THE QUEEN’S CONJUROR

Light miles upstream from the city of London along the Thames’s meandering course lies the village of Mortlake. According to dubious tradition, its name means ‘dead lake’. No such lake exists there now, nor in recorded history, though in the distant past one may have gathered on the bend of the river, a dark pool perhaps fouled with the rotting remains of plague or war victims. A less picturesque explanation, suggested by Daniel Lysons in his 1792 survey of London, is that the name comes from the Saxon ‘mortlage’, meaning a compulsory law.¹

The village that Lysons described in the late eighteenth century was much as it had been in the sixteenth, a small community that had expanded gently over the centuries. It served the stream of river and road traffic that passed by every day, delivering goods and travellers between London and the towns and palaces upstream. Two thousand acres in size, part of the manor of Wimbledon, it comprised a modest church, a cluster of houses mostly concentrated along the Thames tow-path, and a few asparagus fields.

Even without its dead lake, Lysons found that Mortlake had its local legends. One was recorded by Raphael Holinshed, a contemporary of Dee’s and source for Shakespeare’s history plays, who wrote of a monstrous fish caught there in 1240. Another legend Lysons mentioned was that the village had once held the extraordinary library and laboratory of the great conjuror John Dee.

In 1672, Elias Ashmole, planning a biography of Dee which was never written, visited Mortlake to interview the village’s oldest inhabitant, eighty-year-old Goodwife Faldo, who was the last surviving link with the time Dee lived there.

Her memories were vivid. Dee was ‘very handsome’, tall and slender with a fair complexion, smartly dressed in an ‘artists’ gown’ with hanging sleeves, and sporting a long ‘picked’ (pointed) beard which in old age turned snowy white. Faldo recalled how children ran screaming from him because he was ‘accounted a conjuror’, how he would act as a ‘great Peacemaker’ among squabbling adults, and how neighbours would ask his advice on the most trifling domestic problems.

Faldo remembered an incident concerning a basket of pewter tableware that had been sent to London to be polished for a wedding. The job done, the basket was delivered to a prearranged spot on the banks of the Thames to be collected by the boatman Robert Bryan. But Bryan took the wrong basket, and the furious owner found his gleaming pewter substituted by beef tripe. By means that Faldo could not fathom, Dee directed the hapless boatman to a woman in nearby Wandsworth. It turned out the tripe was hers, and she told Bryan he would find the plate still sitting by the river, as she had found it too heavy to carry home.

This ambiguous image of the cunning wizard and wise seer was enhanced by Dee’s impressive connections with foreigners and powerful courtiers. Many such figures came through Mortlake, en route between the Queen’s palaces at Westminster, Greenwich, Richmond, Nonsuch and Hampton Court. Faldo recalled Dee frequently visiting nearby Barn Elms, the home of Sir Francis Walsingham and later the Earl of Essex, Queen Elizabeth’s most rebellious favourite and husband of Walsingham’s daughter Frances. Dee had also once taken Faldo and her mother to Richmond Palace, so they could watch a royal dinner with the King of Denmark.

At the age of just six, Faldo (and her mother) had been invited into Dee’s home, where in a darkened room he showed them the image of a solar eclipse projected through a pinhole.² Despite the reactions of the village’s other children, Faldo seemed quite unafraid of entering Dee’s strange world of ancient manuscripts, intricate devices and chemical smells, walking into the labyrinthine corridors of what by then had become one of the most extraordinary residences in Europe.

Dee had moved to Mortlake out of necessity. Despite the Queen’s welcome on his return from the Continent in 1564, he found life in England far from convivial. The Marchioness of Northampton, whom he had escorted back from Antwerp, had secured the promise of the deanery of Gloucester when it fell vacant, as was imminently expected. It was just the sort of post he needed, promising to provide him with the secure and undemanding living he needed to continue his philosophical work. However, in April 1565, when the marchioness finally succumbed to breast cancer, so did his claim to the deanery. Such offices were entangled with growing antagonisms at court, the tensions between Robert Dudley (just made Earl of Leicester), the leader of the militant Protestant faction and the Duke of Norfolk, the nation’s most senior peer and focus of Catholic sympathies. Dee’s religious loyalties were not delineated clearly enough to arouse the support of either, so he was swept aside in favour of John Man, a radical Protestant who later became Bishop of Gloucester.

Dee did not help the situation by being so inept at cultivating aristocratic patrons. He attended court irregularly, and then only to see the Queen. Robert Dudley had known Dee when he was appointed to the household of his father the Duke of Northumberland in 1553, and would have been an excellent potential benefactor, yet Dee did not dedicate a single work to him. Rather, he eulogised Robert’s brother John, Earl of Warwick, in his Mathematicall Praeface, who had died in 1554.

He seemed to put as much effort into befriending Elizabeth’s servants as her courtiers, welcoming both her Italian dwarf, Tomasina and a ‘Mr Fosku’ of the Queen’s wardrobe to Mortlake.

His hopes that the Queen herself might offer him a post as court philosopher were wildly optimistic. There was certainly a demand for philosophical advice of all sorts: astrological, alchemical, theological, even medical. When a wax effigy of Elizabeth stuck with pig bristles was found under a tree in Lincoln’s Inn Fields; when a ‘blazing star’ appeared in the sky; when the Queen fell sick with a mysterious illness – it was Dee who was called upon to advise. Even on strategic matters, such as the maintenance of a navy or the management of trade, he could expect an eager audience. But whenever the court summoned him, it was as a diligent subject not a paid professional. Only the sophisticated and lavish households of Continental monarchs could afford professional court philosophers. In England, they were considered an unnecessary luxury. For there were Ladies-in-Waiting, Gentlemen-of-the-Wardrobe, even Grooms-of-the-Stool, but no masters of philosophy.

So, with no prospects of office and little of any future income, Dee did what so many in his situation do: he went to live with his mother.

Following Roland’s death, Dee’s mother Jane had settled herself in an ‘ancient messuage [dwelling] of outhowses, orchard and garden,’ opposite Mortlake church, overlooking the Thames.³ Probably built in the previous century, this rather ramshackle residence boasted no more than a hall, scullery, two or three bedrooms and a few cramped chambers when Dee arrived in the mid-1560s. He brought a new wife, Katherine Constable, widow of a London grocer.⁴ Nothing more is known about Katherine. They apparently had no children, or at least none that survived, and she died some time before 1575.⁵

Dee’s new home now became the focus of his ambitions. During his travels he had accumulated a huge collection of books and manuscripts including titles that few in England had seen, such as Johannes de Burgo’s Treatise on Magic, a strange document written in Spanish using the Hebrew alphabet which he had found in Louvain; the Secretum Secretorum (attributed to Aristotle) on the nature of immortality, bought in Padua; Italian volumes on the Cabala and Plutarch; commentaries on the great Greek geometricians Euclid and Appollonius; the Liber Experiementorum (Book of Experiments) attributed to the Spanish mystic and philosopher Ramon Lull, which he had found like the Steganographia in Antwerp. These were added to a list already several hundred long, which included two copies of Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus, Boethius’s Consolations of Philosophy, Norton’s Ordinal of Alchemy and a study of the Tetrabiblios by Ptolemy (the standard classical work on astrology).⁶ In intellectual and material terms, such a concentration of rare and controversial texts was highly combustible and Dee needed somewhere safe to store it.

He set about transforming his mother’s cottage into one of Europe’s largest libraries, encrusting the house with extensions and buying up neighbouring buildings and tenements to fit everything in.

The main addition was an Externa bibliotheca or ‘chief and open library’, a reading room where scholars and copyists could consult the main body of the collection. The works crammed into the shelves covered an immense range of subjects, not just magic and mathematics, but the Armenian church, botany, chastity, demonology, dreams, earthquakes, Etruria, falconry, games, gymnastics, horticulture, Islam, logic, marriage, mythology, the nobility, oils, pharmacology, rhetoric, saints, surveying, tides, veterinary science, weather, women and zoology.⁷

Despite the multiplicity of subjects and number of volumes, the library was arranged according to no recognisable bibliographic scheme. Works were as likely to be arranged according to size as their author or subject. Nevertheless, Dee was renowned for his ability to find references on any subject from among the bending shelves. William Bourne was a former innkeeper and gunner who became a successful writer on navigation. He visited Mortlake some time before 1580, and happened to mention to Dee that there seemed to be very little information about the number of ships the emperor of China might have under his command. Dee then ‘opened a book and showed me a note that…the number was 15,000.’ Expressing his disbelief that the emperor could call upon such a force, Dee instantly located another volume containing supporting evidence. It revealed that when the emperor sent his daughter on a sea journey he provided fourteen ships to act as her escort, indicating that at the very least he was generously provisioned. Bourne was so impressed by this display of bibliographic skill, that he later mentioned it in his navigational primer Regiment for the Sea.⁸

As well as books, the Externa bibliotheca also contained Dee’s collection of scientific instruments (including the globes given him by Mercator) which Dee had decorated with records of his own observations and discoveries, a five-foot quadrant, a ten-foot cross-staff, a sea compass and a watch-clock, accurate to the second.

Several rooms or ‘appendices’ led off from the Externa bibliotheca, housing Dee’s collection of official papers and title deeds (stored in a ‘great case or frame of boxes’), the marvels and rarities that he picked up along his travels, and his laboratories. Goodwife Faldo remembered five or six stills bubbling away, distilling mysterious potions from egg-shells and horse dung.

The room that she did not see, and which Dee did not mention in any of his published writings, was what he might have called his Interna bibliotheca or private study. Only a select few were invited to enter this room, and no one was allowed into the adjoining private chapel or ‘oratory’, where the bibles and devotional texts so conspicuously lacking from the catalogues of the Externa bibliotheca were presumably shelved. Dee stored his magical equipment in the study, such as the strange mirror Pickering gave him, his confidential writings on spiritual transactions and books like Cornelius’s Agrippa’s De Occulta Philosophia, which he kept open on his desk for easy reference.

The costs of creating this labyrinthine academy-cum-laboratory, which occupied him for over a decade, soon stretched beyond the modest £80 he received each year from his rectory at Long Leadenham. To supplement his income, he started to provide services of various sorts: tuition, astrological readings, dream interpretations, medical consultations, even forensic advice.⁹ His diaries are littered with examples: interpreting a dream for Harry Price; advising on the deformed fingers of the London minister John Halton; assessing the guilt of a ‘melancholic’ young man ‘very ingenious in many handiworks’ and suspected of burglary; trying to find the cause of the suicidal tendencies of a local woman called Isabel Lister.

He also accepted government research work. The most substantial commission came in 1570 from Christopher Hatton and Robert Dudley via Edward Dyer. In January, the assassination of the Earl of Moray, Protestant Regent of Scotland, had opened up the ‘postern-gate of England’ to Catholic insurgence supporting Mary, Queen of Scots, currently imprisoned in England and focus of innumerable plots to overthrow Elizabeth. Then, on 2 June, a bull issued by Pope Pius V entitled Regnans in Excelsis was nailed to the door of the Bishop of London’s palace, announcing a Catholic fatwa against Elizabeth. It was against the background of these unnerving events that Dyer asked Dee to write an analysis of the state of the nation.

The resulting paper, Brytannicae Reipublicae Synposis, a ‘Synopsis of the British Republic’, has been described as ‘one of the most important contemporary analyses of Elizabethan England,’ providing as it does a snapshot of the nation’s economy, political institutions and defences.¹⁰ Organised in the form of a large flow chart, it was aimed at showing the true state of the nation, identifying a variety of problems, including those that continued to beset the economy, which Dee attributed to urban decay, low standards in the textile industry, the debasement of currency and unemployment. By calling Britain a republic, Dee was certainly not recommending the end of monarchical government, but emphasising the notion of the state being a commonwealth. In other writings, he attacked privateers and the ‘enclosers of commons’, promoting the doctrine that every man was born to encourage public prosperity rather than private gain.¹¹

No record survives of the government’s response, nor of the fee Dee received for writing it. He felt obliged to refuse payment for other official work.¹² Even if he had been paid, it would not have been enough to cover his growing expenses. Nor would his astrological consultations, which were often sought by nobles, who were notoriously mean, expecting such services to be offered for free.

In 1571, Dee received a ‘passport with my two servants and our geldings’ to depart on a trip to the Duchy of Lorraine to buy laboratory equipment. He returned with ‘one great cart’ laden with flasks and vessels made of clay, metal and glass. He clearly intended to use them in alchemy, a discipline which he considered to be ‘the lord of all sciences and the end of all speculation’.¹³

There was growing government interest in alchemy. The historian John Strype records that, in 1574

a great project had been carrying on now for two or three years, of Alchymy, William Medley, being the great undertaker, to turn iron into copper. Sir Thomas Smith, Secretary of State, had by some Experiments made before him, a great Opinion of it. And for the better carrying it on and bearing the Expences it was thought fit to be done by a Corporation: into which by Smith’s Encouragement, the Lord Burghley, and the Earl of Leicester entered themselves with others: each member laying down an £100 to go on with it.¹⁴

Even if he had been involved, manufacturing copper would not have been the primary focus of his alchemical interest. The true philosopher, he wrote, ‘is interested rather in the theory of alchemy than in the practical devices of the Alchemist’.¹⁶ Expertise or ‘adeptship’ in alchemy was about transmuting the soul rather than the substance.

But Dee’s involvement with alchemical experiments was interrupted by the onset of a crippling illness. He never identified the symptoms, however it is possible that, like many who dabbled in alchemy and metallurgy at the time, he was poisoned by some of the chemicals he was handling.

His condition became so serious the Queen sent her own physicians, Doctors Apslow and Balthorp, to Mortlake. During his convalescence, they were joined by the sister of the Earl of Leicester, Lady Sidney, one of Elizabeth’s most trusted Ladies of the Bedchamber, ‘to discern how my health bettered’. As Lady Sidney sat by Dee’s bedside dabbing his brow, she regaled him with ‘very pithy speeches’, and fed him ‘divers rarities…to encrease my health and strength: the most dutiful and thankful memory whereof shall never die’.¹⁷

For the next few years he seems to have given up foreign travel completely. Indeed, there is little sign of activity during this period, except for a burst of astronomical work with his pupil, the brilliant Thomas Digges. By 1574, his financial situation had become desperate, and he decided to take action. On 3 October, he sat down at his desk at Mortlake, selected several sheets of the smoothest parchment, sharpened a quill into the finest nib, mixed the thickest lampblack into the darkest ink, and, in his neatest secretarial hand, penned a desperate plea for help to Elizabeth’s chief minister, William Cecil, now Lord Burghley.¹⁸

Cecil received many such letters, and doubtless forwarded most to the fireplace. But this one he kept and it has survived. In it, Dee painted a picture of penury totally at odds with the document’s opulence. He described the ‘incredible toil of body and mind’ he had endured in his quest to serve his country by accumulating ‘the best Learning and knowledge’. ‘This Land never bred any man,’ whose efforts had been greater than his, he wrote. And ‘the same zeal remaineth (yea rather greater is grown),’ but he no longer had the means, the ‘liability’, to fulfil it. He needed money ‘which (as God knoweth) findeth not me, and my poor family’s necessary meat, drink and fuel; for a frugal and philosophical Diet.’ The ‘little exhibition which I enjoy,’ was simply not enough, although he would not have even that were it not for Cecil’s previous interventions on his behalf.

And the solution was just two or three hundred pounds per annum. This was a small sum by the standards of court patronage. Nobles regularly received thousands of pounds from the Queen’s coffers. Sir Edward Dyer had managed to secure a royal loan of three thousand pounds (which he never repaid). But Dee was not in Dyer’s league, and knew it.

So, no sooner had he asked for the money than he suggested a cost-free way of providing it. It was related to the discovery of gold not through alchemy, but by locating buried treasure.

Treasure was a particular preoccupation of the Tudor era: ‘Yea, all the wealth that our forefathers hid/Within the massy entrails of the earth…’ as Marlowe wrote in Dr Faustus. Before the age of banking, burial was a common method of safe deposit, and the countryside was assumed to be heaving with hoards of jewellery and coins.

From the peasant classes upwards, money was so tight and income so precarious, that the discovery of hidden treasure was for many the only hope left. Expectations were raised by widely-circulating rumours that the fortunes of newly-rich families were dug up by a gardener’s spade or farmer’s ploughshare. It was also believed that there was a distinct pattern to the distribution of buried treasure. The ruins of abbeys and castles were thought particularly rich terrain, especially since the dissolution of the monasteries. Corrupt priests who had for years fattened themselves on tithes and monopolies were popularly believed to have hidden their ill-gotten gains in consecrated ground before they were chased off into the countryside. For the same reason wayside crosses and even ancient burial mounds were frequently found uprooted or pillaged, so much so that ‘hill-digger’ became a term of abuse similar in meaning to today’s ‘gold-digger’.²¹

But these riches remained infuriatingly elusive. In an age before metal-detectors and mechanical diggers, even narrowing the search area to the precincts of a ruin still meant daunting excavations. The only realistic hope of discovery was to find a map, become adept at spotting anomalies in surface features and vegetation, or resort to more occult detection systems.

Having spent much of his life searching through the nation’s monuments and libraries, Dee may well have found some treasure maps. They were likely to be in code, but that, too, was something he knew about. Dee ended his letter to Cecil with a request for a recommendation to the Keeper of the Records at Wigmore Castle, to gain permission to examine the archives there. ‘My fantasy is, I can get from them at my leisure, matter for chronicle or pedigree, by way of recreation,’ he wrote, in a tone that may have struck Cecil as suspiciously innocuous.

Dee also had some expertise in surveying and geology. He had collected an extensive set of books on mining, including the key contemporary works: De Re Metallica, by the German ‘father of minerology’ Georgius Agricola (1494-1555) and De La Pyrotechnie by the Italian armourer Vannoccio Biringuccio (1480-c.1539).²²

These were full of practical information about identifying promising mining sites, assaying (purifying) metals from ore, sinking shafts and digging tunnels.²³ However, geographical surveying was not enough. To see what lay hidden beneath the soil, other skills were called for.

For Dee, as for most others at the time, the earth and the stars were inextricably linked. He thought, for example, that the appearance of a new star in 1572 signified ‘the finding of some great Treasure’ and noted the discovery two years later of a gold mine. The idea of there being correspondences between the celestial and the terrestrial was one of the principles underlying alchemy. The same astrological sign was used for both the planet and the metal Mercury as both were thought to share the same ‘mercurial’ characteristics. Similarly, Venus was copper and the Moon was silver. The Sun, of course, was gold, and it was believed that where one was most plentiful, so would be the other: the heat of the Sun promoted the formation of gold seams in the soil. The biggest concentrations of gold ore were thus assumed to lie in the tropics, a view which seemed abundantly confirmed by the fabulous hoards brought back from Central America by the Spanish.

Thus it was, his letter explained, that he had become the focus of reports about strange terrestrial emanations and particularly of dreams hinting at the location of buried hoards, and wanted permission to act upon them:

Of late, I have been sued unto by diverse sorts of peoples, of which some by vehement, iterated dreams, some by vision (as they have thought) other by speech forced to their imagination by night, have been informed of certain places where Treasure doth lie hid; which all, for fear of Keepers (as the phrase commonly nameth them) or for mistrust of truth in the places assigned and some for some other causes, have forborn to deal further, unless I should encourage them or counsel them how to proceed. Wherein I have always been contented to hear the histories, fantasies or illusions to me reported but never entermeddled according to the desire of much.

He had ‘never entermeddled’ because it would have been doubly illegal to do so. For, had he uncovered anything, under the ancient law of treasure-trove it would automatically become the property of the Queen. But to have admitted to acting upon such reports might also lay him open to the charge of engaging in magical divination, which was prohibited not just by government, but divine law. ‘There shall not be found among you any that burns his son or his daughter as an offering, any one who practises divination, a soothsayer, or an augur, or a sorcerer, or a charmer, or a medium, or a wizard, or a necromancer,’ states Deuteronomy. This scriptural prohibition was supported by an Act of 1563 which made the discovery of treasure or recovery of stolen goods by magical means an offence. A first conviction was punishable by a year’s imprisonment and four appearances in the pillory, a second by death.

Dee believed that his proposal of searching for treasure was, like his study of the stars, exempt from such prohibitions because it was essentially scientific. It was based on a coherent body of knowledge. He did not have a magical power unavailable to others, but rather an understanding of the forces of nature, and therefore an ability to manipulate and exploit them. Thus his letter to Cecil cited several textural authorities for the idea of divination which demonstrated that it could be done in the ‘manner of Philosophers and Mathematicians’.

Having carefully circumscribed his methods, Dee set out his proposed deal. All he was asking was that, in return for half of the spoils, he be granted a licence to search for treasure on the Queen’s behalf. This was not the equivalent of being granted a mining monopoly. ‘The value of a mine is matter for King’s Treasure,’ Dee conceded, ‘but a pot of two or three hundred [coins] hid in the ground, wall, or tree, is but the price of a good book, or instrument for perspective astronomy, or some feat of importance’ – the very things he needed to pursue his scientific studies on the Crown’s behalf.

The rewards, he promised, would certainly be enough to make it worth Cecil’s while to grant such a licence, for ‘if (besides all books, dreams, visions, reports…by any other natural means…or by attraction and repulsion), the places may be descryed or discovered where gold, silver or better matter doth lie hid within a certain distance, [think] how great a commodity should it be for the Queen’s Majestie and the commonwealth of this Kingdom.’

Despite such enticements, however, Cecil did not agree, perhaps because he dared not give Dee what would become a de facto monopoly over treasure-trove. Instead, Dee was to find himself drawn into a much more ambitious treasure hunt – one in which the prize was not just ‘a pot of two or three hundred’, but the wealth of the Orient, the vast expanses of the Russian Empire, and the unexplored wonders of the New World.

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