The Queen’s Conjuror: The Life and Magic of Dr. Dee

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.

IV

On the afternoon of 6 July 1553, a terrible storm broke over Greenwich as King Edward lay close to death. He had fallen ill the year before, and the Duke of Northumberland, possibly on Dee’s advice, had called in the Italian physician and astrologer Girolamo Cardano to treat the ailing King.1 Before seeing his royal patient, Cardano cast Edward’s horoscope, and discovered ‘omens of great calamity’. A physical examination followed which only confirmed the prediction: Edward was found to be suffering from consumption. Cardano was summoned to the Council to give his opinion. He did not report his grim astrological findings, as drawing up the horoscope of a monarch was potentially illegal, a form of spying through magical surveillance. All he said was that the King needed rest.

By the end of 1552, Edward was coughing up blood. He was prescribed opiates and other remedies, some quite elaborate, such as a mixture of spearmint syrup, red fennel, liverwort, turnip, dates, raisins, mace, celery and the raw meat of a nine-day-old sow, nine spoonfuls to be taken as required. To counter the rumours that the King was being poisoned, Northumberland planted the story that Princess Mary, Henry VIII’s only child from his first marriage and in Catholic eyes his only legitimate offspring, had given her half-brother the evil eye, attempting to despatch him by witchcraft. Northumberland rightly feared that if she became queen, England’s great Protestant experiment would be over.

Northumberland persuaded Edward to disinherit Mary in favour of Lady Jane Grey, the Protestant great-granddaughter of Henry VII. To protect his position further, Northumberland then married Lady Jane to his fourth son Guilford, and Jane’s sister Katherine to Pembroke’s son William, Lord Herbert. The joint ceremony was held on Whit Sunday 1553 at Durham House, Northumberland’s London palace overlooking the Thames. It involved the two families that were now acting as Dee’s patrons, and it is likely he attended the event.

Two months later, on that stormy July afternoon, King Edward prepared to meet his maker. With his final breaths, he was said to have whispered a prayer he had composed especially for the occasion, beseeching God to ‘defend this realm from papistry, and maintain Thy true religion, that I and my people may praise Thy holy Name, for Thy Son Jesus Christ’s sake, Amen.’2 He died at 6pm.

As soon as Edward was dead, Northumberland attempted to install Lady Jane Grey as queen. But popular sentiment, nimble aristocratic loyalties and the law favoured Mary. Within days, she had won over most of Northumberland’s allies, including the Earl of Pembroke, who stood outside Castle Baynard, his London home, and threw a ‘cap full of angels’ (gold coins, worth around ten shillings) to the people to celebrate her accession. He also announced the annulment of his son’s marriage to Katherine Grey, which he had taken the precaution of ensuring remained unconsummated.

The speed of Northumberland’s fall was breathtaking. On 23 August, barely a month after Edward’s death, he was standing on the scaffold on Tower Hill. Stretched out beneath him was the City that had abandoned him for Mary. Nearly a tenth of its population, around ten thousand people, had gathered to watch him die. They beheld a broken man who now publicly renounced his Protestant beliefs. He was, and wanted to die Catholic. Having recanted, he was blindfolded and knelt before the block. But before the executioner could strike, the blindfold slipped and the duke had to get up to put it on again. He knelt again, his distress now obvious, and with a single blow he was beheaded.

In the days leading up to his execution, Queen Mary’s Privy Council began to purge his sympathisers. On 21 August 1553, an order was issued to the Lieutenant of the Tower of London, requesting that three prisoners be sent before the Council for examination. One of the names listed was Roland Dee.3

Roland, like his son John, had prospered in recent years. Reforms such as the dissolution of the monasteries had released expanses of new land onto London’s starved property market and set off a boom that would see the City’s population nearly quadruple from fewer than 50,000 to nearly 200,000.4 Roland had directly benefited from this, being appointed by the King as one of two ‘packers’ with joint responsibility for checking all merchandise shipped through London and its suburbs, and the right to ‘untruss and ransack’ any consignment not packed in his presence. In return, he was to receive a ‘moiety’ (half share) of fees payable on the shipments, the other half going to the other packer, who was appointed by the Lord Mayor.5

Now he was a wanted man, though there is no record of the precise charge. Given the political situation, and the fact that the Privy Council itself wanted to interview him, it seems likely he had been identified as a Protestant activist or even one of Northumberland’s conspirators. Ten days later on 1 September, he was released, a ruined man. Having nurtured a position at court, a thriving business in the City and been rewarded with lucrative privileges – having, indeed, carefully laid the foundations for promotion to the gentry, perhaps ultimately even minor nobility – he had lost everything. This misfortune was also to have a devastating impact on the fortunes of his son. By such ‘hard dealing’, Dee later wrote in a begging letter to William Cecil, his father ‘was disabled for leaving unto me due maintenance’.6 In other words, having confidently expected to inherit independent means that would enable him to continue his studies as he wished, Dee suddenly had to fend for himself.

But the legacy of his father’s fall was to have even wider implications. Two years later, John Dee found himself in equal, if not greater, peril.

In 1555, Mary’s supporters began to burn prominent Protestants. As the church could not execute those it convicted of heresy so, under a statute called De Heretico Comburendo, the civil authorities undertook this responsibility. In force during Henry’s reign, the statute had been abolished in 1547, part of Edward’s Protestant reforms. In January 1555 Mary’s government restored it, and within a month the fires were alight. First victim was John Rogers, former canon at St Paul’s Cathedral. He was burned at Smithfield, which was London’s meat market, as well as the venue for its grisliest executions. For over four centuries traitors, witches and heretics had been brought there and, like the cuts of meat in the butchers’ stalls, hung, roasted and boiled.

Rogers was a married priest, therefore by definition a heretic and, according to partisan Protestant accounts, denied the chance to say goodbye to his wife and children before being tied to the stake. Across the country, many more met the same fate. The numbers vary widely according to the religious sympathies of those reporting them, but are estimated at around three hundred in the five years of Mary’s reign. Later, Protestant storytellers would send shudders through their audiences with highly coloured tales of agonising death, of necklaces of gunpowder which ignited and blew off the victims’ heads or, even worse, failed to go off, as happened to John Hooper, Bishop of Gloucester, who took three-quarters of an hour to expire. According to one tale, a baby erupted from a woman’s womb while she burned, which was thrown back into the fire by the executioner.

The flames burned fiercest in Smithfield and the smoke crept through the surrounding streets, stoking up rebellion as well as fear. There were reports of a mysterious voice emanating from a wall that spoke favourable words about Mary’s half-sister the Princess Elizabeth but remained silent about the Queen. A dead cat dressed as a Catholic cleric was hung from the gibbet at Cheapside.7 A dagger was thrown at one priest who criticised Edward VIs reign, a ‘murderous assault’ made on another during Communion. ‘The Blessed Sacrament itself was the object of profane outrages, and street brawls arising out of religious disputes were frequent,’ one Catholic commentary later noted.8

Late in May 1555, John Warne, an upholsterer living in Walbrook in the east of the City, looked up from his stitching to find the sheriffs at his door. Dragged off to Newgate prison, he was interrogated by Edmund Bonner, the ‘bloody’ Bishop of London. In Acts and Monuments of these Latter and Perillous Dayes (more popularly known as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs), compiled by the Puritan teacher John Foxe exiled in Switzerland during Mary’s reign, Bonner was named as the most diligent and heartless executor of Mary’s religious policy. Foxe summarised his view in two lines of doggerel:

This cannibal in three years space three hundred martyrs slew.

They were his food, he loved so blood, he spared none he knew.9

Bonner accused Warne, presumably on the testimony of informants, of failing to attend Mass and refusing to accept tran-substantiation – the Catholic belief that during Mass bread and wine were turned into Christ’s flesh and blood. Warne was also reported to have seen ‘a great rough water-spaniel’ with its head shaved in the manner of a Catholic priest: ‘Thou didst laugh at it and like it,’ Bonner said.10 Apparently unmoved by such accusations, Warne refused to recant his beliefs ‘unless he were thereunto thoroughly persuaded by the holy Scriptures’. This was a robustly nonconformist response, as belief in the Bible as the sole source of divine truth and authority was central to Protestant theology.

Having been examined by Bonner for three days, Warne was handed back to the sheriffs at Newgate to await his fate. On 31 May, he was taken to Smithfield, where, according to Foxe, he was chained to the stake and burned with John Cardmaker, another former canon at St Paul’s. As the flames leapt up around them, the two held hands and together ‘passed through the fire to the blessed rest and peace among God’s holy saints and martyrs’.11

The following day, the sheriffs were out again. This time the man they wanted was John Dee.

THE LORD OF MISRULE

… when the planets In evil mixture to disorder wander, What plagues and what portents, what mutiny, What raging of the sea, shaking of earth, Commotion in the winds! Frights, changes, horrors, Divert and crack, rend and deracinate, The unity and married calm of states Quite from their fixture!

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,

TROILUS AND CRESSIDA

V

On 28 May 1555 the Privy Council despatched a letter ordering Francis Englefeld, Mary’s Master of the Court of Wards, ‘to make search for one John Dee, dwelling in London, and to apprehend him and send him hither.’1 His house was to be sealed, and his books and papers seized as evidence. His living from Upton-upon-Severn was also confiscated, depriving him of his only regular source of income.

By 1 June Dee was in the custody of Sir Richard Morgan, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas. He was taken to Hampton Court, to be held incommunicado ‘until Mr Secretary Bourne and Mr Englefelde shall repair thither for his further examination’.2

This can hardly have come as a complete surprise. Many of Dee’s closest friends had already been arrested or forced into exile. Following an audience with Princess Elizabeth, Sir William Pickering had escaped back to the Continent, and been indicted for treason in his absence. John Day, a prominent printer who later published many of Dee’s works, had been imprisoned and, on release, also went abroad. The arrest of his own father must have further thickened the atmosphere of apprehension, casting suspicion on the whole family.

Dee was arrested with several others: one Butler, whose identity remains unknown; Christopher Cary, a pupil of Dee’s;3 John Field, a publisher and astronomer who was soon to collaborate with Dee on the printing of a set of ephemerides drawn up according to the heretical Copernican principles; and Sir Thomas Benger, by far the group’s most senior member, who later became auditor to Queen Elizabeth and was now one of her ‘principal servants at Woodstock’, as Dee put it.4 This list is a telling one. It suggests Dee was identified as a member of a secret Protestant cell Mary’s government believed to be clustered around Elizabeth. A week later Elizabeth herself was brought to Hampton Court, where Mary, now married to Charles V’s son Philip, approached the term of what turned out to be a phantom pregnancy. Mary was under pressure from her advisors to dispose of Elizabeth, whose very existence was seen as a threat to the English re-establishment of Catholicism. There were repeated attempts to implicate the princess in Protestant schemes and plots. In Mary’s private chambers, the sisters had a tearful confrontation, apparently (according to Elizabeth) within the hearing of Philip, hiding in a suitably Shakespearean manner behind an arras. Mary demanded that Elizabeth reject her Protestant beliefs, and she refused once more.

The many accusations against Dee focussed not on his religious leanings so much as his links with mathematics and magic. ‘In those dark times,’ John Aubrey later wrote, ‘astrologer, mathematician and conjuror were accounted the same things.’5 This was certainly the case with Dee. He was charged with ‘calculating’, ‘conjuring’ and ‘witchcraft’ on the grounds that he had drawn up horoscopes for Mary, her husband Philip and Elizabeth.

He was probably guilty as charged. The remnant of his diary for this period includes an entry (inaccurately transcribed by Ashmole) showing the date and time of Mary’s marriage to Philip, and noting that the rising sign at the moment of their wedding – 11am, 25 July 1554 – was Libra (a good omen, as Libra, ruled by Venus, was the sign associated with marriage or partnership).

The only other entry from his diary for this period, dated three weeks prior to his arrest, simply reads ‘Books brought from France to London’. Although it appears innocent enough, it may disguise an attempt to communicate with the exiled Pickering, one of Elizabeth’s partisans and a potential traitor. Dee may even have been acting as an intermediary between Pickering and Elizabeth because he was also in correspondence with the princess at this time.

Whether there were grounds for such suspicions or not, the merest whiff of intrigue was sufficient to have prompted the Council’s decision to arrest Dee, but if they were to keep him imprisoned, they would need something stronger than the suggestion he had been drawing up royal horoscopes.

A more serious accusation was duly found, and the very nature of its source hints at the political nature of the proceedings. Two informers were now cited who claimed to have evidence that Dee had ‘endeavoured by enchantments to destroy Queen Mary’. One of them was subsequently identified by Dee as ‘Prideaux’. A Catholic spy of that name later fled to Spain, seeking the protection of King Philip.6

The other informer was a rather more conspicuous character called George Ferrers, a lawyer, member of Lincoln’s Inn, MP and convicted debtor.7 In 1553 he was appointed London’s ‘Lord of Misrule’, an ancient role bestowed during yuletide revelries. This tradition had been revived by the Duke of Northumberland for Edward’s last Christmas and it had been a huge success. Decked in satin robes, Ferrers fulfilled his duties admirably, presiding over a court of fools and illusionists. He repeated the part during Mary’s reign, though no doubt the ‘merry disports’ that formed part of the event did not include jesters dressed as cardinals, as in the inaugural year. Ferrers now accused Dee of using ‘enchantments’ to blind one of his children, and to kill another.

Ferrers apparently bore Dee a longstanding grudge. In 1578 a suppressed edition of a pamphlet entitled Mirror for Magistrates included a story he wrote apparently lampooning Dee. It described a sorcerer hired by one Elianor Cobham to kill the Queen by sticking pins through a wax effigy of her. The story had a particular resonance at the time, as just such an effigy of Elizabeth had been found (at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where Ferrers practised as a lawyer), and Dee had been asked by the Privy Council to advise upon its significance.8

On 5 June, Dee, together with Cary, Benger and Field, was brought before the Secretary of State Sir John Bourne, Francis Englefeld, Sir Richard Read and Doctor Thomas Hughes to be examined on his ‘lewd and vain practises of cal-culing and conjuring’.

This tribunal was made up of Mary’s most loyal supporters. Englefeld was the man she later chose to investigate a conspiracy against Philip.9 Sir John Bourne was famous as ‘an especial stirrer up in such cases’, having ‘marvellously tossed and examined’ one of the leaders of Wyatt’s Rebellion. And Lord North was popularly reputed to have scoured the streets of London for a pauper’s baby to pass off as the male heir Mary was failing, after ten months of pregnancy, to produce.10 The atmosphere at Hampton Court was fraught with fears about the true nature of Mary’s ‘pregnancy’, with xenophobia towards the Spanish king Philip, with sectarian fervour, and with intense suspicions of plots being hatched in the palace’s every corridor and chamber.

The examiners demanded that Dee first answer four articles relating to his supposed offences, followed by a further eighteen. A ‘doctor’, probably Thomas Hughes, called for him to be committed to ‘perpetual prison’ on charges that, as Dee later put it, ‘he most unchristianlike and maliciously had devised’.11 But none of the charges could be substantiated.

A week later, having failed to extract a confession, his interrogators ordered that he be taken under guard by boat from Hampton Court to London, to face Lord Broke, Justice of the Common Pleas. Broke then referred the matter on to the Star Chamber at the Palace of Westminster.

By now the weakness of the case against Dee and his confederates was becoming obvious. Some members of the council were probably mindful that these men were close to Elizabeth who, despite Mary’s hostility, remained heir to the throne. So by July, without a decisive conviction in prospect, they decided to relax the conditions under which the prisoners were held, particularly for Sir Thomas Benger, held at Fleet Prison, named after the fetid Fleet River that carried most of the capital’s sewage past the cell windows into the Thames. On 7 July the Privy Council told the prison warden ‘to permit Sir Thomas Benger to have liberty of the Fleet, and his wife to come unto him at times convenient’.12

On 29 August 1555, three months after his arrest, Dee was bound over to keep the peace until Christmas of the next year. However, he had not escaped unscathed. He was permanently deprived of his post as rector of Upton, and thus of his living, and he alone of the group was to be handed over for further religious investigation.13 In other words, he was now suspected of heresy, and the man asked to examine him was the Bishop of London – ‘Bloody’ Bonner himself.

VI

Old St Paul’s Cathedral was far larger than Christopher Wren’s replacement, an immense hulk of Caen stone that had loomed over London for centuries. During Edward’s reign, it had been the focus of London’s religious reforms. In 1549, within the cathedral’s precincts, an ornate chapel and charnel house filled with elaborate marble monuments was torn down by Protestants. The bones found beneath – apparendy amounting to more than a thousand cartloads – had been dumped on the fields of Finsbury north of the city, creating a hill high enough to support three windmills.1 That same year, the cathedral’s altar and magnificent reredos were destroyed and replaced with a plain table, and the nave was turned into a thoroughfare between Paternoster Row and Carter Lane ‘for people with vessels of ale and beer, baskets of bread, fish, flesh and fruit, men leading mules, horses and other beasts’.2 With Mary’s accession to the throne, many of these alterations had been reversed, and it was a very different St Paul’s that another heretic approached one autumn morning in 1555, to be examined by Bishop Bonner. The altar had been rebuilt, the animals ejected and an air of reverent hush restored.

The prisoner was John Philpot, and his capture was quite a coup for Bonner. He was the son of a knight, educated at Oxford, widely travelled and highly cultivated, having ‘knowledge of the Hebrew tongue’. He had spent some time at Venice and Padua, but was suspected of being a heretic and forced to leave. In Protestant England, he had advanced quickly to become archdeacon of Winchester.3

However, following the return of Catholicism, Philpot was arrested in 1554 for refusing to conduct Mass and was imprisoned in Newgate. He remained imprisoned for a year before hearings began.

His first examination was with a panel of Mary’s commissioners on 2 October 1555. According to Foxe’s not entirely impartial account of the event, the commissioners poked fun at Philpot’s weight, implying that even a Protestant with his puritan values was not immune from fleshly temptations. Philpot responded with an impregnable composure that quickly drove his interrogators to distraction. A further examination followed a similar course and ended with one of the commissioners calling him a ‘vile heretic knave’, ordering that he be taken away to face Bonner’s more formidable inquisition.

The Bishop’s palace squatted among the buttresses of St Paul’s south-west side, beneath Lollards’ Tower, one of the cathedral’s two bell towers. Philpot was left in the palace’s coalhouse, which Bonner was using as a temporary prison.

The coalhouse was already filled with fuel for the Smithfield fires – six suspected heretics in all, including a married priest from Essex who had withdrawn a recantation extracted from him after the bishop had ‘buffeted’ his face black and blue. It was probably a worse prison than Newgate. It was windowless, and despite the generous supply of coal, there was no provision for making a fire to provide warmth or light. There was only straw for bedding, and in the dark adjoining chamber, a set of wooden stocks.

The reception Philpot got from the bishop’s staff was quite at odds with the meanness of his accommodation. He was given a ‘mess of meat and good pot of drink’ and copious apologies for the inconvenience of being incarcerated; apparently the bishop had not known of his arrival. A little later, he was brought to the bishop’s private study, where Bonner, sitting alone at a table, was full of bonhomie, offering his hand and suggesting that the whole business was a frightful mistake. ‘I promise you I mean you no more hurt than to mine own person,’ Bonner said. ‘I will not therefore burden you with your conscience as now, I marvel that you are so merry in prison as you be, singing and rejoicing, as the prophet saith, “rejoicing in your naughtiness”.’4

Bonner sent him off to be given a glass of ‘good wine’ from the palace cellars, which Philpot enjoyed standing at the cellar door, before being taken back to the coalhouse, ‘where I with my six fellows do rouse together in straw as cheerfully (we thank God) as others do in their beds of down’.5