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

Choosing the date of the coronation was far from a matter of scheduling. It was a highly sensitive decision. Her reign was by no means regarded with the unbridled enthusiasm that, following the triumph of the Armada, later Protestant chroniclers would retrospectively assume. England had just endured two troubled experiments in monarchy with Edward, the first sovereign anointed by a Protestant church, and Mary, the first Queen regnant.2 The idea of a third that combined both apparently disastrous innovations aroused deep apprehension.

As daughter of Anne Boleyn and offspring of Henry’s assault on the unity of the Church, Elizabeth’s inheritance of the divine right of sovereignty represented a challenge to the political, even cosmic order. Her half-sister Mary had found the idea of Elizabeth being Henry’s child literally inconceivable and assumed her father must have really been Boleyn’s lute player, Mark Smeaton. Making Elizabeth queen meant that England would be committed to a course of Protestant reformation from which it would be very hard to return.

Elizabeth’s sex amplified the uncertainty. The combination of femininity with majesty was still regarded as highly combustible. Mary had been the first English queen to rule her subjects, rather than act as a king’s consort. Some speculated that it was her gender as much as religion that had made her reign such a difficult one. John Knox issued his famous First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Raiment of Women in 1558, the final year of Mary’s reign. For him the idea of female government was so outrageous it demanded a new term – ‘monstriferous’. John Calvin, the Protestant theologian, wrote to William Cecil that Elizabeth’s coronation ‘was a deviation from the primitive and established order of nature, it ought to be held as a judgement on man for his dereliction of his rights.’ The prognostications of the French prophet Nostradamus for 1559, the first full year of Elizabeth’s reign, seemed to confirm this view. Translated into English, they were widely read, foretelling ‘divers calamities, weepings and mournings’ and ‘civil sedition’ that would make the ‘lowest’ rise up against the ‘highest’.3

Thus, the selection of the date that inaugurated this experiment was crucial. It needed to muster all the favourable auspices that ancient authorities could offer, and show that God would bless such an ordination.

O, when degree is shak’d

Which is the ladder of all high designs

The enterprise is sick!

…observed Ulysses in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida.

Take but degree away, untune that string,

And hark what discord follows!4

Nostradamus had foretold such discord and Dee’s selection of the coronation day had to prevent it.

Dee was well qualified for the role. His Propaedeumata had established him as one of the country’s leading natural philosophers and revived interest in mathematically-based astrology (as opposed to the divination practised by Nostradamus). His frantic bibliographic activity during Mary’s reign had also armed him with a formidable array of ancient texts from which to cite precedents and authorities.

But this was not enough to erase the stigma of his association with Bonner, which, thanks to Foxe and others was already widely suspected, if not known. There must have been some other redeeming quality.

A clue lies in the treatment Dee received in Foxe’s account of Bonner’s persecutions. In the first edition of Acts and Monuments, which was being completed in Basle around this time, Dee’s involvement with Bonner is fully documented. However, by the 1576 edition, he has completely disappeared. His words are still there but every occurrence of his name (more than ten) has been deleted, or substituted with the anonymous ‘a Doctor’.

This erasure is almost unique in a work otherwise notable for naming names. For example, in one of Philpot’s interrogations, Dee is joined by another Doctor, one Chedsey, whom Foxe did not allow the same anonymity, not even when they appeared in the same sentence.5 Perhaps Foxe removed Dee’s name because he was threatened with legal action, or pressurised by the court. But this seems unlikely. Acts and Monuments rapidly became one of the most revered texts of the Elizabethan age; the Queen commanded a copy to be lodged in every cathedral library in the country. Far more probable is that Foxe learned more about Dee’s activities in Bonner’s household and this meant that the portrayal of him in Acts and Monuments as a Catholic colluder was unfair.

In a deposition made to a delegation of Queen’s commissioners in 1582, Dee states that his arrest and handover to Bonner resulted from him being engaged upon ‘some travails for her Majesty’s behalf.’ He had undertaken these unspecified travails ‘to the comfort of her Majesty’s favourers then, and some of her principal servants, at Woodstock’, Woodstock being the palace where Elizabeth was held under arrest. These ‘favourers’ undoubtedly included Robert Dudley. They also included John Ashley, who had since become Master of the Queen’s Jewel House. Dudley was dead by the time Dee came to be interviewed, but Ashley was still alive, and Dee invited the Queen’s commissioners to go and ask him about the Bonner years should they disbelieve his claims.

Of course, these ‘travails’ may have been an invention. But, as Dee well knew, his testimonial to the commissioners would be read by Elizabeth, who was obviously in a position to confirm whether or not, at least in this respect, it was true.

It seems reasonable to assume that Dee’s presence in Bonner’s household was known, perhaps even encouraged by Elizabeth and her supporters. This would explain why, having been deprived of the rectorship of Upton after his arrest in 1553, he was now awarded the living at Leadenham in Lincolnshire, which was presented to him by two members of the Stanley family, Sir William and Henry, Lord Strange.6

Thus it was not as a shamed member of a failed regime that Dee emerged into the limelight in late 1558, but as the loyal ally of a glorious new one, as an ‘intelligencer’, in all the possible meanings of that peculiar Elizabethan term: a seeker of hidden knowledge, philosophical and scientific, as well as a spy.

The Christmas festivities of 1558-9 provided Catholic onlookers with disturbing portents of Elizabeth’s religious policies. ‘Your lordship will have heard of the farce performed in the presence of Her Majesty on Epiphany Day,’ wrote a concerned Spanish ambassador to his Duke, referring to a Twelfth Night masque. He had been appalled by the ‘mummery performed after supper, of crows in the habits of cardinals, of asses habited as bishops, and of wolves representing abbots’. ‘I will consign it to silence,’ he added.7

In the midst of these revelries, Dee set about writing a long and detailed analysis of the astrological augurs for her reign. He chose 15 January 1559 as its start date. His reasons, along with the document setting them out, are lost, but no doubt he was swayed by Jupiter being in Aquarius, suggesting the emergence of such statesmanlike qualities as impartiality, independence and tolerance, and Mars in Scorpio providing the passion and commitment a ruler needed.8 Such a day would mark the nativity of a great reign.

Having set the date, Dee was invited by Robert Dudley for an audience with the Queen at Whitehall Palace.

At the appointed time, Dee passed through the three-storey entrance gate of chequered flint and stone and approached the Great Hall built by Cardinal Wolsey. He was presented to Elizabeth by Dudley and the Earl of Pembroke. Dee remembered vividly what she said to him: ‘Where my brother hath given him a crown, I will give him a noble.’ It was a clever play on the names of coins, the noble being a gold piece worth two silver crowns. But this was not an offer of small change. She was promising a doubling of the fortunes he had enjoyed under Edward. He was to become a favoured member of her court, a player in the great Protestant era to come.

Dee might even have imagined she meant more. Was there not a suggestion, a hint – Dee’s mathematical mind could have calculated the implications in an instant – that she was promising him not just a noble but nobility… title, money, lands, respect, reckoning for the ‘hard dealing’ that had ruined his father and deprived him of his inheritance? The Dee dynasty could be restored and he would finally have the independence to develop new ideas, the resources to build up his library and the influence to found his scientific academy.

But nothing had been explicitly promised and there was no time to dwell on such dreams. Only a few days remained before the coronation date Dee had selected and frantic preparations were already underway There was such a surge in demand for crimson silk and cloth of gold and silver that customs officers were instructed to impound all available stock. Such an order would once have been carried out by Dee’s father Roland, but he was dead by 1555, before the change of regime could rehabilitate him.9

On the eve of the coronation, Elizabeth proceeded from the Tower of London to the Palace of Westminster, where she was to make her preparations for the ceremony. A series of magnificent pageants were performed on huge scaffolds erected along the route: at Gracechurch Street a ‘Pageant of the Roses’ represented the Tudor dynasty on a three-tiered platform; at Cornhill and Little Conduit a play on the theme of time. At Cheapside (somewhat inappropriately named for this occasion) she paused to receive a gift of a thousand gold marks, presented by the City Recorder. She passed through Temple Bar, an archway marking the City’s western limit, upon which were mounted huge statues of Gogmagog and Corineus, giants featured in the story of Brutus, a legendary king of ancient Britain who was to play a prominent part in Dee’s future explorations of British mythology.

The following morning, with the streets ‘new-laid with gravel and blue cloth and railed on each side,’10 Elizabeth appeared at the doors of Westminster Hall attired in coronation robes, made of cloth-of-gold, trimmed in ermine and stitched with jewels. Her auburn hair was down, emphasising her maidenly youth. She processed towards Westminster Abbey beneath a canopy carried by the Barons of the Cinque Ports, followed by nobles, heralds and bishops. The carpet upon which she trod, dusted with snow, disappeared as she went, the crowds lining the route scrambling to tear off samples to keep or sell as souvenirs.

Dee would have had his place in the Abbey, though not in the nave, which was reserved for the nobles who were called upon to declare Elizabeth’s rightful claim to the throne. Illuminated by thousands of torches and candles, standing beneath a thick canopy of tapestries amid a forest of soaring Gothic pillars, surrounded by the singing of choirs and cries of acclamation, Elizabeth then played her role in the ancient act of pagan magic that works a mortal human into a sovereign.

She emerged from the Abbey bearing the enchanted instruments of government, the orb representing the cosmos; the sceptre, the magic wand of authority; and the crown, the halo of monarchy. Smiling and calling to the crowd in a way that at least one observer thought indecorous, she walked back to Westminster Hall, where a great banquet was held that lasted until one the next morning, culminating with the Queen’s champion riding into the hall dressed in full armour, to challenge anyone who questioned her title.

THE MOST PRECIOUS JEWEL

When Faustus had with pleasure ta’en the view Of rarest things, and royal courts of kings, He stayed his course, and so returned home, Where such as bear his absence, but with grief, I mean his friends and nearest companions, Did gratulate his safety with kind words, And in their conference of what befell, Touching his journey through the world and air, They put forth questions of astrology, Which Faustus answered with such learned skill, As they admired and wondered at his wit. Now is his fame spread forth in every land; Amongst the rest the Emperor is one, Carolus the fifth, at whose palace now Faustus is feasted ’mongst his noblemen. What there he did in trial of his art, I leave untold – your eyes shall seeperform’d

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, THE TRAGEDIE OF DR FAUSTUS

IX

Soon after Elizabeth’s coronation, Dee vanished. For nearly five years, he is absent from all historical records.1 All that can be divined was that he spent much of his time abroad, continued collecting books and started to explore a new field of research: the Cabala.

The Cabala was a potent combination of language, mathematics and mysticism based around Hebrew. Dee had taught himself the language, and acquired his first Hebrew texts around this time. Thanks to the influence of humanists such as John Cheke, there had been a growth of interest in Hebrew, because of its potential to release the knowledge contained in ancient texts. But for the Cabalists, Hebrew was much more than another language, because they believed encoded within it were the secrets of the universe.

‘In the beginning was the Word,’ as St John put it. Dee and his contemporaries assumed that Word to have been in Hebrew, or rather its original pure form before it became corrupted by Adam’s Fall. Thus, an analysis of Hebrew was a way of discovering the structure that underlay God’s creation. The laws of nature were its grammar, the stuff of physical reality its nouns.2

Cabalism’s obscure origins go back to first century Palestine. By the sixteenth century, it was regarded in orthodox academic circles with the same suspicion as mathematics, with which it shared many features. Among the multiplicity of methods it used to study language was Gematria, which involved searching for numbers which could be substituted for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet. By then performing arithmetical operations with these numbers, for example by ‘adding’ two words together, it was hoped to find a mathematical relationship underlying the language which would show how one phrase related to another.

Another feature of the Cabala was its numerological preoccupation with angels. Indeed, one of the purposes of Gematria was to work out how many there were (as many as 301,655,172 according to some calculations).3 It also provided a means for working out their names and relationships to one another. For example, it identified the seventy-two angels who provide a route to understanding the ‘sephiroth’ – the ‘ten names most common to God’ which together make his ‘one great name’. The names of such angels were derived from the Hebrew description of their function, suffixed with an ending such as ‘el’ or ‘iah’.

These angels exist at the top, divine level of the Cabala’s three-tiered universe. Below them lay the celestial level of the stars, and at the bottom the elemental level of the physical world. This structure is reflected in the Hebrew language itself, in the three parts of Hebrew speech and the twenty-two letters in the Hebrew alphabet, which divided into two groups of nine letters and one of four, corresponding to the nine orders of angels, nine spheres and four elements.

Such correspondences strike the modern mind as meaningless. Meric Casaubon, who published Dee’s spiritual diaries a century later, warned that ‘some men come into the world with Cabalistical Brains, their heads are full of mysteries… Out of the very ABC that children are taught…they will fetch all the Secrets of God’s Wisdom’.4 But to Dee, it provided a crucial link between language and the mathematical basis of nature.

The Cabala also had a practical, magical side. Since language was tied into the formation of the universe, words had the potential to change it. Cabalism provided a technology for engineering incantations that could summon spirits and influence events, as prayers are supposed to do, but formulated according to systematic, almost scientific principles. And, unlike prayers, such incantations would work whether you were Catholic or Protestant.5

There is no evidence that Dee tried to use the Cabala in this way at this stage in his career. He was, however, fascinated by another practical use, an application of particular interest in the tense atmosphere of Reformation Europe, where governments were eager to find ways of preserving their own secrets and discovering those of their rivals – the creation of secret codes and ciphers.

In February 1563, Dee reappears in the busy merchant town of Antwerp, staying at the sign of the Golden Angel. Still engaged in his endless, expensive search for works to add to his library, he was about to make what he considered to be the find of his life.

Antwerp was filled with the clatter of printing presses. It boasted one of the world’s most important publishing firms, founded by Christopher Plantin, whose ‘Officina Plantiniana’ workshop turned out thousands of Christian and humanist works distributed across Europe and as far afield as the Spanish colonies in Mexico and South America. But Plantin also produced several heretical works, notably those of Hendrick Niclaes, founder of the ‘family of love’. This secretive sect, whose members came to be called ‘Familists’, included Dee’s friend the mapmaker Abraham Ortelius, and the Birkmanns, a powerful bookselling family based in Cologne. Dee patronised their London shop continuously over forty years, falling into conversation with anyone who happened to be there.6 The familists invited all ‘lovers of truth…of what nation and religion soever they be, Christian, Jews, Mahomites, or Turks, and heathen,’ to become part of a learned brotherhood.7 They believed that members could show allegiance to any prevailing religious doctrine in order to promote the movement’s aims of developing an all-embracing theology. This reflected Dee’s own view, and it is likely he knew of and was sympathetic to the sect.8

During the winter of 1563, Dee heard rumours that a copy of one of the most precious manuscripts in circulation, for which scholars from all over Europe had been searching for over sixty years, had turned up in Antwerp. It was called Steganographia, and had been written by Johannes Trithemius.

Trithemius was one of the founders of modern cryptography. He wrote the first published work on the subject, Polygraphia, which appeared in 1518. Born in 1462, he took his name from Trittenheim, a town on the left bank of the Moselle in Germany. He claimed to be unable to read until he was fifteen. At that age he had a dream in which he was presented with two tablets, one inscribed with writing, the other with pictures. Told to choose between them, he picked the tablet with writing because of his ‘longing for knowledge of Scripture’.9

He later joined the Benedictine abbey of Sponheim, which was then ‘poor, undisciplined, ruinous, and virtually without furniture’. In July 1483, he was appointed abbot, and embarked on a complete renovation of the place, transforming it into a centre of learning. He built a lodge for visiting scholars, decorating the walls with classical and contemporary prose and poetry. He also rebuilt the library, increasing it from just forty-eight books to two thousand.

Trithemius’s book-collecting drew him towards the study of the Cabala, and his work became a strong influence for many of the great mystic scholars of the early sixteenth century, notably Henry Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim, who was his pupil. Agrippa was the leading writer on mysticism and magic of the Renaissance. His shadow ‘made all Europe honour him’, Marlowe wrote in Dr Faustus.

As with Dee, Trithemius’s interest in such subjects led to his being accused of ‘trafficking’ with demons. It was even said he conjured up the bride of Maximilian I soon after her death so the Emperor could see her once more. As Trithemius kept his work increasingly secret, so these accusations became ever more insistent and threatening.

Dee knew of the accusations against Trithemius, placing him alongside Socrates and Pico della Mirandola (pioneer of a Christian form of the Cabala) as a victim of intolerance. Like Dee, Trithemius drew a sharp division between magic and superstition. Magic was about knowledge, the study of the hidden forces – spiritual as well as physical – that rule nature. Superstition exploited ignorance. Thus Trithemius called for witches and wizards to be rooted out, and attacked the sort of fortune-telling which was practised by Dee’s contemporaries like Nostradamus as ‘empty and foolish’.

Trithemius summed up his career: ‘I always wanted to know what was knowable in the world…But it was not within my power to satisfy the desire as I wished.’ This was a sentiment Dee would one day echo. But for the moment, with his growing library, knowledge of languages and science, his influence at court and friendships with Europe’s leading intellectuals, Dee seemed at the threshold of complete success. And now he had a copy of Steganographia within his grasp.

Trithemius had started work on the book between 1499 and 1500. He sent a letter to his friend Arnold Bostius, a Carmelite monk in Ghent, in which he boasted that once finished it would be a ‘great work… that, if it should ever be published (which God forbid), the whole world will wonder at’. He promised that it would contain a host of hidden writing systems, a way of transmitting messages over great distances using fire, a method of teaching Latin in two hours and a form of communication that can be achieved while eating, sitting or walking without speech, facial expressions or signs. Unfortunately Bostius died before the letter arrived and it was read with horror by his brother Carmelites, who circulated it in an attempt to discredit Trithemius.

A further setback came when Trithemius was visited by an officious dignitary called Carolus Bovillus in 1500. Bovillus later reported that ‘I hoped that I would enjoy a pleasing visit with a philosopher; but I discovered him to be a magician.’ It was his perusal of the Steganographia, in particular its lists of the ‘barbarous and strange names of spirits’ in languages he did not recognise, that convinced him of this.10

Trithemius then abandoned the work, dying in 1516. But the Steganographia lived on, thanks to its advance publicity: manuscript copies of three of the four books mentioned by Bovillus were thought to have survived. They soon acquired mythical status and became as sought after as Aristotle’s lost dialogues.

Dee was intensely excited when he heard of the existence of a copy of the manuscript in Antwerp. Getting his hands on it proved difficult. It involved spending all his travelling money, some twenty pounds, and working through an intermediary, a mysterious ‘nobleman of Hungary’, who in return demanded that Dee ‘pleasure him…with such points of science as… he requireth’.11 Even then, he was only allowed to keep the manuscript for ten days.

Tucked away in his lodgings at the sign of the Golden Angel, he began transcribing the work. It was a difficult task. Ignoring any problems of legibility, the manuscript was a difficult one to copy. It was filled with tables of numbers and endless lists of nearly identical and apparently meaningless names. Dee had to work round the clock to get the job done in time.

On 16 February 1563, he forced his tired fingers to pen one more document: a letter to William Cecil, Queen Elizabeth’s key minister, reporting the discovery of this, ‘the most precious jewel that I have yet of other men’s travails recovered’, and begging for some recompense for his costs, which had left him virtually penniless.12 This discovery demonstrated why Elizabeth’s regime needed someone with his contacts and understanding scouring the Continent for new texts and ideas, and why it was worth paying him to allow him to continue.

When Dee wrote his letter, he knew that it was about to embark on a long and perilous journey that could last a few days or several weeks with no means of knowing when or even if it would reach its destination.

As every sixteenth-century prince and general knew, distance was the first enemy. Roads were often impassable, ‘noisome sloughs’, ‘so gulled with the fall of water that passengers cannot pass’.13 Despite such barriers and discomforts, despite the enormous cost, Tudor nobles, scholars and merchants were determined to travel. There was constant traffic of people and goods across Europe and as a result growing interdependence between regions. A system that promised instant communications over unlimited distances was of obvious importance, and that was one of many innovations that Trithemius had boasted to Bostius the Steganographia contained. When Dee finally managed to read the manuscript for himself, he found that Trithemius was apparently equal to his word. The Steganographia was divided into three books, the last incomplete and of a rather different nature to the first two. Books I and II describe an enormously elaborate system for sending messages between two people using incantations.