The Arch Conjuror of England by Parry Glyn

Author:Parry, Glyn [Parry, Glyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300117196
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2012-04-24T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 17

The Magnificent Master Alchemist

BEFORE DEE and Kelley left, all states had been warned against Dee's ‘religious innovations’. The city of Erfurt in Thuringia refused them leave to stay, despite Rozmberk's request.1 Pucci trailed behind them, beseeching them to submit to the Pope, under the nuncio's protection. Dee's repeated failures in Court politics show how poor he was at reading character. Only on 11 July 1586 did he realise that Pucci, as the angels had warned, was conspiring with Sega. Dee eventually persuaded Pucci to return to Prague on 17 July, taking with him a letter to Sega restating their orthodoxy and another to Rozmberk.2

Dee and his household turned west, towards the Court of Landgrave Wilhelm IV at Kassel, on the direct route from Prague and Erfurt to England. Dee had visited there in 1563–64 and later corresponded with Landgrave Wilhelm, yet another princely mediator between religious extremists. He corresponded on natural philosophy with Dee's intellectual circle, patronised mathematicians, and maintained precise instruments for astronomical observations like Dee's.

Dee owned several technical treatises by Wilhelm's experts. The landgrave shared Dee's belief that the 1572 supernova appeared in the sphere of Venus and portended great changes. He had also made careful calculations about the 1584 Great Conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter, believing it presaged global cataclysms. Dee arrived at Kassel to find the Landgrave and his research team preoccupied with using Tycho Brahe's improved instruments for an enormous series of solar and stellar observations, like Dee's of the 1550s. They would eventually catalogue a thousand stars.3

Wilhelm showed less interest in alchemical medicine and the philosopher's stone. Dee knew he dismissed the ‘infinite numbers of sophists’ who promised ‘mountains of gold’. However, Dee still found his reception at Kassel that summer disappointing.4 Within months Stephen Powle relayed to Walsingham gossip he had picked up at Kassel about Dee's pretensions and apocalyptic notions. These raised further questions about Dee amongst conservatives at Elizabeth's Court.

Years later Dee claimed that he had hired a single coach for his family. But he arrived at Kassel, Powle maliciously related, in a train of four coaches. Trying to save face after his expulsion from Prague, Dee claimed to have abandoned Rudolf because of his ‘slender entertainment’. To ‘show his greatness’, sneered Powle, Dee also asked official permission to stay at Kassel, an unnecessary ostentation.5 Powle informed Walsingham that Dee publicly claimed he lived on Elizabeth's financial support, and again attributed his departure from England to the ‘envy of some of the nobility’. Worse still, Dee gave the impression that he was possessed by a ‘proud and fanatical spirit’.

Dee presented Landgrave Wilhelm with his new Latin pamphlet ‘About God's Secrets and Mighty Works, called in the Apocalypse Alpha and Omega’. This described the nuncio's tyranny and defended the angelic revelations about ‘the great catastrophe overhanging the world’. It showed how Dee kept returning to the kabbalistic and apocalyptic preoccupations of his Monas. The first page bore the Monad symbol, with the same alchemical verse from Genesis 27:28 that appeared on

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