In 15 June 1583 a fanfare of trumpets rang out across the river, announcing the arrival of the royal barge. Beneath a canopy of royal cloth, escorted by Lord Russell, Sir Philip Sidney and other nobles of Elizabeth’s court, sat a Polish prince, Lord Albert Laski.1 The cavalcade moored at Mortlake, and Laski climbed the waterstairs at the back of Dee’s house and was formally presented to the philosopher by Sidney. He had come, as Dee put it, ‘to do me honour, for which God be praised’.
Laski had arrived in England unexpectedly two months earlier. The Queen was concerned that he had fallen out with the elected King of Poland, Stephen Bathory, in which case his arrival could spark a diplomatic incident. The French ambassador Michel de Castelnau was convinced his mission was to persuade the English to stop selling arms to Russia, a trade that had prospered since the formation of the Moscow Company. Laski unconvincingly claimed he was simply there to meet the Queen and enjoy the scenery.
Laski was a powerful, unpredictable figure in Polish politics. He was the Palatine of Sieradz, a central region of Poland west of Lodz. In 1575 he was suspected of raising a private army to seize the Polish throne, which had lain temptingly vacant for over a year following the flight of its previous occupant, the French prince Henry de Valois. A committed but unorthodox Catholic, he had links to the world of alchemy and magic, and had sponsored the first edition of a work by the German physician and mystic, Paracelsus. Dee also had a particular interest in Paracelsus, who is now regarded as one of the founding fathers of modern medicine, and had a comprehensive collection of his works in the library at Mortlake.
Laski supported the universalist schemes that appealed so strongly to Dee. He was a backer of Jakob Basilikos, an adventurer who claimed to be a descendant of Levantine princes, wandering between the courts of Central Europe to promote the reunion of the Greek Orthodox and Catholic churches. Laski also had links with the heretical ‘Family of Love’. One of the movement’s leading figures was Johannes à Lasko, a kinsman of Laski. Johannes was based at Emden in East Frisia which had become the movement’s centre since its founder, Hendrick Niclaes, had settled there.2
Despite the uncertainty about his intentions, Laski was welcomed to England with full princely honours. His homeland and neighbouring Bohemia were in the throes of bewildering religious and political tensions, between Protestant reform, Ottoman imperialism and Catholic incumbency. England had few contacts and little influence in the region, and William Cecil and Walsingham seized the chance of an insider’s view of the complex dynamics at play. Laski was offered quarters at Winchester House in Southwark, where he found himself surrounded by exiled Italians, bear pits and brothels. There he enjoyed the Queen’s hospitality under the watchful eye of his respectable Welsh servant and escort, William Herle, who had connections with the Northumberland family and was also a government informer.
The Polish prince’s combination of intellectual and physical attributes charmed his hosts. He was learned, fluent in several languages, amiable and, though in his mid-fifties, of ‘good feature of body’, as William Camden put it.3 According to Holinshed, he also sported a very fine beard, which was of ‘such length and breadth, as that lying in his bed, and parting it with his hands, the same overspread all his breast and shoulders, himself greatly delighting therein, and reputing it an ornament’. His everyday clothes were bright scarlet, but on special occasions, such as when he met the Queen, he would wear robes of purple velvet ‘with other habiliments and furniture agreeable’ including shoes ‘of a strange fashion, supposed of some not altogether unlike Chaucer’s’. Elizabeth reciprocated his gallant attentions with invitations to Greenwich and Nonsuch, where feasts and jousts were held to celebrate his visit.4
At around the same time, an Italian friar called Giordano Bruno arrived in London. Bruno was born in 1548 at Nola, among the foothills of Vesuvius, and, as Frances Yates put it, ‘never lost traces of this volcanic and Neapolitan origin’.5 He entered the Dominican order in 1563 but left in 1576 after charges of heresy. Such charges would pursue him through Italy, into France and England, and ultimately to his death in Rome, where he was burned at the stake in 1600. His crime was to criticise the Catholic church for using ‘punishment and pain’ to force people into accepting its doctrines, where the Apostles had relied upon love.
While in Paris, Bruno had written two influential works rich with references to Hermes Trismegistus and Pythagoras and filled with striking magical motifs. In one, De Umbris Idearum (‘On the Shadow of Ideas’), he imagined a world divided between the creatures of light and darkness, the latter, the witches, toads, basilisks and owls, banished into their lairs by the brilliant sun of divine knowledge; the former, the cockerel, phoenix, swan, lynx and lion taking possession of the world’s sunlit surface.
Bruno’s brilliance was recognised from the moment he set foot on English soil, not least by Laski, who was fascinated by the strange friar. The two probably first encountered one another at a tournament at Greenwich in June. Soon after, Laski was offered the Queen’s barge for a trip up the Thames to Oxford.
On his arrival, Laski beheld the magnificent spectacle of the volcanic Bruno erupting forth his ideas about the Sun being at the centre of the universe and the stars glimmering in an infinite void. The professors were unimpressed. A don at Balliol College described the ‘Italian Didapper’ as
stripping up his sleeves like some juggler, and telling us much of chentrum & chirculus & circumferenchia (after the pronunciation of his Country language) he undertook among very many other matters to set foot the opinion of Copernicus, that the earth did go round, and the heavens did stand still; whereas in truth it was his own head which rather did run round, & his brains did not stand still.6
The feeling was mutual. ‘The leader of the Academy on that grave occasion came to a halt fifteen times over fifteen syllogisms, like a chicken in the stubble,’ Bruno pithily observed.7
The combination of the snobbishness and chauvinism Bruno had found (and provoked) reflected Dee’s own experience of the academic world. This was not the place to resurrect ancient wisdom or conjure up new ideas. And so, disgusted by it, Laski left with Sir Philip Sidney, staying overnight at Bisham before arriving with trumpets at Mortlake.
Laski’s grand entrance into Dee’s house was a theatrical one, a staged meeting designed to demonstrate to the accompanying courtiers that this was just another item to be ticked off in Laski’s intellectual tour of England, offering a chance for the two men to admire the impressiveness of each other’s accomplishments and beards. But this was by no means their first encounter. Laski’s name had first been brought to Dee’s attention on 18 March 1583, when a Mr North, having just returned from a trip to Poland, came to see Dee after an audience with Elizabeth, and presented ‘salutations’ from the ‘palatine’. They first met two months later, a fortnight after Laski’s arrival in England, when a private audience was arranged at the Greenwich Palace chambers of Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester.
So was this the true purpose of Laski’s visit, to make contact with Dee? Suspicions must have been aroused further on 19 May, when Laski’s minder, William Herle, went to Winchester House to check on his charge and discovered that the prince had slipped out in the company of two discreet ‘gentlemen’ and gone up-river to Mortlake to visit Dee again.8
Dee described the visit in his diary. Kelley was still absent, collecting earth from the various sites identified in his scroll. But Laski was fully aware of the spiritual conferences, and wanted to participate. In particular, he wanted to see if the spirits could answer three questions: how long Stephen Bathory, King of Poland, could be expected to live; whether Laski was to be his successor; and whether Laski would ‘gain possession of the kingdom of Moldavia’.9
Kelley returned with the soil samples on 23 May, three weeks before Laski’s public progress to Mortlake. What happened to the samples is unclear, for as soon as the spiritual conferences recommenced, Dee focussed entirely on Laski. He asked the angels the questions Laski had posed. An answer was rapidly delivered by Raphael: ‘Many witches and enchanters, yea, many devils have risen up against this stranger,’ he said. ‘But I will grant him his desire.’
The following Tuesday, a more explicit endorsement came, its messenger was a new spirit, one who would later have a powerful – and ultimately catastrophic – influence over Dee. A pretty girl ‘of seven or nine years of age, attired on her head with her hair rolled up before and hanging down very long behind, with a gown of changeable green and red, and with a train’ appeared from Dee’s oratory. ‘She seemed to play up and down, child-like, and seemed to go in and out behind my books, lying on heaps: and as she should ever go between them, the books seemed to give place sufficiently, distinguishing one heap from the other, while she passed between them.’10 She skipped past the ‘great perspective glass’ in the corner of the room, but, Kelley noted, there was no reflection of her in the mirror.
‘Am not I a fine maiden?’ the spirit asked flirtatiously. ‘Give me leave to play in your house.’
Dee asked her name. ‘I am a poor little maiden, Madimi. I am the last but one of my mother’s children. I have little baby-children at home.’ Madimi was a spiritual name that would have been familiar to Dee. It features in Agrippa’s book of magic, a text which he kept in his study ready for consultation.
‘Where is your home?’ Dee asked.
‘I dare not tell you where I dwell, I shall be beaten,’ Madimi replied.
‘You shall not be beaten for telling the truth to them that love the truth,’ Dee reassured. ‘To the eternal truth all creatures must be obedient.’
‘I warrant you I will be obedient. My sisters say they must all come and dwell with you.’
While Dee considered the possibility of this angelic menage, Madimi produced a pocket book. She opened it and pointed at a picture of a man, and asked Dee if he thought the man ‘pretty’.
‘What is his name?’ Dee asked. ‘Edward’, she replied. ‘Look you, he hath a crown upon his head… This was a jolly man when he was King of England.’
‘How long since is it that he was King of England?’ Dee asked.
‘Do you ask me such a question? I am but a little maiden. Lo, here is his father, Richard Plantagenet, and his father also.’ In other words, he was Edward IV, who in 1461 seized the throne during the Wars of the Roses. Madimi continued to leaf through her pocket book, on each page revealing an earlier generation of this family, back through forefathers described as grim, wicked, hairy, ‘writhen’, passing across the lands they possessed, Bewdley, Mortimers Clybery, Wild Wenlock, Ludlow.
After an interruption for supper, Madimi continued with her genealogical catalogue, until she came to one William Lacy. The pocketbook showed him going into France, and from there into Denmark, and from there into Poland, where he married and had children. The purpose of this elaborate pedigree was suddenly apparent: it was to show some link between the English royal family and Laski. But as soon as Dee asked Madimi to explain further, she stopped.
No further actions were recorded until the following Monday, 3 June, when Dee and Kelley were visited by another spirit, Murifri, dressed in a yokel’s russet garb, ‘all in red apparel, red hose close to his legs, a red jacket, red buttoned cap on his head, yea, and red shoes’.11 Where Madimi had been playful, he was morose. ‘Hell itself is weary of Earth,’ he said. ‘The son of Darkness cometh now to challenge his right: and seeing all prepared and provided, desires to establish himself a kingdom.’
Murifri’s Apocalyptic view – that the old world was worn out – was a recurring and familiar theme to Dee, and a condition personally embodied in two people whose cases had recently been brought to his attention. One was called Isabel Lister. She had tried to mutilate herself with knives, and found herself to be ‘sore afflicted long with dangerous temptations’ to commit suicide. She had come to Dee in the desperate hope that he could save her from her imagined diabolical possession.
The other case concerned an impoverished woman ‘driven to maintain herself, her husband and three children by her hard labour’, presumably because her husband was ill or disabled, and her children too young. A ‘maiden’, perhaps a relation, had dreamed of treasure buried in the cellar of the property she was hiring. The lease was about to come to an end, so the maiden and the woman had started digging, but finding certain unspecified ‘tokens’, perhaps human remains, had left off. One of them had then approached Dee to ask if they should continue.
Murifri promised medicine for the first woman, but accused the second of ‘vanity’. ‘Great hope of this world hath infected the weakling’s mind,’ he said. It was such hope that the miserable Murifri found so absent from the weary world. ‘The earth laboureth as sick, yea sick unto death. The waters pour forth weepings, and have not moisture sufficient to quench their own sorrows.’
However, there was a chance of salvation. Dee, anticipating Laski’s imminent royal visit, asked Murifri if the prince should be ‘confirmed’ as a participant of the spiritual actions. ‘Give him sharp and wholesome counsel. For in him (I say) the state and alteration of the whole world shall begin.’
Such an endorsement would have struck Dee as entirely consistent with the context: the imminent onset of the ‘Fiery Trigon’. The global ‘alteration’ that this epochal change announced was, according to astrological tradition, to be focussed on both Britain and Central Europe. Elizabeth was to lead the Britannic element through the founding of a new British Empire. Laski had evidently been singled out to lead the Continental contingent.
And so all seemed ready for a coordinated campaign to receive the divine message, and reveal it to the worldly powers that might implement it.
Two days later and just ten days before Laski’s princely progress would bring him to Mortlake, Kelley’s brother Thomas arrived at Mortlake in the early morning with a message, which threw Edward into ‘a marvellous great disquiet-ness of mind, fury and rage’.12 A warrant had been issued for Kelley’s arrest ‘as a felon for coining of money’. He was also under attack from his former friend, John Husey of Blockley, who was now accusing Kelley of being a ‘cosener, and had used very bitter and grievous reports of him now of late’.13 Joanna, Kelley’s unloved wife, had been staying in Blockley at the time, but had been forced to flee to her mother’s at Chipping Norton.
Kelley’s furious response to these reports, his display of such a ‘revenging mind and intent’ shocked Dee, but also provoked ‘a great pang of compassion’. He knew that it would bring great discredit to himself for ‘embracing the company of such an one, a disorderly person’. However, he was more concerned that it could mean that the ‘good service of God’ that Kelley and he had been commissioned to perform would be taken away from them, which might expose them to ‘great danger, both in body and soul’. He resolved to stand by Kelley.
Later the same day, the two of them engaged in another action, during which a female spirit called Ath appeared. If Kelley stayed at Mortlake and was arrested, it would ruin everything, Dee pointed out. What should he do? ‘It is written misery shall not enter the doors of him whom the Highest hath magnified,’ Ath reassured. Dee then asked if it might help if he approached Richard Young. Young was a relative of Dee’s and a rising member of the judiciary.14 ‘Trouble yourself when you need,’ Ath replied.
For the next few days, Mortlake was suspended in a state of nervous anticipation as the commissioners sent to arrest Kelley were awaited. On 9 June, Dee went to his oratory and prayed long and hard for ‘answer or resolutions of divers doubts’. He waited for word from Kelley, who was at his station in the study, gazing into the crystal, but ‘answer came none.’ The stone remained empty. ‘But I held on in pitiful manner,’ Dee wrote, waiting to see if this meant that the spirits had deserted them.
‘At length a voice came from behind E. K. and over his head.’ ‘The judgements of our God are most profound,’ said the voice, ‘and hard in the understanding of man. There is silence above.’ Dee ‘became in a great and sorrowful heaviness.’ Their actions seemed poised to come to an end, leaving only silence.15
There was nothing further for five days. Then on 14 June, Dee and Kelley suddenly found themselves reprieved. A vision appeared in the stone as soon as Kelley looked at it, revealing an old woman wearing a red petticoat and red silk bodice, her yellow hair ‘rolled about like a Scottish woman’. The woman, who later identified herself as ‘Galvah’, was undertaking a long journey, during which she met several people: an old man with a ‘long grey beard forked’; a young man sitting weeping at the side of a ditch, whose tears she licked away; a group of children clustered around a table laden with meat, who pulled at her clothes in their efforts to reach the food; a thin and feeble man, staggering along, leaning on his staff who collapsed in front of her, a man climbing a hill, whose clothes had been torn off by brambles and briars, and whose hands and feet were sore ‘with his excessive travail’, who fell back down the hill under a hail of stones hurled at him by little ugly ‘maumets’ or dolls. ‘Unto him that hath no weariness, there belongeth no sorrow,’ said the man, picking himself up and continuing his climb. The meaning of the vision was more obvious than usual. In the face of all obstacles and impediments, Dee must persist.
The following day, Laski arrived on the Queen’s barge. He stayed for a few hours, presumably in the company of Sidney. Whilst the august visitors were in attendance, Kelley went missing and did not reappear until six, after the visitors had left. When Dee asked him where he had been, he replied that he had gone fishing.