In 17 July 1607, Dee walked over to the cedar-wood chest where he kept his books of mysteries and magical paraphernalia. He unlocked it, and took out the stone he had used during his travels in Bohemia, his ‘jewel’, newly set in gold. He set it before the man who thirty years before was one of his first skryers and who had returned to become his last, Bartholomew Hickman. Dee was now seventy-nine years old. He had spent the last decade in Manchester, where Archbishop Whitgift had finally determined he should go, as warden of the fractious Fellows of the Collegiate Chapter. It was virtual exile, placing him far outside the orbit of the Queen and her court.
Of the eight children Jane had borne, only three now survived. Michael, born in Prague, had died on 13 July 1594 aged just nine. Dee recorded his son’s last words as ‘O Lord, have mercy upon me’. Theodore, the gift from God born in Třeboň, had given up the ghost in the spring of 1601. Margaret, his youngest (born on 14 August 1595), and Madimi both seem to have been victims of a plague that passed through Manchester in March 1605. The same disease had also taken Jane. After twenty-seven years of marriage, he was now alone.
It is hard to know what feelings Dee and Jane had for one another in their final years together. The nature of their relationship is so rarely glimpsed, and then very unromantically through Dee’s private diary. In a note he made in January 1601, he wrote next to the usual symbol for sex the word ‘voluntaria’ appended to the astrological sign for Venus. The Venus symbol clearly refers to Jane. The meaning of ‘voluntaries is less obvious. It could mean that Jane had been ‘willing’, having been unwilling before, or that she was more willing than usual, or that she initiated their intimacies. The use of Latin indicates the reference may relate to some spiritual instruction. After the cross-matching episode, Dee recorded, again in Latin, sexual encounters with Jane as being conducted with ‘necessary conditions’ or ‘circumstances’.1 Perhaps voluntaria meant that such conditions and circumstances no longer applied, that an act in some manner controlled by the angels could once more be undertaken free of restraint.
Two weeks after this, Dee writes of a ‘reconciliation’ between all the members of his family, ‘and I did declare to my wife, Kath, my daughter, Arthur and Rowland, how things were mistaken.’2 Perhaps the bitter aftermath of the crossmatching episode had finally being resolved, and the man Jane had once so touchingly addressed as her ‘sweetheart’ had been readmitted to her affections.
Now Jane had gone, as had most of his children and many of his friends. Queen Elizabeth had died in 1603, and was replaced by the more austere James I. Dee decided to leave Manchester, and return to London, to seek out once again the consoling company of the angels.
Back in London, he had conducted several actions with Hickman, one at Mortlake, another at the sign of the Three Kings in Covent Garden, another at the home of a Mistress Goodman. The apparitions called up were pallid shadows compared with Kelley’s blazing visions. Only one spirit appeared, Raphael, offering advice on the treatment of Dee’s kidney stones and piles.
Perhaps it was in a desperate attempt to recapture some of the old magic that Dee now produced the stone he had used in Bohemia. But as the crystal sparkled before them, it was Raphael again. ‘I have now, here, in this pearl entered possession,’ the archangel announced, ‘to serve thee at all times’. Raphael also promised Dee that the ‘key’ to the divine revelations left in his keeping and taken from him in the furnace in Prague would be restored once more, so that he would finally achieve ‘the perfect understanding of the hid knowledge and secrecy of God’. ‘And that dust which thou hast in keeping shall be turned to the right use, from whence it was,’ Raphael added, referring to a sample of Kelley’s magic powder that Dee had kept (apparently without Kelley’s permission, as he had been ordered to relinquish all the powder in his possession before leaving Třeboň).
‘Thou shalt take a long journey in hand,’ promised Raphael. ‘And when thou art at thy journey’s end amongst such friends beyond the seas as thou knowest, God shall and will raise thee as faithful friends.’
Dee prepared for the journey by locking his books of mysteries away in the chest, and burying them in the fields around Mortlake. One day, they would be discovered. One day, they would be understood.
His last days were possibly spent at the home of John Pontois, who he had appointed as his executor. Pontois lived in Bishopsgate Street in London, just a few steps from the bustling lanes of Tower Ward where Dee had been born.3 According to one report, in the last two weeks of his life, as he lay dying in his bed, his daughter Katherine ‘conveyed away his books unknown to him…which when he came to understanding, it broke his heart.’4 Throughout his final years, he had been dreaming of those books, of being surrounded by them, many newly printed and filled with ‘strange arguments.’5
It is not known exactly when he died. The date usually given is December 1608. However, in his diary, a skull is drawn in the margin next to 26 March 1609, and the note ‘Jno ∆’. Dee used the triangle, the Greek letter delta, as his personal insignia. Perhaps this marked the day he departed on his final journey, dutifully noted in Dee’s customary manner by John Pontois.
He was buried at Mortlake Church, ‘middest of the chancel, a little towards the south side’, recalled Goodwife Faldo, who warmly remembered the ‘welbeloved & respected’ Dee many decades later.6 There was a gravestone, but it is long gone, as is his ‘cottage’. Part of the site is now covered by a small plot of grass and a bench which overlooks the River Thames.
Thus Dr John Dee passed through the curtain of existence and into the company of angels. ‘Now is there a veil drawn before all,’ as Kelley once said at the close of an action, ‘and all things appear far beautifuller than ever they did.’