The Elizabethans

by Wilson, A. N.

  Back in England, the new star was being observed by Dee’s friend and assistant, Thomas Digges. Digges’s A Perfit Description of the Caelestiall Orbes (1576) contains many long passages of Copernicus rendered into English and was an overt homage to the Polish astronomer, ‘according to the most aunciente doctrine of the PYTHAGOREANS, latelye reuiued by COPERNICVS and by Geometricall Demonstrations approved’.

  Digges and Dee were both from time to time encouraged in their researches by William Cecil – and it was to Cecil that Digges wrote:

  I cannot, here, set a limit to again urging, exhorting and admonishing all students of Celestial Wisdom with respect to how great and how hoped-for an opportunity has been offered to Earthdwellers of examining whether the Monstrous System of Celestial globes . . . has been fully corrected and amended by that divine Copernicus of more than human talent, or whether there still remains something to be further considered. This I have considered cannot be done otherwise than through most careful observations, now of this Most Rare Star, now of the rest of the wandering stars and through various regions of this dark and obscure Terrestrial Star, where, wandering as strangers, we lead, in a short space of time, a life harassed by varied fortunes.5

  It has been justly argued that Digges, himself the son of an eminent mathematician, Leonard Digges, was seen at the time as one of the leading English Copernicans. Robert Burton, for instance, in his preface to the Anatomy of Melancholy, never fails to mention Digges’s name when he discusses those who believe in the Copernican theory, not just as a mathematical hypothesis, but as a physical reality.6

  The new star was visible for a few months and then faded from view – disappearing completely by March 1574. Whether it was a comet or a meteor, with a tail too small to be seen with the naked eye, it is impossible to say. Throughout Europe at the time, opinion was divided between those who were prepared to concede the implications of the new star and those who were not. Conservatives who had not believed, let alone absorbed, the teaching of Copernicus, had to believe that the star had been there all along, and had only now become momentarily visible because condensation on one of the spheres carrying the planets had cleared. Such a view was advanced by Valesius of Covarrubias, Philip II’s physician; in Italy, Girolamo Cardano, an ancient and distinguished mathematician, argued that it was the Star of Bethlehem that had reappeared, full of portent.

  Most European astronomers, however, dismissed this view. And that would mean that the universe in which men and women had believed since the time of Aristotle was no longer there. The fixed, enclosed universe, with the Earth at its centre, was – as humanity was slowly about to discover – limitless. All they knew so far was that they were living in a new order.

  What we call applied science began as magic; applied science and magic both seek to impose the human will on Nature. To this extent, medicine and the cures of witchcraft both have the same aim. Alchemy might differ from later chemistry in being fuller of chicanery, but it has comparable aims – to transform matter by laboratory experiments.

  The Renaissance scholars who looked back to the sun-centred mysteries of Hermes Trismegistus were the ancestors of modern experimental scientists, but it is not surprising that they should also be seen as magicians. Mathematics was regarded as a form of magic. The obsession with alchemy – the turning of base metal into gold – was shared by many a serious academic. Yet the ability to summon up spirits (a skill that in our day is quite distinct from physics and chemistry) was in Elizabethan times a necromantic art that would be half-expected of the mathematician or the astrologer.

  When drama emerged as the great art-form of Elizabethan literature, it was not surprising that the scientific preoccupations of the age should be projected onto two mythic figures: Faust and Prospero.

  The original Faust was an inconsiderable, fraudulent scholar. Dr Georg Faust was banished as a soothsayer from Ingolstadt in 1527. Dr Faust – ‘the great sodomite and necromancer’ – was refused a safe-conduct by the city of Nuremberg on 10 May 1532. Is he the same as Johannes Faust who was granted his BA in the Faculty of Theology in Heidelberg in 1509?7 In a sense it does not matter. The original Faust(s) laid claim to magic power because of his learning. He was ripe to be turned into a potent symbol of his times; Christopher Marlowe probably read an English translation of Faust’s life in 1588.8 Although Marlowe’s play Dr Faustus ends with the protagonist’s supposed damnation – he has sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for forbidden knowledge – the scholar-necromancer is really a hero to Marlowe, whose conquests of knowledge, like Tamburlaine’s conquests of territory in Marlowe’s other (two-part) hit play, wowed audiences in the 1590s with their picture of moral defiance. Marlowe no more expects his audience to succumb to a Christian or moral view of the world, having seen the downfall of Dr Faustus, than the fans of 1970s rock bands would be deterred from a wild way of life by one of their idols taking an overdose or dying a violent death. The terrible end is part of the hero’s daredevil thrill.

  Dr Faustus probably owed something to the character of Dr Dee, about whom all sorts of wild stories circulated from his earliest years, but then, as John Aubrey charitably remarked in his Brief Lives, ‘in those dark times, astrologer, mathematician and conjuror were accounted the same things’. In another place, Aubrey says, ‘’Twas had a sin to make a Scrutinie into the Waies of Nature.’9

  Aubrey considered Dee ‘a mighty good man’.10 He did not deny Dee’s magical powers, or that ‘the Children dreaded him because he was accounted a Conjuror . . .’ ‘Meredith Lloyd . . . told me of John Dee etc., conjuring at a poole in Brecknockshire, and that they found a wedge of Gold; and that they were troubled and indicted as Conjurors at the Assizes; that a mighty storme and tempest was raysed in harvest time, the country people had not known the like.’

  When Dee was a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and a mere nineteen years old, he demonstrated what appeared to be supernatural powers. During a production of Aristophanes’ play Peace, Dee laid on some spectacular special effects. In the play, Trygaeus, a vine-dresser, wishes to consult Zeus about the military prospects of his fellow citizens in Athens. He takes a ride on a giant dung-beetle. Dee somehow managed to create just such a flying machine, to the wonder and bewilderment of the Cambridge audience. He had seen such flying automata on his continental travels: ‘for in Nuremberg a fly of iron, being let out of the Artificer’s hand did (as it were) fly about the gates . . . and at length, as though weary, return to his master’s hand again . . .’11

  When Mary Tudor became Queen, Dee was arrested and charged with ‘calculating’, ‘conjuring and witchcraft’, on the grounds that he had drawn up horoscopes for the Queen and for Princess Elizabeth. He managed to avoid being prosecuted, however, even though they deprived him of his living – he was the vicar of Upton-upon-Severn. With an admirable capacity to bob up again when stricken with misfortune, he became chaplain to the Bishop of London, Edmund Bonner, who masterminded the burning of so many heretics at Smithfield. It is possible that Dee had been planted in this role by Protestants (he had formerly been part of Protector Northumberland’s household). He certainly was involved in espionage in various capacities. He was identified by a double agent as ‘Prideaux’, a Catholic spy. (Did this suggest the name of Jim Prideaux in John Le Carré’s Cold War thriller Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy?)

  Queen Elizabeth, always willing to favour her fellow Welsh, had none of her half-sister Mary’s objections to Dee’s alleged activities as a ‘conjuror’. He had been a favoured member of the Dudley entourage in the reign of Edward VI and, with Elizabeth’s accession, Dee returned to favour. He was actually asked to choose the most auspicious date for Elizabeth’s coronation. He selected 15 January 1559, Jupiter then being in Aquarius – which suggested the possible emergence of such great statesmanlike qualities as impartiality, independence and tolerance; and Mars being in Scorpio, which would provide the new ruler with passion and commitment. When he had made this calculation, Dee was taken by Dudley
to Whitehall Palace for an audience with the Queen. It took place in the Great Hall, built by Cardinal Wolsey. Dee, a tall Merlin-like figure, with ‘a very faire cleare rosie complexion’ and a long beard, wore ‘a Gowne like an Artist’s gowne, with hanging sleeves, and a slitt’.12 He was led up to the Queen by Robert Dudley and by a leading member of the Taffia, the Earl of Pembroke. She merrily told him that ‘where my brother hath given him a crown, I will give him a noble’,13 a joke that could have meant she intended to pay him a gold coin (worth two silver crowns). It could also have meant she was flirtatiously hinting that she would like to have ennobled him. Dee tells us that his father was a gentleman-server, antesignanus dapiferorum, to Henry VIII and in no fewer than three pedigrees he claimed ancestry through the Lord Rhys, Rhys ap Gruffudd to Rhodri Mawri and Coel Hen. If he hoped for preferment from the Crown, Dee was to be largely disappointed. He hoped in vain to become Dean of Gloucester. In old age he was obsessed by his pursuit of a sinecure. His application to become Master of the Hospital of St Cross, Winchester, to this day a refuge for indigent rogues and those of unsound mind, was unsuccessful, and he ended by having to be content with a less lucrative wardenship of a collegiate church in Manchester. Those who wish to cast him in a Faustian mould have had to contrive an end for Dee that was a disgrace, even a ‘hell’, but the truth is that he never fell into disgrace with the Queen. She simply was not as generous to him as she might have been. In the early 1580s she consulted him about the possibility of changing over to the Julian Calendar. He had been asked to give her advice about the new star in 1572; he even acted as one of her medical advisers in 1571 and 1578; and in the 1570s and 1590s he was asked for legal advice about Elizabeth’s titles to foreign lands.14

  Clearly there always were, and always will be, those for whom Dee’s wizardry was the most interesting thing about him.

  Beside Dee’s dabbling with alchemy, his interest in astrology and his fondness for crystal-gazing, we must also remember his friendship with the spurious wizard Edward Kelley, and his claim to have seen angels and summon up spirits. Undoubtedly it is as a wizard that his reputation survives in the scholarly writings of Frances Yates. He is known to have been a hero to the preposterous master of the Dark Arts, Aleister Crowley (self-styled wickedest man in the world), and he probably contributed to the character of Voldemort in the Harry Potter stories. He also turns up as a character in Charlie Fletcher’s Stoneheart trilogy for children, as a wholly malign worker of black magic.

  Yet this is the man to whom Queen Elizabeth gave a modest church living as a clergyman in Manchester, and who as late as August 1592 was having dinner two nights running with Lord Burghley and his sons, Robert and Thomas, mulling over the chances of church preferment. In spite of the ‘jentle answer’ he received from Cecil, there was not much money forthcoming, but the sober, respectable and religious Cecil would never have had dinner with an evil wizard. He would, however, have delighted in the company of Dee the well-travelled scholar, whose lectures on Euclid at ‘Rhemes College’ in Paris had been received by enormous, rapturous audiences; who knew the courts of Bohemia and Poland, and the scholars of many of the most distinguished universities in Europe.

  One reason that Dee was always poor was that he was irresistibly drawn to the acquisition of books and manuscripts. This was a passion he shared with Archbishop Parker, who also had a prodigious collection. The Dissolution of the monasteries during the reign of Henry VIII had led to the destruction of untold, unguessable numbers of treasures. Parker had a particular interest in the discovery and preservation of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, but in the vandalistic mayhem of the 1530s there is no knowing how many Wanderer or Seafarer poems were used to line pudding basins or how many epics of the quality of Beowulf were used as lavatory paper. Nor was the vandalism confined to bumpkin monasteries in the country. The universities were just as gleefully anxious to destroy the past. Richard Layton, the King’s visitor to Oxford in September 1535, delighted in the spectacle of the front quadrangle at New College thick with the leaves of scholastic manuscripts that his assistants had thrown out of the library. They were collected by a Buckinghamshire gentleman to use as scarecrows.15

  Dee’s collection of books and manuscripts was one of the most significant of Renaissance collections in England – significant, that is to say, for what antiquarian interest sought to salvage from the past, and in what scientific and other directions he chose to expand learning. Some of Dee’s manuscript collection was lost through vandalism. During one of his absences abroad in 1589, his house in Mortlake was attacked by burglars. John Davies the pirate (not to be confused with the lawyer-poet of Orchestra) was believed by Dee to be responsible. His pupil Nicholas Saunder also appears to have stolen from him.16

  Some of the books and manuscripts were sold by Dee himself or were bought by other scholars or libraries from his collection after he died. These were catalogued in 1921 by M.R. James – he of the Ghost Stories – and the bulk of the manuscript collection identified by James is to be found in Corpus Christi College, Oxford. As for the books, stray volumes were acquired by such varied libraries as Pepys, Harley and Lambeth Palace.17

  What M.R. James demonstrated was that Dee’s library was not merely a private antiquarian fad, or an accumulation of old junk by an obsessive collector. His library was possibly as large as 3,000 or even 4,000 volumes. It was far bigger than any university or college library at this date, and it was rich in learning that was all but unknown in universities. ‘The whole Renaissance is in this library,’ said Frances Yates.18 F.R. Johnson, the American historian of science, wrote that Dee’s circle and his Mortlake library constituted the scientific academy of Renaissance England.19 There were works here in twenty-one different languages, and covering every branch of learning. It was much consulted by those who wished to share in Dee’s learning, not only in science as we should now term those branches of knowledge that relate to outer space and the natural world and mathematics, but also to navigation. Dee was the first man to use the phrase the ‘British Empire’ and he was one of those who encouraged the Queen and her government to expand their interests beyond Europe and colonise the New World. In short, the books and manuscripts that filled room after room at Mortlake (‘4 or 5 Roomes in his house fild with Bookes’, according to the antiquary Elias Ashmole, 1617–92) were the library of Prospero.

  Faust is a myth of knowledge as power. Prospero is a myth of knowledge as imagination. Like Dee, Prospero was a magician and a book man and, in his treatment of Caliban and his assumption of lordship over the island, an early exemplar of ‘the British impire’. His library ‘was dukedom large enough’,20 but this is not a self-abnegating saying, since he achieves more power through knowledge and magic than he would have done through politics.

  When we light our eyes on Dr Dee, what was memorably called the Elizabethan World Picture21 comes into focus. Dee’s library, salvaged as it was from the wastes of monasteries, as well as being replenished from the new printing presses of Europe, represents a continuation just as much as it represents a break with the past. Dee and his contemporaries – Catholic or Protestant – had far more in common with the Middle Ages, and indeed with the classical past, than they do with us. They took for granted a fluency in Latin, for one thing. They regarded astrology as a science rather than a chicanery. They might have disapproved of summoning up angel-spirits, but of the reality of angels they had no doubt. Heaven had been shifted by Copernicus, but God was still there. The planets still shed their influence.

  8

  The Northern Rebellion

  NORTH OF TRENT was another land. If Elizabeth made herself loved by royal progresses and pageants in Berkshire, Hertfordshire, East Anglia or Warwickshire, she was never in the North. During the whole of her reign she limited her travels to the Midlands and the South.

  In spite of Cecil’s preoccupation with the threats to the government of the realm by Scotland or the Scottish queen, he overlooked warnings sent from the country in between –
the North of England – that not everyone was happy.

  In October 1561 the new Bishop of Durham, a learned and Protestant-minded man named James Pilkington, wrote in distraught tones to Cecil, ‘I am afraid to think what may follow if it be not foreseen. The worshipful of the shire’ – that is, the aristocracy and the gentry – ‘is set and of small power, the people rude and heady and by these occasions most bold.’ A month later Pilkington was continuing to warn Cecil, ‘for the nature of the people I would not have thought there had been so forward a generation in this realm . . . I am grown into such displeasure with them . . . that I know not whether they like me worse or I they. So great dissembling, so poisonful tongues and malicious words I have not seen . . . where I had little wit at my coming, now have left me almost none.’1

  The extent of the bishopric of Durham, the actual landed wealth of the bishop, was enormous. He was by far the biggest landowner in the region, owning whole manors, boroughs, towns and hamlets, and commanding rents of £2,500 per annum.2 Next to the bishop in landed wealth was the cathedral itself – formerly a great Benedictine monastery, and now a corporation (chapter) of canons, presided over by a dean. The leading lay magnate of the region was the Earl of Westmorland, who owned almost as much as the cathedral – as well as lands in Northumberland and Yorkshire, he commanded the lordships of Brancepeth, Raby, Eggleston and Winlaton. The Earl of Westmorland, of the family of Neville, was the greatest magnate of the Durham bishopric, with other aristocratic and gentry families – Lord Lumley, the Bowes of Streatlarn, the Hiltons of Hylton, the Tempests, the Lambtons – themselves owning much land and owing an almost feudal obedience to the Nevilles. The tensions between the Durham landowners and the new government in London should have alerted Cecil to the potential dangers of a clash with the North. But Durham is a very long way from London. Even in the eighteenth century, after the invention of stagecoaches, the journey from London to York took four days, with a further two from York to Newcastle. The ride made by Sir Robert Carey in 1603 from London to Edinburgh, to tell James VI that he was now the King of England, took a prodigiously brief three days, but this meant averaging a ride of 150 miles per twenty-four hours. Anything that required the movement of luggage, or goods, or military supplies took much, much longer. The only main road was the Great North Road, leading from York to Newcastle and onward to the Scottish border.