On 15 December 1589, after six years, thousands of miles, some triumphs, several disasters, a few accolades and numerous humiliations, Dee walked back into his cottage at Mortlake to find it in ruins.1
The journey home had been an eventful one. The decision to leave Třeboň was made on 3 February 1589, and the following day he handed over ‘the powder, the books, the glass and the bone’ to Rozmberk who in return gave Dee ‘discharge in writing of his own hand: subscribed and sealed’. The glass was the magic mirror Dee had been left by William Pickering, before which the Queen herself had once posed. Rozmberk presented it to Rudolf to add to his collection.
On 11 March, Dee and his family finally set off. They departed Třeboň in some style, their train comprising three purpose-built coaches drawn by twelve young Hungarian horses, three outriders, and three ‘wains’ or wagons. During the journey across Germany, they also acquired an escort of twenty-four soldiers and six ‘harquebusiers and musquettiers’ (soldiers bearing guns and muskets) from the Earl of Oldenburgh’s garrison to provide protection from marauding gangs.2
They passed through Nuremberg and Frankfurt, arriving at the German port of Bremen on 9 April, where Dee put the saddle horses out to pasture, and sent the twelve coach horses to the Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, who had provided him with a home during his months of exile from Bohemia.3 The Dee family spent the next seven months in hired lodgings in Bremen, meeting a procession of travellers, hearing snippets of news and writing letters both to England and Bohemia.
Some old troubles returned to haunt him. Money, briefly in such lavish supply, began to run short. He had arguments with Jane and his landlord, and was repeatedly warned to leave. He also had nightmares, the most vivid on 12 August, when in the early morning he had a ‘terrible dream that Mr Kelly would by force bereave me of my books’.
On 26 November, he left Bremen for Stade, on the estuary of the Elbe. There he briefly met Edward Dyer, on one of his many missions to persuade Kelley to return to England. Dee sailed for England on the Vineyard on 29 November. The crossing now involved a date shift of ten days, as England was still using the old Julian calendar. His ship reached the Thames estuary on 22 November, ‘old style’.
He disembarked near Stratford, then a small village east of London, where his ‘brother’ Justice Richard Young lived. He needed help with regaining possession of his house at Mortlake. This was evidently difficult, as he spent over two weeks in negotiations. He could only peer through the windows of his old home as he passed by it on 9 December, on his way to Richmond Palace for an audience with Elizabeth. He came to a settlement the following day, when it was agreed he could go back as a tenant of Jane’s brother, Nicholas Fromonds. Five days later, he finally walked in through his front door.
The house had been ransacked. The reading room, once the centre of his intellectual empire, had been stripped of all its furniture and reading equipment. Most of his scientific instruments had been taken, such as the ten-foot long ‘radius astronomicus’ used in his astronomical observations; a sea compass; his ‘excellent watch-clock made by one Dibbley’; a ‘great bladder’ containing a ‘brownish gum’ that had been prepared in Dee’s own laboratory using multiple distillations; and – perhaps most devastating of all – the celestial and terrestrial globes given to him by Mercator, upon which Dee had so carefully marked his own discoveries.4
In the ‘appendix’, all that remained of his irreplaceable collection of title deeds and official papers were the storage boxes, pulled from the case or ‘great frame’ that had once held them, bearing chalk labels describing the papers they no longer contained. In the laboratories, the ingredients and glassware he had collected from across Europe, the ‘purposely made vessels’ of clay, metal, glass and ‘mixed stuff’ he had brought back in ‘one great cart laden’ from the Duchy of Lorraine, were all gone. Only a few, worthless ‘spoiled and broken’ jars remained.
As for the library, Dee estimated that five hundred volumes had been taken, including four books which alone he estimated to be worth £533.5
Several theories have been advanced about the ‘spoilation’ of Dee’s library. For years, the accepted story was that a ‘London mob’ had gathered in Mortlake and stormed the property after his departure for the Continent with Laski. This explained the mud found on the pages of several surviving manuscripts, which were thought to have been stained when they were trodden beneath stampeding feet.6
In fact, at least some of the culprits were known to Dee. He identified one in a series of annotations he added in 1589 to the library catalogue he drew up just before his 1583 departure: John Davies, the privateer who had visited Mortlake with Adrian Gilbert. In a copy of Sebastian Muenster’s Cosmographia, Dee wrote ‘Jo. Davis took [this book] by violence out of my house after my going.’ And this was not the only work he had taken. He had helped himself to manuscripts on perspective, commentaries on the Psalms, anything he could lay his hands on – around seventy volumes in all, according to Dee’s own estimate.
Davies was the only thief Dee identified, but he was not alone. Hundreds of other books and articles went missing. Some of the scientific equipment was later found by a local, Thomas Jack, such as a fragment of Dee’s ‘magnes stone’ (a sample of magnetised iron ore or lodestone).
It may have been Jack who recovered the missing ‘great sea cumpas’ that turned up three years after Dee’s return, delivered to Mortlake in the middle of the night with its needle missing.7 It had come from the home of Nicholas Saunder, who turned out to have many more of Dee’s possessions. In their survey of Dee’s library catalogue published in 1990, the bibliographers Julian Roberts and Andrew G. Watson showed that many of the works taken from Dee’s library subsequently resurfaced with Dee’s signature incriminatingly bleached out and replaced or written over with Saunder’s. They concluded: ‘the presumption must be, therefore, that if Saunder was not a thief he was at least a receiver on a massive scale.’8
Thus, Dee’s house had been ransacked not by an ignorant peasant mob, but by his pupils and associates. Their motives remain unclear. Perhaps they seized the books to settle outstanding debts, to discover the secrets they contained, or to hide them from others. However, they did not simply remove his valuables; some they vandalised, such as the quadrant Dee had used to compile a book of star positions in 1554, which he found scattered across the floor, ‘with hammers smit to pieces’.9
Dee was now sixty-two. The England to which he had returned was very different from the one he had left. The court was unrecognisable. Many of Dee’s old friends were gone. Elizabeth’s one-time favourite, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester was dead. Soon to follow were Sir Christopher Hatton and Francis Walsingham. ‘Good Sir Francis’, as Dee dubbed him, passed away on 6 April 1590. His agonising death throes were luridly reported by the Catholics his regime had so effectively repressed, one noting that urine erupted from his mouth and nose as his body suffered its final spasms.10
There was also a distinct change of mood towards astrologers. The conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter in 1583, inaugurating the era of the Fiery Trigon, was supposed to mark the onset of a period of cataclysmic disaster, culminating in the annus horribilis of 1588. The year turned out to be one of the most successful in English history. Catholic plots against the Queen were quelled, Sir Walter Raleigh had founded the first English colony in the New World, at Roanoke Island, and, of course, the great Spanish Armada had been defeated. A flurry of pamphlets, plays and books began to appear ridiculing astrological prophecies. ‘An astronomer,’ thunders the character Raffe in John Lyly’s play Gallathea, ‘of all occupations that’s the worst… He told me a long tale of Octogessimus octavus [i.e. 1588], and the meeting of the Conjunctions & Planets, and in the mean-time he fell backward himself into a pond.’11
Dee soon found that he, too, was toppling into the mire. When rumours of strange, demonic happenings spread across London during an outbreak of plague in the early 1590s, he was blamed.12 He was also said to have foreseen the assassination attempt against Elizabeth by the Queen’s Portuguese doctor Roderigo Lopez in 1593.13
In 1592, a pamphlet published in Antwerp by Catholic exiles started to circulate London’s streets which appeared to make a direct attack on Dee. An Advertisement written to a Secretary of My L. Treasurer was aimed at discrediting Sir Walter Raleigh. Raleigh was at this time in the midst of a vicious power struggle with the ambitious and ruthless Earl of Essex, and it was no doubt Essex’s partisans who were spreading the rumours contained in the pamphlet.
It accused Raleigh of setting up a ‘school of atheism’ at Durham House, his sumptuous riverside residence – the school later dubbed the ‘School of Night’. The pamphlet went on to complain ‘of the conjuror that is master… and of the diligence used to get the young gentlemen to this school, wherein both Moses and our Saviour, the Old and the New Testament, are jested at, and scholars are taught among other things to spell God backward.’14 The pamphlet does not identify the ‘conjuror’ by name who is usually assumed to be Thomas Harriot, a philosopher and alchemist who worked for Henry Percy, the ‘Wizard Earl’ of Northumberland, whose name was also associated with the ‘school’. However, Dee was also a contender. One of the unidentified authors of the tract was the exiled Sir Francis Englefeld, who had arrested Dee for ‘lewd and vain practises of calculing and conjuring’ during Mary’s reign.15 Dee certainly seemed to consider himself the pamphlet’s target, as he indicated in a petition he presented to King James I in 1604.16
Dee had several links with Raleigh’s infamous ‘school’.17 Many of its members, such as Christopher Marlowe, would have been known to him. He was closely associated with Raleigh, who had taken Dee’s place in the ‘Fellowship of New Navigations Atlanticall and Septentionall’ that set off to colonise America in the mid-1580s. Dee had dined at Raleigh’s London home, Durham House, the supposed venue of his ungodly academy.18 He knew Harriot as well, describing him as his ‘friend’, and the two were in contact during this period, exchanging books.19
In the spring of 1590, Jane gave birth to a daughter, their fifth child. She was christened Madimi at Mortlake Church on 5 March. Dee managed to persuade an impressive selection of nobles to become her godparents, including Walsingham’s widow. However, none of them would have appreciated the significance of their infant goddaughter’s name, with the possible exception of one: Sir George Carey.
The son of the Lord Chamberlain, Lord Hunsdon and later a patron of Shakespeare, Carey was a prominent member of Raleigh’s irreligious ‘school’. In 1594, George Chapman published The Shadow of Night, in which he reminisced about the times his friend ‘my good Mat… reported unto me that most ingenious Derby, deep-searching Northumberland and skill-embracing heir of Hunsdon had most profitably entertained learning in themselves, to the vital warmth of freezing science, & to the admirable lustre of their true nobility.’20 ‘Ingenious Derby’ was Lord Strange, ‘deep-searching Northumberland’ Henry Percy, and ‘the skill-embracing heir of Hunsdon’ Sir George Carey. And ‘my good Mat’ was Matthew Roydon, a poet, friend of Christopher Marlowe and author of a moving elegy to Sir Philip Sidney ‘A Friend’s Passion of his Astrophel’. He was also the courier who brought Kelley’s letters from Prague to William Cecil in 1591.21
Dee had connections with this magic circle, though whether from inside or without remains unclear. But he was certainly interested in stoking the ‘vital warmth of freezing science’, despite the damage it might do to his reputation. With his livelihood at Mortlake destroyed, he came up with an audacious plan to start afresh by setting up a secret academy of his own.
On 19 June 1591, Dee went to Greenwich to lobby for the job of mastership of St John’s Cross, an almshouse near Winchester’s famous school. The position was already occupied by ‘the worshipfull Mr. Doctor Bennet’, but there were some vacant bishoprics, and Dee felt sure Bennet would eagerly accept any offered him. This idea revived an aspiration that had been thwarted for twenty years, ever since the position was first promised him by the Queen.
Dee had ambitious plans for St John’s Cross. He wanted to set up a research institute, complete with laboratories and printing presses, overseen by ‘mechanical servants’ (technicians) which would offer a secure place ‘for our learned men to be entertained and lodged’. It would be a place where thinkers who might elsewhere be accused of atheism and necromancy would find themselves ‘in such a solitary and commodious place, they may dwell in freedom, security, and quietness, under her Majesty’s unviolable protection’.22 He also noted that, being in Winchester, it was good for schools, and also the glass factories of Sussex, where he could better ‘oversee the workmen and workmanship, for better matter and shape of glass works and instruments-making’.
Dee was desperate for his plan to be accepted. It represented his only hope of rehabilitation. His finances were now in a critical condition. As well as the damage done to Mortlake, he had returned to discover that the living of Long Leadenham had been seized during his absence by John Robinson, Archdeacon of Bedford, which deprived him of his only regular source of income.23 He had issued petitions to recover it along with the rectorship of Upton, taken from him during Mary’s reign, but to no avail. ‘Utterly put out of hope for recovering the two parsonages by the L. Archb. and the L. Treasurer,’ he despondently noted in his diary on 21 January 1591.
The issue of the mastership of St John’s Cross was handed over to Cecil and, while sending ever more urgent pleas to Kelley to return to England, the Lord Treasurer ruminated at his leisure on Dee’s application. He finally produced a vague response in December, a ‘gentle answer’ that the Queen was mindful to give him one of the posts that would be freed up by the imminent round of new bishoprics.24
As Dee was left dangling on this thread of reassurance, beneath him the chasm of debt continued to deepen. He pawned his plate to pay his bills, raising £20, £14 of which went straight to Thomas Hudson for wood and corn, £4 to Goodman Bedell for ‘billet, bales and loose faggot’, and eight shillings to Goodwife Welder for one month’s nursing. He was also propped up by donations from friends and patrons, £20 and an hogshead of claret from the adventurers Richard and Thomas Cavendish; £10 from the alchemist Thomas Smith; £5 in ‘rials and angels’ from the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Queen herself called by to promise him a princely one hundred angels, half of which he received within two days, the other half apparently not at all. He also appears to have resumed his career as a freelance astrologer and advisor. On 1 February 1594, for example, he received ‘two little double gilt bowls’ from a John Ask, whose horoscope he had cast.25 He weighed them carefully, presumably to calculate their value. On 5 April 1592 he was consulted by Lady Russell, who had been ‘robbed a little after midnight of pearls, diamonds’. ‘One John Smyth is suspected,’ Dee wrote, ‘a young man of thirty years old, very ingenious in many handiworks, melancholic, auburn-haired.’
Dee’s financial problems were accompanied by a string of domestic disasters. His son Roland fell into the Thames, his infant daughter Madimi fell out of bed and hurt her forehead, and Arthur, while playing at the home of Dee’s neighbour Sir William Herbert, knocked himself out with the ‘wanton’ throwing of a brickbat straight up in the air ‘and not well avoiding the fall of it again’.26 When they were not having accidents, the children were ill: Theodore with ‘tertian ague’ and a bloodshot eye, Arthur with ‘quotidian gentle ague’, which was treated with blood-letting, and Madimi with some unspecified sickliness.27 Jane suffered too, having a miscarriage after being ill for three days, aborting, Dee noted, a foetus ‘nearly as big as an egg’.28
Dee was strong and healthy for a man in his sixties. He continued to make frequent trips to London and the royal palaces, and welcomed guests to his house almost daily. His diary also shows that he and Jane regularly had sex. However, he was not immune from aches and pains, suffering from cramps in his calves, ‘veins or arteries’ and rectum, and from kidney stones. Dr Giffard treated the stones with enemas, leaving Dee ‘eased of my grief’. He got further relief from the news, received two days after his sixty-fifth birthday, that a certain Mr Carter of Yorkshire had managed to reach the ripe old age of eighty.
But mingled with such reassurances were insistent reminders of mortality. One of the saddest concerned the Dee family’s melancholic nurse Anne Frank. She had, he noted in his diary in the summer of 1590, ‘long been tempted by a wicked spirit: but this day it was evident, how she was possessed of him.’ Dee attempted to rid her of her demons by performing an exorcising ritual. There was a two day respite before she once more suffered a ‘great affliction of mind’. The next day she had recovered a little, being ‘well comforted’, and the day after that Dee ‘anointed (in the name of Jesus) Ann Frank her breast, with the holy oil.’
Any relief she enjoyed was short-lived. The following week, she asked to be anointed again. Dee ‘very devoutly’ prepared himself with prayers, and tried another application of the holy ointment. ‘The wicked one did resist a while,’ he noted. A month later, Anne tried to drown herself in the well, ‘but by divine providence I came to take her up before she was utterly overcome of the water, shortly after sunset.’ Dee set one of his maids to watch over her, but three days later, Anne slipped away from her bedchamber and downstairs to the hall in the adjoining ‘hovel’ that Dee had rented. There, behind a door, she slit her own throat. ‘Lord have pity on us,’ Dee wrote.29
By 1592, Dee began to receive indications that the Lord might indeed have pity on him and his family. On 6 August, he rode to Nonsuch, Elizabeth’s Surrey palace. The mastership of St John’s Cross was now a good prospect. He might even get compensation for the damage done to his house while he was away, which he estimated to be well over £1000.
The cause of this new-found hope was Anne, Countess of Warwick. One of Elizabeth’s closest ladies-in-waiting, she had been using her influence to lobby hard on Dee’s behalf. The Countess was married to Ambrose Dudley, a son of the Duke of Northumberland who Dee had served in his youth, and it was perhaps this connection that made her such an eager champion of Dee’s cause. She may also have known Jane when she served at court.
Dee arrived at Nonsuch to find promising news. The Countess had sent word through a Mr Ferdinando that the Queen was favourably disposed towards his application for the mastership of St John’s Cross. Dee also saw the Archbishop of Canterbury there, who confirmed the Queen’s enthusiasm.
Over the following days, these promising signs were reinforced by a sudden and apparently spontaneous display of ingratiation by William Cecil. The veteran Lord Treasurer, who had on so many occasions rebuffed Dee, now overburdened the philosopher with hospitality, inviting him to dinner on two successive nights and sending him a haunch of venison as a gift. There are a number of possible reasons for Cecil’s attentiveness, none of them designed to further Dee’s interests. Cecil perhaps wanted Dee to use his influence to persuade Edward Kelley to return home. Another possible reason is suggested by the presence at the dinner table of Cecil’s son. Sir Robert Cecil, who had replaced Sir Francis Walsingham as Elizabeth’s chief spymaster, later would use his intelligence network to unravel the Gunpowder Plot. One particular scheme Sir Robert was working on may well have arisen as a topic at dinner conversation – a plot to test the loyalty of Lord Strange.
Strange, whose father had put forward Dee’s name for the rectorship of Long Leadenham in 1558, was from the Stanley dynasty, long suspected of harbouring Catholic sympathies. Fascinated by science, Strange was also believed to have connections with a number of English papists exiled in Prague, among whom was Richard Hesketh, an amateur alchemist and merchant who had moved there in 1590. Robert Cecil had devised a plan to plant a letter calling for Catholic insurrection on one of these exiles for delivery to Strange at his Lancashire stronghold. If Strange failed to report the letter to the authorities, it would prove that he was a traitor. The unfortunate Hesketh was chosen as the courier.
The plot was hatched when Hesketh returned to England in 1593. En route to Lancashire, he stopped at the White Lion Inn at Islington. There he was given a letter addressed to Strange, which he was led to believe contained news concerning his English confederates. Hesketh duly delivered the incriminating missive. Strange handed the letter over to the Queen, saving his own skin but condemning that of the unfortunate messenger. On 29 November 1593 Hesketh was hanged, drawn and quartered at St Albans.
There is no evidence that Dee was involved in this, but it is possible that while he dined with Sir Robert, he was being pumped for information about Prague. He knew of Hesketh, having noted his nativity.30 Dee had left Bohemia by the time Hesketh arrived there, but there is plenty of evidence to link Kelley with the Catholic cell to which Hesketh belonged. For example, a Jesuit priest in Prague, Thomas Stephenson, wrote a letter to Hesketh which, in the space of a few sentences, mentioned not only the overthrow of Elizabeth, but the current well-being and whereabouts of a ‘Sir Edward’, ‘Mr Thomas’, ‘Mr Hammon’ and ‘Mr Leigh’. It seems certain that ‘Sir Edward’ was Kelley, and possible that that the others were Kelley’s brother Thomas, John Hammond, a ‘gentleman’ hired by Dee while in Třeboň, and Henry Leigh, who had carried letters between Kelley and Burghley.
One further piece of suggestive evidence links Dee with the conspiracy. The agent lurking in the shadows at Islington, who slipped the fateful note into Hesketh’s hand via one of the inn’s boys, was a ‘Mr Hickman’. One of Dee’s first skryers was Bartholomew Hickman. Hickman had government connections: he and his uncle Richard having originally come to Mortlake on the recommendation of Sir Christopher Hatton, the late Lord Chancellor.31 In fact, Dee had dealings with the whole Hickman clan, not just Bartholomew and uncle Richard, but his brothers William and Ambrose, his daughter Joan and an unnamed nephew. And Bartholomew Hickman re-entered Dee’s life at precisely this time.32
Dee was also a friend of Thomas Webb, one of the agents Cecil used to report on Kelley’s activities in Prague. At the end of 1593, soon after Hesketh’s execution, Webb was arrested and sent to the Marshalsea Prison in Southwark for ‘coining’, the same charge as was brought against Kelley which was used by the government as a handy judicial instrument for controlling unruly or unreliable agents. Dee went to visit Webb at the Marshalsea, and would return when Webb thought he was about to be condemned.33
Whatever Dee’s role in these machinations, it did not win him any permanent support either from Cecil or his son. The Lord Treasurer continued to fret about the absence of Kelley, and dream of being enriched by his alchemical art. He soon lost interest in Dee.
On 9 November 1592, Dee heard that the Countess of Warwick had managed to persuade the Queen to appoint commissioners to investigate his case for reparations and the mastership of St John’s Cross. She chose Sir Thomas Gorge and Sir John Wolley, her Latin secretary and an old acquaintance of Dee’s. They came to Mortlake on 28 November, and Dee laid before them a detailed survey of his writings, his services to the Queen and to the nation, and the losses he had suffered, which he calculated to amount to £1,510. A week later, he heard that Sir Thomas Gorge had succeeded in securing for him ‘speedily’ a royal grant of one hundred marks. This was welcome, but only temporary relief.
Dee lobbied for St John’s Cross with growing desperation. He took his wife and all seven children to Isleworth to petition Elizabeth. He asked old family friends, such as Lady Scudamore, to apply pressure. Jane even intercepted the Queen as she was walking from her private garden at Somerset House up the Strand, passing her a petition, which Elizabeth apparently accepted ‘and kept upon her cushion’.34
In May 1594, Dee finally heard that Sir John Wolley had ‘moved my suit to her majesty’. She had apparently ‘granted [it] after a sort, but referred all to the [Archbishop] of Canterbury’ – an unpromising development, as exactly the same had happened to his ill-fated proposals for calendar reform.35 A month later, he went to see the Archbishop, John Whitgift, at Croydon. Elizabeth had total faith in Whitgift, and Dee had no hope of securing the job without the Archbishop’s support.
Whitgift said that the previous Sunday he had been with the Queen and Lord Treasurer at Theobalds, Cecil’s lavish country seat in Hertfordshire, and they had discussed Dee’s case. It seems Cecil had decided to continue with the policy of prevarication. No action was to be taken. The indecision was final.
Dee could take no more. ‘I take myself confounded for all suing or hoping for anything that was,’ he wrote after returning home from Croydon. ‘And so, adieu to the court and courting, till God direct me otherwise.’