A few days after Dee ‘confirmed’ ‘Talbot’s’ deception, Saul, Dee’s previous skryer, suddenly resurfaced with a peace offering: the two ‘chests’, probably of books supposedly found in Oundle, Northamptonshire that he had mentioned two years earlier. Dee gave him short shrift, ‘chiding’ him for ‘his manifold untrue reports… He tarried not.’1
In November 1582 ‘Talbot’ reappeared: this time as Edward Kelley. Unlike Saul, Kelley was welcomed back with open arms, despite his change of identity. Dee marked the event by starting a new notebook to record the eagerly anticipated actions. He called it Mysteriorum Liber Post Reconciliationem Kellianam (The Book of Mysteries after the Reconciliation with Kelley).
Many apologists and commentators have found Dee’s attachment to Kelley baffling. The fact that Kelley had arrived under a false name; that he had been accused of deception by Dee’s own wife; that he had suspicious connections with the Catholic world and may have even been a recusant priest; that he was – as Dee later discovered – a fugitive accused of forgery and coining; that he was fractious, irascible and unreliable: none of this dented Dee’s trust in his skrying skills. At one point, he was so dependent on Kelley he confessed that his heart ‘did throb’ at the thought of the skryer’s absence.2
Kelley himself provided Dee with more than sufficient grounds for suspicion. On one occasion, Dee recorded Kelley suffering ‘a great storm or temptation… of doubting and misliking our instructors and their doings’.3 On another, the skryer claimed that the spirits he had summoned were ‘all devils’ adding that Dee’s servant John ‘can well enough deliver you these [spiritual] letters, and so you need not me.’4 On such occasions, all Dee would do was calmly reassure Kelley that he should have more faith, and that it was God’s will that had brought them together. Dee seemed to have fallen under Kelley’s spell.
But Kelley’s value to Dee was not a matter of character. The flaws in his nature were in fact evidence of his strengths as a skryer. An effective medium needs to be like a child or even an animal: instinctive, volatile, highly sensitive to his surroundings, and unconstrained by intellect or experience. So a certain juvenile petulence should be expected. But most important, where it counted, Kelley delivered. The richness and sophistication of his visions, the combination of clear divine light and complex cabalistic formulae was not only captivating, but convincing.
During the winter of 1582 and the following spring, their actions ranged across a vast variety of subjects and concerns, some relating to Dee’s other work for the government and with voyages of discovery, some to the revelations the spirits themselves were promising. This set the somewhat haphazard pattern for the coming years, where exciting progress in one area was countered by frustrations in another.
The first action Post Reconciliationem with Kelley took place on 21 November 1582. It confirmed Dee in his belief that he had found the right medium. This time, Kelley summoned up a spirit called King Camara. Camara stood resplendent before him, brandishing a rod of black and red to ‘measure us and our power’, and asked ‘What is your desire?’ Dee confessed to Camara that he was having difficulties understanding the complex tables the spirits had shown him previously, and was afraid that he had mistranscribed some of the words.
‘One thing is yet wanting,’ the King Camara proclaimed. ‘A meet receptacle… a Stone… One there is, most excellent, hid in the secret of the depth &c, in the uttermost part of the Roman Possession. Lo, the mighty hand of God is upon thee. Thou shalt have it. Thou shalt have it. Thou shalt have it. Dost thou see? Look and stir not from thy place.’
‘I see it not,’ Dee confessed.
‘It is sanctified,’ Camara announced. ‘Thou shalt prevail with it, with kings, and with all creatures of the world: whose beauty (in virtue) shall be more worth than the kingdoms of the earth. Look, if thou seest: but stir not, for the angel of his power is present.’
At this point, Kelley turned towards the study window, and saw resting on the mats next to a pile of books an object ‘as big as an egg, most bright, clear and glorious.’ He saw an angel ‘of the height of a little child’ which held the glistening jewel up to Dee, offering it to him.
‘Go toward it, and take it up,’ Camara commanded. Dee obediently got within two feet of the place where this object was supposed to be. But he could see nothing. Then he saw a shadow on the ground ‘roundish and less than the palm of my hand. I put my hand down upon it, and I felt a thing cold and hard.’ It was a crystal. ‘Keep it sincerely,’ said Camara. ‘Let no mortal hand touch it, but thine own. Praise God.’5
It was a new magical lens, through which Kelley would perceive the most compelling visions yet.
The next day, Kelley left Mortlake for London, and then for Blockley, a village thirty-five miles north-west of Oxford. The entry in Dee’s diary recording this apparently innocuous news is mutilated.6 Two days later, Dee had a nightmare: ‘Saturday night I dreamed that I was dead, and afterward my bowels were taken out, I walked and talked with divers, and among other with the L. Treasurer,’ he wrote. William Cecil had come to Dee’s house to look through his books, and looked ‘sourly’ at Dee.7
Dee does not specify which books he feared Cecil might find, but they must have included his ‘Arabic’ Book of Soyga, so promisingly described by the spirits as containing the language of Adam. A few months later Dee discovered it had gone missing, and suspected that Cecil might indeed have it. A far more likely suspect is Kelley, who may have wanted to study it privately in preparation for future angelic actions.8
After Kelley’s departure for Blockley, there is no record of any further actions for the next four months. Then on 22 March 1583 Kelley arrived at Mortlake accompanied by John Husey. Husey, Kelley told Dee, came from Blockley, and together they had found a ‘certain monument of a book and a scroll’ at nearby Northwick Hill, having been directed there by a ‘spiritual creature’. Just before his death, Dee identified the book as being written by St Dunstan, the patron saint of the City church around which he had played as a boy.9
The scroll seemed to be a map, with ten locations cryptically identified by a collection of objects: feathers, pots, leaves and crosses. Each location was accompanied by a short message written in an unfamiliar alphabet, and accompanying the whole was a block of text written using the same alphabet.
Kelley later revealed to Dee that they had also discovered a red substance, variously described as a ‘powder’, ‘earth’ and a ‘congealed thing’. It was later claimed to be a sample of the Philosopher’s Stone, the much sought-after alchemical tincture that turned base metal into gold, and dead matter into living. Elias Ashmole wrote that the powder was so potent, that a single ounce was capable of producing 22,694 pounds of gold.10
In the coming years, many legends would accumulate around Kelley’s curious finds. A century later, the story circulated that these ‘monuments’ had been found buried among the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey. This tale was no doubt reinforced by the connection with St Dunstan. A courtier to King Athelstan, he was exiled following accusations of sorcery, and later made Abbot of Glastonbury, rebuilding the institution after its sacking by the Danes. Glastonbury was also, of course, thought to be the resting place of King Arthur and the birthplace of English Christianity, the sort of legendary locus that made the perfect setting for the discovery of such mysterious artefacts.
Another version, recorded by the French writer Nicolas Lenglet du Fresnoy, stated that the powder and scroll had been found by grave robbers in the tomb of a Welsh bishop, and sold to Kelley for £1 by an innkeeper.11
Whatever their origin, the book, scroll and red powder were to become central features of Kelley’s continuing revelations. However, the spiritual advice concerning them continued to be obscure, deeply allegorical and haphazardly delivered.
The day after Kelley’s return from Blockley, he and Dee commenced another action, during which they hoped to receive ‘some exposition of the scroll, written in strange characters’. On this occasion, none was forthcoming. Instead a vision of a tree, with a pool of water around its roots followed. The moisture was drawn up into the tree, causing it to swell and produce fruit, ‘great, fair and red’. The archangel Raphael, appearing under the label Medicina Dei (the Medicine of God), started to eat the fruit.12 ‘It lighteth the hearts of those that are chosen,’ he told Kelley, and said it would have the same effect on Dee.
The following day, Medicina Dei appeared again, this time lying prostrate, his head being licked by a lamb. The spirit suddenly rose and ‘wiped his face as though he had wept.’ ‘Man’s memory is dull,’ he announced, and said he had a medicine from God to heal it. This medicine was ‘understanding and reason’. These had ‘elevated and lifted up the dignity and worthiness of man’s memory,’ he said. ‘New worlds shall spring of these,’ he added. Then he produced a book with leaves of gold covered in text written with blood. He instructed Kelley to count the pages of the book: forty eight.
Dee then unravelled the scroll Kelley had found: ‘Will you of these characters and places of treasure hid (here portrayed by picture) say anything?’ ‘The thing there, which you desire of me, is no part of my charge,’ the spirit replied, and departed, putting his golden book ‘in his bosom as he goeth’.
The spirit appeared again on 26 March. Dee immediately asked for more information about the ‘medicine’. ‘What liquor is more lively than the dew of truth, proceeding from the fountain most sweet and delectable?’ the spirit replied. He produced the golden book again and opened it up. He pointed to a series of strange characters, and counted them from left to right, twenty-one in all. ‘Note what they are,’ he commanded. Dee copied them down. They were the letters of the celestial alphabet, his first sight of the written language handed by God to Adam.
After he had finished copying down the characters, Dee asked the spirit about Adrian Gilbert. The previous day, Gilbert had joined them in an action. As they had all gathered in the study, a man had appeared from the direction of Dee’s oratory and laid a ‘fiery ball’ at Gilbert’s feet. Dee wanted to know ‘whether it were any illusion, or the act of any seducer.’ ‘No wicked power shall enter into this place,’ the spirit reassured.
‘Must Adrian Gilbert be made privy of these mysteries?’ Dee anxiously asked. The spirit did not directly answer, and Dee noted in the margin of his notebook that Gilbert ‘may be made privy, but he is not to be a Practicer.’ The spirit then linked Dee and Kelley’s own journey into ‘New Worlds’ with those undertaken by Gilbert and other adventurers. They were all part of the same enterprise. ‘The corners and straights of the earth shall be measured to the depth: and strange shall be the wonders that are creeping in to new worlds. Time shall be altered, with the difference of day and night. All things have grown almost to their fullness,’ the spirit said.
The reference to time would have had a special significance for Dee. For, in the midst of all these actions, and his involvement with the navigators of the New World, he was also working on an important but highly delicate government report on reforming the calendar.
The previous year, Pope Gregory XIII had issued a bull commanding the Catholic world to remove ten days from October. This had been considered necessary because the calendar introduced by Julius Caesar in 45 BC, and adopted by the Christian world at the Council of Nicaea in AD 325, was based on erroneous measurements of solar and lunar cycles. As a result, holy and feast days had drifted out of alignment with the celestial events they were supposed to mark, notably the equinoxes (when in spring and autumn the day and night are of equal length) and solstices (the longest and shortest days of the year). One result was that the principal Christian festival, Easter, was no longer occurring on the date it was supposed to, the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox.
Walsingham had acquired a copy of the Papal bull, and he asked Dee what he thought of it. Dee came up with an alternative plan, which he set out in a sixty-two-page illuminated treatise and delivered to William Cecil on 26 February 1583.13 The proposals backed by Pope Gregory, the ‘Gregorian’ calendar, were based on calculations that reached back to the time of the Council of Nicea. Citing a range of authorities including Copernicus, Dee argued that this was the wrong starting date. The Gregorian calendar was ‘singular and insufficient’, as it was based on an artificial foundation, the date of the Council of Nicaea, a political not cosmic coordinate. His doctrinally neutral alternative was a universal (as far as he and all Christians were concerned) moment: the birth of Christ, the true ‘Radix of Time’. However, this necessitated the removal of eleven rather than ten days to realign the calendar.
Dee had another reason for proposing his alternative scheme, one that related directly to the angelic actions. An accurate calendar, based on astronomical observations and mathematical principles, is essential, as he put it, for ‘the consideration of Sacred Prophecies’.14 Without one, knowing when such millennial events as the coming of the ‘fiery Trigon’ were actually to occur would be impossible.
The Privy Council supported his proposals. Walsingham was impressed, and addressed encouraging letters ‘To my very loving friend Mr. Doctor Dee’.15 Even the sour-faced Cecil considered the paper to be ‘in the right line’. ‘He proveth [his proposals] by a great number of good authorities,’ he noted, ‘such as I think the Romanists cannot deny’.16
Cecil also wanted a decision to be taken quickly, ‘for that it is requisite, for a secret matter, to be reformed before November.’ It is not known what this tantalising matter might have been. But Dee knew and alludes to it in his paper, which shows that he was still being given access to confidential matters under discussion by the Privy Council.17
Despite the backing of Walsingham and Cecil, the scheme soon foundered. It was blocked by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Edmund Grindal, whose long-standing feud with Elizabeth had now reached a new intensity. He wrote to Walsingham arguing that the very idea of reforming the calendar was Papist, insisting that the matter should be discussed at a convocation of all Protestant churches across Europe, knowing full well that this would be impossible to arrange. By 28 March 1583 (Maundy Thursday) Dee had given up, complaining to one of the spirits that he was ‘grieved’ to discover that the calendar was not to be reformed ‘in the best terms of verity’. As a result of this decision, England remained outside the Gregorian system for a further one hundred and seventy years, communications during that period customarily carrying two dates, one ‘OS’ or Old Style, the other ‘NS’ or New Style.18
Dee’s preoccupation with the cosmic calendar took its toll. For years he had been agitating for the restoration of the rectorship of Upton-under-Severn, taken from him following his arrest in Mary’s reign. If he succeeded, the £80 annual income he made on the living from Long Leadenham would be instantly doubled. In 1576, Sir Christopher Hatton finally extracted the necessary letters from the Queen. They now needed the approval of the Archbishop of Canterbury, which took another six years to be granted. However, under the convoluted rules of Tudor bureaucracy, Dee’s claim was invalid without the Great Seal. Dee was so preoccupied with drawing up his paper on reforming the calendar, he failed to make the necessary application in time, and the order expired, ending forever any hopes of getting Upton back.19
He also learned that Adrian Gilbert had just received his letters patent from the Queen concerning the voyage to the New World he had discussed with Dee. Without consulting the other members of the company, Gilbert had applied for and been awarded sole and exclusive rights on all royalties that the expedition might yield. Dee admitted to the spirits that his mind had become ‘afflicted’ by such ‘unseemly doing[s]’. Gilbert and he would have no further dealings.
‘Thou shalt prevail against them,’ Medicina Dei consoled him on 28 March 1583. ‘Thy weapons are small, but thy conquest shall be great.’20 Reassured by this angelic endorsement, Dee turned his attention to the business of the actions themselves. In the very first spiritual conference he had undertaken with Kelley, the spirits had told Dee to provide a special table, the ‘table of practice’, as he now called it, which was to stand on a sheet of red silk two yards square, with each leg supported by a Sigillum Dei (sacred seal). Work had begun on this spiritual equipment, but Dee was now concerned that it would not be portable, ‘because I think that some services to be done in God’s purposes by me will require other places than this house.’ The spirit agreed, and gave Dee permission to make appropriate alterations.
The following day was Good Friday. As they prepared to begin another action, Kelley complained that he could smell burning. Then a sword thrust out of the crystal which struck him in the head, ‘whereat he started, and said he felt a thing (immediately) creeping within his head, and in that pang became all in a sweat’. The sensation continued for a quarter of an hour, and then disappeared. On Easter Sunday, 31 March 1583, Kelley reported feeling the same sensations in his head, and heard the sound of ‘musical harmony’.
No further actions were reported until 6 April. Then Uriel, the spirit Dee had encountered during his first action with Kelley, reappeared, and announced that in just forty days ‘must the book of the secrets and key of this world be written’. Uriel commanded that Kelley was to perform daily ‘the office committed to him’, in other words continue skrying until the job was done.
The sudden pressure was intensified by an interruption. ‘Mistress Haward’ (Lady Frances Howard, Jane Dee’s former employer) had called by, possibly to see Jane. She somehow discovered what Dee and Kelley were up to. The actions were supposed to take place in the utmost secrecy. Only outsiders approved by the spirits, such as Adrian Gilbert, were allowed to know what was going on. Dee worried lest her unintentional intrusion would bring the angels’ wrath upon her. ‘Is it the will of God that for her great charity used toward many (as in procuring the Queen’s Majesty’s alms to many needy persons), the Lord intendeth to be merciful to her?’ Dee anxiously asked. As usual, the response was cryptic: ‘Who is he that opened thy mouth, or hath told thee of things to come?’ said Uriel. ‘What thou hast said is said.’
There followed a prolonged session in which lines from the ‘Book of the Secrets’ were dictated to Kelley: ‘Arney vah nol gadeth adney ox vals nath gemseh ah orza val gemáh, oh gedvá on zembáh nohhad vomfah olden…’
On 9 April, a visitor arrived at Mortlake, a mysterious ‘Macedonian’ carrying letters written by one ‘Sanford’. Sanford may have been James Sandford, a writer and astrologer who had translated Agrippa’s book of magic and had been promoting the idea of Elizabeth having a key role in the coming ‘new world’ foretold by the coming of the fiery Trigon.21 The following day, Kelley saw a black shadow in the corner of the study, which announced itself to be the Macedonian, now wearing a hat with a message showing that he was defiled and sinful.
Soon after this, Dee had a breakthrough. He had been to court on some unspecified business and upon his return decided to spend a few private moments examining the scroll that Kelley said he had found at Blockley. Looking at the strange text accompanying the map, he wondered if it might be encoded Latin. Several of the coded words had similar endings, which was characteristic of inflected languages such as Latin.
After many attempts, he broke the code. The passage began ‘Tabula locorum’ (table of locations). It promised to reveal where ‘the objects and hidden treasures’ of Menabon, a Danish warrior king and of many other ‘famous men’ based at military camps in southern Britain were to be found.22 Dee also deciphered the labels accompanying the figures on the Tabula locorum. The results were not particularly illuminating: ‘Huteos cros…Gilds cros… blankis Suters cros… Marsars got cros…Montegles arnid’. Was the latter a reference to Lord Mounteagle, whose books Kelley had helped to recover, or perhaps to his estates in Lancashire? Then Dee recognised ‘Huteos cros’. Kelley had said that the scroll had been found at ‘Huet’s Cross’ on Northwick Hill. Perhaps the other labels marked similar locations elsewhere.
A few days later the Queen visited Mortlake on her way from Richmond to Greenwich, arriving on horseback. Sir Walter Raleigh, who by now was a close ally of Dee’s, had suggested she call. ‘Quod deferturm, non aufertur’ (that which is offered will not be taken away), she told Dee, referring to the various promises made to find him a secure position and living, presumably to compensate for the loss of income from Upton and Long Leadenham. She then proffered her hand for him to kiss.
The same day, Dee also met a new spirit. He was ‘very merry’, dressed like a ‘vice’ or fool in a play. At first Kelley assumed he was an ‘illuder’, so Dee decided to ‘powder the pith’ of his words – treat them with suspicion.
‘Will you see my heart?’ the spirit asked. He opened up his body to show that his heart was inscribed with the word ‘El’. Dee asked this ‘El’ if he knew anything about the now missing Book of Soyga.
‘Soyga signifieth not Agyos,’ El replied. ‘Soyga alca miketh’
‘What language is that?’ Dee asked.
‘A language taught in Paradise to Adam.’
‘Be there any letters of that language yet extant among us mortal men?’
‘That there be,’ said El. ‘Before the Flood, the spirit of God was not utterly obscured in man. Their memories were greater, their understanding more clear, and their traditions most unsearchable. Nothing remained of Enoch but might have been carried in a cart.’ In twenty-eight days, the Book of Enoch, the legendary text written in the language taught in Paradise to Adam, would be Dee’s, El promised. Meanwhile, he was to go and dig up the treasures identified in the map.
Dee was nervous: digging for treasure without a royal licence was ‘dangerous’, he pointed out. His previous attempt to get Cecil to sanction such a scheme had failed.
‘If thou hast a parcel or part out of every place of the earth, in any small quantity, thou mayest work by the creatures whose power it is to work in such causes,’ said El. In other words, if Dee and Kelley were to collect samples of earth from each of the locations, the spirits could then recover whatever lay buried there.
Dee was now in a state of confusion. The continuing spiritual dictation of the Adamic language had become overwhelming, its remorseless disclosure threatening to undermine his attempts to transcribe it accurately. At the same time he had to grapple with the other occult revelations: The Book of Soyga, the strange alphabet, the Danish treasure. The nature, timetable and purpose of his entire angelic mission was in chaos.
Over the following days, he and Kelley quarrelled violently. Kelley had himself been in a disturbed state for some time. Three days before the action with El, the skryer had been set upon by four spirits ‘like labouring men, having spades in their hands and their hair hanging about their ears’. Dee had seen the wounds they had left, two bright red stigmata on Kelley’s arms ‘as broad as groats’. As they continued to attack Kelley, who cowered behind a stool, Dee tried to beat them off with a stick, flailing at the empty air until he was told they had disappeared.23
Now the skryer was once more assailed by ‘illuding spirits seeking his destruction’. Kelley felt he was wasting his life. He was ‘a cumber to my house, and that he dwelled here as in a prison’. He wanted to escape, to study, to get a decent job and earn a living. He told Dee that he had been attacked the day before by someone called ‘little Ned’ at the Black Raven Inn in Westminster, for having a part in a bargain Ned had struck with a surgeon called Lush, ‘now fallen into poverty’. He wanted to get away from all this, to find peace, somewhere ‘where he might walk abroad without danger or to be cumbered or vexed with such slaunderous fellows’.
He started to complain of suffering pains, of his belly and bowels swelling up and being ‘full of fire’. These sensations, he confided, called to his mind the recent burning of an adulterous man and woman at St Bride’s Church in London. The reference was a telling one. A growing sexual tension had stalked Mortlake since Kelley’s arrival.
Kelley was by now married to Joanna Cooper, a union he had not wanted and now rejected. Even the spirits seemed to join in with the protests against his matrimonial state. ‘Cursed wives, and great devils, are sore companions,’ commented one, apparently referring to Kelley.24
The first mention of Joanna in Dee’s diaries occurs in April 1583, in the second action involving El (or ‘II’ as he was now called). After the spiritual conference had ended, ‘E.K. rose up from the table and went to the west window, to read a letter which was even then brought him from his wife.’ Kelley then withdrew to his chamber upstairs taking with him a little prayer book left by Adrian Gilbert, ‘intending to pray on it a certain prayer which he liked’. Kelley did not reveal what was written in that letter, but told Dee a few weeks later, ‘I cannot abide my wife, I love her not, nay I abhor her; and here in the house I am misliked, because I favour her no better.’25 The latter complaint was a clear reference to Jane Dee, who had obviously sided with Joanna.
Such tensions must have disturbed a household which had, until Kelley’s arrival, been settled and happy. Dee doted on his wife and children, and was unusually involved in domestic affairs for an Elizabethan father. His astrological interests encouraged him to note in detail the exact moment of many family events. A touching example occurred just a few weeks before Kelley first appeared. Dee was watching his eldest son Arthur playing with Mary, daughter of Sir William Herbert, a close neighbour and friend. The children, who were both three years old, decided to conduct ‘a show of a childish marriage’ together, ‘calling each other husband and wife’: Dee noted in his diary how astrologically auspicious such a marriage would be.26
Kelley’s attempt at marriage was proving far less propitious. One possible reason is that Kelley had been paid to marry Joanna, to legitimise children she had by an aristocratic lover. The scholar Susan Bassnett has shown that Joanna had at least two children by a previous relationship. One of them was Elizabeth Jane Weston, or ‘Westonia’, who went on to make her name as a Latin poet in Bohemia. Westonia, later described as ‘probably the most highly gifted woman during Elizabeth’s reign’, always insisted she was of noble birth, and there has even been speculation that there was some link between her natural father and Dee’s friend, Sir Edward Dyer.27
Whether or not this was the cause of Kelley’s hostility towards Joanna, her inclusion, and presumably that of her two infant children, into his life, and ultimately into the Dee household introduced a further element of instability into Mortlake’s already volatile atmosphere.
Dee tried desperately to keep these explosive ingredients under control, and concentrate on the job in hand, namely finishing the holy book that the spirits had told him to complete within forty days.
On 26 April, following a series of arguments between Kelley, Jane Dee and Adrian Gilbert, he thought he had finally managed to establish a ‘new pacification’ between all parties. But the confusion and unrest continued. Over the following days, list upon list of strange words and names were communicated, culminating in an action on 5 May, when a new alphabet of ‘holy letters’, the alphabet of Enoch’s divine revelation, was communicated.
Dee also started to make arrangements for collecting together the ‘earths’ at the ten locations identified on Kelley’s scroll. It was decided Kelley would embark on a circulation of the sites himself on horseback, a trip that it was estimated would take ten to twelve days. Dee could not find an affordable horse. Kelley eventually managed to get hold of a ‘pretty dun mare’ from a local, ‘Goodman Pentecost’, for £3 paid in angels.
Dee was now worried that if Kelley left they would break the forty-day deadline set for the completion of the angelic book. He was no longer even sure how many days they had used up, as there was no obvious moment that he could identify as the starting date.
He was also confused as to how he should deal with the material he had already received, and bombarded the spirits with questions, most of which were impatiently dismissed: What should he write the angelic book on, paper or parchment? Since the ‘holy language’ was written from right to left, like Hebrew, should the book go from back to front? How should the diagrams be laid out? Who should he hire to paint the top of the Table of Practice? ‘Can Master Lyne serve the turn well?’28
To add to the confusion, Kelley started suffering from strange visions outside the confines of the study. On 4 May, as he and Dee were having supper in the main hall, Kelley suddenly said he could see an ocean ‘and many ships thereon, and the cutting off the head of a woman, by a tall black man’. What, Dee anxiously asked the spirits the following day, could this mean? ‘The one did signify the provision of foreign powers against the welfare of this land, which they shall shortly put in practice,’ Uriel replied. ‘The other, the death of the Queen of Scots. It is not long unto it.’ These were terrifying prophecies, which Dee noted years later were fulfilled in 1587 with the execution of Mary and the ‘great preparation of ships against England by the King of Spain, the Pope and other princes called Catholic’ – the Armada, which attacked the following year.29
In the midst of Kelley’s visions, spirits continued to cast doubt on the proceedings. One said: ‘How pitiful a thing is it, when the wise are deluded’ and added that ‘all that is done is lies’. When Dee rebuked it, the spirit mocked him, and threatened to destroy his family. For the first time, Dee started to harbour misgivings about what he was doing. He would go to his oratory to seek guidance, to pray a ‘lamentable pang of prayer’; or recite supplications such as Psalm Twenty-Two which Jesus had quoted on the cross: ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’30 Doubts assailed him just as the demons had assailed Kelley and left him ‘sorrowful’. ‘I was in an exceeding great heaviness and sorrow of mind,’ he recorded, ‘and bewailed my case to God, and promised a greater care henceforward, of governing my tongue: and consenting to forbear to accompany with my own wife, carnally: otherwise than by heavenly leave and permission.’
On 9 May, Kelley finally departed to recover the earths. He left for London by boat, where he was to buy a saddle, bridle and ‘boot-hose’. Dee watched him disappear down the Thames, and noted in his diary ‘God be his guide, help and defence,’ then with a note of finality ‘Amen.’
And there the entire episode of Dee’s communion with spirits and search for the divine language might have come to a premature end, but for the magnificent entrance at Mortlake of another colourful, charismatic and not entirely trustworthy character.