The Arch Conjuror of England (8 page)

If Mary and the child both died, that would immediately destroy Philip's power in England. If the child died, Mary had little chance of bearing another at thirty-nine, and Philip's support in England would evaporate, leaving Elizabeth as the obvious successor. Advisers urged the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V to send troops to enforce his son Philip's rule, should Mary miscarry or die. Mary called Pembroke to Court to organise her forces.
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On the other side Elizabeth's supporters began military preparations to oppose the hated Spaniards, published propaganda and wrote to France and Germany seeking support.
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The possibility of her sudden succession required Elizabeth to walk a very fine line between being prepared for power and avoiding entanglement in traitorous conspiracy. She certainly recognised this quandary.
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If Mary died in June 1555, prominent courtiers such as Pembroke, Arundel and Paget might well support Philip, a powerful king liberal with rewards, over an inexperienced woman likely to revenge herself against courtiers who had repeatedly tried to marry her off, assassinate her, or tar her with treason.

Facing an uncertain future, Elizabeth needed information in order to concentrate her forces for maximum effect. Therefore in April 1555 she turned to Dee to divine the future awaiting herself, Mary and Philip. Her choice suggests that Dee already had an established reputation as a seer, though not a scrap of evidence survives about any previous work. He performed his magic at Woodstock Palace before her auditor, Sir Thomas Benger, and two members of Elizabeth's household.
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Since Elizabeth lived under tight security but attended Mass at Woodstock, Dee's Catholic priesthood may have been useful cover for his frequent visits.

Dee worked through April, when the Privy Council uncovered an obscure French-backed plot against Mary, though his vague hints mean we must guess at which of the many current methods he used. Elizabeth left Woodstock Palace for Hampton Court on 17 April, and Dee then performed divination at Great Milton in Oxfordshire, the home of auditor
Benger, when rumours that Mary had given birth caused spontaneous celebrations.
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Back in London Dee tried to conjure the future in rented lodgings, where the Privy Council's pursuivants abruptly arrested him on 28 May, seizing his books and papers and sealing up his door ‘for suspicion of Magic’.
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He blamed two informers, George Ferrers and Thomas Prideaux. The fact that Ferrers, a confirmed Dudley opponent, denounced Dee indicates that he believed his magic served Dudley interests. Perhaps Dee hoped to enhance the Dudleys’ standing with Elizabeth. Their subsequent gratitude might help him recover the family fortune that Roland Dee had lost.
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The connections of Dee's other accuser, Thomas Prideaux, reveal the high political stakes involved in the campaign against him, for Prideaux was a trusted servant of Sir Francis Englefield, Mary's Privy Councillor.
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Englefield and Mary's Principal Secretary, Sir John Bourne, took over the questioning of Dee, showing that the investigation originated inside Mary's household, where her devoted servants constantly sought to implicate Elizabeth in treason. Dee cracked under pressure from Bourne, a notorious bully.
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The Privy Council then arrested his chief astrological accomplice, John Field.
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Pembroke attended the Council meetings on the affair and had his own reasons for persuading Dee to cooperate, given his hopes of serving Philip. The Privy Council confined Dee and Field on 1 June, but from Mary's point of view the real prizes that day would have been Benger, Elizabeth's auditor, and Christopher Carye, an Oxford medical graduate and Dee's former pupil. Carye could claim kinship with Elizabeth through the Boleyns.
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Roping in Benger and Carye improved the chances of pinning the conspiracy on Elizabeth.
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Politics thus motivated the investigation of Dee, which initially focused only on the horoscopes that he had cast for Philip, Mary and Elizabeth. Within narrow limits, ‘genethlialogy’ of the mathematical type Dee had learned at Louvain seemed harmlessly conventional. Mary's own doctors applied commonplace ideas of lunar prognostication to argue that the birth ‘unless it take place at this new phase of the moon [23 May] may be protracted beyond the full moon and its occultation on the 4th or 5th’ of June.
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However, astrologers courted danger when they drew up destinary or questionary horoscopes about princes. Destinary horoscopes required
knowing the ascendant sign or planet upon the horizon at the moment of conception. From that and with considerable tedious labour a complete horoscope could be developed.
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Dee's note in Stoeffler's
Ephemerides
that Philip and Mary's marriage took place at 11 a.m. on 25 July with Libra in the ascendant may be a fragment of such calculations.
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Ultimately, even the immensely complex procedure required to forecast a time of death could be justified by Ptolemy's example in his
Four Books
, the fundamental text for Renaissance astrology, though those in authority considered such forecasts damnable.
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More controversial still were questionary horoscopes, though monarchs, nobility and commoners alike used them avidly. Drawn to answer specific questions, they were calculated from the questioner's moment of birth – Dee left many birth calculations – or from the time of asking the question. They were often used to locate lost or stolen property. However, the questionary horoscope could also be applied to high politics, because it assigned specific themes to the twelve houses of the destinary horoscope, including nativity in the fifth house, favour with the monarch in the sixth, and monarchs themselves in the tenth.
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In normal times Dee and his fellows might have appealed to their patrons for protection, but the perilous childbirth of a reigning Queen in her late thirties was anything but a normal occasion. As time dragged on, Mary's anxiety about the success of her pregnancy transmitted itself to her courtiers and beyond. Rumours circulated in London that she was bewitched, sick, or dead.
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Ominously, within days of Dee's arrest, one of Ferrers's children died and another went blind.
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This apparent exercise of magical revenge against Dee's accuser struck directly at Mary's fears for her unborn child and strung the Privy Council's nerves even tighter. By 5 June Dee and his three fellow prisoners had confessed to ‘lewd and vain practices of calculing and conjuring’. The thoroughly panicked Council now feared a broader conspiracy. They demanded their investigators uncover it and added ‘eighteen written questions’, which Dee still remembered in 1592. Within two days the prisoners’ answers raised the charges to full-blown accusations of ‘conjuring or witchcraft’, apparently confirmed by what
happened to Ferrers's children. The French ambassador now reported rumours that the accused had practised enchantments against Philip and Mary, impaling wax images to kill them by sympathetic magic. Rumours spread that they had conjured a demon for advice. Though the Council sought to prove a necromantic conspiracy, the investigation had stalled by 9 June. The four ‘obstinate persons’ had refused to incriminate themselves, so the Council authorised the use of torture.
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For this purpose the questioners moved the prisoners to the Tower, nearly two years after Roland Dee had endured months there. The Tower dungeons housed the torture devices, especially the rack. Its system of pulleys stretched the prisoner's arms and legs, causing agonising pain in the joints and ligaments, which might never recover even if the joints did not dislocate. If Dee was racked, he never mentioned it, but for a man highly conscious of his princely descent and singular intellect, it would have been a humiliating as well as an excruciating experience. At this point the Privy Council record falls silent, but Dee recalled in 1592 that ‘at length’ he and his fellow prisoners were brought to the Star Chamber in August, where they were ‘discharged of the suspicion of treason’, after the Council finally resolved the political and legal problems of precisely what to do with them.
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Dee's vague ‘at length’ quietly skipped over the fact that in early July, soon after the Privy Council had authorised torture, he reappeared in Bonner's household as chaplain, weeks before the Council officially sent him there. Perhaps he had confessed all the Council required. John Foxe's
Acts and Monuments
(1563) places Dee in Bonner's garden at Fulham on 5 July. There the Protestant prisoner Robert Smith debated the Eucharist with ‘one of my lord's chaplains, a conjuror by report’, identified in the 1570 edition as ‘Dr Dee’. Foxe described Dee's ingratiating ‘sweet words’. Smith replied, ‘Under the honey lies the poison’. Smith rebutted Dee's argument for transubstantiation, that Christ could be simultaneously in many places because He only possessed a spiritual body, as reviving the ancient Marcionist heresy. Foxe summarised Dee's response as ‘many scoffings’. Protestants not versed in magic could not possibly grasp his spiritual theories.
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Dee believed that Christ's body could move through solid objects and hence that spirits could manifest themselves in this world. In the summer of 1555 he explored techniques for summoning spirits into crystals. Dee's interest in spirits supports the Privy Council's allegation that he and his accomplices dealt with ‘a familiar spirit’.
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The loose contemporary notion of magic made this a common accusation, since it had been practised since ancient times and condemned by the Church for a thousand years. Nonetheless, the circumstances surrounding Dee's arrest point to more complicated procedures than casting horoscopes. The Council's action in sealing up his London rooms and its interest in his books and papers suggests he was suspected of performing elaborate magical rituals tied to a specific place, requiring some paraphernalia. The most likely procedure for summoning spirits used ‘Archemastry’, the form of divination Dee had encountered at Cambridge. His ‘Mathematical Preface’ was carefully vague in describing it. Dee intimated that just as intellectual architecture surpassed manual building skills because it enabled ‘mind and imagination’ to perceive architectural symmetry instantaneously, so ‘Archemastry’ surpassed the ‘Astronomer, and the Optical Mechanician’ by its power of giving instant revelation to the imagination.

Some defended divination by natural causes. Contemporaries believed that all vision occurred when light beams emitted by the soul and imagination through the eyes encountered objects. So when constantly reflected from highly polished surfaces, those beams sent the soul, particularly the virgin soul, into a self-reflexive spiral of religious rapture in which visions appeared. Dee applied mathematical rules of perspective to take such terrestrial beliefs to the higher, celestial, level, arguing that one could use optical devices to manipulate celestial influences. The Archemaster could use light, ‘that Divine Creature’ that modelled the occult celestial influences, to achieve inner illumination. Before Dee dropped hints about ‘Archemastry’ in the ‘Mathematical Preface’ in 1570, he indignantly denied the slander that he was a ‘Conjuror of wicked and damned Spirits’.
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This rumour, which began spreading in 1555, still clung to him fifteen years later.

Within ‘Archemastry’, Dee alluded obscurely to three subordinate sciences, using esoteric names only recently decoded by Nicholas Clulee. They were ‘Alnirangiat’, the ‘Art of Sintrillia’ – divination by reflecting celestial rays onto liquid surfaces – and a third ‘chief … OPTICAL Science’ that Dee left nameless.
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The second and third of these sciences seem ideally suited to the needs of Elizabeth and her supporters. ‘Sintrillia’ enabled seers to divine the past, present and future, by using polished surfaces to reflect celestial rays onto semi-precious stones submerged in three different liquids.
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Inducing visions by the use of gems and crystals, crystallomancy, like the ‘chief … OPTICAL Science’, involved invocations of angels or spirits.

Crystal-gazing and raising spirits happened frequently at Renaissance courts. Many courtiers in 1555 could have recalled William Wycherley, who was examined for conjuring in 1549. Wycherley had told Lord Protector Somerset that he invoked celestial spirits into crystals, aided by a ‘scryer’ and several Catholic priests to bind them. The Privy Council's accusation that Dee, also a priest, had a ‘familiar spirit’ suggests that he employed crystals the same way in his magic. Despite his denials, when Dee began working with a new ‘scryer’, Edward Kelley, about twenty-five years later, he simply assumed that Kelley could perform rituals to command angels into a crystal. About twenty years after that a conjuror who visited Dee's Mortlake house beside the Thames copied a traditional ‘call’ he found there. It would allegedly bring angels into a reflecting surface, on which the conjuror had written the powerful name ‘Hermely’ in oil. This closely resembled methods found as far away as fifteenth-century Bavaria. Whatever his precise method, Dee believed that the ‘Art of Sintrillia’ offered a total understanding of the cosmos, and in 1555 this belief enabled him, or his accomplices, to forecast the outcome of current political crises.
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In early July, while Dee debated theology with Robert Smith in Bonner's garden, the surviving supporters of the Dudleys and of Sir Thomas Wyatt found new courage as Mary still failed to give birth. They began meeting openly in St Paul's Cathedral, then a fashionable promenade and gossip centre. The Lord Chancellor, Bishop Stephen Gardiner, fearing they
would become a focus for Elizabeth's partisans, banished them to their country houses.
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Mary's false ‘pregnancy’ had precipitated the conjuring crisis. However, once her delusion was perceived, the crisis evaporated, thus saving Dee. By early August even Philip had stopped believing that Mary would give birth to an heir, and everyone accepted that Elizabeth would succeed her.
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Gardiner, ever the realist, gave his first loyalty to the House of Tudor. Therefore the embarrassing conjuring scandal needed to go away.