of Protestant heretics. Dee does not even mention where this incident took place. The significance of the birdsong is also unclear. Edmund Spenser later noted in The Faerie Queen that the ‘Whistler shrill’ was a bad omen, ‘that who so hears, doth die’.1
Dee later recalled that his interest in astronomy first flourished during this period. Each clear night he would stand beneath the firmament, set up his quadrant or cross-staff, and make ‘observations (very many to the hour and minute) of the heavenly influences and operations actual in this elemental portion of the world. Of which sort I made some thousands in the years then following.’2
A cross-staff, its use was as awkward and uncomfortable as this contemporary illustration suggests. To find the angle between two points (such as the horizon and a star), the observer would need to align the top and bottom of each cross bar with both points. The angle between them could then be measured off a scale marked along the main shaft. (Museum of the History of Science, Oxford.)
Dee soon discovered, however, that England did not provide the best intellectual viewpoint for surveying the secrets of the universe. To find out all the latest advances, both scientific and astronomical, he needed to travel abroad, in particular to the Low Countries, the place where the light of the Renaissance now shone with its fullest intensity.
The Low Countries have since split into Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. They were termed ‘low’ because so much of the land was beneath the level of the North Sea. Rich and successful commercial centres, they were also prone to floods of foreign influences, what Dee called the ‘intertraffique of the mind’. Radical Protestantism poured in from Germany, Renaissance science and art from Italy, news of navigational discoveries from Portugal, and imperial forces from Spain, whose king, Charles V, now ruled the entire region.3
On 24 June 1548, Dee arrived at Louvain, near Brussels. It was home to the finest university in the region, which had been adopted by English reformers such as Dee’s friend and fellow academic Roger Ascham as a model for educational innovation.4 The town’s strong Protestant sympathies, braced against the Catholicism of the Imperial authorities, gave the university’s schools an intense, unsettled, but exciting atmosphere which was made all the more precarious by, as Dee noted in his diary, the recent arrival from Spain of Philip, Charles V’s son and heir.
Dee enrolled on a law course ‘for leisure’, but spent much of his time among the mathematicians, in particular a group clustered around the eminent scientist and physician Gemma Frisius.5 Frisius (1508-1555) was the university’s professor of medicine and mathematics, and practised as a physician in the town. However, his most important work was geographical not medical. Frisius pioneered the use of triangulation in land surveying, which enabled the position of a remote landmark to be measured from two points a known distance apart. The method relied on trigonometry, then almost unknown in England.6
Under Frisius’s influence, Louvain had become caught up in a rapture of scientific measurement, a mood reflected in the contemporary Flemish picture The Measurers.7 Frisius set up one of the finest workshops in Europe making measuring instruments. It was run by the engraver and goldsmith Gaspar à Mirica, and some of the leading cartographers of the Renaissance were apprenticed there.
In amongst the cross-staffs and astrolabes in Mirica’s workshop, Dee encountered Frisius’s leading cartographer, Gerard Mercator.8 He was labouring away on a series of globes and maps that incorporated the discoveries made by Columbus and his successors in the New World. Dee became fascinated by Mercator’s painstaking work, watching over his shoulder as a picture of the world emerged that to sixteenth-century eyes would have been just as startling and significant as the first photographs of Earth taken from space were in the twentieth. Medieval charts typically depicted the world as a disk or semicircle comprising three continents divided by the Mediterranean, Asia at the top, Europe to the left, Africa to the right and Jerusalem in the centre.9 They also often showed religious features, such as the Garden of Eden and the Tower of Babel.10 Mercator’s maps, in contrast, were starkly geographical, showing a world made up of four continents, its curved surface ‘projected’ onto a rectangular map using a mathematical method that enabled accurate navigation.
It was in the midst of these Measurers of Louvain that Dee’s ‘whole system of philosophising in the foreign manner laid down its first and deepest roots’.11 He and the thirty-six-year-old Mercator became inseparable. ‘It was the custom of our mutual friendship and intimacy that, during three whole years, neither of us willingly lacked the other’s presence for as much as three whole days,’ he reminisced years later. As a mark of his respect and affection, Mercator gave Dee a pair of his globes, one of the earth, the other of the heavens, objects of huge financial and scientific value. In return Dee later dedicated his astronomical work, Propaedeumata Aphoristica (1558), to Mercator.
At Louvain, Dee also practised his skill using such instruments as the cross-staff, perhaps during surveying expeditions guided by Frisius and Mercator, stealing off into the dangerous hinterland of cosmological speculation. Only a few years before Dee’s arrival, news of Copernicus’ heretical theory about the sun rather than the earth being at the centre of the universe had started to seep out of Germany. It was first described in an account by George Rheticius (which Dee owned, though it is unclear when he bought it),12 and later published in full in 1543 in Copernicus’ own De Revolutionibus. Whether or not Dee and Mercator were discussing Copernicus’ ideas at this point is uncertain but they were experimenting with new models of the universe. Mercator even made one from brass, especially for Dee. Dee called it a ‘theorick’. At first glance the theorick might have appeared to reflect the orthodox view of the universe, comprising a series of concentric rings made of brass representing the spheres thought to carry the planets and stars. But Dee mentions it having rings for the ninth and tenth spheres.13 According to the standard view of the universe, there were eight spheres: seven carrying the planets (the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn), and an outer shell carrying the stars. Ptolemy also proposed a ninth sphere, the primum mobile or divine force that drove the cosmic system. Mercator’s ‘theorick’ had ten rings, which at least suggests that it was unconventional, though in what way is impossible to know, as the device, like Mercator’s globes, was later stolen from Dee’s house.
Mercator may have been the most influential but was by no means the only mathematician and cartographer Dee encountered at this time. In 1550, Dee went to Brussels to meet Mathias Haker, musician and mathematician to the Danish court, and then ‘by wagon’ to Antwerp, to see Abraham Ortelius, Mercator’s one-time travelling companion and a fellow cartographer. Dee and Ortelius (who also came from a family of merchants) evidently got on well. Some time later Dee wrote a fulsome entry for Ortelius’s ‘Friendship Album’, to which he added his coat of arms (only granted in 1567) and an expression of love for Ortelius, ‘Geographer, Mathematician, Philosopher’.14
Another acquaintance at this time was Pedro Nunez, then Lisbon’s leading navigator who became a close friend and an important figure in Dee’s life. When struck down by serious illness in the late 1550s, Dee appointed Nunez his literary executor.
Dee generally had little to do with his fellow countrymen while abroad. The exception was Sir William Pickering, the English ambassador to Charles V’s court at Brussels. On 7 December 1549 Dee began to ‘eat at the house’ of Pickering, as he put it in his diary. He also became his host’s tutor, training him in the arts that would help Pickering establish a position in the ferociously competitive court of Europe’s most powerful ruler: ‘logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, in the use of the astronomer’s staff, the use of the astronomer’s ring, the astrolabe, in the use of both [i.e. terrestrial and celestial] Globes, &c.’15
Pickering had, like Dee, studied under Sir John Cheke at Cambridge, who presumably provided the connection between the young scholar and the powerful and glamorous diplomat. Pickering was of good family: his father had been Knight Marshal to Henry VIII. Dashing and wealthy, ‘one of the finest gentlemen of this age, for his worth in learning, arts and warfare’, he was to be a future suitor to Queen Elizabeth.16
The two men developed a long and fruitful relationship, Pickering occasionally sending Dee books he had managed to pick up from his various foreign postings.17 He also was to bequeath Dee a strange mirror which, like Pickering himself, would catch the eye of Queen Elizabeth.
Dining at Pickering’s table in Brussels and surveying with Mercator and Frisius in Louvain, Dee must have felt himself at the centre of the intellectual and political firmament, a feeling only confirmed when Charles V offered Dee a position at his court. It was the first of five such offers from ‘Christian Emperors’, and like the others, he turned it down. He never gave a reason for this decision. It may have been anxiety about embracing a Catholicism which would exile him from an increasingly Protestant England. It may have been a combination of loyalty to his homeland and the hope that its sovereign would one day make the same offer.
By 1551, the whole Continent seemed to lie at young Dee’s feet. On 20 July, after five days’ travel, he arrived in Paris, where, ‘within a few days after (at the request of some English gentlemen, made unto me to do somewhat there for the honour of my country) I did undertake to read freely and publicly Euclid’s Elements Geometrical… a thing never done publicly in any University of Christendom.’18
According to Dee, the lectures were a great success. Even though just twenty-four and unknown, he later boasted that he had packed out the ‘mathematical schools’, forcing latecomers to lean in through the windows. He left no record of what had attracted such numbers, but whatever it was, it apparently caused a sensation. ‘A greater wonder arose among the beholders, than of my Aristophanes Scarabeus [the dung beetle] mounting up to the top of Trinity Hall in Cambridge,’ he later wrote.19
More offers of royal patronage and jobs flowed in, as did invitations from learned scholars. Once again, Dee turned the work down. But he did exploit the chance to meet as many other mathematicians as possible and to start building up his book collection. One particularly precious item that came into his hands at this time was a manuscript copy of Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblios, the standard ancient work on astrology and astronomy, which came from the library of the French king.20
After his triumphs in Paris, Dee returned to a very different England. The throne was no longer overflowing with the dominating bulk of Henry, whose reign had ended in religious and political inertia. Perched upon it now was Henry’s nine-year-old son Edward VI, his feet not yet reaching the floor. Edward’s succession in January 1547 had released a surge of pent-up Protestant fervour. ‘Everywhere statues were destroyed in the churches,’ Dee noted in his diary.21 ‘The great crucifix… on the altar of St Paul’s was a few days ago cast down by force of instruments, several men being wounded in the process and one killed,’ and an alarmed Spanish ambassador reported. ‘There is not a single crucifix now remaining in the other churches.’22
The impulses of the reformers were not, however, purely destructive. A progressive academic mood, receptive to the ideas Dee had encountered in Louvain, swept through the court, promoted by Roger Ascham, now Edward’s Latin secretary, and John Cheke, Edward’s former tutor and now his close aide. Although Cheke professed he did not have a ‘mathematical head’, he showed ‘great affection’ towards mathematicians. Dee was evidently among them, as Cheke personally supervised his introduction to the upper reaches of the new Edwardian court. Among those Dee met was Cheke’s son-in-law, William Cecil, who was to become the foremost statesman of the Elizabethan era. Even this early in his career, Cecil was well established and it was he who presented Dee to Edward VI.
Dee proudly pressed into the King’s hands two astronomical works he had written at Louvain. Both clearly showed Mercator’s and Frisius’s influence, one being on celestial globes, the other on the sizes and distances of heavenly bodies.23 Neither work has survived (like much of Dee’s prolific output), though their very titles indicate that he was now hoping to establish himself as a British Mercator.
Dee could hardly expect the boy king to understand his works but the books’ dedication to Edward was certainly appreciated, and Dee was duly rewarded with a pension of one hundred crowns, which he exchanged in March 1553 for income from the rectory of Upton-upon-Severn. This produced eighty pounds a year, a modest but certainly comfortable sum for an ambitious young man with expectations of a large inheritance.
His situation improved even further when, on 28 February 1552, he was invited to enter the service of William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke.24 Herbert was then at the height of his powers; the wily broker who had sided with John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, in the scramble for political domination during Edward’s minority. Dee was probably retained as tutor to William’s sons.
It is hard to imagine how Dee got on in the household. The Earl of Pembroke was no Pickering. He was wild, ‘a mad… fighting fellow’, according to Aubrey.25 It was said that he could neither read nor write, and used a stamp to sign his name.26 His idea of good company was not a learned tutor or refined diplomat but his beloved ‘cur-dog’.
Despite their obvious differences, Pembroke evidently came to trust his in-house scholar, asking him to cast horoscopes for various members of his family, including his second wife.27 He may also have recommended Dee to John Dudley who, since his seizure of power from Edward’s Protector, the Earl of Somerset, had promoted himself to Lord President of the Council and Duke of Northumberland.28
Dee joined Northumberland’s household in late 1552, possibly as an advisor to the Duke himself or again as tutor to his sons.29 Dee would have been a safe choice for either role, with impressive testimonials from well-known Protestant humanists such as John Cheke and Roger Ascham.
Dee was now established as an intellectual of some standing. He was ‘astronomus peritissimus’, an expert astronomer, as John Bale put it in his Index of British and Other Writers, published in the 1550s.30 At the heart of the new Protestant order, he was poised to become a favourite of the King, and seemed destined to enjoy rank and wealth.
Then fortune intervened. The heavens turned hostile and, for Dee, as for Hamlet, all occasions did inform against him.
The free sample has ended.
