The Arch Conjuror of England (19 page)

In 1581 Lok recalled in his freezing prison cell how he had confounded Dee. For, like Dee, he expected that Frobisher would encounter an advanced civilisation in the North-West Passage. Where Dee imagined Arthurian colonies, Lok used the same travellers’ tales to prove that ‘the new found lands’ were as ‘full of people and full of such commodities and merchandize’ as Scandinavia.
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By 1581 Lok knew enough about the barren reality of Baffin Island to have abandoned hopes of any lingering Arthurian outposts. However, his assumption in 1576 that Frobisher would establish another Muscovy trade explains the emphasis of the first voyage on trading opportunities.

Flattened by an enthusiast whose claims for the duration and cost of his researches for once matched his own, Dee bounced back by offering to teach polar navigation to Frobisher and Christopher Hall. For this, Lok recognised, ‘he deserveth just commendation’, though not as much as he thought. William Borough, Dee's pupil with actual experience sailing in high latitudes, had long been preparing Frobisher for his journey. In the sixteen days of frantic last-minute preparations for their first voyage, Frobisher and Hall had little leisure to grasp Dee's ‘
Perfect Art of Navigation
’, by which he meant practice with his ‘Paradoxal Compass’.
Memorials
, showing Dee's characteristic tactlessness, printed their letter claiming that they tried to follow his instructions, but, ‘for want of learning’, could not understand the art.
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A short-tempered bully who chose to be portrayed clutching a pistol, and who left his wife and children to starve while he haunted the glamorous Court, Frobisher had little interest in complex theories and sailed by traditional dead reckoning. Lok purchased the elementary English books on the sphere best suited to his extremely limited arithmetic.
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The most compelling evidence that Dee and Lok happily cooperated, is that Lok apparently put up £100, a full share, for Dee's investment in the gold-hunting second and third voyages.
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Also, the Privy Council nominated Dee to a commission that would smelt the ore from the second
voyage and organise the third. However, Dee only became an ‘investor’ after three ships returned from the second voyage in October 1577 groaning with allegedly high-grade gold ore. Before this, Dee could waste neither money nor his limited credit on such high-risk speculation, despite reports of gold from the first voyage. Lok was willing to include new venturers after the second voyage because he needed ready cash to pay off the ships.
³⁹
However, Dee's ‘investment’ owed less to his abilities than to his connection to the previously unknown story behind the financing of the second and third voyages.

Lok's enthusiasm for the voyages effectively bankrupted him. By 1580 he had invested about £2,200. He was also personally liable for £2,500 owed by the ‘Company of Cathay’, because the ‘Company’ was never legally incorporated.
⁴⁰
Lok borrowed much of this money on personal bills of exchange, which he claimed cost £500 in interest alone.
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But having raised £800 for the first voyage, Lok's credit eventually ran out, especially when successive assays after the second voyage failed to find gold. He later tried to fob off his creditors by reminding them ‘by whose hands I have taken up the money’. By this he meant Richard Young, another Muscovy merchant, who had known Lok since the 1560s and had invested before the second voyage.
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Young had risen through the Customs service since the 1550s, using the Customs fees he collected to run a lucrative money-lending business, which was well established by 1577.
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Young's excellent credit rating enabled him, after Frobisher's second voyage, to counter-sign ‘many Bills of Exchange … for the said Michael Lock amounting to £1600’ and to pay the principal and interest on Lok's outstanding bonds.
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Young effectively took over the stumbling ‘Company of Cathay’.

This explains Lok's unusual generosity in paying for Dee's share, undoubtedly a condition of Young's financial support, for Dee was Young's brother-in-law.
⁴⁵
Dee's involvement in the Frobisher venture dates only from the time that Young began underwriting Lok's borrowings.
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Dee was therefore advancing his new financial self-interest in advising Elizabeth of her title to ‘Meta Incognita’ in his audiences of November 1577. Yet, though alchemical assays convinced Elizabeth that Frobisher's
ore contained gold, the Privy Council disagreed over its value.
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At this stage Dee remained a passive investor. His eventual appointment as a commissioner owed as much to Young's financial influence as to his own alchemical expertise.

The Privy Council added Young to the commission overseeing the smelting at Dartford on 8 January 1578. Eleven days later they added Dee, after other commissioners came up with excuses to withdraw.
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Young and Dee sat on the commission for several years, but Young's financial resources gave him greater say over the ‘Company of Cathay’.
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In November 1578, after the third voyage, he solved another cash-flow crisis, lending the Company a staggering £400 in coin to pay off the Queen's ship, the
Aid
. In return, Young received the first fragments of gold and silver that the smelters coaxed from the ores in 1579.
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With ‘great difficulty’ Young forced Lok to guarantee his loans by mortgaging his Cheapside and Tottenham properties to him for £1,000 on 3 February 1579. Young thus secretly financed Lok's attempt to buy up all the north-west ore over the following weeks. Most other investors had given up, but Lok believed that the ores would produce sufficient gold to redeem the mortgage before it fell due in June. However, when the ores proved worthless, Lok defaulted. Young claimed the properties in July, provoking an epic legal battle that rumbled on until Lok died in early 1621.
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Therefore, Dee's apparent prominence in the Frobisher voyages only reflected Young's financial clout. This underlines the fact that Dee's ‘imperial’ writings were not simply concerned with American exploration. The real purpose of Dee's ‘imperial’ writings – applying his magic to advance the ‘Protestant cause’ during the central crisis of Elizabeth's reign, the Netherlands Revolt – opens new vistas onto that European political crisis, to which we now turn.

F
ROM ABOUT
1576 to 1583, Dee's occult philosophy became entangled with the politics of the Elizabethan Court as it struggled with a European crisis. Two significant features of that Court explain why. The first characteristic all Renaissance courts shared with modern politics. Courtiers inhabited a political hall of mirrors, officially reflecting their sovereign's dazzling light, but more often enabling politicians to present their rivals in unflattering postures, by exposing their activities from unexpected angles. What we now see as discrete events resulting from various causes, courtiers could weave together for ideological ends, presenting them to the monarch as evidence of a coherent threat. Dee would feel the force of this distortion.

In England's particular religious and strategic crisis during these years, this general political ‘spin’ interacted with a feature specific to the Elizabethan Court. The line of ideological difference ran not between Leicester and Burghley but between outright Protestant Privy Councillors and a far more conservative Queen. Burghley struggled to convince a reluctant Elizabeth of the reality of an international popish plot, which since the first moments of her reign had tried to subvert true religion and her people's obedience, kill her and place Mary Queen of Scots on her throne. The papists knew, Burghley insisted, that they must destroy her to succeed in their determined assault on the ‘Protestant cause’.

On the other side, conservatives emphasised that tolerating what they stigmatised as ‘puritan’ disobedience to the Church established in 1559 would subvert due order and usher in ‘popular’ or ‘anabaptist’ government. Anti-Catholicism and anti-Puritanism, like modern ‘wedge-issues’, therefore enabled courtiers to ‘spin’ events in ways targeted at the Queen's anxieties and prejudices. At moments of delicate balance, contingent events could therefore disproportionately influence her decisions. Even Dee understood this. Coming across Fernandez de Oviedo's bitter reflection on the ‘problem of counsel’ in his
General and Natural History of the Indies
during these years, Dee wrote in the margin ‘NOTE: Either Truth is kept from Princes or They will not believe it, being told’.
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This did not just affect the Queen's notoriously fickle policy decisions but also affected the man to whom Dee dedicated his
Memorials
, Christopher Hatton, who at that very moment in 1576–7 was making his delicate transition from handsome favourite to trusted counsellor. Hatton knew his best course lay in tracking closely to Elizabeth's twists and turns, but more outspokenly Protestant advisers could apply the anti-Catholic ‘wedge’ to force him away from his conservative instincts. It affected Dee, not only determining his access to Elizabeth at crucial moments for the ‘Protestant cause’ but also what he wrote: when politicians ‘spun’ events to suit their ideological agendas, the intellectuals they co-opted had to ‘spin’ their writings to follow suit.

Therefore, Dee's imperial writings contained hidden messages. Like the courtiers for whom he wrote, their surface appearances often concealed underlying purposes. One of Dee's drawings for the highly symbolic title page of
Memorials
claimed that ‘more is hid, than uttered’, an acknowledgement phrased in discreet Latin in the printed version.
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To unearth the hidden messages of his ‘imperial’ writings we should read them as one collective text, since Dee constantly reiterated earlier ideas in later works. Broadly speaking, his writings show increasing interest in Arthur's European conquests. Their apparent concern with American empire conceals Dee's deeper interest in recovering Britain's empire in mainland Europe, in the unusual circumstances of the late 1570s, ‘Wherof
in this
place
, or of the foresaid means, how to bring this royal purpose to pass farther discourse is not to be holden’.
³

Dee's hidden agenda emerges when we listen closely to his stated intentions for, and descriptions of, his writings. Finding that agenda restores their connection with Dee's practice of magic. This context, perhaps surprising for the modern reader, actually explains his perspective on Elizabeth's ecumenical empire. Far from marginalising Dee from the Elizabethan Court, his reputation as a ‘magus’ along with his ‘philosophical’ knowledge and practices helped to shape his imperial vision. In the right circumstances they made him more useful to politicians seeking to advance the ‘Protestant cause’.
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Yet when conservatives pushed back with their own ‘spin’ on affairs, he was cut out of policymaking.

We can begin recovering Dee's wider imperial vision by tracing the connections between his writings, which Dee collectively entitled ‘The British Monarchy’. ‘Limits of the British Empire’ reveals Dee's magical imperial perspective, because that manuscript, written only for Elizabeth and her Privy Councillors, could openly discuss the hidden meanings of
Memorials
and ‘Discoveries’, which carefully screened Dee's magical ideas from a wider public. In ‘Limits of the British Empire’, Dee revealed to the inner circle that lately he had been ‘strangely, and vehemently stirred up’ by the Holy Trinity and ‘ordered, to pen divers advices, and Treatises, in the English Language’, that is,
Memorials
and ‘Discoveries’. Only if Queen and Privy Council permitted would her ‘British subjects’ understand and ‘practise’ those works, because in
Memorials
‘the method … covertly proceedeth (occasion so served)’, though most could be understood ‘vulgarly’. This confirmed Dee's warning about
Memorials
that ‘more is hid, than uttered’.
Memorials
in turn warned that ‘in the Secret Centre’ of ‘Discoveries’ there ‘is more bestowed, and stored up than I may, or
(in this place)
will express’.
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So both
Memorials
and ‘Discoveries’ hid meanings accessible only to the elite, from which ‘many more [meanings] may consequently be thought upon, and inferred’. Such hidden meanings explain why, although it was printed in fifty copies by September 1577, Elizabeth commanded Dee not to distribute
Memorials
, which in August 1578 was ‘yet stayed in
my hands’. In return for his occult advice, Dee required free access throughout Elizabeth's dominions under her ‘protection absolute’ to perform mysterious future services for the ‘British Empire’. These would follow not human policy but ‘the Almighty his will and direction’. They recall Dee's offer to Burghley in 1574 to find buried treasure by spiritual means. Dee's advice directed by God would recover Elizabeth's northern and western British Empire and, more intriguingly, the ‘homage and arrearages’ of ‘your Easterly and Southerly disdainful Vassals and Tributaries’ – because Dee's advice also pertained to areas ‘
besides
that portion of the world’, meaning besides America.
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