The Arch Conjuror of England (20 page)

These mysterious allusions point to the hidden meanings of
Memorials
and ‘Discoveries’. For, amongst the writers verifying Arthur's empire, Dee considered ‘none, of greater name and crediting than Johannes Trithemius’, in his book
On the Seven Planetary Intelligences
.
⁷
‘Discoveries’ also made that book, ‘so great, as lightly it can not of any man be rejected’, central to proving Arthur's empire over thirty kingdoms.
⁸
Dee's respect for Trithemius suggests why he felt ‘strangely stirred up’ by the Trinity to write about the magical restoration of the British Empire ‘Easterly and Southerly’, on mainland Europe.

Trithemius had long been notorious for the invocation of demonic spirits. In 1563 Dee had excitedly promised Cecil a copy of Trithemius's ‘Steganographia’, which superficially taught methods of conjuring angels for communicating messages. Those rituals Trithemius drew from the medieval conjuring tradition attributed to Solomon, Peter of Abano and Honorius of Thebes. Dee possessed Honorius's
Sworn Book
detailing the elaborate preparations, in a manuscript later owned by the playwright Ben Jonson, who lampooned Dee and his ‘scryer’ Edward Kelley in
The Alchemist
.
⁹
Agrippa continued the tradition, and the angels later instructed Dee and Kelley to use Honorius's design of the
Seal Aemeth
, which became the centre of their angelic rituals.
¹⁰

Dee's emphasis on Trithemius is striking evidence of his perspective on empire. He may have been signalling to courtiers familiar with angelic magic that they should perceive Arthur's empire within a magical, cosmic religious framework. Trithemius's book did not discuss Arthur's history
or address questions of empire; rather it described how the angelic spirits governing the seven planets controlled history. Each angel ruled successive periods of 354 years and four months, giving each epoch distinctive characteristics, including Arthur's empire. The cataclysmic political and religious changes that marked each new period formed steps towards the Second Coming of Christ, the Eschaton.

Dee accepted Trithemius's scheme so wholeheartedly that he recalculated his periods. Unlike Trithemius he believed that Anael, the angel of Venus, governed the remarkable concentration of female rulers in mid-sixteenth-century Europe. The November 1572 supernova, which his calculations placed within the sphere of Venus, increased that angel's influence. God was signalling through the new star, he told his Court connection Edward Dyer, that a decaying world would be restored by angelic magic and by the discovery of the philosopher's stone.
¹¹
Therefore, he dated
Memorials
to the year of the world 5540, ‘The Fifth Year, of the Star Sent from Heaven and Returning Directly There’.
¹²

Like his dedication of his
Monas
to Maximilian II, Dee's belief in Arthur's empire shows that, together with his ecumenical generation of European intellectuals, he believed in the centuries-old vision of a reformed world, unified politically and religiously under a Last World Emperor.
¹³
Dee saw Arthur as part of his search ‘for the pure verity, understanding, and recovering of divers secret, ancient, and weighty matters’ of universal knowledge. His first Arthurian studies at Louvain with Gerard Mercator and Gemma Frisius, sometime cosmographer to the Emperor Charles V, had introduced him to Habsburg court culture at nearby Brussels, where Charles celebrated Arthur as the model for a Habsburg Last World Emperor.
¹⁴

For centuries, the default position in English foreign policy had been to maintain good relations with whoever controlled the Netherlands, the primary outlet for England's most important export trade, woollen cloth. Until the 1570s, that meant good relations with the Habsburgs. However, the Netherlands Revolt beginning in the mid-1560s caused a watershed change in Elizabethan policy, to an effectively anti-Habsburg position. This persuaded devotees of the ‘Protestant cause’ that Elizabeth should
become a Protestant Last World Emperor. The ‘learneder sort’ now applied the ancient prophecies to her. After the collapse of Spanish control in the Netherlands in late 1575, some Privy Councillors encouraged her to accept the proffered sovereignty of Holland and Zealand.
¹⁵
One enthusiast believed she would thus become ‘sovereign of the sea’, able to advance Christ's Kingdom and resolve religious differences ‘in all Christendom’. Importantly, this would advance ‘the exploits towards the coast of the Indians’, thanks to Dutch information about the northern passages.
¹⁶
The States-General of Holland and Zealand offered her election as Countess through her descent from Philippa of Hainault, but Leicester's followers broadened this into claims to the whole Netherlands.
¹⁷
They tried to persuade the House of Commons to petition Elizabeth to accept Dutch sovereignty in early 1576. Hatton blocked their efforts, demonstrating his new political importance as a potential conservative leader.
¹⁸

In 1576 even Elizabeth imagined herself bringing peace to the whole of Christendom.
¹⁹
Dee's associate in magical learning, James Sandford, another Leicester client, that year dedicated a book to Hatton which gave Elizabeth the cosmic apocalyptic role previously reserved for the Habsburgs. Plagiarising Cyprian Leowitz's predictions that the great 1583 conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter would bring abrupt imperial changes, Sandford added for good measure the widespread expectation that either the world would end in 1588 or ‘at least governments of kingdoms shall be turned upside down’. Elizabeth, in whom ‘there must needs be some diviner thing … than in the Kings and Queens of other countries’ would lead humanity in the ‘End Times’.
²⁰

Sandford dedicated his translation of Giacopo Brocardo's
The Revelation of St John Reveled
to Leicester. Following Joachim of Fiore, Brocardo foresaw Christ's religion dominating ‘the whole world. No other religion, no other law, and rule to hear than that of the Gospel’.
²¹
Soon the belief that Elizabeth would usher in world peace permeated the excitable underworld of popular prophecy. Manuscripts circulated declaring that ‘Elizabeth now Queen of England is ordained of God to be Queen of Jerusalem’.
²²
It was in this context of prophetic excitement that Dee's
General and Rare Memorials
appeared in September 1577, urging Elizabeth to recover Arthur's vast European empire, to the ‘south, and east’. It was a time when, Dee later recalled, ‘great hope was conceived, (of some no simple politicians), that her Majesty might, then, have become the Chief Commander, and in manner Imperial Governor of all Christian kings, princes, and states’.
²³

Therefore, Dee's assertion of ‘your hi[ghness] just Arthurian claim, and title Imperial’ made an important contribution to the Elizabethans borrowing, or rather stealing, an ancient imperial mythology from the Habsburgs. However, Dee never defined the British Empire as particularly Protestant. He dedicated his now lost treatise on converting the American Indians partly to Elizabeth and her Privy Council, partly to Philip II and the Pope, since all imperial authority must spread universal piety.
²⁴

By the 1570s Dee believed that the feminine angelic influence of Venus pointed to Elizabeth's special role in the sudden change of empire. This was because he felt that angelic revelations inspired many of his ideas, not just global restoration. Since his Cambridge years Dee had regularly prayed for revelation of God's ‘truths natural and artificial … bestowed in the frame of the world’. His desire for angelic teaching of? ‘radical truths’ by God's ‘extraordinary gift’ had been answered in 1555. He later encountered a spirit, ‘Prince Befafes’, who had been with no human since King Solomon but ‘preserved me … from the power of the wicked’ on that occasion.
²⁵
Though he indignantly denied Vincent Murphyn's accusations that he was a ‘Conjuror of wicked and damned Spirits’, Dee wrote ‘1567’ in the margin where he read about demons deceptively promising wealth.
²⁶

Dee also convinced himself that he channelled the Holy Spirit because
Monas hieroglyphica
contained kabbalistic mysteries revealed by the angel Michael.
²⁷
By psychological means that lie beyond historical explanation, Dee believed that
Propaedeumata aphoristica
had been God's ‘extraordinary gift’. The Catholic exile Robert Turner wrote to William Camden in 1574, attacking Camden's friend John Dee for plagiarising much of
Propaedeumata
from the twelfth-century Urso of Salerno. When Camden
questioned Dee, he conceded that superficially ‘our aphorisms are indeed one and the same (only different in order and phrasing)’. He blamed angelic illumination for their ‘admirable divinely influenced consensus’.
²⁸
Even if their books ‘were literally word for word’, God's complete knowledge explained ‘such miracles’.
²⁹

Dee connected both
Monas
and
Propaedeumata
to
Memorials
. His enigmatic title-page design for
Memorials
includes cryptic symbols derived from his Monad, while the Archangel Michael leads the ship of state. His ‘Preface to the Reader’, omitting the claim to divine inspiration for the public, insists that
Propaedeumata aphoristica
had been proved original against ‘the slanderous opinion’ of plagiarism.
³⁰
He explained that he published
Memorials
anonymously because of the ‘Strange and undue speeches’ against his
Monas
.
³¹
Dee spent pages in
Memorials
denying Murphyn's lies that he was a ‘Caller of Devils’.
³²
He did so because crucial parts of
Memorials
‘from above only’, by angelic revelation, not human reason, ‘hath gratuitously streamed down into my Imagination’.
³³
He claimed the book was ‘directed’ by ‘the Omnipotent Spirit of Verity’.
³⁴
This was why Dee confided to the inner circle in ‘Limits’ that the Holy Trinity had ‘strangely, and vehemently’ stirred him up to write about the ‘British Monarchy’, and why parts of his advice had to be reserved for the Queen and Privy Council.
³⁵

Angelic magicians were no strangers to the courts of Renaissance princes. On the contrary, Trithemius dedicated
On the Seven Planetary Intelligences
to the Emperor Maximilian I, who saw himself as the Last World Emperor.
³⁶
After seeing Maximilian II's coronation, adorned with Habsburg global symbolism, Dee dedicated his
Monas
, and its German translation, to that notably ecumenical Emperor.
³⁷
The Monad's ‘real cabbala’ would help Maximilian achieve the ‘perfect piety and religion’ envisaged by prophecies of the Last World Emperor, part of ‘still greater mysteries … described in our cosmopolitical theories’.
³⁸
This did not merely echo Postel's dreams of cosmic reform. Wandering European alchemists regularly earned the epithet ‘cosmopolitan’, and
Memorials
also alluded to Dee's application of natural philosophy ‘in sundry affairs Philosophical, and Cosmopolitical’.
³⁹

Memorials
used the same apocalyptic language as
Monas
, because restoring the British Empire required divine assistance. Dee carefully concealed this in additions to the printed
Memorials
in 1577, under language intended for the inner coterie familiar with angelic magic. This subtext explains why the printed
Memorials
especially emphasised that John Foxe had been forced to remove accusations against ‘the Arch-Conjuror’ from his 1576
Acts and Monuments
. If retained, they would have made Dee's important ‘intended exploits’ appear diabolical, not inspired by ‘the Blessed Trinity’.
⁴⁰
In other words, Dee believed that
Memorials
recorded what angels had revealed about restoring the British Empire.

This included his central idea that a revamped Royal Navy would restore the imperial authority secured by King Edgar's navy in the tenth century. For ‘the self same
Idea
’ as Edgar once had, had ‘gratuitously streamed down into my Imagination’. In magic, angels were
ideas
that streamed down into crystals.
⁴¹
Thus, like magical secrets, Dee could only reveal some of the secrets in
Memorials
verbally to Privy Councillors or Elizabeth, ‘in convenient Time and Place’.
⁴²
Little time remained, felt Dee, writing as ‘Cosmopolites’, citizen of the ‘Mystical City Universal’ meditating on ‘the Cosmopolitical Government’ under God, which was moving swiftly towards the apocalypse.
⁴³

While echoing the apocalyptic tone of
Monas
,
Memorials
also offered Elizabeth the philosopher's stone that Dee had offered to Maximilian. Dee connected angelic revelation with a purified alchemy, which would enable Elizabeth to become the Reforming Empress of the Last Days. Therefore, he added a proposal to
Memorials
in the summer of 1577, that revenue raised for his proposed ‘Petty Navy Royal’ should also support an alchemical research institute hosting ‘Four Christian Philosophers’. This proposal outdid his plans for Gilbert's ‘Academy’ and fuelled wider expectations that Elizabeth would acquire the philosopher's stone in 1577.
⁴⁴
By hiding his proposal under allusions to the alchemical King Khalid, Dee signalled to courtiers ‘whose Insight, is Sharp, and Profound’ the connection between producing the philosopher's stone and restoring the British Empire. Such veiled language again illustrates the many layers of meaning in his imperial writings.
⁴⁵

Connecting Dee's angelic magic with his imperial vision also recovers the hidden purpose of his 1577 ‘Famous and Rich Discoveries’. The first thirty folios of this manuscript, declaring Dee's intentions, are lost. Parts appeared in Samuel Purchas's
Hakluytus posthumus
(1625), which quoted from ‘Discoveries’ how the Earth seemed lost in the immense Heavens, so Dee would go ‘far above all Heavens … and thence with a spiritual and heavenly eye look on earth’.
⁴⁶
This angelic perspective encouraged Dee into a typically Renaissance display of copious justifications for the North-East Passage to Japan and India, and evidence ‘confirming’ the North-West Passage.
⁴⁷
This fulfilled the claim in
Memorials
that ‘Discoveries’ established Elizabeth's title to ‘very large Forrein Dominions’, since Arthur's empire had controlled both northern passages to Asia. Yet the surviving manuscript of ‘Discoveries’ does not reveal how God's Providence ‘will benefit all of Christendom, and Heathens’ by restoring Arthur's empire. Nor does it justify the assertion of
Memorials
that ‘the Secret Centre’ of ‘Discoveries’ hid more ‘than I may, or (in this place) will express’.
⁴⁸
Obviously, the lost part of ‘Discoveries’ contained these mysteries.