The Arch Conjuror of England (13 page)

According to the official indictment, on 10 September 1562 John Prestall had invoked ‘false evil spirits’ to ask ‘the best way to carry out their treasons’. Cecil privately revealed that Prestall had also inspired the plotters with another prediction that Elizabeth would die, this time in March 1563.
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The fact that she had nearly died in October 1562 made Prestall's actions seem even more sinister. Conjuring did not constitute a felony, because that statute had been repealed in 1547, but Cecil's plans for the Parliament of 1563 included penalising conjuring.
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This was why Cecil arranged the show trial of the conspirators on 26 February in Westminster Hall, mere yards from the Parliament chambers.
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All the accomplices were duly condemned, despite claiming they intended to act only after Elizabeth's prophesied death. Yet none was actually executed, according to the historian William Camden, ‘for reverence of the blood Royal’, despite their reliance on ‘the unlawful Arts of cunning Wizards’.
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Cecil's timing helped push the Witchcraft Act through a legislative logjam, criminalising conjuring evil spirits, including to find buried treasure and lost goods, and conjuring love.
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Yet his triumph remained incomplete. Prestall had left for the Netherlands on 10 October 1562, just days before Elizabeth's smallpox forced Cecil to scoop up the other plotters. Outlawed and broke, in late 1563 Prestall grovelled to Cecil for the Queen's letters of protection before returning to England to answer the charges. On arrival he was immediately thrown into the Tower and condemned as a traitor.
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Prestall nursed a lifelong grudge against Cecil, but direct attack would cost him his head. Against Cecil's oppression of himself and his kin through the somewhat imaginary conspiracy, he could only mount an indirect attack against one of Cecil's clients. Prestall could even call upon another
kinsman to carry out this attack. The target was John Dee, who had countered Prestall's predictions in 1558–9, and whose letter from Antwerp of February 1563 expressed his dependence on Cecil. Prestall's chosen weapon was the first edition of John Foxe's
Acts and Monuments
, published in 1563.

Foxe's book reprinted the anonymous
Examination of John Philpot
. Thus
Acts and Monuments
widely publicised Dee's participation in Bonner's seventh examination of John Philpot in November 1555. Dee's brief appearance in that debate was undistinguished, at least in Philpot's version, which was smuggled out to the London Protestant underground, published in Europe in 1556, republished in 1559 and now again by Foxe. Consciously organised as dramatic confrontations, Philpot's ‘tragedies’ used Dee to connect unlawful magic with the Catholic clergy, a theme that Elizabethan Protestants, especially Cecil, would hammer home despite Bonner's attempt to distance his Church from folk beliefs. Philpot recounted Dee's hesitant, nervous attempt to prove the Pope must be Supreme Head of the Church. He rejected Dee's divinity as ‘nothing but scoffing’ and dismissed him as a novice in the subject ‘though you be learned in other things more than I’.
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Philpot's subsequent account made it obvious that those ‘other things’ involved conjuring.

During his imprisonment Philpot exchanged smuggled letters with the London faithful. One letter sent to him reported the treatment of Barthlet Green, a young lawyer held in Bonner's household. When searched, Philpot attempted to destroy the letter, but Bonner reassembled it, and read that Green had been committed to the care of ‘doctor Dee the great conjuror’. This was just months after the great conjuring scandal that summer, in which Dee had faced charges of high treason. Reading the letter to John Christopherson, Dee's Cambridge patron, Bonner claimed Philpot had written it and dishonestly chose ‘to belie me, and to call my chaplain a great conjuror’.
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Subsequently published in the
Examination
, and especially in
Acts and Monuments
, after Elizabeth's accession this letter became crucial evidence to influential London Protestants, confirming Dee's reputation as a ‘conjuror’. It associated him closely with Bonner and other leading Catholic hate-figures, such as the virulently anti-Protestant
Dr John Story, Dee's fellow student at Louvain, and the exiled propagandist Nicholas Harpsfield, another former chaplain to Bonner.

The new regime also brought the ‘Cambridge Connection’ back into power. So those continually reminded of Dee's activities in 1555 numbered many of his university predecessors and contemporaries.
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Their leaders included Edmund Grindal, who initially conceived ‘a book of English martyrs’ and had closely read Philpot's account while at Strasbourg.
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Grindal could not have missed the references to Dee the ‘great conjuror’. When Bishop of London and confronted with Coxe's ‘magic and conjuration’ in 1561, Grindal demanded ‘extraordinary punishment’ for such grievous offences against God. His visitation articles denounced these ‘devilish devices’. Grindal's later reluctance when Archbishop of Canterbury to permit Dee to hold two church livings reflects his distaste for the conjuror.
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Philpot's
Examination
also recorded that Bonner showed the letter about ‘doctor Dee the great conjuror’ to Barthlet Green. The story of his martyrdom followed Philpot's in
Acts and Monuments
, revealing new details about Dee's participation in Bonner's persecution.
Acts and Monuments
printed Green's own long letter describing his treatment by Bonner, including that he ‘was committed to master Dee, who entreated me very friendly’, and whose bed he shared.
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Although Bonner's chaplains often used friendliness to ‘soften up’ Protestants before aggressive examinations and disputations, this hardly reflected badly on Dee.

However, Foxe underlined Philpot's pastoral importance by printing several previously unpublished letters between Philpot and the London godly underground. They included an unsigned letter, purportedly from a friend of Philpot, giving a very different version of Bonner's treatment of Green. All the details in this letter could have been gleaned from the already published
Examination
, including the fact that Green shared a chamber with Dee. Yet the sinister interpretation this letter placed on that fact would come to assume apparently disproportionate importance to Dee. He traced all later slanders about his occult philosophy back to the letter's words that Bonner had ‘since committed [Green] in chamber to Doctor Dee the great Conjuror: whereunto conjecture you’.
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Dee attributed such importance to this letter because it became the kernel of a campaign of manuscript and oral slander against him, justified by its appearance in the authoritative
Acts and Monuments
. In the political, religious and cultural context prevailing after 1563, this accusation of conjuring put him outside both the law and mainstream opinion. The 1563 Witchcraft Act had recriminalised ‘conjurations and invocations of evil spirits’. Cecil's carefully timed prosecution of the Poles had indelibly identified Catholic priests and traitors with conjuring demonic powers against Elizabeth.
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Acts and Monuments
therefore inspired the wider circulation of gossip and manuscript libels that enlarged upon its relatively brief mentions of Dee the ‘conjuror’. The writings have long disappeared, but Dee knew that the peculiar atmosphere of the Court magnified their effects. As the ‘fount of honour’ where the monarch distributed rewards, the Court seethed with gossipy, backbiting rivalry. The Crown's relative poverty during the 1560s, the uncertain succession and religious divisions, only exacerbated that hierarchical society's intense sensitivity about issues of reputation and good name. All this made slander an exceptionally sharp weapon when strategically employed against a competitor.
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Dee's compromised past put a keen edge on that weapon. Thus he complained in his ‘Mathematical Preface’ in 1570 about ‘Vain prattling busy bodies’ gossiping about his ability to conjure spirits, and ‘Fond Friends’ exaggerating his occult powers to thrill their listeners and enhance their own importance. Trying to distract attention from Foxe's evidence about 1555, his ‘Preface’ first tried to trace his sinister reputation to his theatrical illusions at Trinity College over twenty years previously. He defended those ‘marvelous Acts and Feats, Naturally, Mathematically, and Mechanically’ contrived as utterly different from his reputation ‘as a Companion of the Hellhounds, and a Caller, and Conjuror of wicked and damned Spirits’.
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This misleading explanation for his conjuring reputation is too often believed.
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In fact his theatrical natural magic had been forgotten, as Dee's manuscript ‘General and Rare Memorials’ acknowledged in 1576, when he abandoned this diversion. Instead, ‘Memorials’ directly rebutted the
‘Malicious Ignorant’ who attacked Dee's occult knowledge to support their relatives and friends amongst his rivals at Court.
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These devilish liars, Dee wrote, claimed that he did not serve with God's aid like a good subject and Christian, but used ‘wicked and ungodly Art … by the help of Satan’.
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The manuscript ‘Memorials’ then proudly demanded that Elizabeth throw out crafty Satan. The
Memorials
as printed in 1577 wisely replaced this reflection on the Queen's failings with a humble request that she suppress this ‘very Injurious Report … Spread and Credited’ that Dee was not just a conjuror of devils but ‘
The Great Conjuror
: and so, (as some would say),
The Arch-Conjuror
, of this whole kingdom’.
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So finally, in 1576, Dee admitted that his reputation as the ‘Arch-Conjuror’ really began with his forecasting for Elizabeth in 1555 and with Philpot's
Examination
.

However, he attributed its propagation by
Acts and Monuments
to his enemies inserting forgeries into Foxe's book. The ‘Memorials’ claimed that ‘divers impudent lies are placed (long since) among the Records’ of the martyrs, and blamed Foxe and his assistants. The printed
Memorials
shifted responsibility to the forger who had deceived that editorial team with ‘divers untrue and Infamous Reports’. These lies ‘Credited, by reason of the Dignity of the place wherin they were installed’ then enabled the ‘Devilish Cozener’ to fabricate even more ‘Counterfeit letters, or Discourses, answerable to the foresaid foul untruths, unadvisedly Recorded’.

Dee's enemies had exploited the brief description of ‘doctor Dee the Conjuror’ in
Acts and Monuments
to concoct numerous documents, convincing the credulous that Dee dealt with devils and so was an unfit member of the commonwealth. These ‘Cozening forgeries’ probably circulated at Court and in London, but their disappearance makes it difficult for us to appreciate the true extent of the hostile campaign. However, Dee's reference to forgeries inserted into
Acts and Monuments
in 1563 points to the anonymous letter, which had ostensibly invited Philpot to ‘conjecture’ how ‘Doctor Dee the Great Conjuror’ would treat Barthlet Green, as the first of these ‘Counterfeit letters’, because of the counterfeiter whom Dee identified.
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Dee's ‘Memorials’ names him as Vincent Murphyn, in Dee's eyes a low-grade ‘cunning man’ performing ‘Devilish horrible facts’ and ‘fraudulent
feats’ for money. Independent evidence confirms that Murphyn was one of those creatures who inhabited the shadowy Elizabethan underworld, making a living of sorts out of casting political horoscopes and spreading political prophecies, conjuring with nail clippings and hair, and dealing in spirit magic. Murphyn also had a habit of forging letters and other documents to support his invented stories, ingratiate himself with the powerful and to blacken his enemies, including Dee.

According to Dee, even after Murphyn conned John Foxe by fabricating letters about Dee's conjuring with devils, he attached himself to Dee's coat-tails. Murphyn then forged letters allegedly written by Dee, letters that not only supported Murphyn's ‘ungodly and unlawful’ magic but also confirmed ‘the foresaid foul untruths’ in
Acts and Monuments
. Murphyn also deceived his ‘miserable’ clients by claiming to have discussed their cases with Dee. Murphyn thereby threatened to entangle Dee's occult reputation with the lowest kind of popular ‘conjuror’. More importantly, Murphyn did all this because he was John Prestall's brother-in-law.
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Murphyn's forging of the anonymous letter in the 1563
Acts and Monuments
greatly incensed Dee because by identifying Dee as the ‘Great Conjuror’ it indirectly attacked Cecil for his treatment of Murphyn's kin. Murphyn's prolonged and successful slander campaign against Dee highlighted Dee's activities since 1555, thus distracting attention from Prestall, while exposing the hypocrisy of the Elizabethan regime's attack on Catholic magic in the trial of the Poles and the Witchcraft Act of 1563. So long as Dee, with his Catholic priestly orders, his ambiguous record under Queen Mary, his connection with Bonner, and his conjuring reputation enhanced by Murphyn's forgeries, enjoyed the Elizabethan Court's patronage, he threw an unwelcome light on Elizabeth's regime. Murphyn's attack partly explains Dee's inability to secure major appointments in the 1560s and later, as his rivals for patronage exploited Dee's reputation as the ‘Arch-Conjuror’ created and disseminated by Murphyn.
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This context made it easy for Dee's rivals to present all his actions in a sinister light. When he sent copies of his
Monas hieroglyphica
from Antwerp in 1564, Elizabeth had to defend him against ‘University-Graduates of high degree, and other Gentlemen’ who through ‘malicious
fantasy, willfully bent against him’ devised ‘Strange and undue speeches … of that Hieroglyphical writing’ as a form of conjuring. After Dee's return to England in June, Elizabeth's interest in ‘the secrets of that book’ helped to suppress criticism by her ‘little perusal of the same with me’. She encouraged his ‘studies philosophical and Mathematical’, despite being baffled by the
Monas
.
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