Mystic implements of magic might,
practised the occult sciences, cast his nativities, transmuted the baser metals to gold, and, as the common people believed, held familiar intercourse with the Evil One, and did other uncanny things. But of Dee and his doings we purpose to speak anon.
The wardenship of Dr. Dee forms a curious chapter in the ecclesiastical history of Manchester, and at the same time presents us with a humiliating picture of the condition of society in the golden days of the Virgin Queen. It has been said that witchcraft came in with the Stuarts and went out with them; but this is surely an injustice to the memory of Elizabeth’s sapient successor, for the belief in sorcery, witchcraft, enchantment, demonology, and practices of a kindred nature were widely prevalent long ere that monarch ascended the English throne. Henry VIII., in 1531, granted a formal licence to “two learned clerks” “to practise sorcery and to build churches,” a curious combination of evil and its antidote; and ten years later he, with his accustomed inconsistency, issued a decree making “witchcraft and sorcery felony, without benefit of clergy.”
The belief in these abominations was not confined to any one class of the people, or to the professors of any one form of faith. On the contrary, Churchmen, Romanists, and Puritans were alike the dupes of the loathsome impostors who roamed the country, though each in turn was ready to upbraid the others with being believers in the generally prevailing error, and not unfrequently with being participators in the frauds that were practised. The great and munificent Edward, Earl of Derby, “kept a conjuror in his house secretly;” and his daughter-in-law, Margaret Clifford, Countess of Derby, lost the favour of Queen Elizabeth for a womanish curiosity in “consulting with wizards or cunning men.” The bishops gave authority and a form of licence to the clergy to cast out devils; Romish ecclesiastics claimed to have a monopoly of the power; and the Puritan ministers, not to be behind them, tried their hands at the imposture.
Education had then made little progress, and the men of Lancashire, though the merriest of Englishmen, were as ignorant and superstitious as they were merry. Nowhere was the belief in supernatural agency more rife than in the Palatinate. The shaping power of the imagination had clothed every secluded clough and dingle with the weird drapery of superstition, and made every ruined or solitary tenement the abode of unhallowed beings, who were supposed to hold their diabolical revelries within it. The doctrines of necromancy and witchcraft were in common belief, and it is doubtful if there was a single man in the county who did not place the most implicit faith in both. Hence, Queen Elizabeth, if it was not that she wished to get rid of a troublesome suitor, may have thought there was a fitness of things in preferring a professor of the Black Art to the wardenship of Manchester; believing, possibly, that one given to astrology, and such like practices, could not find a more congenial home than in a county specially prone, as Lancashire then was, to indulge in diablerie and the practice of alchemy and enchantment.
A brief reference to the earlier career of Dr. Dee may not be altogether uninteresting. According to the genealogy drawn up by himself, he belonged to the line of Roderick the Great, Prince of Wales. His father, Rowland Dee, who was descended from a family settled in Radnorshire, carried on the business of a vintner in London; and there, or rather at Mortlake, within a few miles of the city, on the 13th July, 1527, the future warden first saw the light. After receiving a preliminary education at one or two of the city schools, and subsequently at the Grammar School of Chelmsford, he entered St. John’s College, Cambridge, being then only fifteen years of age; and during the five years he remained there he maintained, with unflinching strictness, the rule “only to sleepe four houres every night; to allow to meate and drink (and some refreshing after), two houres every day; and,” he adds, “of the other eighteen houres, all (except the tyme of going to and being at divine service) was spent in my studies and learning.” On leaving the University he passed some time in the Low Countries, his object being “to speake and conferr with some learned men, and chiefly mathematicians.” He made the acquaintance of Frisius, Mercator, Antonius Gogara, and other celebrated Flemings; and on his return to England he was chosen to be a Fellow of King Henry’s newly-erected College of Trinity, and made under-reader of the Greek tongue. His reputation stood very high, and his mathematical and astronomical pursuits, in which he was assisted by some rare and curious instruments—among them, as we are told, an “astronomer’s staff of brass, that was made of Gemma Frisius’ divising; the two great globes of Gerardus Mercator’s making; and the astronomer’s ring of brass, as Gemma Frisius had newly framed it,” which he had brought from Flanders—drew upon him among the common people the suspicion of being a conjuror, an opinion that was strengthened by his getting up at Cambridge a Greek play, the comedy of “Aristophanes,” in which, according to his own account, he introduced “the Scarabeus his flying up to Jupiter’s pallace, with a man and his basket of victualls on her back; whereat was great wondring, and many vaine reportes spread abroad of the meanes how that was affected.” Though causing “great wondring,” and seeming at that time too marvellous to be accomplished by human agency, it was in all probability only a clumsy performance, and much inferior to the ordinary transformation scene of a modern pantomime. The “vaine reportes,” however, led to Dee’s being accused of magical practices, and he found it expedient to leave the University, having first obtained his degree of Master of Arts. In 1548 he went abroad and entered as a student at Louvain, where his philosophical and mathematical skill brought him under the notice of some of the continental savants. Apart from his intellectual power, he must in his earlier years have possessed considerable charms both of person and manner, for he contrived to gain friends and win admiration wherever he went. He was consulted by men of the highest rank and station from all parts of Europe, and before he left Louvain he had the degree of Doctor of Laws conferred upon him.
On quitting that University, in 1550, he proceeded to Paris, where he turned the heads of the French people, who became almost frenzied in their admiration of him. He read lectures on Euclid’s Elements—“a thing,” as he says, “never done publiquely in any University of Christendome,” and his lectures were so fully attended that the mathematical school could not hold all his auditors, who clambered up at the windows and listened at the doors as best they could. A mathematical lectureship, with a yearly stipend of 200 crowns, and several other honourable offices were also offered him from “five Christian Emperors,” among them being an invitation from the Muscovite Emperor to visit Moscow, where he was promised an income at the Imperial hands of £2,000 a year, his diet free out of the Emperor’s kitchen, and to be in dignity and authority among the highest of the nobility; but he preferred to reside in his native country, and, foregoing these inducements, he returned to England in 1551.
The fame of his marvellous acquirements had preceded him, and on his arrival he was presented by Secretary Cecil to the young King, Edward VI., who granted him a pension of 100 crowns a year, which was soon “bettered,” as he says, by his “bestowing on me (as it were by exchange) the rectory of Upton-upon-Seaverne,” in Worcestershire, and to this was added the rectory of Long Leadenham, in Lincolnshire. Though holding these two benefices, it is somewhat remarkable that Dee does not appear to have ever been admitted to Holy Orders. There is no very clear evidence that he at any time occupied his Worcestershire parsonage, but he must have been resident for a while at Long Leadenham, for at that place a stone has been found inscribed with his name and sundry cabalistic figures, indicating that he had at some time lived in the parish. If he ever resided at Upton-upon-Severn he must have found an uncongenial neighbour in Bishop Bonner, who then held the living of Ripple—for the one was visionary, sensitive, and unpractical, and the other stern, cruel, and unscrupulous, while on religious and political questions their views were as wide apart as the poles.
On the 6th of July, 1553, Edward VI. finished his “short but saintly course,” and the solemn sound then heard from the bell-towers of England, while it announced the fact of his decease, crushed the hopes of Dee, for a time at least, and in a proportionate degree raised the expectations of Bonner. Mary had not been many months upon the throne before Dee was accused of carrying on a correspondence with Princess Elizabeth’s servants and of compassing the Queen’s death by means of enchantments. He was cast into prison and tried upon the charge of high treason, but acquitted; after which he was turned over to Bonner to see if heresy might not be proved against him. Christian martyrdom, however, was not in Mr. Dee’s vocation, and so, after six months’ detention, on giving satisfaction to the Queen’s Privy Council, and entering into recognisances “for ready appearing and good abearing for four months longer,” he was set at liberty August 19, 1555, to find that during his incarceration his rectory had been bestowed upon the Dean of Worcester, Bonner having detained him in captivity in order that he might have the disposal of his preferment. The following characteristic letter, written about this time, and addressed from the Continent (endorsed “fro Callice to Bruxells”), has been recently unearthed from among the Marian State papers by that painstaking antiquary, Mr. J. Eglinton Bailey, F.S.A., and printed in Mr. Earwaker’s “Local Gleanings:”
My dutye premysed unto youre good L’rdshype as hyt apperteynethe. This daye abowt iiij of the clocke at after noone my L. Chawncelare (Gardyner) taketh his Jorneye toward England havynge rather made a meane to a peace to be hereafter condyscendyd unto, than a peace at thys tyme yn any pointe determyned. In England all ys quyete. Souch as wrote trayterouse l’res (letters) ynto Germany be apprehendyd as lykewyse oothers yt dyd calculate ye kynge and quene and my Lady Elizabeth natyvytee, wherof on Dee and Cary and butler, and on ooyr of my Lady Elezabeths ... ar accused and yt they should have a famylyare sp(irit) wch ys ye moore susp’ted, for yt fferys on of ther a(ccu)sers-hadd ymedyatly upon thaccusatys bothe hys chyldr(en) strooken, the on wth put deathe, thother wth blyndnes. Thys trustynge shortly to doe youe yn an ooyr place bettre servyce I bed yowr good Lordshype most hartily to farewell. Wryte ffro Cales ye viijth of June.
Yowr Lordshyps most asured Tho. Martyn.