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

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’.