The magician and scientist John Dee (1527-1609) has long been an object of fascination both to his contemporaries and to posterity. There have been several valiant attempts by scholars to establish Dee as a pivotal figure in the history of science, as an innovator in mathematics and astronomy in particular, and to consequently play down his rather sinister experiments in the occult; after all, even Isaac Newton (and it has been argued that Dee is in some small way a precursor of Newton) had his flaky side, wasting years of his life on what we now see as eccentric theological speculation. But it is Dee the alchemist and conjurer, the negotiator with angels and demons, who survives in popular tradition (as does the relationship between Dee and his assistant, the medium Edward Kelley, who persuaded Dee that an angel wanted them to share Dee’s young wife).
Dee was described by Elizabeth I as ‘my philosopher’, but this philosopher had an earlier, much less well-known and rather horrible career in the dark art of interrogation, as one of Bishop Bonner’s assistants during the reign of Elizabeth’s predecessor, Mary I. The ‘Marian Persecution’ resulted in the execution of around 300 Protestants. Dee himself had gone into Bonner’s custody in August 1555 as a suspected heretic, yet quickly, and mysteriously, emerged from detention to become one of Bonner’s chaplains, in which capacity he helped interrogate the cleric John Philpott. Philpott was a clever man, a Latin poet and Hebraist, and while well known for being outspoken, was also popular; altogether an uncommon assortment of traits in any period.
While awaiting trial in November 1555 at the Bishop’s palace at St Paul’s, Philpott and other suspects were held in a windowless coalhouse; a tactic designed to remind them of their fate if they did not recant.
Philpott was taken to face Bonner and other senior clerics on 19 November. Dee was one of the interrogators. No official account of the questioning survives, but Philpott’s own account was smuggled out and has been preserved. He clearly held his own against both Bonner and Dee, and when Dee left the room at one point, Philpott called after him: ‘Master Dee, you are too young in divinity to teach men in the matters of my faith. Though you be learned in other things more than I, yet in divinity I have been longer practiced than you’. As Dee’s biographer Benjamin Wolley points out, this is a fairly clear reference to Dee’s reputation as a magician. That Dee’s experiments in the occult were known to his masters became certain shortly, when Bonner, in response to a letter from Philpott being being found on another religious dissident, asked fellow bishops, with the clunking irony of the eternal oppressor, ‘is this not an honest man to belie me, and to call my chaplain a great conjuror?’.
On 18 December Philpott was taken to the stake at Smithfield. He recited a few psalms, tipped the executioners. and seems to have died as calmly in the flames as any man possibly could.
What Happened Next
The period during which Philpott was martyred was one of great significance in British and Reformation history. His terrible death is one of many described in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1563). It is fair to say that not all of the martyrs were universally attractive or admirable figures – though none deserved their fate – but there were also many, such as Philpott, who were good as well as principled men, willing to endure a truly awful death for what they believed in. Dee, in contrast, went on to become an influential establishment figure during the reign of Elizabeth, a reign that officially celebrated the memory of men such as Philpott. but allowed shadowy men such as Dee to prosper under a regime in which it was now the turn of Roman Catholics to be tortured and executed. The story of these two parallel lives was to become a common story in successive centuries: as revolutions came and went, martyrs would be created, while those who served the persecutors well would often find themselves – and their appalling skills – quietly welcomed by the guardians of the new regimes.