The Arch Conjuror of England (43 page)

These meetings shaped clerical solidarity around the belief that preaching trumped external conformity. In 1590, Whitgift's protégé John
Piers, Archbishop of York, tried to enforce conformity in Manchester when he visited on his metropolitan visitation. Shocked by this new authoritarian line, eleven of Dee's future colleagues in Manchester and surrounding parishes, including Oliver Carter, ‘preacher’, signed a collective letter of protest to Piers.

Edmund Hopwood of Hopwood, a local justice and deputy lieutenant of the county, helped gather political support from sympathetic Privy Councillors to defeat Piers. Hopwood would consult Dee about demonic possession and prosecuting witchcraft in Manchester. Yet the letter of protest shows that Carter and other local clergy would perceive Dee, ironically, as Whitgift's stooge in imposing conformity.

The protestors reminded Piers that they refused to use the sign of the cross stipulated by the Book of Common Prayer because they lived amongst superstitious ‘obstinate papists’, who made ‘every ceremony of our church’ an idol of their church, ‘but especially that of the cross’. The preachers therefore omitted the cross from ceremonies, to avoid scandalising ‘zealous professors of religion’ by using a symbol abused by popery.
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In contrast, Dee considered the sign of the cross profoundly important. Many charms and spells required its repeated use. Also, for Dee it encapsulated the Trinity, and its centre symbolised the philosopher's stone, that perfect balance of qualities, as hinted at in Theorem XX of his
Monas
. Like Elizabeth he made the sign of the cross at moments of profound religious emotion, and especially before he invoked angelic illumination.

Dee began an ‘action’ in April 1586, kneeling and ‘making the sign of the Cross after my custom’, by:

By this he meant the philosopher's stone at the alchemical heart of the
Monas
, his memory of the great cross at St Dunstan's, with its blazing crystal at the centre, and the use of the cross in charms in the folk religion of his youth.
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In his ‘Mathematical Preface’ Dee disguised this cross as a geometrical representation of mathematical proportions, whose junction represented perfect ‘temperance’.
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This aspect of Dee's religious practice probably endeared him to many Lancashire laity. Hardline Protestants preaching against or omitting the sign of the cross found themselves reported to episcopal visitations by their churchwardens or abandoned in favour of conformist, or popish ministers.
⁶⁹
Other elements of Dee's religious practice alienated Carter and other local radicals but connected him to the laity.

Dee never mentions hearing a sermon. Like Elizabeth, he emphasised the power of private prayer. When bishops visited, Dee scandalised the godly by his regular presentation as ‘no preacher’. His use of set Latin prayer, especially reciting the psalms when seeking angelic guidance, would have been familiar to the local laity but papistical to the godly, who venerated extempore prayer in English. It took him four years to persuade the Fellows to accept ‘upon condition’ the use of organs in the church, another popish remnant for the godly.
⁷⁰

Anyway, despite the godly's loud rhetoric about the ministry of the Word, preaching at Manchester, as throughout south-east Lancashire, really was more honoured in the breach than the observance. Dee might be ‘no preacher’, but Oliver Carter could not live on his frequently unpaid College stipend of £24 a year. He established a second career as a solicitor, was non-resident in 1590 and 1601, and failed to preach in the latter year.
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Other members of the College became pluralists to make ends meet. Thomas Williamson, another preaching Fellow, held two other Lancashire livings, preaching once a year in each for ten years before Dee arranged his replacement in 1600 by ‘a preacher to be gotten from Cambridge’.
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Thomas Richardson also held two other livings, one in London.
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In neglecting both their spiritual and their physical church, these men accurately reflected the predicament of the godly in Lancashire when Dee arrived as Warden of Manchester Collegiate Church. If anything, this made
Dee even less acceptable. The contrast between their rhetoric and their behaviour made the Fellows especially sensitive to his conservative churchmanship. Also, during Dee's Wardenship local conservative gentlemen, seizing their chance now that Whitgift's drive for conformity had weakened the godly clergy's support at Court, coordinated prosecutions against godly ministers for nonconformity, increasing their discomfort.
⁷⁴

Dee's patent of appointment described him as a clergyman. Did the Fellows know of his Catholic ordination, Dee's only clerical qualification? Carter had graduated Bachelor of Divinity from St John's College, Cambridge, but they represented contrasting generations. Dee had been educated amongst the St John's Catholic faction that lost power at Edward VI's accession, whereas Carter's mind had been shaped by the fiery evangelical Protestantism which dominated the College in the 1560s.

The Fellows knew their
Acts and Monuments
, but which edition? Did they know about Dee the ‘conjuror’ from the earlier editions, or from Murphyn's forgeries? Had slanders about Dee's studies spread that far? Even though Carter and Williamson lived mostly out of college, could Dee keep his alchemy and angel magic secret? Carter, whose anti-papist book associated ‘conjuring’ with the rise of Antichrist, would have been appalled by what he did.

Dee regularly worked at Manchester with two ‘scryers’, his alchemical student, Francis Nichols, and Bartholomew Hickman. On 11 July 1600, soon after his return from two years in London, he recorded his ‘consternation of mind about the discord of the two scryers about the things that they saw’. On 29 September Nichols persuaded Dee to burn all Hickman's deceitful ‘revelations’, because Hickman's long-predicted cosmic changes for that month had not happened. In that conflagration we lost Dee's questions to the angels, which would have revealed his responses to his Manchester ‘labyrinth’.
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The one result of Dee's ‘conjuring’ that might have improved relations with the godly may not have been known to them. The local Ecclesiastical Commission, dominated by conservative gentry, had never enthusiastically promoted Protestantism. The exception had been the thorough anti-Catholic purges of 1592, which were ultimately inspired by Dee's prophecy of a Spanish invasion.
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For most of 1596, judging by the absence of quarrels from Dee's ‘Diary’, the Fellows seem to have accepted his attempts to restore the College finances. They could hardly object when in August he encouraged the parish leaders to find ‘a preacher’ for the College's evangelical mission.
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The calm proved deceptive. On 22 January 1597 Carter announced that he would sue Dee. An acquisitive character once stabbed by an aggrieved business partner, Carter had sued both the previous wardens for unpaid wages.
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Ostensibly, Carter complained about Dee's failure to restore the College's finances, though he may have feared revelations about his own sharp practices.
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By September, however, money worries had compounded Carter's objections to Dee's churchmanship. Dee recorded Carter's ‘impudent and evident disobedience in the church’, and though next day Carter repented, money problems destroyed the uneasy peace in November. The Fellows disagreed with Dee's interpretation of the accounts and refused the £5 for house rent specified in their charter.
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Something other than personality clashes was poisoning the atmosphere. Witchcraft prosecutions in Lancashire peaked in the late 1590s.
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Much worse for Dee, from 1596 a series of books detailing sensational stories of demonic possession and exorcism held the country agog. They would make Dee even more notorious.

D
EE'S INVOLVEMENT
with the Presbyterian minister John Darrell over the demonic possession of the ‘Lancashire Seven’ has never been properly explained. Dee's actions alienated the Fellows at Manchester Collegiate Church, brought him to national prominence again, exposed him to further criticism from Whitgift, and finally destroyed his hopes of escaping from his Manchester ‘labyrinth’ to promotion elsewhere. Darrell gained widespread notoriety during the late 1590s for apparently ‘curing’ the demonically possessed by group sessions of prayer and fasting. His methods had profound political implications. To his supporters they confirmed God's support for his charismatic ministry, and the Presbyterian manifesto of Church reform. To his conformist critics, notably Whitgift, Bancroft and their protégé Samuel Harsnett, Darrell used fraudulent magic designed to win Presbyterianism ‘popularity’, which threatened political upheaval.

On 8 December 1596 Nicholas Starkie of Cleworth near Manchester consulted Dee about the demonic possession of seven people in his household. Like most contemporaries, Starkie assumed that the learned could communicate with the spirit world. He could not know about Dee's previous attempts at exorcism, though he may have heard rumours about his angel magic. Two of Starkie's sons had shown the convulsive symptoms of demonic possession in early 1595. After spending the huge sum
of £200 without curing them, Starkie engaged Edmund Hartley, a local ‘cunning man’, as a household servant, who succeeded in calming them for eighteen months with ‘certain popish charms and herbs’.

However, Starkie eventually suspected Hartley of bewitching three other children, a maid, and an adult family relative, the ‘Lancashire Seven’. Dee's response to Starkie's plea, we should note, became a bone of contention between Presbyterians and conformists. The simplest Presbyterian version, usually repeated by historians, claimed that Dee refused to meddle in the matter and advised Starkie to consult ‘some godly preachers’ about ‘a Public or Private fast’. That Presbyterian method of exorcism involved long, fervent extempore prayers. According to the Presbyterian story, Dee ‘sharply reproved, and straightly examined’ Hartley the witch, temporarily easing the symptoms. Nor, they insisted, did Dee suggest that Starkie write to Darrell, already well-known for successful exorcisms.
¹

The conformists told a different story. Of the thirteen books published about the Darrell controversy, Darrell or his supporters wrote ten. The three replies by their opponents had greater impact on Dee's reputation. Whitgift, Bancroft and Harsnett emphasised from the first Dee's involvement in the exorcisms and his knowledge of Darrell's reputation. Their tactics forced later Presbyterian accounts of the Lancashire Seven into gradually admitting that Dee played a more significant role than they had first suggested.

The conformists exploited an advantage: they had captured a manuscript, written by a Manchester preacher named Dickons, which gave a detailed account of these goings-on. Darrell claimed that Bancroft kept a copy, though it has disappeared.
²
Bancroft naturally selected from this manuscript to suit his prejudices, which included denying that Hartley was really a witch. In autumn 1598 the High Commission tried to force Darrell to admit that he had in fact instructed the Lancashire Seven how to counterfeit their symptoms of demonic possession.
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By emphasising Dee's involvement with Darrell, the conformists could use his established notoriety as a ‘conjuror’ to blacken the Presbyterians, while denouncing the witchcraft accusations and exorcisms as fraudulent. That approach helped to undercut Presbyterian claims that Darrell's
power over demons confirmed their cause and further emphasised that credulity about exorcisms made the populace vulnerable to political subversion. As Bancroft and Harsnett put it, the Presbyterians ‘not prevailing by the conspiracy of Hacket, nor by the libelling of Martin [Marprelate] (yet fearing to attempt the rebellion of Scotland and Geneva for their reformation) would obtain credit by working miracles in casting out Devils’.
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The conformists repeatedly waved this red flag of religious rebellion over witchcraft and demonic possession.

Ironically, Dee's response to the accusations against Hartley sometimes seems as sceptical as Bancroft's. The local justice Edmund Hopwood prepared for Hartley's trial at Lancaster assizes by taking the depositions of Starkie's children in February 1597.
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Darrell arrived in Lancashire on 16 March, and three days later Hopwood consulted Dee, perhaps for advice on whether he should cooperate with Darrell.