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

When Ashmole unwrapped the parcel, he could barely contain his excitement. These were papers he had spent years searching for, and had assumed to be destroyed. He arranged to meet Mr Wale’s wife a week later at the Excise Office in Broad Street, where he worked. When she told him the story of how the papers had come into her possession, his hopes were confirmed. John Woodall, the father of the former owner of the chest, had been one of the last known custodians of the effects of Dr John Dee. 3 These volumes were the surviving remnants of Dee’s Liber Mysteriorum, his book of mysteries. According to the man in whose hand they were written, they contained the secrets of the universe.

My mind to me a kingdom is Such perfect joy therein I find, That it excels all other bliss That world affords or grows by kind.

EDWARD DYER,

‘MY MIND TO ME A KINGDOM IS’

There is official record of the moment John Dee entered the world. He is not listed in any parish register or private correspondence. There is no birth certificate or diary entry. There is only a series of numbers, a cosmic coordinate: 1527 July 13 4 h.2’ P.M. Lat. 51°.32’.

The data are inscribed on a mysterious document among his papers at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. 1 A square containing a series of numbers and astrological symbols is sketched on parchment. It is a horoscope, drawn up in the ancient manner, showing the heavens at the precise time and place of Dee’s birth.

He was born at 4.02pm on 13 July 1527. His birthplace was 51 degrees and 32 seconds north of the equator, roughly the latitude of London. 2 Latitudes, which specify how far north or south a location is on the earth’s surface, were absent from maps of early or mid sixteenth-century England (there were barely any maps anyway; the earliest to survive of London is dated 1558). 3 However, the information could be found in tables of astrological data. One set compiled by Dee is to be found among his papers; it identifies the location of cities and landmarks across the world, from Paris (49° 10’, 150 miles from London) to the ‘Lake of Sodome’ (31° 10’, 2,404 miles from London). 4 In that table, Dee gives London’s latitude as that shown on his birthchart, which – according to modern measurement – falls just outside the wall marking the city’s northern limit.

Following contemporary practice, Dee did not record the longitude of his birthplace. There was no standard meridian at the time, and the methods of measuring longitude were extremely unreliable. However, from the date and the position of the Sun plotted on the birthchart, it is evident that Dee’s birthplace was within a few degrees of the modern Greenwich meridian. The most likely location for Dee’s birth is the City itself. His father Roland, of Welsh descent, was a textile merchant and member of London’s powerful guild of ‘mercers’. His mother Jane, was the daughter of William Wild. Roland married her when she was fifteen. Born three years after the wedding, John was apparently their first and only surviving child. 5

Roland was recorded as being resident in Tower Ward, the area immediately west of the great Tower of London, and within sight of Tower Hill, where, as the Tudor surveyor John Stow put it, ‘is always readily prepared at the charges of the city a large scaffold and gallows of timber, for the execution of such traitors and transgressors as are delivered out of the Tower’. 6

In later years Roland would find himself a ‘transgressor’ and spent time in the Tower. But in the 1520s, he was on the threshold of a promising career, which drew him in the opposite direction, towards the City’s teeming square mile.

Many merchants in Tower Ward lived along Thames Street, close to Billingsgate Docks, where the quays bustled with barques and barges bringing herring, wine, wool and timber into the capital. Next to Watergate, which was a lane leading up from the river, stood ‘Wool Wharf’, which had been used for the ‘tronage’ – public weighing – of wool imports ever since the reign of Richard II. 7 Roland Dee was later to perform a similar job, so he and his son were likely to have visited, and may have even occupied, the rickety riverside house, as bulbous packets of wool were heaved into its weighing room and dropped on the official scales or ‘tron’.

East of Thames Street lay the imposing parish church of St Dunstan’s. Its fabric was lavishly maintained by local merchants, whose bequests were rewarded with opulent sepulchres in its nave and cemetery. Dunstan was then one of England’s most revered and popular saints (another church is named after him in the west of the city). Much associated with Glastonbury and early British nationalism, his name would feature prominently in the life of the boy who was being brought up within the church’s precincts. 8

Surrounding St Dunstan’s were bustling inns and narrow streets whose very names spelled commerce: Lombard Street, just north of the church, named after the merchants of Northern Italy who settled there in the twelfth century; the Three Cranes, which got its name from a timber crane used to unload lighters loaded with casks of Bordeaux, and the chosen venue for French tradesmen brokering deals with English vintners; Threadneedle, Milk and Friday Street, where tailors, dairymen and fishmongers plied their trades; Cheapside, the thoroughfare for London’s main market or ‘cheap’ which was lined with grocers and apothecaries; Ironmongers Lane, where among the clanking wares hanging from shopfronts, Roland would go to meet his fellow Mercers at their handsome Hall. 9 This was the world that shaped Dee’s formative years: a place filled with the babble of foreign tongues and complex numbers, of ready ‘reckonyngs’ and tricky deals.

However, the City was not the only focus of Roland Dee’s career, and it is just possible that John was born just a few miles up the Thames, on the Greenwich meridian itself. Greenwich Palace stood on the bank of the Thames, Greenwich Hill rising up behind. 10 It was King Henry VIII’s birthplace and his main residence. Roland had a position in Henry’s court as a ‘gentleman sewer’. 11 His role, like so many court positions at the time, hovered between the ceremonial and the functional. It is unlikely Roland would have been expected to stitch the King’s clothing, but he may have been involved with buying and maintaining the innumerable fabrics that furnished the King’s palaces and person.

That summer of 1527, events were taking place within the confines of Henry’s private apartments at Greenwich which would prove momentous in English and European history. Just three weeks before John Dee’s birth, the King, desperate both for a male heir and to consummate his infatuation for Anne Boleyn, accosted his wife Catherine ‘in her closet’ and, reviving arguments about their union violating Biblical law, suddenly announced that their marriage was invalid. 12

In the drama that followed, a key role was played by a colleague of Roland’s, another gentleman sewer in Catherine of Aragon’s retinue, Felipez. Catherine was desperate to get news of her predicament back to her nephew and Catholic guardian, Charles V of Spain, the Holy Roman Emperor and most powerful monarch in Europe. She told Felipez to go to Henry and protest that the Queen had cruelly refused him passage home to Spain, where his mother was dangerously ill. Catherine knew Henry would contradict her and dispatch the apparently disgruntled servant back home, where he could then make contact with Charles.

However, Henry was prepared for such ‘dissimulation’ and ‘did also dissimulate’. He granted Felipez a licence to leave the country while arranging for agents to waylay him en route. But Felipez managed to give them the slip and reach the Emperor at Valladolid, where he broke the news of Henry’s plan. 13 These revelations precipitated Henry’s break with Rome and the turmoil of the Reformation, seismic events that would shape English politics for generations to come, and bring danger and conflict into the life of the infant son denied to Henry and Catherine, but so recently born to Roland and Jane.