Mr. Rawlegh his letter unto me of hir Majestie’s good disposition unto me.
the writer being Sir Walter Raleigh, who was then in great favour with Elizabeth, and himself a patron of Dee’s.
The visit of Count Lasque was an important event in Dee’s career. The Polish noble was accounted of great learning, and fond of “occult studies.” He paid frequent visits to the house at Mortlake, where he was admitted to the séances of the English magician, and became much impressed with his learning and professed knowledge of the mystical world. When the time came for Lasque to return he suggested that Dee should go out with him to Poland, with his wife and children, accompanied by Kelly and his wife and brother, and their servants. When in his castle at Sieradz they could make their experiments in undisturbed seclusion. Seeing no prospect of the fulfilment of the promises made to him at home, and being hampered with debt, Dee, who was then in his 57th year, was nothing loth to try his fortune abroad once more. They left in September, and it was six years before any of them again set foot on English soil. The departure is thus recorded in the “Diary”:—
Sept. 21st (1583).—We went from Mortlake, and so to the Lord Albert Lasky, I, Mr. E. Kelly, our wives, my children and familie, we went toward our two ships attending for us, seven or eight myle below Gravessende.
The period of their residence abroad was a chequered one, and many and extraordinary were their adventures and experiences, alternating between honour and discredit—between luxury and distress. For many months they were hospitably entertained by Count Lasque while engaged in their researches for the Philosopher’s Stone, but finding that they spent more gold than they were able to produce he got tired, and persuaded them to pay a visit to Rudolph, King of Bohemia, who, though a weak and credulous man, soon became conscious of the imposture that was being practised, and passed them on to Stephen, King of Poland, at Cracow, but he declined to have anything to do with them, and the Emperor Rudolph refused to pay their expenses, or further encourage their experiments, though he permitted them to reside at Prague, and occasionally to appear at Court, until they were banished from the country at the instigation of the Pope’s Nuncio, who stigmatised them as “notorious magicians.” Dee lamented the “subtill devises and plotts” laid against him, and pathetically added, “God best knoweth how I was very ungodly dealt withall, when I meant all truth, sincerity, fidelity, and piety towardes God, and my Queene, and country.”
The old man had surrendered himself entirely to Kelly. Under his iniquitous influence he degenerated into a mere necromancer, and was sinking more and more into discredit. On leaving Bohemia the two adventurers found an asylum in the Castle of Trebona, whither the Count of Rosenberg had invited them, and where, for a time, they were maintained in great affluence, owing, as they affirmed, to their discovery of the secret of transmuting the baser metals into gold. Kelly would seem to have learned some secrets from the German chemists which he did not reveal to his employer, but by their possession contrived to increase his influence over him, while he himself had recourse to the worst species of the magic art for the purposes of avarice and fraud. It was while at Trebona that Kelly produced the wonderful elixir, or Philosopher’s Stone, in the form of a powder, which Lilly, in his “Memoirs,” says he obtained from a friar who came to Dee’s door. With this “powder of projection,” or “salt of metals,” as it was variously called, they were enabled to coat the baser metals with silver or gold, and would seem to have hit upon the process which, a century and a half later, Joseph Hancock introduced into Sheffield—that of electro-plating. Among other transmutations they converted a piece of an old iron warming pan, by warming it at the fire, into (or covered it with) silver, and sent it to Queen Elizabeth.[24] Why, when they were about it, they did not “transmute” the whole pan is not stated, but it would seem they were not able to work the discovery easily or quickly enough to make it pay, for heart-burnings, jealousies, and disputations arose, and quarrels became of frequent occurrence. At one time Kelly got such a hold upon his dupe as to persuade him that it was the Divine will that they should have their wives in common; then a rupture occurred between the ladies, who, however, became reconciled to each other, and we have the entries in the Diary—
April 10th (1588).—I writ to Mr. Edward Kelly and to Mistress Kelly ij charitable letters requiring at theyr hands mutual charity.
And—
May 22nd.—Mistris Kelly received the sacrament and to me and my wife gave her hand in charity; and we rushed not from her.