The Friar and the Cipher

by Lawrence Goldstone

  But the myth of Roger Bacon also appealed to Dee. The Roger Bacon of the brazen head, the Roger Bacon of the magic mirror (Dee had such a mirror himself), the Roger Bacon who wrote in elaborate codes in order to conceal secrets of the utmost importance—that was also the Roger Bacon with whom Dee became fascinated. And so he combed the dark places and haggled with agents and stole—and the work of Roger Bacon was saved.

  Then Mary died and Elizabeth ascended the throne.

  THE REIGN OF ELIZABETH I OF ENGLAND is one of the most remarkable and best-loved tales in all history. What is not so well known, perhaps, is the nature and complexity of the world surrounding Elizabethan England, as well as the measures taken to ensure her survival. For Elizabeth's rule coincided with one of the most dangerous periods in European history, and for all the queen's attempts to disengage from continental politics, England was nonetheless sucked into the chaos of international affairs. To understand Elizabeth is to understand that she was the only female head of state of the only avowedly Protestant nation in Europe. Sandwiched in between all-powerful Catholic Spain and anguished France like “a bone between two dogs” as one of her councilors put it, Elizabeth had a tenure that marked almost to the day the violent madness of the Catholic initiative to win back territory lost in the previous decades to men like Martin Luther and John Calvin.

  John Dee's copy of Bacon's Compendia Studii Philosophii BODLEIAN LIBRARY

  The number of plots against Elizabeth during her forty-five-year reign reflects this hazardous state of affairs. For a monarch so beloved, she certainly had a lot of enemies. Even before her ascension, her half sister, Mary, and Mary's ally, Stephen Gardiner, the bishop of Winchester, had thrown Elizabeth into the Tower of London for two harrowing months before confining her to an old hunting lodge in Oxfordshire. (Elizabeth could see the execution scaffolding erected on the Tower Green over the top of the prison wall and wondered daily if she would be the next use of it.) The day after her coronation, her cousin Mary Stuart decided to call herself the queen of England, even though Mary was living in France with her husband, the dauphin. This Mary, known as Queen of Scots (who spoke neither Scottish nor English, having been born and bred a Frenchwoman), would remain a continual threat to Elizabeth. As the granddaughter of Henry VII—Henry VIII's older brother, who died young—she had a legitimate claim to the throne. And this was by no means the end of the list. King Philip of Spain sent his Armada to conquer England and kill Elizabeth; the powerful Guise family in France tried to have her poisoned; and even the pope went so far as to issue a bull excommunicating Elizabeth and promising a spot in heaven to whoever assassinated her.

  Uncertain times like these called for innovative measures—and advisors. Elizabeth found hers in Sir Francis Walsingham.

  Walsingham was the dark energy of the Elizabethan era. A trusted advisor from 1568, later a member of Elizabeth's privy council, Walsingham almost single-handedly saved the queen from the multitude of villainous intrigues to which she certainly would have otherwise succumbed. In 1568 he wrote to Cecil, “I beseech your honour that I may without offense conclude that in this division that reigneth among us, there is less danger in fearing too much than too little, and that there is nothing more dangerous than security.” A devout Protestant and disciple of Machiavelli, Walsingham was committed to his queen and his religion, which he saw as interchangeable. Only a man like Walsingham, preemptive, at once cynical and passionate, could have taken the swirl of Catholic plots surrounding Elizabeth and used them to establish a network of spies and informers that would eventually evolve into the British secret service.

  Walsingham's was a world of agents and double agents, of intelligence, counterintelligence, bribes, burns, traps, and moles. He bankrupted his estate by personally financing most of his networks. He began by utilizing the services of one “Franchiotto, the Italian” (a Protestant double agent working for France, who reported that Queen Elizabeth had better be careful about what she ate), and by the time he died in office in 1590 he had half of Europe spying on the other half. He made use of people of both high and low station, Catholic and Protestant alike, although most of his trusted agents were Protestant.

  Walsingham understood that in a world of shifting alliances information was power, and so he focused his energy on gathering as much as possible. He had the lord mayor of London prepare reports each week on any suspicious foreigners entering the city and kept tabs on those who stayed. He had ties to Protestant networks in France and Italy from his days abroad and ran agents out of Spain and the Netherlands. He issued fake papers and invented cover stories that allowed his spies to roam freely in enemy territory. He alternately bribed and threatened government officials. He intercepted enemy messages and wasn't above manufacturing incriminating evidence when necessary.

  Not all of the threats came from overseas. Although only a small proportion of the English population remained radically committed to Rome and the overthrow of Elizabeth, these people, too, had to be watched. Walsingham was forced by the sheer magnitude of his task to make do with whatever raw material was at hand, and one of those at hand was John Dee.

  Dee had emerged miraculously unscarred by his connection to Bishop Bonner and Queen Mary to take up his old position in the royal social circle. Indeed, he was immediately rewarded by Elizabeth with the plum assignment of determining the most auspicious date for her coronation, a sure sign of the new queen's favor and confidence. (By contrast, Bonner was cast into the Marshalsea prison.) John Dee survived because he had been a spy. He had been in correspondence with Pickering and Cecil while they were abroad; he seems even to have been in communication with Elizabeth. The Protestant nobility knew that Mary was ill and that it was only a matter of time before Elizabeth gained the throne. Those who had fled Mary's barbarity were prepared to return to England and begin a new administration as soon as she died. But they needed eyes and ears in England while they were abroad, and Dee was evidently one of those who provided information.

  Dee was absolutely committed to Elizabeth. He formed his first attachment to her while she was Mary's prisoner. More than that, Dee had the bourgeois' reverence for title and the trappings of the aristocracy. He loved being a member, however distant, of the queen's society. He kept a diary for the years 1554 to 1601 full of glowing references to the queen and her visits (as well as a minute record of all the money he borrowed over the years):

  Sept 17th, 1580: the Quene's Majestie cam from Rychemond in her coach, and whan she cam right against the church she turned down toward my howse: and when she was against my garden in the felde she stode there a good while, and than cam ynto the street at the great gate of the felde, where she espyed me at my doore making obeysains to her Majestie; she beckend her hand for me; I cam to her coach side, she very speedily pulled off her glove and gave me her hand to kiss; and to be short, asked me to resort to her court.

  Dee had earlier turned down a position at Oxford teaching mathematics on the grounds that academia would have been too constricting for one who wanted to pursue spiritual mathematics. But what he was really hoping for was a position as court philosopher to Elizabeth.

  Elizabeth wasn't a woman to pay for something that she could have for free, however. She got all the advice she wanted but never gave Dee an official position at court. Soon after her coronation, he left on a five-year book-hunting trip to the continent. Dee was to go off and see if he could find anything useful to her administration. If he found something, he would be rewarded.

  He did find something. It was a rare manuscript called the Steganographia (On Secret Writing), written by a fifteenth-century German abbot, Johannes Trithemius. Dee found the book in Antwerp. Its owner, a Hungarian nobleman, lent it to Dee for ten days on condition that the Englishman answer scientific questions on demand. Dee spent ten frantic days copying the manuscript and wrote to Cecil that he had found a book for which others had offered “a Thousand Crownes and yet could not be obteyned . . . a boke for which many a lerned man has long so
ught and dayly doth seeke; whose use is greater than the fame therof is spread . . . the most precious jewel that I have yet of other men's travails recovered.” He then asked for money.

  On its surface, the Steganographia was a detailed occult work for conjuring up various spirits, a subject in which Dee would have been interested anyway. But actually the book was an instructive manual in the use of highly sophisticated ciphers. Embedded in the incantations were messages based on elaborate codes (alternate letters of alternate words, number substitution, different base languages) nearly impossible to break without a key. Dee, whose knowledge of mathematics and fascination for the dark arts helped make him one of Europe's reigning cryptographers, understood the book's true purpose. His interest in Trithemius's work was threefold. He wanted to use the magic incantations to contact the spiritual world, he wanted to understand the ciphering in the hopes that he could uncover an ancient language based on astrological symbols to unlock the secrets of the universe, and he wanted to prove to Elizabeth's government that ciphers and spiritualism could help protect the queen. When Dee returned to England and moved into a new house called Mortlake, just outside of London, he brought all of his books with him. There was no British Museum at the time. Dee's library became the unofficial athenaeum of the Elizabethan administration. Walsingham, who had a house nearby, was a frequent visitor.

  Francis Walsingham was also enormously interested in ciphers, but for more practical purposes. He himself had picked up a book on the subject while in Italy during Mary's reign, and had observed Catholic undercover communications operations firsthand. In fact, ciphers were all the rage in sixteenth-century Europe, because a clandestine operation obviously had a better chance of success if instructions could be passed in an unbreakable code among the various participants. Walsingham needed to develop his own codes and break others. For this he turned to Dee and his library. Dee would certainly have shown him Roger Bacon's work on the subject, as well as briefed him on the Steganographia. Dee came up with several ciphers for Walsingham. Unfortunately, most of them were too sophisticated for day-to-day espionage—Dee used alchemical symbols to denote scientific jargon, which in turn was embedded in allegories, so that the encoded messages took a long time to decipher and the communication ran to pages and pages. He did, however, give Walsingham one code that the secretary did use, the “Trellis Cipher,” in which the message was read down and then up again rather than from left to right, but Dee sniffed at it as being too simple. It was “a childish cryptogram such as eny man of knowlege shud be able to resolve,” he said.

  Dee and his library enabled Walsingham not only to develop his own ciphers but to break those used by Elizabeth's enemies. And Elizabeth had no enemy greater than her cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots.

  BY 1568, and for the two decades following, Mary, Queen of Scots, had become a serious problem for Elizabeth's administration.

  A devout Catholic, Mary wanted to be queen of England. After a scandalous escapade in Scotland, in which her husband murdered her lover and she had another lover murder her husband, she arrived in England, where she would remain for the next twenty years. Her first attempt to seize the throne was to ally herself with the Duke of Norfolk, import troops from abroad, and thereby overthrow Elizabeth.

  Two decades later, now under house arrest for her first attempted coup, Mary tried for the throne of England once more. The sophisticated methods used to catch her the second time are testimony to how far Walsingham had come in the ways of espionage and how critical was the use of ciphers to his methods.

  In 1583, Elizabeth appointed her cousin Sir Edward Stafford as ambassador to France. The queen never appropriated enough money from government funds to run the place in style, and frequently the ambassador would have to foot the shortfall. Stafford had an even bigger problem—he liked to gamble and ran up big losses. It didn't take long for the Spanish ambassador to France to pick up on Stafford's financial difficulties. “Now was the time for Your Majesty to make use of him [Stafford] if you wished any service done . . . you should see by his acts how willing he was to do so . . . This ambassador is much pressed for money,” he wrote to King Philip of Spain. King Philip responded with two thousand crowns. The powerful French Duke of Guise also noticed and paid Stafford's gambling debts as well. By 1585, Stafford had become a spy for both the French and the Spanish, who were conspiring together to unseat Elizabeth and put Mary on the throne.

  Walsingham, who had never trusted Stafford (he had a Catholic wife), had spies watching him from the very beginning and soon learned of Stafford's treachery. But since Stafford wasn't especially subtle at espionage, Walsingham left him in place. Walsingham wanted to prove to Elizabeth that Mary was a traitor, so he set a trap.

  He had one of his own agents, Thomas Philips, investigate Mary's household, and sent another agent, a captured Catholic spy named Gilbert Clifford, to the French embassy in London to offer himself as a courier for Mary. Mary and Clifford arranged to have enciphered letters smuggled out in waterproof packages inside the stoppers of the kegs of beer that were routinely delivered to the house to which Mary was confined. The arrangement was that Mary wrote the letters, her secretary transcribed them in ciphertext, the letters went out with the old beer, Clifford took them to the French embassy, the French embassy sent them to Stafford, and Stafford handed them over to the Spanish ambassador.

  Unbeknownst to the conspirators, every letter Mary wrote or received went through Walsingham first. By this time Walsingham had an entire cipher department working out of his house in London, with Philips his chief cryptographer. Sometimes Walsingham just read Mary's letters and passed them along as written; sometimes he changed them slightly; and sometimes he kept them and sent his own versions instead.

  It was through this unofficial channel that Walsingham learned that the Spanish were planning to build an armada and invade England. So dire was the threat that in 1587 he took the unheard-of step of writing out a covert plan of defense in order to impress upon Elizabeth the urgency of the situation so that she would appropriate funds for his networks. Entitled Plot for Intelligence out of Spain, the document outlined a number of surreptitious operations. One of these was to send an agent to Crakow, where Walsingham had a contact who claimed that he could steal the pope's personal correspondence and thereby intercept communications between Spain and the Vatican.

  Walsingham's secret agent in Crakow was John Dee.

  DEE HAD NEVER GOTTEN the paid position at court that he wanted and was continually scrounging about for money, but he did whatever Elizabeth asked, no matter how trivial. When she had a toothache and refused to have it pulled, he personally went abroad to converse with the best dentists in Europe for alternate remedies. (Eventually, one of the queen's friends, Bishop Aylmer, had to have one of his own teeth pulled to persuade her to do the same.) Over the years, Walsingham had made use of Dee in various ways. He had dispatched him to France in 1571 to make a horoscope of the Duke d'Anjou, Elizabeth's French suitor (and come back with whatever information he could about French schemes to dethrone the queen). Whenever anybody made a little wax figure of Elizabeth and stuck pins in it, as people sometimes did, Dee was duly called on to mumble incantations and undo the spell. Walsingham sent English explorers and geographers like Richard Hakluyt to Dee for advice and the use of his library, consulted him personally about Admiral Drake's expedition, and encouraged him to find in his old books academic rationales for English territorial expansion. Dee obliged in 1577 by writing two books on the subject, General and Rare Memorials and Brytanici Imperii Limites, the latter of which included a map of all the lands to which his research supported Elizabethan claims. In so doing, he became the first scholar to formulate the idea of a British empire. “Nov. 28th, [1578], I spake with the Quene hora quinta; I spake with Mr. Secretary Walsingham. I declared to the Quene her title to Greenland, Estetiland and Friseland,” Dee recorded in his diary.

  In June 1583, Dee had had a visitor, Lord Albert Laski, a Polish prince on an
unofficial tour of England. Laski was a Catholic, but as an immense landholder and powerful nobleman he represented an entrée into the court of Rudolph II, king of Bohemia and Hungary. More than that, Laski was ambitious, and ambitious men were useful to Walsingham. Accordingly, the English government went to considerable trouble to make him feel at home. Laski, who was preoccupied with the study of alchemy (land and serfs were all very well, but gold was liquid) and considered himself something of a patron of scientists, expressed an interest in meeting the great English alchemist John Dee, of whose work he had heard so much. Dee noted the meeting in his diary:

  June 15th [1583], abowt 5 of the clok cam the Polonian Prince Lord Albert Lasky down from Bissham, where he had lodged the night before, being returned from Oxford whither he had gon of purpose to see the universityes, where he was very honorably used and enterteyned. He had in his company Lord Russell, Sir Philip Sidney, and other gentlemen: he was rowed by the Quene's men, he had the barge covered with the Quene's cloth, the Quene's trumpeters, &c. He cam of purpose to do me honor, for which God be praysed!

  Unfortunately, by the time of Laski's visit, John Dee's notion of science and mathematics had descended into the grotesque. A year earlier, he'd made the acquaintance of, and subsequently hired, a man who would exert enormous influence over him for the rest of his life, Edward Kelley.

  Kelley had materialized out of the shadows of the Elizabethan underworld one evening to have his horoscope read, and stayed on with Dee, more or less, for the next six turbulent years. On the run from the law on a charge of counterfeiting, he was operating under the assumed name of Talbot when he arrived on the astrologer's doorstep. He had already had his ears lopped off as punishment for his crime and wore a black skullcap over his long, unkempt hair to hide the disfigurement. This gave him a macabre, slightly sinister look that recommended him to Dee, who was by this time engaged in surreptitious acts of magic and was looking around for someone to perform a particularly delicate supernatural task for him. Dee was looking for what the sixteenth century called a “skryer.”