At about nine in the evening of Thursday, 8 March 1582, Dee watched the sky over Mortlake turn the colour of blood.1 He had never seen anything like it. A strange glow formed and spread out, as though the clouds themselves had caught fire.
Earlier that day, a Mr Clerkson had turned up. Clerkson seems to have been acting as an agent for scholars and itinerant ‘skryers’ – or spirit mediums – introducing them to prospective patrons. The week before, he had arrived at Mortlake with a Thomas Robinson; ‘Magnus’ (the great), Dee had called him, suggesting that perhaps he was a noble, learned or talented figure, though apparently not enough to feature again in Dee’s diary.2 This time Mr Clerkson had turned up with someone new, a ‘friend’ who called himself Edward Talbot.
‘Talbot’ is a mysterious figure, just as elusive as the spirits he would soon release into Dee’s life. If he did not exist – and that seems to be the only fact about him beyond dispute – it would be only too easy to invent him. When first introduced to Dee, even his name was an invention. He was really called Edward Kelley. Kelley had possibly decided to call himself Talbot because it was the name of an ancient Lancastrian dynasty, and he may have thought that the lineage would impress Dee (or Clerkson or his previous employer, who could have been Thomas Allen, the mathematician and receiver for Lok’s bankrupt Cathay Company).3
According to a birth chart drawn up by Dee, Kelley was born in Worcester on 1 August 1555, which would make him twenty-six at the time of their first encounter. An interpretation of the chart made a century later by Elias Ashmole certainly indicates that there was something extraordinary about the young man. He was, the stars suggested, ‘of clear understanding, quick apprehension, an excellent wit, and a great propensity to philosophical studies’. The position of Jupiter promised great fame, but, being ill-aspected, portended misfortune and ultimate disaster. Mars’s position indicated he was rash, boastful, presumptuous, stubbornly weak, histrionic, deranged and treacherous.4
This vivid astrological portrait (written, of course, retrospectively and clearly coloured by the incidents of Kelley’s life) is supported by the only independent documentation concerning his origins, the parish registers of Worcester. These show that an Edward Kelley, son of Patrick, was christened on 2 August 1555 (i.e. the day after his birth) at St Swithin’s, Worcester. It seems very likely that this is the man who appeared at Dee’s door that March day, as both Edwards had a brother called Thomas (christened 1564) and a sister (identified as Elizabeth in the Parish records).5
Thereafter, we are lost in legends. If these are to be believed, the man Dee met was remarkable, just the sort of strange creature that might be announced by the sky catching fire. He was a cripple (‘Il Zoppo’, as one Papal official once contemptuously described him) who went around with a walking staff and due to his disability – or perhaps his diabolical nature – had difficulty kneeling.6 He wore a cowl, giving him the appearance of a monk, concealing his ears.7 At least one ear was certainly ‘diminished’, according to a curious observer.8 It was commonly supposed that it had been lopped for ‘coining’ (forging or adulterating coins). There were reports that at one stage of his eventful career he was a notary in London and had specialised in forging title deeds – the sorts of deeds that Dee himself collected as part of the scheme he had proposed to Queen Mary to preserve national ‘monuments’, and which he now kept in the ‘appendix’ to his library at Mortlake.9 Kelley reputedly had been found guilty of forgery, in which case his face might have been scarred by stones hurled at him whilst locked in the stocks.
He was also accused of being a ‘necromancer’ – a dabbler in dead bodies. According to one story, Kelley and a Paul Waring one night entered a park at Walton-le-Dale, near Preston in Lancashire, where they ‘invocated some one of the Infernal Regiment, to know certain passages in the life, as also what might be known by the Devil’s foresight, of the manner and time of the death of a Noble young Gentleman, as then in Wardship.’
These ‘Black Ceremonies of that Night being ended’, Kelley then asked a local, one of the noble young gentleman’s servants, to direct him and his companion to the freshest corpse in the adjoining churchyard. He was shown the grave of a pauper, interred that day.
He and the said Waring entreated this foresaid servant to go with them to the grave of the man so lately interred, which he did; and withal, did help them dig up the carcass…whom by their incantations, they made him (or rather some evil Spirit through his Organs) to speak, who delivered strange Predictions concerning the said Gentleman.10
The source of this deliciously diabolical tale was apparently the servant who had directed Kelley to the grave, although neither the servant nor the gentleman he served have ever been identified.
This story also linked Kelley with another colourful Lancashire character, the self-styled ‘Baron of Walton’, Thomas Langton, who was accused in 1593 of harbouring Catholic spies. According to one account, Kelley was hauled up before Langton, who as local squire had to decide what to do with him. As he shared Kelley’s interest in the occult, he used his influence as a friend of Lord Strange, son of Lancashire’s Lord Lieutenant, to engineer Kelley’s release.11
Yet another legend suggests the reason why Kelley turned up at the house of Dr Dee that March morning. Elias Ashmole was told this tale about Kelley by the alchemist William Backhouse. Backhouse lived at Swallowfield in Berkshire, at a house packed with ‘all manner of Inventions and Rarities’.12 Ashmole described himself as being Backhouse’s ‘Son’, in other words, the inheritor of his alchemical knowledge.
Knowing of Ashmole’s interest in Dee and Kelley, Backhouse told him that Kelley had once ‘Cheated a Lady of certain jewels’ and that among his many powers were those of the conman. Kelley made his escape with his booty but was soon being chased by an unidentified ‘Pursevant’ (pursuer).
Kelley then arrived at Dee’s under an false name with the intention of lying low. But the Pursevant eventually caught up with him at Mortlake and confronted him. Exercising the same powers that had enabled him to dupe the lady, Kelley somehow persuaded him that he would recompense the lady for his crime, whereupon the Pursevant let him go.
The truth of this story, which only too convenientiy confirms Kelley’s reputation as a swindler, is impossible to establish, as Backhouse, through Ashmole, is the only source. Dee makes no direct reference to the episode in his own diary, though he does write three months after their meeting that ‘I have confirmed that Talbot was a cosener’ – in other words, a fraud. Beside these words Kelley has indignantly (and, given it was Dee’s private diary, impertinently) scribbled ‘a horrible and slanderous lie.’13
According to Backhouse, one reason that Kelley decided to follow Dee to the Continent eighteen months after their first meeting was that he was still being stalked by the Pursevant. Hearing reports of Kelley’s subsequent fame in Bohemia, he travelled out there and confronted him again. This time he was rewarded with one of Kelley’s celebrated alchemical ‘projections’. Using a tiny scattering of magic ‘powder’, Kelley produced two thousand pounds’ worth of gold, which, together with a sample of the powder, he handed over to the now placated Pursevant. The gentleman took the booty home and used it to buy up large areas of Warwickshire, and to turn a flint he found in the grounds of his expanding estates into a huge diamond.
Disentangling the truth from such a tapestry has proved impossible. Dee, however, knew little or nothing about the reputation of the man who turned up at his home with Mr Clerkson.14 Indeed, as he opened his front door, his initial impression might have been that Clerkson had picked up yet another desperate itinerant ‘skryer’ looking for work.
Thanks to a combination of factors – the series of famines in the early 1570s, the destabilising influx of gold and silver from the New World, urbanisation and religious turmoil – the Elizabethan highways had become crowded with itinerants. This was something even Dee had commented upon in one of his reports for the government. Such people would have been a common sight, tramping past his door on their way towards the supposed opportunities of London, but where they were more likely to encounter poverty or plague.
Skryers like ‘Talbot’ were usually drawn from these dispossessed ranks. As church records show, they were particularly common during the late sixteenth century. Almost every parish, and apparently several aristocratic households, boasted a ‘cunning man’, who, for the price of a beer or a bed, would summon spirits and tell fortunes. They were a strange fraternity of young men, literate but generally lowborn, often outcasts or fugitives. Like actors or artists today, they were almost required to be odd, as it was their distinctive sensibility that enabled them to pick up occult emanations. Hence even the most respectable patrons would tolerate their eccentric, ‘melancholic’, even criminal behaviour.15
‘Talbot’ was apparently just such a creature. But he was unusually well-educated for a man of his status and seemed strangely determined to join Dee’s household. There is every indication that, at some level, the mysterious man who arrived at Mortlake on that March afternoon in 1582 had been expected.