The Arch Conjuror of England (45 page)

When Dee arrived in London in the summer of 1604, he learned that Parliament had for weeks been debating a new witchcraft bill, introduced into the Lords on 29 March. Bancroft sat on the Lords committee that
rewrote the bill by 2 April. The Lords sent it to the Commons on 8 May, who sent it into committee on 25 May. Soon afterwards Dee learned about the committee's deliberations. He panicked, believing that the new law was aimed at him. Gossip about his ‘damnable magic’ had circulated in London the previous winter. His angel magic was no secret. About now another conjuror, John a Windor, copied ‘out of a Book that lay in the Window’ at Mortlake a traditional Latin invocation, different from Kelley's. It asked Christ to send true angels from His right hand, to be visible in a mirror to a virgin boy. Windor later used this ancient call.
³⁰

The Witchcraft Act of 1563 had made dealing with wicked spirits a felony only if physical harm resulted. The new bill, however, mandated death for ‘any Invocation or Conjuration of any evil and wicked spirit’, without qualification. Bancroft aimed to catch the Presbyterian exorcists under this general provision, but Dee took the bill personally, and he rushed into print. On 5 June the committee returned the amended bill to the Commons for its third reading. That day Dee published his printed petition to James, a copy of which still lies in the files of Sir Julius Caesar, James's Master of Requests.
³¹

The petition claims that Dee presented it to James on 5 June. Whether or not this was wishful thinking, the petition summarised his fears. Describing himself as the King's servant, Dee asked to be ‘tried and cleared’ before James, the Privy Council or Parliament, of the perennial slanders that he was a ‘Conjuror, or Caller, or Invocator of Devils’. He pointed out that the unnamed ‘English traitor’, actually William Allen, had used similar accusations in 1592 to slander Elizabeth's Privy Council. To clear this discredit on himself and Elizabeth's Privy Councillors who still served James, he offered his head if anyone could prove that he invoked ‘Devils, or damned Spirits’, or could verify the ‘strange and frivolous fables’ told of him by the ‘many headed Multitude’. Dee then asked James to solve his financial woes and punish his enemies, who had ‘so long’ sought ‘his utter undoing, by little and little’.
³²

There is no sign that James granted any part of Dee's petition. On 7 June the Commons passed the amended bill against ‘Conjuration, Witchcraft, and dealing with wicked and evil Spirits’. The next day, Friday
8 June, Dee published a verse petition to that House. He was not just seeking to clear his name. For fifty years he had been slandered as a ‘conjuror’, but now he demanded a general Act against slander, with special provision ‘for John Dee his case’. The Commons ignored Dee, and on Saturday sent their bill back to the Lords, who passed it immediately.
³³

Having failed to move either King or Parliament, Dee naively addressed himself to the court of public opinion. He reprinted his
Letter
of 1599, defending the ‘very Christian course’ of his philosophical ‘exercises’. He added to it his petitions to James and the Commons.
³⁴
Dee's last publication, the little book failed to convince anyone.

He dined with the alchemical and astrological doctor Richard Napier at the house of his friend John Pontois's employer, the great Levant merchant Richard Staper, on 26 July 1604. Napier and John Dee had much to discuss besides John's ‘grief’ and alchemy. For the Witchcraft Act threatened them both. Like Dee, Napier feared the name of ‘conjuror’, since he also used prayer, fasting and magical rituals to invoke the Archangel Gabriel.
³⁵

Rebuffed in London, Dee wearily returned to Manchester, where in November the Bishop of Chester's visitation duly found him ‘no preacher’.
³⁶
That month, aged seventy-seven, Dee again prepared to follow the College suits at the Duchy courts in London.
³⁷
Then severe plague hit Manchester in late March 1605. Oliver Carter, one of its first victims, was buried on 18 March.

Tragically for John, Jane Dee caught the plague and was buried on 23 March. Dee may still have been in London at the time. They had been married for twenty-seven years. Of the seven children they brought to Manchester, Theodore had been buried 12 April 1602, aged fourteen, and Margaret on 1 February 1603, just seven-and-a-half years old. Arthur had married in 1602 and begun his own career as an alchemical and astrological doctor. By the time Jane died, she and John had two grandchildren, perhaps some small consolation to him.
³⁸

Dee would have found none in Manchester. As the frightening death rate from the plague accelerated, the wealthy fled, leaving behind only ‘covertly rascals and slaves’, who now openly criticised Sir Nicholas
Mosley, a great encloser of common land.
³⁹
In June government and society collapsed under the strain. William Burne preached in the Collegiate Church as long as he could and finally resorted to preaching in a field ‘by reason of the unruliness of infected persons’.
⁴⁰
Since Dee could not preach and had no authority over Manchester town itself, after Jane's death he had no reason to stay.

Dee disappears from the written record between November 1604 and February 1606, when he suddenly reappears in London. He was not attending the Duchy courts for the College. He tried to make friends in the city the only way he knew, through his learning. On 19 February 1606 the Mercers’ Company court recorded that ‘Mr Doctor Dee a brother of this company presented of his free gift as a token of his good will unto this company Four Books, the first The British Monarchy alias the Petty Navy Royal, the second Propaedeumata Aphoristica, the third Monas Hieroglyphica to the Emperor Maximilian, the fourth a Letter Apologetical’.
⁴¹
At the end, Dee would need the Mercers, though one wonders what the stolid merchants made of his
Propaedeumata aphoristica
and
Monas hieroglyphica
.

More immediately, he needed angelic advice. The gap in his recorded angelic conversations does not mean that he stopped trying to contact the angels. The record abruptly starts again in London, on 20 March 1607, in his eightieth year. Bartholomew Hickman again scryed, despite Dee having burned all Hickman's ‘actions’ in 1600. They still began with the ritual recitation of Latin prayers asking God to send His light and truth. Dee's questions returned to his intestinal bleeding, with kidney stones adding to his misery. He planned ‘a great attempt’ to inform the indifferent Privy Council ‘of my beggery’ and to offer Sir Robert Cecil, now Earl of Salisbury, his service. He also expected help from Bancroft, now Archbishop of Canterbury. The angels offered no practical advice, only ‘the hid knowledge and secrecy of God that is not as yet made known unto thee’.
⁴²
Dee still lacked political insight. Cecil habitually supported conformists and showed little sympathy for magicians. Bancroft continued Whitgift's policy against occult explanations of the world.

Nor was Dee handling his relations with the Manchester Fellows very well. The new, uncompromisingly Protestant Fellowship, led by Burne, had finally solved the local preaching problems, but at Dee's expense. The College charter entitled him to three months’ paid absence a year, but the Fellows refused to pay him beyond that, even when he was absent on College affairs. Dee remained warden to his dying day, despite claims that he resigned in 1605. In July 1607 the angels advised him to organise matters about his Wardenship ‘and in all other causes of worldly affairs’. In September they urged him to content himself with ‘that little that can be made of thy right in the College matters’.
⁴³

Needing money, from June to September he pressed for angelic help in locating stolen property for a Lancashire client, a practice that Dee evidently began in Manchester.
⁴⁴
He doggedly pursued the alchemical route to riches. In July the angels promised him the Book of Dunstan, the philosopher's stone, and the ‘secret wisdom of that Jewel’ delivered by an angel years before. Accordingly, at Mortlake in December he began alchemical work towards finding the stone, which somehow petered out in January 1608.

More helpfully, the angels laid out the political realities. Salisbury had turned King James against Dee, describing him as one ‘that doth deal with Devils and by sorcery, as you commonly term them witchcraft’. Therefore, Hickman's cruel revenge on his eighty-year-old master, for having burned all his ‘actions’, made some sense. Since God has hardened England against you, and you live in poverty, said the angels in September 1607, prepare to depart overseas, where God will miraculously cure you. You will not return, so abandon your library and alchemical equipment. In fact, sell your books through John Pontois. Thus the largest private library in England started to be dispersed.
⁴⁵

At this stage Dee still retained his house at Mortlake and his rectory at Tenby. Yet by July 1608 he had resigned the rectory and by August had disposed of the house. He was obeying the angelic advice of September 1607, that since God chose him alone to receive the ‘wisdom only Enoch enjoyed’, he must abandon his unworthy country.
⁴⁶
He had exchanged letters with Landgrave Moritz of Hesse-Kassel in 1595, praising the
mathematical approach to alchemy. In the summer of 1608 he again fixed his eyes on Germany, hoping to join Johannes Hartmann's scheme for an ‘alchemical college’ at the University of Marburg under Moritz's patronage. Like Dee, Hartmann was a mathematician turned alchemical doctor. Unlike Dee, however, Hartmann succeeded because he moulded his studies to his patron's desires. Alchemical teaching at Marburg would closely resemble Dee's mathematically precise method planned for ‘Queen Elizabeth's Academy’ forty years earlier, though now without Dee. He also made one last effort to secure Rudolf II's patronage, for that summer he expected money from the Emperor.
⁴⁷

Dee started yet another scheme to find buried treasure.
⁴⁸
Yet by September 1608, though Pontois hoped to make money through alchemy, they were ‘utterly unable to provide things necessary’.
⁴⁹
Here the manuscript ends, and for all we know the angels fell silent at last. Dee still struggled on, sick, impoverished and weak, but able to record astrological phenomena. In September 1607 he had sent Thomas Harriot his observation of the spectacular comet later named for Edmond Halley.
⁵⁰
Yet, whatever the travel plans for which he raised money in the summer of 1608, his last illness intervened. In a now illegible note Pontois recorded in Dee's ‘Diary’ some medical disaster on 15 August 1608.

Somehow, Dee braved the London winter. At the end, the intellectual of vaulting ambition, who had been instructed by God's messengers, and who had admonished emperors and princes, could only rely upon his father's people, the London merchants. On 11 January 1609 the Mercers agreed that ‘Doctor Dee a brother of this Fellowship shall be gratified with 5 marks [£3 10s.] of this company's gift to help him in his sickness.‘
⁵¹

Legend has it from Richard Napier that in his last months Dee sold his books to buy food, but in fact the Jacobean world was a little kinder than that. He lived in John Pontois's house in Bishopsgate Street, a frail, white-haired figure of eighty-five, surrounded by manuscripts and books that overflowed the shelves of a large study and spilled out of numerous trunks. They included the Arabic book he called
Soyga
, which combined angel magic with alchemy and astrology, and a valuable manuscript of Paracelsus. His astrological clock survived, together with some precious
mathematical instruments. His cedar chest with its hidden compartment still protected his secrets – his olive-wood rosary and cross, his angelic manuscripts, his own writings. Pontois believed implicitly in the angels, and long afterwards he kept the chest, the Holy Table and ‘a certain round flat stone like Crystal’. Dee died amongst these remnants of his long life of learning at 3 a.m. on 26 March 1609. Within days a Scotsman had his Wardenship.
⁵²

What are we to make of the extraordinary story of John Dee? To the community of his early years, whose folk religion valued charms and spells, his magic would have seemed a natural extension of life. To some of his contemporaries, who lived through Protestant attacks on religious charms, and the Catholic response, which began the decline of magic, occult philosophy would have remained a familiar part of life and politics. To them Dee's life would have seemed, if not exactly ordinary, then at least perfectly explicable. Men, and from the Queen downwards many women, of Dee's education understood astrology, alchemy and angel magic as the common inheritance of the learned. Their practice of magic, like Dee's, shared far more with the unlearned than is sometimes acknowledged. Contemporary politicians, steeped in such learning, were comfortable using occult knowledge to advance their policies and defeat their opponents. Even those who criticised occult philosophy did so out of a deep appreciation of its hold over the imaginations of their deluded fellow men.

Only towards the end of his life, when he ran foul of cultural conservatives in the second wave of Protestant attacks on magic, can the headwinds that Dee encountered be attributed to his fervent belief in occult philosophy. The reasons for his earlier setbacks were familiar enough in Tudor England. Like many others he found it difficult to navigate the hurly-burly of mid-Tudor politics, just as his father had fallen victim to factional politics and backed the wrong side in a political crisis. John switched sides too soon in 1555 and missed the change in the political tide.

Yet his partial recovery at Elizabeth's accession actually depended on occult philosophy, and Dee's career and reputation at her Court flourished when the political planets aligned in ways that made his skills useful to influential politicians. Ultimately, he failed as political circumstances
changed and the powerful no longer needed his occult talents. Sometimes he was overlooked not because of his reputation as a ‘magus’ but because he was outshone by more flamboyant magicians – especially John Prestall and Edward Kelley. Dee found the going hard not because he was an isolated figure, marginalised by his magic, but because he had too many rivals in magical learning and service, both in Europe and at the Court of Elizabeth I.