Benjamin Woolley - The Queen’s Conjuror - The Life and Magic of Dr. Dee

Despite – or perhaps because of – the book’s inherent dangers, Elizabeth seemed drawn to the Monas. She even suggested she might act upon its findings. 5 In the dedication, Dee wrote that if Maxmilian ‘will look at [the book] with attention, still greater mysteries will present themselves such as we have described in our cosmopolitical theories’. 6 Presumably the same applied to Elizabeth.

Unfortunately, the nature of these ‘cosmopolitical theories’ remains obscure, as the work in which Dee apparently expounded them is lost. Dee later used the term ‘cosmopolitical’ in the sense of cosmopolitan, referring to a more global perspective on political affairs. In one book he described himself as a ‘Cosmopolites’, a ‘Citizen and Member of the whole and only one Mystical City Universal’. 7 Perhaps these theories in some way related to his ideas on imperialism, a vision of world government run according to universal Christian principles.

Whether or not these were the ‘cosmopolitical’ concerns that Dee discussed with Elizabeth, she was beguiled by them, and ‘in most heroical and princely wise did comfort me and encourage me in my studies’.

He needed all the comfort and encouragement he could get, as the book received a less welcome reception in other quarters. ‘University Graduates of high degree’, Dee later wrote, ‘dispraised it, because they understood it not’. 8 He does not say why, but its unorthodox treatment of what were essentially foreign philosophical and mathematical ideas was a likely reason.

Dee’s relationship with English academia had been deteriorating since he left Trinity College in 1548. The first sign of trouble had come in 1554, when he turned down a post to teach the ‘Mathematical Sciences’ at Oxford. The Monas marked a decisive split. In his preface to the English edition of Euclid’s Elements he pointedly identified the book’s readership as ‘unlatined people, and not University scholars’. He increasingly saw the latter as provincial, dogmatic and mathematically illiterate.

This antagonism may have preserved his intellectual freedom, but it came at a high price. An independent mind needs independent means, but, thanks to his father’s catastrophic fall from grace during Mary’s reign, that luxury was denied him. Without the support of an academic stipend, he had to look elsewhere to make a living.

There was only one alternative: the court, which was filled with the very people he had so roundly condemned for becoming ‘ensnared by the enticements of this world or burning with a desire for riches’.

In his poem ‘The Lie’, Sir Walter Raleigh described the court as a place that ‘glows and shines like rotting wood’. Its theatricals were spectacular, often entertaining, but always deadly serious. The stakes were very high: wealth, status, power, or poverty, oblivion and annihilation. In the Presence Chamber of the Queen’s palaces, where the courtiers gathered each day to catch Elizabeth’s attention and, hopefully, her favours, the selective pressures were intense and remorseless. It was survival of the quickest, smartest, prettiest and wittiest.

Everything revolved around Elizabeth. For courtiers such as the poet Sir John Davies, she was literally at the centre of the universe, and they railed against the newfangled Copernicanism espoused by Dee, for fear it might knock her and their whole world off balance. In a poem inspired by the sight of the Queen dancing, Davies wrote:

Only the earth doth stand for ever still,

Her rocks remove not nor her mountains meet;

(Although some wits enricht with learning’s skill

Say heav’n stands firm and that the earth doth fleet

And swiftly turneth under their feet):

Yet, though the earth is ever steadfast seen,

On her broad breast hath dancing ever been. 9

Those who fell out of Elizabeth’s orbit found themselves banished into utter darkness, without money, influence or prospects. Following some unrecorded slight or insult, the poet and diplomat Sir Edward Dyer, Dee’s pupil and close, if sometimes troublesome friend, was excluded for years, and driven to the edge of destitution. He eventually won his way back to favour by staging a spectacular pageant featuring himself dressed as a minstrel, singing to the Queen from the branches of an oak tree of his ‘tragical complaint’. 10 Elizabeth was charmed, and patted a place for him by her side.

Dee believed he also had a special place next to Elizabeth. He was one of very few commoners to be honoured with personal visits. Twice, they coincided with Dee’s personal tragedies. The first time she arrived, with the entire Privy Council in attendance, was just four hours after the death of his second wife. On the second occasion, Dee had just buried his beloved mother. On both occasions, Elizabeth refused his befuddled entreaties to come into his house, and offered consolation. Both times Dee anxiously struggled to overcome the awkwardness of the situation by trying to entertain her as she waited outside. During the first visit, he brought out the magical mirror Sir William Pickering had given him, which ‘to her Majestie’s great contentment and delight’ he demonstrated to her. 11

He was frequently summoned to court to talk to her about various matters, some of which were quite intimate, such as the prospects for her proposed marriage to the Duke of Anjou. He had become, one commentator noticed, ‘hyr philosopher’. 12

He reciprocated such attentions with strong devotion – something she engendered in many of her courtiers, who often translated their dependence upon her into expressions of rapturous love. He devised a special symbol, a capital letter ‘E’ topped with a crown, which he used to refer to her in his diaries. Minutely noting every favour she granted, he refused to blame her for the many denied.

In January, 1568, he gave copies of a new edition of Propaedeumata to William Cecil and the Earl of Pembroke to present to her. Three days later Dee heard back from Pembroke of her ‘gracious accepting and well liking of the said book’. 13

On 16 February he was invited to Westminster Palace. He approached her in the palace gallery, Elizabeth’s preferred location for informal, unscheduled and confidential meetings, as she could pick out from the courtiers hovering nervously those she wished to talk to. Today it was her philosopher’s turn and their conversation quickly moved on from a discussion of the Propaedeumata’s astronomical findings to something more sensational. He revealed to her ‘the great secret for my sake to be disclosed unto her Majesty by Nicolaus Grudius Nicolai, sometime one of the Secretaries to the Emperor Charles the Fifth’. 14 He never let on what this secret was, and little is known about Grudius, a Belgian poet. Dee noted his death in 1569 in one of his books, describing him as a ‘friend’. They also shared the same publisher in Antwerp, Willem Silvius. 15 The assumption is that Grudius’s secret related to alchemy, a recurring interest among European monarchs desperate to find easier ways of filling coffers regularly depleted by wars.

The promise of such mystical revelations undoubtedly drew Elizabeth to Dee and her appetite for them drew him to her. Elizabeth had a profound sense of the forces of the cosmos acting upon her, and regarded her monarchical powers as magical in some way. For example, she was an enthusiastic practitioner of the ‘royal touch’. In this rite, which had origins reaching back at least to the reign of Henry II, a monarch would touch the neck of a sufferer of epilepsy or scrofula (a painful and disfiguring inflammation of the lymph glands which was also known as ‘the king’s evil’), who would then be cured. Elizabeth’s touch appeared so effective, it was often cited as vindication of her claim to the throne and proof that the Pope’s attempt to excommunicate her had been vetoed by God.