Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City (20 page)

When the audience was at an end and Tycho had stepped out of the room, secretary Barwitz was summoned inside for a word with the Emperor. He returned to tell Tycho that His Majesty, who obviously did not miss a thing, had looked down from his window and had seen him arriving at the castle, and, ever the beady-eyed collector, had wondered what was the mechanical device attached to his carriage. It seems this was a milometer, of Tycho's own making. Tycho had his son fetch the thing, and Barwitz brought it into the Emperor's chamber, returning after a little while to say that His Majesty had one or two such devices already - well, he would have, of course - but not so large or made in the same way. Tycho hastened to offer his as a gift, but Rudolf said he would content himself by having one of his craftsmen construct a similar one based on Tycho's design. Barwitz also assured Tycho again of the Emperor's high regard for him, and his determination to confer him with an annual grant and to provide suitable quarters for him and his family. Tycho was delighted; here at last was a royal who knew how to treat a man of genius.

Despite his capriciousness and extreme proneness to suspicion, Rudolf was indeed a remarkably steadfast patron. He stuck doggedly by his magicians and necromancers - what is the collective noun: an alembic of alchemists, an abyss of alchemists? - despite their inevitable failure to locate the philosopher's stone or distil the elixir of life. Repeated disappointments and even betrayals could not destroy his faith in the power and efficacy of magic. When the great Doctor John Dee, 'who understood the language of the birds and could speak the idiom of Adam the protoplast', as Ripellino tells us, arrived in Prague in 1584 he brought with him the infamous Edward Kelley, who among other unlikelihoods boasted of being able to conjure spirits in Dee's magic mirror, a sphere of smoky quartz the Doctor claimed had been given him by the angel Uriel. Kelley was an Irishman, or at least was of Irish descent, officially but somewhat confusedly described in the
(national records of the Czech legislative assembly, the
), as 'Eduard Kelley, born an Englishman, of the knightly kin and house called Imaymi in the county of Conaghaku in the kingdom of Ireland' Kelley was known to Praguers as a
Jahrmarkts-doktor,
or mountebank, and, even less flatteringly, a
cacochymicus,
which does not require translation. His real name was Talbot, and he was born not in the 'country of Conaghaku' (Con-naught?) but in Worcester. In 1580 he was arrested for forgery and as punishment had his ears cut off by the Lancaster executioner. Earlessness, added to his hooked nose and pinkish eyes, gave him a decidedly, and no doubt useful, aspect of the diabolical. In his wanderings about England he had discovered in a Welsh pub, so he swore, a magical document which had come from the grave of a magician, along with two phials, containing respectively a red and a white powder. The document was written in an indecipherable language, but Kelley was convinced it contained the formula for the philosopher's stone. He brought parchment and phials to Dee's laboratory at Mortlake in London, and was appointed the great man's assistant. Doctor Dee, it seems, was as gullible as his future royal patron. But then, Dee himself had claimed to have found some of the elixir of life in the ruins of Glastonbury.
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On a visit to England in 1583, the Palatine of Sieradz, Olbracht
a great Catholic landowner,visited Dee at Mortlake, where a spirit appeared in Dee's crystal ball and predicted that
would inherit the Polish throne. The thrilled and grateful
promptly invited Dee and his assistant to come to Poland, and it was from Cracow, perhaps hurrying away from another disappointed patron -
never did get to wear crown of Poland - that the pair arrived in Prague only a year after Rudolf had transferred his court there from Vienna in 1583. Dee, whose fame as Elizabeth of England's chief sorcerer had gone before him, was welcomed by Rudolf - Dee had visited Rudolf's father, Maximilian, twenty years before, and dedicated one of his most important works, the
Monas Hieroglyphia,
to him - and proceeded at once to bamboozle the Emperor by pretending to transmogrify mercury into gold, and conjuring, with Kelley's help, a host of spirits in his crystal mirror. This seems to have been the only time Dee was able to speak directly to the Emperor. The Catholic party in Prague was highly suspicious of this English magician, a favourite of the anathematised Queen Elizabeth, after all, and a Protestant, or so they thought - in fact, Dee held to a chiliastic form of universal Christianity unfettered by dogma. By 1586, two years after his arrival in Prague, Dee was being accused by the Papal Nuncio of having dealings with the Devil, and Rudolf had no choice but to banish him, ordering him to be gone within a day; Dee remained in the area, however, under the protection of the rich nobleman Vilem of
on his estate at
returning to England in 1594. Unadvisedly, Rudolf set Kelley in Dee's place.

Kelley did very well for himself in the Emperor's service, earning enough gold to buy a brewery and a mill and a number of houses in the city - one of them, according to legend, the house in the sinister Cattle Market, now Charles Square, in which Dr Faust lived; the
Dum, or Faust House, still stands at Karlovo
40.
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Fortuna, however, is a fickle mistress, and after his time at the top Kelley's subsequent turns of the wheel were all downward. In 1591 he killed one of Rudolf's courtiers in a duel, and although he lost no time in going on the run, the Emperor's police caught up with him, and after another sword fight he was imprisoned at
Castle. He remained there for two and a half years, then one night, having bribed the jailer, he lowered himself from the window of his cell on a rope. However, the rope broke and he fell into the moat, where he was found next morning, unconscious and with a broken leg. Rudolf relented and allowed him to return to Prague, where his leg, by now infected, had to be amputated and replaced with a wooden one. So now the earless sorcerer was also a pegleg. By now he had run out of properly and money, his Bohemian wife had to pawn her jewellery, and eventually Rudolf had the bankrupt thrown into prison again, this time at Most Castle, eighty kilometres upriver from Prague, from where even the diplomatic intervention of Sir William Cecil, Queen Elizabeth's Secretary of State, could not rescue him. Never daunted, Kelley attempted the rope trick again, but again the rope broke and he fell once more into the moat, smashing his remaining leg. Hauled back to his cell, he took his own life by drinking a phial of poison smuggled to him by his wife, who perhaps was, understandably, impatient for her viduity. Kelley died on November 1st, 1597.
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