The Arch Conjuror of England (31 page)

Meanwhile the political situation in Cracow turned against Laski. Emboldened by the angelic prophecies, he joined a conspiracy against Stephen Bathory. Unfamiliar with Polish politics, Kelley proved slow in appreciating the danger. Stephen struck quickly against the conspirators. His Chancellor paraded the renegade Samuel Zborowski through Cracow on 7 May, and Laski was quickly implicated. When Dee asked the angels that day for news of Laski, Kelley reported an enigmatic vision of a man overcoming obstacles. Almost immediately they heard from Laski that ‘he was in some cumber and hindrance’. He escaped punishment only with support from Cracow's citizens.
⁷⁰

Zborowski was beheaded in Cracow's marketplace. Out of his depth, Kelley could give only confused responses to the increasing danger. On 21 May the angels again promised Poland to Laski if he served God, because ‘The King and Chancellor have sold the people of this land, and are sworn Turks’. Yet at the same time they commanded all three to flee to the Emperor Rudolph II at Prague. Local opinion thought Dee and Kelley's situation to be precarious. One of Walsingham's correspondents reported that some citizens believed Dee had quit ‘a certain estate for an uncertain hope’ but ‘will repent of it at leisure’. Another Englishman who had witnessed Laski's magnificent entertainment in England now found him ‘very bare’ in Cracow.
⁷¹

While the political situation remained confused over the next two months, the angels continued to dictate invocations. There remained calls for thirty heavenly princes and governors of kingdoms, who ‘vary the Nature of things’.
⁷²
As these began on 21 May, Dee's fears burst out in his questions whether Elizabeth still lived and how Laski should deal with the Chancellor. The angels fudged the latter question but again urged them to take Laski to Prague.
⁷³
As a long-established Habsburg partisan, Laski could give Dee and Kelley entrée to Rudolf's inner circle. The angels
repeatedly promised they had prepared Rudolf's heart for Dee's warnings. However, if Rudolf remained ‘willful’, he would die on 19 September, when the world would suddenly alter. This date agreed with John Harvey's prognostication that the solar eclipse of 30 April 1584 would particularly affect Bohemia. It presaged the Sultan's death in September 1584 and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The forecast would encourage Dee to inform Rudolf that September of his future triumph over both Turk and Devil, and of the Empire of the Last Days.
⁷⁴

Though God had chosen Laski as another Joshua, the angels revealed that ‘the King's Enchanters’ had impoverished him, using wax-image magic. This prevented them leaving for Prague, and in late June Dee again pressed for angelic guidance to buried treasure.
⁷⁵
However, Kelley placed his hopes in alchemy. In late June he began a new course of dictation, again using grids of angelic letters. These contained all human knowledge, including the alchemy of stones and metals. When apparently illuminated by divine light, Kelley easily used the grids to construct angelic words. These holy names gave the adept power over evil angels to transmute metals. They also offered foreknowledge about Christ's Kingdom on Earth, the coming of Antichrist, that Dee was destined to set up the Cross in Constantinople on 15 September 1585, and that the angels obeyed when they were called by God's hidden names.

As Kelley pointed out, ‘this is somewhat like the old fashion of Magick’. Indeed, alongside Kelley's apocalyptic visions of these weeks the angelic guidance reveals his long experience in traditional
grimoires
, books of ceremonial magic that bound spirits by magic circles, ritual spells and incantations.
⁷⁶
Dee acquiesced in these suspect rituals, because of the great privilege the two men were receiving, the language through which they shared God's angelic knowledge.

Dee also knew they needed money to escape their precarious political situation. The angels promised money ‘by Art’.
⁷⁷
Kelley used both arguments in early July, when Dee began to notice human errors in his revelations. Kelley reiterated that only Enoch received the language to constrain the angels. Like Adam, he conversed with God and the angels in the original tongue.

By 23 July 1584 (Gregorian calendar) the final call of the forty-eight ‘keys to God's storehouses’ had been delivered, and Kelley belatedly grasped local political realities. In a shattering assault, an angel accused Dee of disobedience for not departing for Prague without Laski. God had abandoned Laski, who should no longer receive the divine secrets. Dee was forgiven when he pointed out their poverty. Further instruction in the Book of Enoch, the angels promised, would be given in Prague. By 31 July, through mysterious means, Dee and Kelley managed to raise sufficient money for the journey. After a tedious eight-day coach ride they arrived in Prague on 9 August, now expecting Laski to follow after God forgave him.
⁷⁸
They brought with them the angelic promises of the Last Days and the Book of Enoch, the key to all the world's mysteries. Surely the Emperor must listen, or be cast down from his throne.

T
HE
H
ABSBURG
Court at Prague shone as the European centre of prophetic expectation. The Habsburgs had long attracted cosmopolitan intellectuals aching for universal reform and religious reconciliation. Thinkers who rejected rigid orthodoxies moved restlessly across the religious spectrum, seeking mystical resolution of their spiritual uncertainties. Dee's transition from Catholic priest to conforming Elizabethan layman, to participant in angelic revelations, eventually to dutiful confessor and recipient of Catholic Communion, seems almost conventional by comparison with men he would encounter in Bohemia, such as Francesco Pucci and Christian Francken.
¹

The ‘Catholic’ and ‘Protestant’ labels imposed by us in hindsight hardly fit many of those attracted to Rudolf II's Court. In the relative anonymity of Prague their spiritual pilgrimages could end in extremely heterodox beliefs. Kelley's emotional instability and eclectic mishmash of ideas in the angelic revelations reflect the city's religious atmosphere. His denials of Christ's divinity and claims for the transmigration of souls provide a fleeting glimpse of a lost, exotic religious landscape.
²

These cosmopolitan thinkers sought universal conciliation from Habsburg emperors, such as Maximilian II, who resented Rome's increasingly strident orthodoxy and refused its last sacraments on his deathbed. Dee had dedicated
Monas
to Maximilian, believing that its revelation of
the universal secrets of Creation would support the House of Austria's universal rule. As ‘Cosmopolites’ Dee knew of Laski's attempt to recover Greek Christendom with Maximilian's implicit support. So Dee and Kelley expected Laski to assist them in pressing apocalyptic reformation on Rudolf at Prague.

They had some grounds for expecting a positive response. Rudolf's ecumenical outlook arose from his increasing alarm that Rome's Counter-Reformation undermined his imperial sovereignty. Yet he also feared Protestant aspirations to political independence. His melancholic spiritual uncertainty led him to pursue divine certainty through occult philosophy, especially alchemy.
³
Dee and Kelley would discover that Rudolf's uncertainty made him vulnerable to the powerful forces buffeting his throne in the late 1580s, particularly from Rome.

Dee's host in Prague in 1584, Tadeus Hajek, an accomplished alchemist, astrologer and astronomer in touch with moderate thinkers across Europe, had been personal physician to Charles V, Maximilian II, and now Rudolf, whom he counselled on his universal aspirations. Hajek probably met Dee at Maximilian's coronation in 1563, after which Dee had returned to Antwerp via Bohemia. All Hajek's sons studied in England, and he befriended Philip Sidney. Dee owned Hajek's book on the supernova of 1572, another reason for Hajek to correspond with Dee.
⁴
Hajek had collaborated with Laski on Habsburg plans to unite Christendom against the Turk. As Rudolf's confidant in cosmology, astronomy, medicine and alchemy, Hajek potentially gave Dee and Kelley access to the Emperor. Other circumstances encouraged them. They began angelic conversations in Hajek's house, where the study walls painted by a previous seeker after ‘the holy stone’ featured six alchemical vessels. They read his traditional summary of alchemy as ‘a child's game and the toil of women’.
⁵

The angels stressed that the angel of Revelations 16:12 was pouring out the sixth vial, presaging unclean spirits working miracles. Therefore, they commanded Dee to warn Rudolf that the Angel of the Lord rebuked him for his sins but also promised him universal rule if he listened to Dee in ‘this last time’.
⁶
Even Dee balked at this presumption when he wrote to
Rudolf on 17 August. Instead he emphasised the ‘divine plan’, bringing them together through incredible patterns like the kabbalistic patterns revealed by his
Monas
, which he enclosed. He claimed that three successive Habsburg emperors had valued his learning: Charles V, Ferdinand and Maximilian II.

Dee's previous Habsburg connections underlined the divinely inspired prophecy in Theorem XX of
Monas
, which promised that numerological unfolding of the alchemical mysteries within the four elements would exalt either Maximilian ‘or else some other member of the House of Austria’. The numerological correspondence between Dee, the fourth letter of all divine alphabets, and the Emperor, the fourth Habsburg he would serve, fulfilled that prophecy in Rudolf. Theorem XX also presaged this apocalyptic moment, which offered Rudolf a place among the twenty-four elders gathered around God's throne in the vision of Revelation 4:4.
⁷

Even so, Dee kept his letter for another week, while the angels reiterated their special election as vessels for God's wisdom, the privilege Dee had claimed in
Monas
. God also renewed with Dee the covenant He had made with Seth, Noah and Abraham, to multiply Dee's seed, and, more surprisingly, to give him many houses in Prague. The guardian angels of Dee and Kelley even opened to them the greatest mystery, the dates when they would die, already entered in the Book of Life: 1601.
⁸
Such divine favour encouraged Dee to send his letter through the Spanish ambassador, Guillen de San Clemente. His choice underlines Dee's cosmopolitan outlook, despite Spain's increasing confrontation with England. San Clemente claimed descent from the Catalan mystic Raymond Lull, who he believed had also received divine insights into Nature, including the philosopher's stone. He remained Dee and Kelley's influential friend at the Habsburg Court.
⁹

While they waited nervously for Rudolf's response, Kelley buckled under the stress. Through him the angels began to contrast God's Kingdom with the Catholic Church. Satan also seduced Kelley into getting fighting drunk, the day before Rudolf interviewed Dee on 4 September. In Bohemia's tense atmosphere of barely restrained religious sectarianism, Kelley's instability would create problems. Heterodox religious opinions,
generated by decades of religious and social conflict, challenged the Catholic Church's attempts to reassert control over the Protestant nobility and town bourgeoisie.
¹⁰

Dee walked to his interview in the Hradschin Castle through the Old Town, picking his way past steaming piles of manure and channels of filthy water. He carefully skirted the many gangs of street criminals in the newly booming city, crossed the Charles bridge over the Vltava, and ascended to the Castle, outwardly a gigantic, aloof setting for the Emperor. Yet Rudolf's Court had barely arrived in Prague, and inside Dee found an enormous building site, teeming with craftsmen creating display spaces for the vast array of exotic objects and pictures assembled by Rudolf, the greatest art patron in the world. The chamberlain led Dee from the Guard Chamber through the Dining Chamber, into the Privy Chamber, where Rudolf sat in his customary richly embroidered black doublet, his pronounced Habsburg jaw in his heavy, fleshy face emphasised by his full beard. Before him lay Dee's letter, his
Monas
, and ‘A great chest and Standish of silver’.
¹¹

Rudolf had granted Dee an audience on San Clemente's assurances about Dee's scholarly standing, his zeal for Rudolf's reputation and desire to benefit him. Unfortunately, like Elizabeth, Rudolf could make little of the
Monas
. Frequently kneeling during the hour-long audience, Dee reviewed his forty-year quest for insights into the hidden springs of Creation, revealing that since Kelley had arrived in early 1582 angels had answered his prayers, bringing him a crystal stone worth more than earthly kingdoms. Tragically for his hopes, Dee then abandoned the emollient tone of his letter and followed Kelley's line, announcing firmly that ‘The Angel of the Lord … rebuketh you for your sins’. If Rudolf refused the admonition, God would cast him headlong from his throne. But if Rudolf forsook his wickedness, God would make him outshine all emperors and imprison the Devil, whom Dee identified with ‘the Great Turk’.
¹²