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

A series of other examinations followed, each one taking the form of a polite and learned discussion on theological particulars, conducted in the genteel surroundings of the Bishop’s Palace, and each ending with Philpot being ‘carried’ (i.e. manhandled) back to the coalhouse.

On 19 November, Philpot was once again led blinking out of his cell and brought before the bishop. This time, Bonner had company: the Bishop of Rochester, the Chancellor of Lichfield and a Dr Chedsey. And another young scholar was also in attendance, who Bonner introduced to Philpot as one of his chaplains: John Dee. What was Dee, who might have been a cohabitee in the coalhole, doing there? Had the Protestant poacher turned Catholic gamekeeper? Unfortunately, no record remains of Dee’s own interrogation by Bonner, nor of his subsequent treatment. He disappeared into St Paul’s a suspected heretic, and now emerged an obedient chaplain.

The only record of Philpot’s imprisonment and examination is contained in Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, first published in English in 1563, after Elizabeth had succeeded to the throne, returning the country to Protestantism. It is a significant historical document, but by no means a politically or religiously neutral one. Though covering the entire history of religious persecution, it focuses with particular intensity on ‘the bloody murderings’ of ‘godly martyrs’ during Mary’s reign. Through the testimony of Mary’s Protestant victims accompanied by gruesome illustrations of beatings and burnings, Foxe embroidered a vivid but decidedly Protestant picture of Catholic cruelty. It is thus hardly surprising that the account of Philpot’s interview, based on his own account, does not portray John Dee in a flattering light.

The examination was to prove a turning point. It began with Bonner asking Philpot why he had kept his interrogators waiting. The bishop’s tone was now very different to the friendly one of their first meeting.

‘My lord, it is not unknown to you that I am a prisoner, and that the doors be shut upon me,’ Philpot replied.

This did not satisfy Bonner. ‘We sent for thee to the intent thou shoulds’t have come to mass. How say you, would you have come to mass, or no, if the doors had been sooner opener?’

‘My lord, that is another manner of question,’ Philpot replied. And Bonner did not pursue it, instead engaging Philpot in a theological debate on the subject of the unity of the church and the papacy. In particular, Philpot was asked to discuss the works of the third-century philosopher St Cyprian of Carthage who, according to Bonner, declared, ‘There must be one high priest, to which the residue must obey,’ a clear endorsement of Papal authority. Philpot disputed this interpretation, arguing thiat St Cyprian was referring to himself, as he was then patriarch of Africa.

At this point Dee intervened. ‘St Cyprian hath these words: “That upon Peter was builded the church, as upon the first beginning of unity”.’ Philpot replied with another quote, from a book of Cyprian’s that Dee himself would later have in his library: ‘In the person of one man, God gave the keys to all, that he, in signification thereby, might declare the unity of all men.’

After a further exchange, Dee announced that he was leaving the room, whereupon Philpot, losing his temper, called after him: ‘Master Dee, you are too young in divinity to teach me in the matters of my faith. Though you be learned in other things more than I, yet in divinity I have been longer practised than you.’ It was a clear reference to Dee’s reputation as a magician, which was obviously understood by all those present. Dee did not reply.

Dee did not attend any further interviews with Philpot which from this point on became increasingly hostile. However, at around the same time he did attend another examination with one of the newer arrivals at the Bishop’s palace, Bartlet Green. Dee mentioned Green in an account of his arrest written many years later, in which he described himself as having been a ‘prisoner long’ at the Bishop’s palace, ‘and bedfellow with Barthlet Green, who was burnt.’6

This was an economical version of the truth. In a letter to Philpot intercepted by Bonner, Green reported the encounter as follows:

I was brought into my lord [Bonner]’s inner chamber… and there was put in a chamber with master Dee, who entreated me very friendly. That night I supped at my lord’s table, and lay with master Dee in the chamber you [i.e. Philpot] did see. On the morrow I was served at dinner from my lord’s table, and at night did eat in the hall with his gentlemen; where I have been placed ever since, and fared wonderfully well.7

That is the only reference to Dee that Green gave in his submission.

Poor Bartlet did not fare so wonderfully well in the coming days, and neither did Philpot, who evidently attempted to engineer an escape. The Bishop’s men discovered a dagger sewn into the belly of a roasted pig delivered to him. In punishment, Bonner sent Philpot to be locked up in the coalhouse stocks, and a few days later himself came to the coalhouse to see his prisoner. Bonner claimed it was the first time he had ever visited the place and he thought it too good for Philpot. He ordered his guards to seize the prisoner, and to follow. He led them to the ‘privy door’ leading from his palace into St Paul’s, where his prison warder was waiting.

The keeper led the prisoner up the nave of the cathedral, past the reinstated rites and shrines Philpot so despised, and up the stone steps that led to Lollards’ Tower. Many fellow heretics were already incarcerated in one of the tower’s chambers, and forced to sit or lie with their feet and hands locked into a wall of wooden stocks, half-deafened by the din of the bells. But Philpot was taken along the walkway across the west side of the cathedral, into a tunnel leading into the bell tower on the opposite side, the ‘Blind Tower’. There he was confined in a chamber ‘as high almost as the battlements of Paul’s’ with a single east-facing window ‘by which I may look over the tops of a great many houses, but see no man passing into them’. He was searched and a number of letters were found hidden in his clothes, which he tried in vain to tear up as the guards pulled them from him. One of these letters was addressed to Bartlet Green.

Philpot’s interrogations did not stop, but they were now aimed solely at incriminating rather than converting him. His letter to Green, painstakingly pieced together, contained a reference to Dee, ‘the great conjuror’. ‘How think you, my lords, is not this an honest man to belie me, and to call my chaplain a great conjuror?’ Bonner asked the assembled Bishops. They obligingly smiled at his irony.

Philpot realised that his position was now hopeless. He asked his servant, whose visits provided his only remaining link with the outside world, to procure a ‘bladder of black powder’, but it was intercepted by Bonner’s men. Philpot explained that it was to make ink, but Bonner’s suspicion must have been that it was filled with gunpowder. Philpot no doubt planned to hang the pouch around his neck in the event that he was burned, to provide an early release from lingering agonies.

Formally condemned on 16 December 1555, Philpot was held in a small chamber in preparation for the handover to Newgate’s chief keeper – the moment when the ecclesiastical authorities returned to their chapels, leaving the secular arm of government to conclude the business. The first words of Philpot’s new keeper, Alexander, were: ‘Ah! Hast thou not done well to bring thyself hither?’ This cheery greeting was immediately followed by an order to hold the prisoner down on a block of stone, and lock his legs using as ‘many irons as he could bear’, which Alexander would remove only if Philpot paid him four pounds.

An appeal to the civic authorities brought gentler treatment. The city sheriff, Master Macham, ordered that the prisoner’s irons be removed and his personal possessions restored. Philpot was then taken to Newgate where he was given a cell to himself. The following day he ate his final meal and was told to make his preparations. He was awoken at eight the following morning. His guards carried him to the place of execution as ‘the way was foul’. As they lifted him up, he apparently joked ‘What? Will ye make me a pope?’

Bartlet Green was burned the next month. Beyond his brief encounter with Dee, little is known about his last days, although he was brought into one of the final interrogations with Philpot to identify the incriminating letter. On 27 January 1556, he followed Philpot’s short journey from Newgate up Giltspur Street to his pyre which was still smouldering from the burning of Thomas Whittle the day before. Bartlet was only twenty-five years old.

The figure of Dee glimpsed through the pages of Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, of the ‘great conjuror’, Bonner’s ‘chaplain’, flitting in and out of interrogations, is a disturbing one. He was a favoured and apparently enthusiastic member of Bonner’s household. Indeed, the bishop had become his ‘singular friend’, and would remain so even into the late 1560s, when Bonner, stripped of his honours by Elizabeth’s Protestant government, lay dying in Marshalsea prison.8 A note in one of his books also reveals that Dee was staying, perhaps even living, at Fulham Palace, the bishop’s Thameside residence four miles upriver, between 18 and 24 September 1555, the weeks leading up to Philpot’s interrogations.9 Could Dee, so recently an enthusiastic member of Edward VI’s Reformist court, have been a closet Catholic?

The Reformation did not split the world between Catholicism and Protestantism quite as neatly as many historical accounts suggest. Militants on both sides were prepared to kill and die for their cause but the vast majority, including many of the Reformation’s leading figures, were much more ambivalent. Throughout his life, Henry VIII himself clung to many Catholic rites and attitudes, even those concerning divorce. His was primarily a struggle for power rather than religious principles.10 Elizabeth I, a renowned symbol of Protestant sovereignty, told the French Ambassador André Hurault: ‘There is only one Jesus Christ… The rest is dispute over trifles.’11 This, it seems, was Dee’s view as well.

Dee always refused to commit himself to a particular religion, though it is certain he was not an orthodox Catholic. In 1568 – by which time England had reverted to Protestantism under Elizabeth – the Jesuit leader Francis Borgia received a secret report on the English Hospice in Rome. The hospice provided lodging for English pilgrims and later (as the English College) became a training camp for Catholic missionaries and spies. In the paper, probably written by the exiled Catholic militant Dr (later Cardinal) William Allen, a warning is issued to keep the hospice’s lodgers away from certain irreligious influences, including one ‘Ioannes Deus, sacerdos uxoratus, magicis curiosisque artibus deditus’ (‘John Dee, a married priest, given to magic and uncanny arts’).12 This curious note contains two pieces of information for which there is no other direct evidence: that Dee was ordained and married. Philpot’s reference during one of his interrogations to Dee being so ‘young in divinity’ suggests it could well have been Bonner himself who ordained Dee. This would explain the origin of the ‘Doctor’ title so closely associated with his name, for which Dee himself never publicly accounted. But as Catholic priests must remain celibate, the marriage must have come later. This was why the Jesuit report ordered the English hospice’s inmates to avoid him – it proved he had renounced Catholicism. Being connected with ‘magic and uncanny arts’ only compounded the sin. It represented pagan heresy and unorthodox scientific interests.

However, Dee could not be counted a committed Protestant either. Although he was very much a part of the Protestantism that defined Elizabeth’s reign (for example, when consulted by the government on the issue of Calendar reform, he openly criticised the Pope and ‘Romanists’), he became partial to Catholic rites in later life, and was comfortable among Catholic activists, such as Sir George Peckham, whom he advised about setting up a Catholic colony in the New World.

Such mixed messages left many of those that met him wondering where his loyalties lay. One correspondent of Francis Walsingham’s, who encountered Dee in Germany, was so befuddled by Dee’s theology, he concluded that the philosopher must have ‘disliked of all religions’.13

In fact Dee’s diaries are filled with heartfelt expressions of piety, including accounts of lengthy sessions of anguished prayer and supplication conducted in his own private chapel. But he refused to accept that either Protestants or Catholics, the Bible or the Pope had the monopoly. He believed that God’s truth was also to be found in nature and in learning. It was to the movements of the stars and to ancient texts that humanity must look to find the common ground upon which the Christian Church had originally been built. Only on Peter’s Rock, the long lost foundation of faith, could the ‘first beginning of unity’ proclaimed by St Cyprian – and reiterated by Dee during Philpot’s interrogation – be restored.

This was his theology, a religion founded on ancient principles and confirmed by science, and his behaviour following his arrest was, as subsequent events were to show, aimed at its fulfilment.

VII

Following his brush with Bartlet Green and John Philpot, Dee appeared very much at home in the new Catholic order. On 15 January 1556, only a few days before Green’s execution, he published his ‘Supplication to Queen Mary….for the recovery and preservation of ancient writers and monuments’. The ‘monuments’ to which he referred were not the statues smashed by Protestant radicals in churches and monasteries, but the far more precious ancient and medieval manuscripts currently shelved in vestries and scriptoria. The tempest of the Reformation had already scattered many of these irreplaceable pages. ‘There was no quicker merchandise than library books,’ John Bale later observed of the period, noting that bundles of them were routinely to be found for sale in ‘grocers, soapsellers, tailors, and other occupiers’ shops, some in ships ready to be carried overseas into Flanders’.1 If action was not taken quickly, England’s fragile intellectual infrastructure would be gone forever.

Dee’s plan was to send agents across the length and breadth of the country to collect or copy these works for a new ‘Library Royal’. This great national archive would not only preserve manuscripts and books from ‘rot and worms’, but provide a resource to which ‘learned men’ could turn in times of religious strife and uncertainty to settle ‘such doubts and points of learning, as much cumber and vex their heads’. For there they would find, Dee argued, that all the most troubling issues of the day – for example the true meaning of St Cyprian’s words concerning the unity of the church, the subject of Dee’s heated argument with Philpot – ‘are most pithily in such old monuments debated and discussed’.2 Thus would ‘learning wonderfully be advanced’.

Although his scheme did not receive official backing, it provided Dee with a pretext for pursuing his own private version. A period of frenetic bibliographic activity followed. Dee criss-crossed the country, searching for material, keeping notes as he went:

Remember two in Wales who have excellent monuments. Mr Edward ap Roger in Raubon 7 miles from Oswestree Northward and…Edward Price at Mivod X [i.e. ten] miles from Oswestree, somewhat westwards. Archdecon Crowly and Robert Crowly sometime printer had Tully’s translation of Cyropaedia…3

Dee’s desire to preserve and own these texts pushed him to extreme measures. He borrowed four scientific manuscripts from Peterhouse College in Cambridge, promising to return them but apparently failing to do so. He acquired six manuscripts from the collection of John Leland within days of its supposed custodian, Sir John Cheke, being kidnapped in his exile in the Low Countries, brought home and forced to renounce his Protestantism.4

His quest was most obsessive when looking for scientific manuscripts and books. Dee also started work on one of his own, the Propaedeumata Aphoristica (Preliminary Aphoristic Teachings), a series of maxims explaining astrological powers ‘by rational processes’.5 For Dee wanted to discover the ‘true virtues of nature’, to find out how celestial events – the movement of the Sun, Moon and planets against the stars – influenced ‘sublunar’ (i.e. atmospheric and terrestrial) ones.

In early sixteenth-century England, astrology was in decline. This was not because of general disbelief in its powers. No one then seriously questioned that the planets influenced earthly events, any more than we would question the existence of gravity today. The cause of the decline was a general ‘torpor’, as the historian Keith Thomas put it, in English mathematics.6 It was impossible, for example, to get English ephemerides, so they had to be imported at great expense. Dee’s aim was to shake England out of this torpor, and it was his Propaedeumata that set the trend.

Dee theorised that every entity in the universe emanated ‘rays’ of a force which influenced other objects it struck. He took as an example the forces of attraction and repulsion produced by the ‘lodestone’ – magnetised iron ore. This demonstrated in miniature what was happening throughout the cosmos. The rays’ important feature for Dee was that they could be studied scientifically. He pleaded for more detailed astronomical studies, so that the true sizes and distances, and therefore influence, of the heavenly bodies could be established.

This became the basis of Dee’s natural philosophy, and in several ways it anticipates Isaac Newton’s ground-breaking Principia Mathematica, which triggered the scientific revolution and modern physics, by over a century. There are similarities with Newton’s theory of gravity: the idea of a magnetic-like force emanating from physical bodies which acts on others; the emphasis on mathematics combined with measurement as a way of discovering how such a force works. Furthermore Dee believed, like Newton, that the universe worked according to mathematical laws.

His other works of this time, few of which have survived, only reinforce the impression that he was moving towards a decidedly scientific view of the universe. He wrote papers on perspective, on astronomical instruments and on the properties of circular motions. As early as 1553, while working for Northumberland’s household, he wrote a work dedicated to the duke’s wife on the ebb and flow of tides, a subject directly related to the idea of gravity – also an interest of Newton’s.

He even endorsed the observation that two bodies of unequal weight fall to the ground at the same speed.7 The acceptance that this could be the case, even though it flew in the face of common sense and accepted theories of motion, is usually attributed to Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), and cited as proof of the great Italian astronomer’s pioneering role in making observation the keystone of scientific enquiry. However, Dee knew of it (and pointed out that others did before him).

But the Propaedeumata Aphoristica was no proto-Principia Mathematica: for at its heart lay a force that was magical as much as physical. This is revealed by the book’s title page, which shows the qualities of heat and humidity, the Sun and the Moon, the elements of earth and water all connected to the mystical symbol which dominates the centre of the image: the monad.

The monad was an astrological sign Dee invented. He regarded it as the key to a true understanding of the unity of the cosmos. Its appearance on the title page of the rationalist Propaedeumata Aphoristica indicates that Dee’s idea of physics strayed far beyond the limits of physical reality.

Dee’s belief that ‘rays’ emanating from physical objects could affect the human soul as well as body makes the Propaedeumata essentially an astrological work. For this was why astrologers, by applying principles abstracted from centuries of practice, could divine something about a person from the configuration of the heavens at the moment of his or her birth, and why, with a scientific understanding of such bodies and the rays, so much more could be achieved. Dee also suggested that the tools used to manipulate light could also be used to manipulate these emanations. Lenses and mirrors might be able to concentrate, reflect or refract these rays. Such instruments might even make them visible. Perhaps (though he was circumspect on the matter, because of its connotations of conjuration), a fortune-teller’s crystal ball works as a sort of lens, its material being of such quality that it is able to capture and focus the invisible rays in its immediate vicinity.

Thus, at the heart of Dee’s science lay what has come to be called ‘natural’ (as opposed to supernatural) magic. When God created the universe, itself an act that Dee accepted to be beyond scientific understanding, He let loose a divine force which causes the planets to turn, the Sun to rise and the Moon to wax and wane. Magic, as Dee saw it, is the human ability to tap this force. The better our understanding of the way it drives the universe, the more powerful the magic becomes. In other words, magic is technology.

Dee planned the Propaedeumata to be his magnum opus, but managed to complete only a hastily written summary. During the final years of Mary’s reign, England suffered a series of disasters: bad harvests and famines at home, diplomatic failures and military blunders abroad. Meanwhile, two devastating epidemics of influenza (which got its name from the belief that it was caused by malign astrological influences) swept the country in 1557 and 1558. Falling seriously ill, Dee thought his days were numbered. He set his affairs in order, and arranged for a draft of Propaedeumata to be published, handing over the rest of his literary affairs to Pedro Nuñez.

Queen Mary was also in decline. At the end of 1557, six months after Philip’s departure for Spain, she announced once again that she was pregnant. In February 1558, in anticipation of the birth, she withdrew to her chamber. As before, the baby failed to materialise, though Mary was still waiting at the end of March. She finally gave up hope in May, and fell into a depression from which she never recovered – dying on 17 November 1558. Anyone associated with her regime and religion was now dangerously exposed, chief among them Bishop Bonner and his chaplain, John Dee.

VIII

After all the stormy, tempestuous and blustery windy weather of Queen Mary was overblown, the darksome clouds of discomfort dispersed, the palpable fogs and mists of most intolerable misery consumed, and the dashing showers of persecution overpast, it pleased God to send England a calm and quiet season, a clear and lovely sunshine, a quietus from former broils, and a world of blessings by good Queen Elizabeth.1

Thus wrote the chronicler Raphael Holinshed in the 1570s. He could hardly have been further from the truth.

Legend records that she received the news of her accession while sitting alone beneath an oak at Hatfield House reading the New Testament in Greek, a scene that sublimely combines the Protestant virtues of humanism, piety and humility. One of the two nobles sent to make the announcement was the Earl of Pembroke, who, having switched allegiance from Northumberland to Mary, managed with equal agility to switch back again: he was rewarded with a position in Elizabeth’s council but never with her affection or admiration.

Entering London less than a week after her half-sister’s death, Elizabeth was received with rapture. Bonner stood in line at the walls of the City to welcome her. She offered her hand to the Mayor and aldermen to be kissed, but when Bonner approached and knelt before her she withdrew her hand and walked on. The message was obvious – here was a woman who was going to make a clean break with the past, theologically and politically.

Another sign of her intentions was her decision to appoint Robert Dudley, a radical Protestant and son of the disgraced Earl of Northumberland, as chief organiser of her coronation. Dudley enthusiastically accepted the role, and decided he needed the help of a scholar to set the date, someone who could draw on the most ancient and respected astrological and historical authorities to determine the best day. His appointment was a surprising one. He did not choose from among the ranks of persecuted exiles tentatively returning to the country. Instead he selected a man who, at least according to Foxe, reeked of the smoke from Bonner’s bonfires: John Dee.