THE QUEEN’S CONJUROR

As Dee and his household made their preparations for departure, the royal court was distracted by the wedding of the poet and courtier Sir Philip Sidney to Frances, daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham. Laski may have been in attendance, as would have been many of Dee’s closest associates and friends, such as Sir Edward Dyer. Sidney was now one of the most popular and glamorous figures in Elizabeth’s court. He was also a friend (and possibly former pupil) of Dee’s, whom he half-jokingly described as ‘our unknown God’ – by which he apparently meant the inspiring figure of his literary circle, the mysterious ‘Areopagus’.¹

The Areopagus was named after the hill near Acropolis in Athens where the city’s rulers would meet. According to a letter from Edmund Spenser to Gabriel Harvey, Sidney and Dyer adopted it as the name of a literary circle set up to silence ‘bald Rymers’ and proclaim new ‘Laws and rules of Quantities of English syllables for English Verse’.² Whether the Areopagus ever really existed, or was a figment of fizzling literary imaginations, is hotly debated.³ But a programme of poetical reform certainly did exist, and its manifesto was Sidney’s Defence of Poesy. Sidney described how the poet,

lifted up with the vigour of his own invention, doth grow, in effect, into another nature; in making things either better than nature bringeth forth, or quite anew; forms such as never were in nature, as the heroes, demi-gods, Cyclops, chimeras, furies, and such like; so as he goeth hand in hand with Nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging within the zodiac of his own wit.

Poetry would open up fantastic, artificial universes to rival that of God. ‘New worlds shall spring from these,’ in the words of Dee’s angels, a meta incognita so spectacularly discovered in Sidney’s own Arcadia and the Faerie Queene of Spenser. And it is in the Faerie Queene that a homage to Sidney’s ‘unknown God’ can be glimpsed. He sits in a room in the House of Temperance,

…whose walls
Were painted faire with memorable guests,
Of famous Wizards, and with picturals
Of Magistrates, of courts, of tribunals,
Of commonwealths, of states, of policy,
Of laws, of judgements, and of decretals;
All arts, all science, all Philosophy,
And all that in the world was aye thought wittily.

Of those that room was full, and them among
There sat a man of ripe and perfect age,
Who did them meditate all his life long,
That through continual practise and usage,
He now was grown right wise, and wondrous sage.
Great pleasure had those stranger knights, to see
His goodly reason, and grave personage,
That his disciples both desir’d to be.⁴

Was the man of ripe and perfect age, seated in the symbolic setting of Elizabeth’s court, Dee? Were the stranger knights Dyer and Sidney, his disciples Spenser and Harvey? And what would they have made of what was happening now of this ‘wondrous sage’ man, together with Kelley and their wives and children, standing on the banks of the Thames on the afternoon of Sidney’s wedding, passing from waterside to a waiting barge crates of books, trunks of clothes and a case containing the newly-completed table of practice and the set of magic seals wrapped in red silk? There is a clue in Spenser’s epic, following a verse marvelling at the discoveries in the New World. These places, Spenser pointed out, had existed,

…when no man did them know;
Yet have from wisest ages hidden been:
And later times things more unknown shall show.
Why then should witless man so much misween
That nothing is, but that which he hath seen?
What if within the Moon’s faire shining sphere?
What if in every other star unseen
Of other worlds he happily should hear?
He wonder would much more: yet such to some appear.⁵

So, beyond the New World there may be yet another, whose existence is no more dependent on its discovery by man than were the Amazon, Peru and ‘fruitfullest Virginia’. Spenser called it the ‘fairy land’.

Dee’s journey began on 21 September 1583: St Matthew’s Day, as he noted in his diary. By 3pm, their belongings were stowed and they had set off down the Thames towards London. The serpentine curve of the river as it approaches Hammersmith provided Dee with a last lingering view of his beloved house, the place where the Queen had posed before his magical mirror, where members of the court, travellers and adventurers had stopped for advice, where he had performed his experiments, read his books, where his mother had died and his three children been born (the youngest, Roland, just nine months earlier), the place where he had built up his reputation and great collection, and which he had now entrusted into the custody of Jane’s brother, Nicholas Fromonds.

Laski met them on the river and together they waited for nightfall. ‘In the dead of the night,’ as Dee put it, they all loaded their goods onto ‘wherries’ and sailed through London, past the leaded windows of the palaces, through the narrow arches of London Bridge, beneath the dangling floors of the houses perched along its sides, past the Tower and Traitor’s Gate towards Greenwich, where they stopped to ‘refresh’ themselves at the house of a friend of Dee’s, ‘Goodman Fern’, a local potter.

Their clandestine departure then involved a transfer to yet another vessel, a ‘great tilt-boat’ (a large rowing boat with an awning) which Dee had hired with a ‘Mr Stanley’.⁶

Their motive for leaving the country in this covert manner was and remains as opaque as the muddy river waters that slipped along the sides of the great tilt-boat as it carried its cargo out to sea. Some have suggested Dee’s reasons for leaving were financial, that he and Kelley were drawn by the prospect of good wages and a secure living as part of Laski’s household in Poland. But Dee had known some time before planning his departure that Laski was insolvent.⁷

On several occasions Dee hinted that he was embarking on a private mission on behalf of the Queen, suggesting that he may have been, perhaps in combination with Kelley, acting as a spy, or more accurately an ‘intelligencer’, detailed to use his position as part of Laski’s entourage to gather sensitive foreign information.⁸

As the sun rose over the North Sea, the tilt-boat approached two ships moored at the mouth of the Thames. Dee, Kelley, their families and Laski boarded the larger, which was a Danish ‘double fly-boat’, a fast-sailing coastal vessel. Dee’s and Laski’s servants, two horses and the luggage were loaded into the smaller, a Flemish ‘boyer’. As soon as passengers and cargo were aboard, they immediately set sail for the Low Countries.

At midnight, a storm blew up, which drove the ships back towards the English shore. Dee’s ship dropped anchor in an attempt to keep a safe distance out to sea, but the anchor dragged, forcing the sailors to cut the cable, hoist sail and make their way to the nearest harbour – Queenborough, at the mouth of the Thames estuary.

They finally reached harbour the following morning and the passengers disembarked onto two dinghies. The mast of the dinghy carrying Dee and Kelley became entangled with the ship’s ropes, and as the powerful winds and currents pulled it out to sea, it began to lean over and take in water. Kelley desperately started bailing with a ‘great gauntlet’ while the crew attempted to free the mast. In all this commotion, the boatman lost one of his oars which quickly floated beyond reach. Eventually the dinghy was freed and floated to a ‘crooked creek’, where they moored. The boatman jumped out, and offered to carry the passengers to the shore, but as he lifted Dee they both fell in, leaving Dee ‘foul arrayed in the water and ooze’.

They spent the rest of the week holed up in lodgings, awaiting the delivery of a new anchor from London, leaving Dee plenty of time to contemplate the implications of such a farcical start to their mission. On Wednesday, 25 September, he consulted the archangel Michael. ‘Let the winds open their mouths, and let the raging waters open their deep and powerful currents into all parts of your vessels,’ Kelley reported Michael as saying, ‘yet they shall not prevail, because I shall give you my overwhelming power.’

The next day, they returned to their ships. They spent the night at anchor, and sailed the following morning. They had reached the coast of Holland by 28 September, but as neither the ship’s master nor the pilot recognised the terrain, they decided to sail back out to sea ‘with great fear and danger’. They landed at Brielle in Holland the day after, and spent a night in Rotterdam, then sailed further up the coast to Amsterdam and through the Zuider Zee to Enkhuizen. Here Dee’s servant Edmund Hilton was sent ahead to Denmark with some of the luggage, which possibly included the huge caskets containing the eight hundred or so books Dee had packed.¹¹

The passengers crossed the Zuider Zee to Harlingen, and then proceeded up to Dokkum and toward Emden (which is now in Germany). Emden was a port at the end of the Ems river estuary with strong connections with England through the cloth trade. Dee and his companions had chosen it as the departure point for their inland journey through northern Germany and towards Poland. They arrived in their boats at 6pm on 17 October, only to find the town’s gates locked, forcing them to spend another night aboard – although Laski managed to find lodgings on the opposite side of the estuary. The following day, they entered the town. It was not a particularly prosperous place, with an ‘old rotten church at the town end’.¹² They found different lodgings: Laski at the White Swan on the waterside, Dee, Kelley and their families at the Three Golden Keys, which adjoined the ‘English house’, Emden’s main meeting place for English merchants.

Without stopping to rest (perhaps to reduce their travelling costs), they rode through Oldenberg and ‘a very simple village’ called Oppen and arrived in Bremen on Tuesday, 22 October. Exhausted, they finally allowed themselves some respite from the road, staying at an old widow’s house at the sign of the Crown. When Laski caught up, they departed on 2 November, riding for Ostarhold (where they looked round a ‘great nunnery’) reaching Harburg on the banks of the River Elbe two days later. The following morning they loaded their wagon onto a ferry and crossed the river to Hamburg.

There was only time for a brief stay in the city before they were off again. Dee’s family and servants had gone ahead to Trittau, a village four miles up the road, where they had arranged to meet up and continue with their journey. Dee arrived to find no sign of them, ‘to my great grief’.¹⁴ Night fell, and he anxiously sent messengers out for news. They were not finally reunited until midnight.

And so their slow progress continued, through Lübeck, Rostok, over the Polish border to Stettin (or Szczecin), where they spent Christmas; south-east to Poznan, where Dee found time to tour the cathedral and admire its library and the ‘beautifully carved’ monuments to Polish kings in the crypt. At the end of January, freezing weather was hampering their progress. At Konin they had to cross a wooden bridge over the River Warta, which was close to collapse after some of its rickety supports had been swept away by pack ice. They then had to hire twenty-five men to clear a two-mile stretch of road to enable their coaches to pass, before finding themselves marooned outside Vinew, which was encircled by floods.

On 3 February 1584, after travelling for over four months, by ship, boat, coach, horse and foot, having endured storms, blizzards, separations, though fortunately no serious injuries or illnesses, they finally arrived in Lasko, Laski’s home town. This, Dee assumed, was to be their destination, at least for the time being, and he summoned the angels to tell him what he should do next.

The actions had, in fact, continued throughout their journey, though in a necessarily punctuated fashion. Many of them were about the land they had left behind, which seemed to become more threatening as it receded. In October 1583, while they were at Dokkum, the archangel Gabriel himself had appeared, and warned that ‘In England they condemn thy doings, and say, Thou art a Renegade. For they say, Thou hast despised thy Prince.’¹⁵ On 1 November 1583, in Bremen, Kelley had a vision of Vincent Seve, Laski’s brother-in-law in London walking from Charing Cross down Whitehall towards Westminster Palace, where horses were grazing in the gardens and crowds of people gathered at the entrance to the Abbey. Grandly dressed in a ‘great ruff’, Seve was talking to a group of men on horseback armed with rapiers. No sooner had this ‘shew’ appeared than it was ‘vanished away’, leaving the strong impression that Seve was up to something.

A few days later, a spirit told Dee that Jane’s brother Nicholas Fromonds, left in charge of Dee’s house and library, had been imprisoned, and was at that moment under cross-examination. His interrogators were telling him that Dee ‘hast hid divers secret things’ in the house and they demanded that Fromonds reveal their location. There was also a threat that Dee’s ‘house may be burnt for a remembrance of thee [i.e. Dee] too.’¹⁶ Although these angelic reports are extreme, Fromonds certainly faced threats and incursions while at Mortlake.

After their arrival in Lasko, a new spirit called Nalvage appeared, who had a childlike face and downy hair. Dee, who had been suffering from a severe fever for a few days, asked Nalvage for medical advice. Nalvage responded with a terrifying vision. Six or seven people wielding torches were crouched like apes on the roof of a house – it must have been the cottage at Mortlake. ‘They are like shadows,’ Nalvage said. ‘They start to thrust their torches into the sides of the house, which begins to blaze.’

Now your wife runneth out, and seemeth to leap over the gallery rail, and to lie as dead. And now come you out of the door, and the children stand in the way toward the church. And you come by the…door; and kneel, and knock your hand on the earth. They take up your wife; her head waggleth this way and that way. The stone house quivereth and quaketh, and all the roof of the house falleth into the house. Your wife is dead, all her face is battered. The right side of her face, her teeth and all is battered. She is bare-legged, she hath a white petticoat on.

When Dee asked what this meant, a ‘wench’ appeared, dressed in white and sitting on a bench. Madimi, the spirit who first endorsed Laski’s role in Dee’s spiritual mission, had returned. She told Dee she had been in England, ‘at your house where they are all well’. ‘The Queen said she was sorry that she had lost her philosopher,’ she added. ‘But the Lord Treasurer answered: “He will come home shortly, a-begging to you.’” His study and its secrets were safe, Madimi reassured. The Queen had commanded it to be ‘sealed up’.¹⁷

Intermingled with these unsettling revelations were the all-important angelic tables, the ‘Cabala of Nature’, as Nalvage called it. These now came faster than ever, Dee’s fingers racing as he struggled to scratch down the relentless stream of divine data. After each session, he spent further hours alone, trying to incorporate what he had been told with the information he had already received, drawing the results together in the books of revelations that he would later hide away in the secret drawer of his cedar chest. This was the promised language of Adam and of Enoch which would reveal the keys to the cosmic code: it had been delivered in a stammer back in England, but here it flowed like vespers from a distant chapel. ‘It is so terrible, I tremble to gather it,’ he wrote after one particularly intense session.¹⁸

On 19 March 1584, recovered from his attack of feverish ‘ague’, Dee set off for Krakow with his family, leaving Kelley behind. The city, a hundred miles south of Lasko, Madimi had declared to be a ‘place sanctified’.

Krakow was the capital of sixteenth-century Poland, its status proclaimed by the ‘Wawel’, the imposing hill-top fortification that loomed over the surrounding countryside. The kingdom’s spiritual and temporal nucleus of power, the Wawel contained both the Renaissance palace that acted as the chief residence of the country’s monarchs, and the cathedral, their Romanesque mausoleum.

Beneath the Wawel bustled a thriving city. Years of religious tolerance and civic autonomy had fostered a vibrant mercantile and intellectual climate. The city’s university was among the finest in Europe, a centre of natural philosophy which had once been home to Copernicus and now boasted an important collection of scientific instruments.

The travellers arrived on 23 March, and spent the following week at a boarding house in the suburbs, while Dee looked for lodgings in the city. He eventually found a house for eighty guilders a year in St Stephen’s Street, near the spacious market square and the university’s main college.

Kelley arrived in Krakow on 6 April – the Friday of Easter Week, as Dee noted, according to the new Gregorian calendar, which was used by the Poles. Now reunited, they immediately resumed their actions in a room set aside in Dee’s modest lodgings, the passing traffic of Krakow’s busy citizens unaware of the strange business being conducted by these foreign visitors – at least for the time being.

The angel Nalvage reappeared, his childlike appearance was now explained by his acquiring the ‘physiognomy’ of the English boy-king Edward VI. He began to deliver further tables, instructing Dee to write down a series of word squares. But as Kelley delivered the angelic formulae, he seemed to be interrupted by another voice, heard not through his external senses, through which he claimed to behold the visions of the angels, but internally, through the ‘imagination’. This evidently unsettled him, and later in the same action he confessed to feeling ‘very angry’.¹⁹

A few days later, his mood worsened. He told Dee once more that he doubted the actions. He said he ‘would no more sit to receive ABC’ and left the room. Over the next week Dee continued to work in his ‘upper study’ at transcribing and interpreting the tables. On the morning of Thursday 19 April, he heard Kelley on the stairs and invited him to come and look at the work he had done. He showed Kelley the books and ‘how I had some understanding of those holy words their significations’. Kelley was not reassured. He told Dee he had confessed his doubts in a letter to Laski, and wanted to return to England.²⁰

Laski himself arrived in Krakow the following Wednesday, staying in a ‘little wooden lodging’ in the gardens of St Stanislaw Church, south of the Wawel. If he had received a letter from Kelley he clearly had not taken it seriously, and the actions continued. However, so did Kelley’s volatility. Some days he was happy, telling the spirits he was content with his ‘friend here, Master Dee’ and ‘very well persuaded of these actions’.²¹ Other days, in a ‘great storm’, he would lock himself in his study and refuse to come out. He even produced evidence to show that some of the information imparted by the spirits had been copied from books in Dee’s own collection. This was not the first time Kelley had tried to discredit his own visions. However, as before, his admission was not couched as a confession of actual fraud, rather as proof of spiritual mischief, and Dee dismissed it.

During one session, Dee received very clear instructions on the binding of one of the books of tables he had compiled. It was to contain forty-eight pages, he was told, eight by seven inches in size, and be covered in leather tooled with silver. ‘What shall I do with the book after I have bound it?’ Dee asked the spirit. ‘I will answer for him,’ Kelley interjected. ‘Burn it.’²²

As moods deteriorated inside Dee’s study, so did the political situation outside. On 7 May, Dee watched sixty coaches wound their way round the Wawel and into the city. The enormous train was an escort for a ‘closed’ (windowless) carriage covered with a red cloth carrying the rebel Samuel Zborowski. Zborowski had been arrested on the orders of the Polish king Stephen Báthory on charges of treason. He had led a faction of Polish nobles sympathetic towards Báthory’s enemy Rudolf II, the Holy Roman Emperor, whose dominions stretched across Germany and Bohemia, right up to the Polish borders. Zborowski was a popular figure in Poland, and his arrest sent a frisson of rebellion through the city which rattled the doors of Dee’s home, startling him from his spiritual actions.

Laski was widely believed to be a supporter of Zborowski and Dee worried that this put him and his family in danger.²³ He interrupted at least one action in St Stephen’s Street, because he thought he heard footsteps in the chamber adjoining the study, noting that the door at the bottom of the stairs had been left open.²⁴ He had every reason to be concerned. The spirits themselves were now openly hostile towards the Polish king, accusing him of being in league with the Ottoman Empire. ‘Go to the Emperor,’ Nalvage told Dee, meaning Rudolf, who had set up his court at Prague, which was three hundred miles to the west.²⁵

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