The Arch Conjuror of England (3 page)

This new understanding of John Dee demonstrates that his occult philosophy gives him a prominent and legitimate place in histories of a sixteenth-century world saturated by magical thought. In expanding our knowledge of Dee, this book aims to expand our awareness of the sometimes dazzling, often treacherous, Elizabethan Court where he sought advancement. What Dee made, or failed to make, of his opportunities is only part of the story.

In gathering the evidence for this forgotten landscape I have benefited from the assistance of many librarians, archivists and colleagues. I therefore wish to thank the interloan staff of Victoria University of Wellington Library, and the staffs of the National Library of New Zealand, the Alexander Turnbull Library and the Legislative Assembly Library. I owe much to my colleagues Matthew Trundle, Jim Urry and Steve Behrendt, to Linda Gray for her sharp editorial eye on an earlier draft, and to Richard Mason at Yale University Press for his work on the final copy. In San Marino, California, I have been ably helped by the staff of the Henry E. Huntington Library, particularly Mary Robertson of the Manuscripts Department, Christopher Adde, Laura Stalker and Juan Gomez in Reader Services, and, amongst the Readers there, by Barbara Donagan through
discussions at afternoon tea and Bruce Moran through discussions at all times. I am much indebted to Peggy Spear for years of hospitality and laughter in Altadena and Claremont, and to Jan Tappan in Pasadena. In London I am grateful to the staff of the British Library, the National Archives, London Metropolitan Archives, the Guildhall Library and Tottenham Borough Archives. I am indebted to my learned friend Dr Ian Adamson and to Vicky Adamson for their friendship and help over the years, and to Helen and Chris Mountfort. Outside London the librarians of the Bodleian Library, Cambridge University Library, Birmingham City Library, Chetham's Library Manchester, Manchester Cathedral Archives and the John Rylands Library of the University of Manchester have been universally helpful, as have the staff of the record offices of Chester and Cheshire, Devon and Exeter, Essex, Kent, Lancashire, Lincoln, Warwickshire and Worcestershire. To Nona I owe much more for years of incisive support, a receptive ear and a lively appreciation for the intricacies of Tudor Court gossip.

To aid the reader obscure spellings and titles in the text have been modernised.

J
OHN DEE
was born into a world resonating with magical forces, which surrounded him to the end of his life. Within days of his birth on 13 July 1527 he was baptised in the ancient Gothic church of St Dunstan's-in-the-East, just west of the Tower of London, between Tower and Thames streets. His parents, Roland and Jane, like their neighbours, believed that the rituals and prayers of the elaborate ceremony would expel the Devil, save John's soul and rescue him from limbo. The baptismal water, salt and oil had been exorcised by repeated prayers and signs of the cross at a Sunday high Mass. After immersing John in the font three times, the priest, resplendent in a rich cope reflecting the flickering light from dozens of candles burning before images of Christ and the saints, repeated the holy words that gave the hallowed substances power to drive out unclean spirits. He then placed the salt in John's mouth, made the sign of the cross on his head, chest and hands with water, and anointed his forehead with the holy oil, over which he tied a chrisom cloth to be burnt when his mother returned for her purification. Then the holy water was locked away to prevent its use in illicit magic, and John's godparents washed their hands to remove any holy oil.
¹

Fifty years later John would use ‘holy oil’ in a futile attempt to exorcise demons from one of his servants.
²
To the end of his life he believed implicitly that the sign of the cross, and the formulaic repetition of holy
words, had the power to ward off evil. Thus he retained elements of the Catholicism of his childhood and youth, which incorporated the magical beliefs of laypeople into a flexible and familiar ritual marking the seasons of the year. As a child John learnt to pray from a Book of Hours or Primer, designed for laypeople who believed that invisible demonic enemies surrounded them, provoking harm and discord. John would later complain that Satan stirred up backbiters to accuse him of ‘conjuring’. Some Primer prayers did not just appeal for God's help, but like spells and charms presumed that incantations of God's magical names and repeated signs of the cross would conjure angelic assistance against human and demonic enemies.
³
Other prayers would win favour before the King, or protect against thieves, fevers, plague, fire and drowning. Young John's contemporaries attributed the results both to God's grace and the inherent power of His magical names, which also featured in spells conjuring spirits for divination, whether into a child's well-polished thumbnail, a sword, a basin of holy water or a crystal.
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While John was growing to manhood in the 1540s, and learning to conjure his own spirits, such beliefs remained popular from the King's Court downwards. Only gradually would ‘elite’ Catholic clergy tacitly accept Protestant criticisms by distancing themselves from ‘popular’ magical beliefs, leaving John exposed to attacks as a ‘conjuror’.
⁵
John's training in ‘magic’ therefore began with his experience of the Catholic ritual year during the last decade before Protestants and, in response, Catholic reformers began to undermine its comfortable certainties.

At Candlemas on 2 February every parishioner would carry a blessed candle in procession, before offering it to the priest at Mass to burn before the image of the Virgin. The priest would then bless many more candles, giving them power to make Satan's minions flee. Parishioners took these candles home to protect against demons who filled the air during thunderstorms, for reassurance in times of sickness and to comfort the dying.
⁶
The ashes distributed on Ash Wednesday, like the ‘palms’ blessed on Palm Sunday (actually green branches of yew, box or willow) would also protect the house from evil spirits. Handmade crosses assembled during the reading of the Passion story that day were believed to have great protective
powers. At Rogationtide in late May or June, parishioners formed processions to drive the Devil and evil spirits from the parish and restore neighbourly unity, singing the litany of the saints and reading the Gospels, carrying banners, handbells and processional crosses. Dee could recall those occasions sixty years later, when he led processions that beat the parish boundaries at Manchester to settle tithe disputes.
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Most parishioners received the Blessed Sacrament once a year, at Easter, after confessing and being absolved by a priest, and reconciling quarrels with neighbours, the steps Dee would follow in Prague more than fifty years later. The Easter Mass was the peak of the ritual year and emphasised the special priestly power to recreate the body of Christ, flesh and blood that renewed the bonds of the Christian community. Adoring the Blessed Sacrament at its moment of elevation brought great benefits, not only signifying God's protection over body and soul but also working as a magical charm that protected individuals against sickness, bad weather, robbery, the perils of childbirth and epidemics. Every weekday shorter ‘low’ versions of the Mass reinforced belief in the priesthood's special status, when priests actually created the Sacrament and distributed other ‘sacramentals’, holy bread and holy water, which were also imbued with great protective power. Only priests could touch the sacred vessels with bare hands, such was the power that emanated from Christ's body and blood, the ‘angel meat’ as one contemporary described it.
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No wonder John Dee became a Catholic priest himself at the age of twenty-six.

In the light of his later occult studies and ‘imperial’ writings, it is somehow appropriate that Dee grew up in the church of St Dunstan, the much-venerated tenth-century patron saint of goldsmiths, and thus alchemists, renowned for his artistic skill in precious metalwork (hallmarks still change annually on his feast day, 19 May) but excessively prone to visions of angels and evil spirits. According to legend, in one contest he took the Devil by the nose with his red-hot tongs, which became Dunstan's symbol ever afterwards. Sixteenth-century Protestants preferred to retail accusations of witchcraft and necromancy, which had dogged his reputation for five centuries. Dunstan had restored Glastonbury Abbey, the
legendary hiding place for mysterious alchemical books and even the philosopher's stone itself, as Dee would discover. As Archbishop of Canterbury, Dunstan had crowned King Edgar, who was later Dee's model as the first ‘imperial’ monarch of Britain after Arthur.
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Merchants and traders congregated in the crowded, noisy parish of St Dunstan's, whose narrow streets ran down to the busy warehouses, quays and cranes near Billingsgate, London's major dock, the Customs House, and the hundreds of ships anchored just below London Bridge. From there brave men set sail on epic voyages of discovery, and to such men the mature John Dee would give important advice. About the time of John's birth, Robert Thorne tried to interest Henry VIII in exploring the North-West Passage to search for the fabled riches of Cathay, and John would later acquire his speculative map of that route. Mercantile wealth accumulated in less ambitious ventures, particularly exporting woollen cloth to the Netherlands, ensured that St Dunstan's large church was well maintained; over fifteen tombs and a small chapel commemorated the local merchant dynasties. When John was a boy the laity controlled much of the church's decoration and services, through the guilds or brotherhoods of the Holy Trinity and ‘Our Lady’.

Thanks to generations of devout donors, the wall paintings and windows illustrated the Lord's Prayer, the Hail Mary, the Apostle's Creed, the Ten Commandments, the seven works of mercy, the seven virtues, the seven vices and the seven sacraments. The guilds used their income from properties to ensure that candles burned constantly before the images of the crucified Christ, Mary and Joseph on the Rood screen, and before the many brightly painted images of the saints, those powerful advocates and comforting friends whose shrines filled the church. On festival days, devotees would dress those images in rich velvet coats, with little silver shoes. Even though some precious altar vessels disappeared while John's father, Roland, was churchwarden, in August 1549 St Dunstan's could still count in gold and silver to grace its altar four chalices, two basins, two incense censers, two candlesticks, two cressets (for oil), and several silver sheep, religious symbols but also tokens of the wool trade. Above them rose ‘the Great Cross with Beryl’, at its centre a huge crystal shining and
sparkling in the candlelight. Dee must have seen that cross many times, and whenever in after years he crossed himself he would pause in the middle of his chest in memory of that profound junction, where in his occult philosophy he would place the philosopher's stone.
¹⁰

Dee later claimed descent from Welsh princes, even from Arthur and Cadwallader themselves. In reality the House of Dee clung to its Arthurian legends as threadbare covering for its far more modest Tudor status. On the Radnorshire border with England the extended family, there spelt ‘Ddu’, the Welsh for ‘Black’, were accounted mere yeomen cattle farmers, hardly gentlemen at all.
¹¹
When they migrated to London as small-time merchants the Cockneys called them ‘Dye’. Roland had followed the example of his first cousin, Hugh Dee, who had risen highest in the world. Hugh had become a Yeoman of the Crown by 1514. Over the next decade Henry VIII rewarded him with important local positions. By 1526 Hugh had become joint mayor of Worcester. He represented the town in the Parliament of 1529, which rejected the Pope's authority and made Henry VIII Supreme Head of the Church of England.
¹²

Other branches of the Dee family followed Hugh's example. The Court offered ambitious men of limited means and common blood a path to advancement. Through relatively minor positions close to the King, they could develop strong personal bonds with the monarch, who used trusted men to build up his client network in the localities.
¹³
Roland Dee tried to emulate his cousin's career. Roland's prospects brightened with his marriage in 1524 to Jane, the fifteen-year-old heiress of William Wilde of Milton-next-Gravesend in Kent. Jane gave birth to a daughter in 1525 and to John in 1527, then to three more sons. The Wilde family had also risen through service in the King's Chamber and through strong connections with the Kentish magnate, Sir Henry Wyatt. By marrying Jane, Roland gained an alliance that offered political insurance.
¹⁴
He would need it in the rough and tumble of the Tudor political world he now entered. St Dunstan's lay in Tower Ward, dominated by the looming Norman fortress, where both Roland and John would later find themselves imprisoned for backing the wrong side in deadly infighting at Court. If the instruments of torture in the Tower dungeons, the scaffold and gallows on
Tower Hill, had not warned them, the many fresh traitors’ heads displayed on the gatehouse of London Bridge nearby surely would have.