Dee treated his actions with the spirits with the utmost seriousness. His list of instructions about how they should be conducted specified that, for three days before each action, the participants should abstain from ‘Coitus & Gluttony’; that on the day they should ‘wash hands, face, cut nails, shave the beard, wash all’; and that just before a session commenced, invocations should be made ‘five times to the East, as many to the West, so many to the South, & to the north’. The spirits should only be called during certain phases of the moon, under the influence of a ‘good planet…well placed,’ and ‘in the sunshine’.1
On Sunday 29 April 1582 at a quarter past eight in the evening, an action took place that broke at least one of these injunctions. Michael appeared and announced that he was about to reveal an important message about the relationship between divine and earthly powers. ‘We show unto you the lower world: the Governors that work and rule under God.’ This was to be done by revealing the names of the forty-nine angels ‘whose names are here evident, excellent and glorious.’ Forty-nine was numerologically significant, being the square of seven, the number of heavenly bodies in the cosmos (the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn). ‘Mark these Tables,’ he commanded, ‘Mark them. Record them… This is the first knowledge.’2
There then appeared one of the most elaborate tables yet – indeed a table of tables, seven in all, each made up of seven rows and seven columns, each cell of which contained a number and a letter. One table related to ‘wit and wisdom’; another to ‘the exaltation and government of princes’; another to ‘counsel [i.e. royal advisors] and nobility’; another to the ‘gain and trade of merchandise’; another to the ‘quality of the earth and waters’; another to the ‘motion of the air’; and finally, set in the centre, was the table relating to divine government. This demonstrated that the angelic revelations about to be delivered were not about personal but political salvation, about the creation of a new global order run by godly principles.
‘Talbot’ spent nearly three hours reading out the contents of these tables, cell by cell, letter by letter, number by number, which Dee laboriously copied into his notebook. Then the skryer fell silent. He was, he later told Dee, being addressed by Michael directly. The session finally came to an end at 11.30pm, after which ‘Talbot’ revealed Michael’s commands to Dee. ‘He said that I must betake myself to the world, and forsake the world. That is, that I should marry. Which thing to do, I have no natural inclination, neither with a safe conscience may I do it, contrary to my vow and profession.’
The last comment, which Dee underlined, is a striking one. It suggests that ‘Talbot’ was – or wanted Dee to believe that he was – a Catholic priest, who had been ordered by an archangel to break his vow of celibacy. This is yet another pungent ingredient dropped into the cauldron of speculation and legend surrounding this enigmatic figure. Was he really a priest? Was this what Ashmole was referring to when, a century later, he described Kelley as the ‘canon of Bridlington’?3 And if so, was he really a Catholic?
If he was, his presence placed Dee’s household in great peril. As one historian put it at this time, ‘the air of northwest Europe was, if not thick with the cries of the massacred and martyred, thick with the expectation of massacre and martyrdom’.4 In the coming months, religious tension was to intensify sharply, provoked by Elizabeth’s revived marriage negotiations with the Catholic Duke of Anjou (with which Dee was intimately if discreetly involved) and culminating with the uncovering of the ‘Throckmorton Plot’, which attempted to release Mary, Queen of Scots, and overthrow Elizabeth’s Protestant regime. Throckmorton had been foiled by Cecil’s extremely powerful and sophisticated intelligence network, which was now run by Sir Francis Walsingham. Walsingham and Dee had several meetings during this period, mostly in connection with the exploration of the Northwest Passage. Another visitor of Dee’s was one of Walsingham’s most sinister associates, Charles Sledd. Sledd had been instrumental in uncovering the English College in Rome as a training camp for Catholic priests sent to spy on England. Whenever he came to Mortlake, the outcome seemed unpleasant. On one occasion Sledd suffered two nose bleeds, both of which seemed spontaneously to erupt the moment Dee talked to him about ‘virtue and godliness’ – ‘Meaneth he well toward me?’ Dee anxiously asked the spirits. On another occasion Sledd had a violent row with Talbot-Kelley.5 Dee does not record the cause of the argument, but Kelley’s suspicion that Sledd had been sent to spy on him may well have featured.
Sledd was by no means the only person to fall out with Kelley. The intense, turbulent young man soon started to cause problems much closer to home. On Friday, 4 May 1582, a few days after Michael had told ‘Talbot’ to get married, the skryer was in a truculent mood. At first he refused even to invoke the angelic ‘creatures’ that had been their daily company in the past month, ‘utterly misliking and discrediting them’. Dee eventually managed to persuade him to continue, but in protest he insisted on wearing his hat throughout the proceedings.
A badly mutilated entry in Dee’s diary dated two days later records that his wife Jane had spent the entire evening and night, and the ‘next morning until 8’ in a ‘marvellous’ rage over ‘Talbot’. She was ‘melancholic and choleric for the cosening’ – in other words, furious because Talbot had been deceiving her and her husband. This skryer was just like all the rest, brought to Mortlake by Clerkson (who, along with his brother, was also implicated) ‘as honest learned men’, who then ‘used’ Dee for their own ends.
Dee was apparently at a loss to account for her behaviour. A week later he reported that she ‘rode to Cheam’, where her father lived.6 But by the end of the month he too had come to understand ‘Talbot’s’ ‘wicked nature and his abominable lies’.7 Over the following weeks, ‘Talbot’ went away from Mortlake on several occasions, to track down some books once owned by the late William Stanley, the third Lord Mounteagle. The Stanleys were a fiercely independent Lancashire family that would act as a focus of Catholic rebellion for years to come.
‘Talbot’ returned to Mortlake on 13 July. He and Dee fell out, but soon made up, parting ‘on friendly terms’ after ‘Talbot’ revealed that he had managed to trace Mounteagle’s books. Three days later, Dee had to juggle nursing his wife, who was suffering from stomach pains and vomiting ‘very much green stuff’ with receiving both Sir George Peckham to discuss the colonisation of America and William Pole, whom he knew through the Earl of Pembroke. At the end of his diary entry for the day, he tersely noted ‘I have confirmed that Talbot was a cosener.’
‘Talbot’ was never to be seen again.