The Arch Conjuror of England (10 page)

Bacon's theories about optics had influenced the astrological teachings of the Louvain mathematicians. Yet Louvain had also exposed Dee to the empirical application of optics in the Low Countries’ tradition of naturalistic painting. David Hockney has recently demonstrated how this tradition originated with Van Eyck, quite suddenly, around 1420–30. Artists learned to use lenses and mirrors to project external scenes onto walls and canvases in darkened rooms, a miraculous effect that Bacon had described two centuries earlier. Using this projection technique, artists from the Low Countries harnessed the creative power of light to paint, apparently by ‘magic’, realistic landscapes and portraits. This tradition reached its height during Dee's time at Louvain, when Gemma Frisius learned about the effect.
²³
Optical effects delighted Dee as they had Bacon, and in 1557–9 Dee wrote on ‘the refraction of rays’ through lenses and mirrors, and the secrets of artistic perspective.
²⁴
He owned Albrecht Dürer's writings on the subject. Dee's experience of practical optics stimulated his acquisition of Bacon's works in the mid-1550s.
²⁵

Dee found ancient support for astrology in the Arabic philosopher al-Kindi's treatise
On Rays
, which taught that occult rays constantly pouring out of stellar bodies determined events and human actions. Dee's interest in al-Kindi probably dated from his time at Louvain, for like the Louvain group al-Kindi applied his ray theory to weather predictions. Reading Bacon convinced Dee that he could further vindicate astrology by systematically measuring the intersecting occult influences from all celestial bodies. Applying optical rules and mathematical calculations to celestial rays, in 1558 he produced
Propaedeumata aphoristica
(or ‘An Aphoristic Introduction Concerning Certain Outstanding Virtues of Nature'), which merely sketched a staggeringly complex programme of geometric optics.

Like many of Dee's ideas, this worked better in theory than in practice. Even his ‘very general’ calculations became hopelessly involved, so that by Aphorism 117 the ‘industrious workman’ needed to measure the influence of over twenty-five thousand different celestial conjunctions. Nor was the idea exactly new. Dee had no very convincing answer to critics who later accused him of plagiarising his aphorisms from the
twelfth-century doctor Urso of Salerno. When Dee began casting horoscopes he reverted to traditional methods.
²⁶

The contrast between exalted theory and mundane reality became particularly obvious for Dee towards the end of Mary's reign and the beginning of Elizabeth's. To supplement his income from Upton, and whatever honorarium he received from Bonner, he worked as a jobbing mathematician and astrologer in London, judging by the mathematical treatises he later claimed to have written in these years. In 1554 he had turned down an offer from two impeccably orthodox Catholic academics to teach mathematics at Oxford. Apart from teaching terrestrial and celestial perspective, Dee now gave practical lessons on the astronomical instruments he had brought back from Louvain. In 1557 he applied Gemma Frisius's teaching to a typically ingenious treatise on a hundred additional uses for the astronomical ring, which was originally designed to tell time by the sun.
²⁷
He continued to consult for the Muscovy Company, further developing the ‘paradoxal compass’ with a work on nautical triangles and the ‘analogical compass’. He claimed to have invented a mathematical art he named ‘Hypogeiodie’ in 1560, to settle conflicting claims over unusually fractured coal seams. It actually applied German techniques for plotting underground compass bearings on the surface by spherical geometry.
²⁸

Dee's mundane consulting did not prevent him from more elevated theorising about the cosmos. His Monad, combining the symbols of all the planets and metals, appears on the title page of
Propaedeumata
, concentrating rays emanating from the sun and moon and connecting the four elements. Dee believed its comprehensive powers included ‘whatever wise men seek’. Even when focused on astrological optics, in the
Propaedeumata
Dee remained mindful of his recent alchemical reading. For the celestial rays poured down upon practical alchemy. In Aphorism 52 Dee suggested that those skilled in ‘catoptrics’ could intensify rays through focusing mirrors. Such a boost to natural forces resembled Bacon's idea of alchemy as natural magic, harnessing hidden principles to perfect Nature's work.
²⁹

Dee sent Mercator a copy of his
Propaedeumata
, enclosing the alchemists’ planetary symbols ‘in a certain Monad’, the symbolic key to the underlying unity of nature, encrypting profound alchemical secrets.
³⁰
Contemplating the Monad over the next seven years, he would discover another approach to the underlying unity of Nature, through the kabbalistic study of language, writing and all Creation. He sketched the potential of this approach in his
Monas hieroglyphica
(1564). Yet even Dee's contemporaries, accustomed to enigmatic books of luxuriant eccentricity, would struggle to understand his allusive arguments in the
Monas
.

J
OHN
D
EE
was fortunate that the circumstances surrounding Elizabeth's accession on 17 November 1558, plus help from powerful patrons, enabled him to recover from his disastrous choice to abandon her in 1555. Fundamentally he shared the new Queen's religious and philosophical outlook, and he could prove his usefulness in counteracting both French propaganda against her and the magical resistance of die-hard Catholics to her accession.

Elizabeth and Dee both practised an evangelical, Christocentric style of religion, venerating the sign of the cross in the private prayers that they much preferred over preaching. They shared the belief that Christ was really present in some form in the eucharistic bread and wine. Elizabeth easily accepted later suggestions, some made by Dee, that she could reconcile Protestants and Catholics as an ecumenical Last World Empress. In part this reflected her learning in occult philosophy. She believed Dee's interpretations of the celestial signs foreshadowing the coming Apocalypse. The means to bring about this final reconciliation included alchemy and the philosopher's stone, which like Dee she avidly pursued throughout her life, as we shall see.

More immediately, from late 1558, the French, again at war with England, stepped up their propaganda. They publicised Nostradamus's enigmatic prophecies of catastrophe for Elizabeth's anticipated religious
changes. English writers had to acknowledge that these effectively stirred up popular anxiety.
¹
Moreover, within days of Mary's death on 17 November the Privy Council arrested Anthony Fortescue, comptroller to the just deceased Cardinal Pole, Thomas Kele and John Prestall. They were accused of ‘conjuring’. This was the first of several occasions when Prestall cast horoscopes or consulted spirits, predicting Elizabeth's imminent death and the succession of his Catholic near kinsman Arthur Pole, great-grandson of the Duke of Clarence and the Cardinal's nephew. Sir William Cecil, ever paranoid about Spanish plots, believed that the Poles had been egged on in their rebellious plans by the Spanish ambassador, in whose house they were arrested.
²

An ambitious but spendthrift Surrey gentleman, Prestall spent the next thirty years alternately involved in magical conspiracies against the Elizabethan regime, seeking his recall from impoverished exile by informing on his fellow exiles, or buying his way out of prison by offering to apply his alleged alchemical skills. Several times his fate became entangled with John Dee's, and their continuing occult conflict from late 1558 partly explains the persistence of slanders that Dee conjured evil spirits.

Dee's patron the Earl of Pembroke attended those Privy Council meetings that ordered Prestall's arrest with his accomplices. Pembroke recognised the political threat their conjuring and prophecies posed to an infant regime bogged down in an unpopular war, a sluggish economy and an empty treasury. However, the Council still lacked legislation against conjuring, as they had when faced by Dee's similar activities in 1555. Therefore, they sent the culprits for ‘severe punishment’ under ecclesiastical law to the Bishop of London.
³
This was still Edmund Bonner, and Dee may still have been his chaplain. No record proves that Bonner punished Prestall.

However, this ironic situation does suggest how the Privy Council's need to counter Prestall helped Dee to recover Elizabeth's goodwill. He later recalled how in early December 1558 Elizabeth ‘very graciously took me to her service’, recommended by Pembroke and Robert Dudley, her rising favourite and leader of the Dudley clan, which both Dees had served. With their memories of 1555, Pembroke and Dudley appreciated
how Dee's occult knowledge could be used against Nostradamus and Prestall's dangerous prophecies. Dee's biographers usually state that he chose Elizabeth's coronation date, but the Council seems to have settled on 15 January even before Dee's return to favour. Against the occult threats facing the new Queen, Dee performed a greater service at Dudley's suggestion, delivering an electionary horoscope about the day ‘appointed for her Majesty to be crowned in’.
⁴

Dudley would utilise the power of occult knowledge at Court until his death in 1588. However, Dee's electionary horoscope, based on Ptolemy and his numerous Arabic and medieval followers, did not ‘elect’ a time for Elizabeth's coronation but interpreted the horoscope governing her coronation day. Doubtless he foresaw a long and glorious reign, a useful counter to Nostradamus and Prestall's dire warnings of imminent catastrophe.
⁵
Yet as Elizabeth's coronation procession wound slowly from the Tower towards Westminster through a joyous, holiday crowd, pausing regularly for intensely loyal, but also intensely Protestant, pageants, neither monarch nor astrologer would have much appreciated the real future that lay before them.

Dee's first service as an astrological consultant to Elizabeth's Court received an ominously meagre reward. In 1559 he became rector of distant Long Leadenham in Lincolnshire. The fact that he found it necessary to reside there for the next few years emphasises the meagreness of the position.
⁶
The appearance of a second edition of
The Examination of John Philpot
in 1559 refreshed memories of Dee's assistance to Bonner, and Foxe's Latin translation spread the story throughout Europe.
⁷
Elizabeth, not for the last time, failed to keep her large promises of doubling Edward VI's pension when she received Dee. Therefore, he embarked on a scholarly tour from January 1562 to June 1564 that included Rome.
⁸
However, he headed first for Louvain and Antwerp, where he knew he could acquire books for his new interest in Kabbalah.
⁹

Dee also planned to copy rare manuscripts of natural philosophy in great European libraries, particularly the Vatican and St Mark's, Venice. He left England intending to travel only for a year. He took just £20 in cash, supplemented by bills of exchange secured against his Church
living. In mid-February 1563 he wrote from Antwerp begging Cecil for more time and money, announcing the stupendous discovery of a manuscript by Johannes Trithemius that offered ways to communicate through spirits and angels.
¹⁰
‘Steganographia’, or ‘Hidden Writing’, described how to invoke spirit messengers to convey messages instantly. When he wrote, Dee knew that these spirits included the ‘malicious and untrustworthy’ Pamersiel, and that Trithemius openly identified many spirits as demons. Trithemius had a long-established reputation for trafficking with evil spirits, which evidently did not worry Dee. When he read Trithemius's claim that angels revealed arcane knowledge to men who served God in love and purity, he commented in the margin, ‘God has given this to us sometimes’.
¹¹

Apparently Dee never realised that the incantations in ‘Steganographia’ could not invoke angels but contained encrypted instructions for concealing messages inside gibberish or inoffensive ‘plain text’. Not until the
Key
to
Steganographia
(1606) could Books I and II properly be decoded, and Book III's numeric codes defeated all cryptanalysis until 1998.
¹²
Dee therefore continued to reverence Trithemius's authority on angelic matters and later pronounced his book
On the Seven Planetary Angels
conclusive proof for Arthur's great European empire.

Cecil's response to Dee's offer of demonic magical communication illuminates his general attitude to occult philosophy. He wrote supporting Dee's further travels, enabling him to remain abroad until June 1564. Cecil clearly rated ‘Steganographia’ highly. Like his keen interest in alchemy, this may have dated from his Cambridge days. Probably he sent Dee money, for Dee could hardly have travelled for another year in Europe only by teaching ‘points of Science’ to noblemen like the Hungarian who let him copy ‘Steganographia’.
¹³