The Arch Conjuror of England (5 page)

At Trinity College, Dee found a patron in the leading Greek scholar John Christopherson, a devout Catholic from St John's. He arranged for Dee to pursue his mathematical studies at the Catholic university of Louvain in the summer of 1547, supported by money from Trinity and Christopherson's commendatory letters. The Inquisition had purged Louvain of heresy in 1546, savagely executing evangelicals, issuing the first Index of prohibited books, and tightening control over university admissions. The great geographer Gerard Mercator had been imprisoned for months under threat of execution for heresy.
⁴⁶
Dee spent the summer studying with Mercator, Gemma Frisius and Antonius Gogava at the leading European centre for astronomy and astrology. When Dee on his return presented Mercator's globes and astronomical instruments to Trinity, Christopherson conveyed the college's gratitude for these exceptionally beautiful and accurate gifts.

After graduating Master of Arts in May 1548, that summer Dee again left Cambridge for Louvain. The college once more financed his studies. To make his elevation to the Court seem more effortless, he later claimed that he never returned to Trinity. In fact he mostly resided there from October 1551 until April 1553, eking out his meagre Fellowship stipend of £8 a year.
⁴⁷
Trinity epitomised the impoverished university's increasing dependence on royal patronage. Henry VIII had established the college to supply humanist intellectuals for political service, not intellectual speculation.
⁴⁸
Thus, Dee developed in an intellectual culture attuned to the practical demands of the monarch and Court. His career would depend on how well he could attract patrons by tailoring his erudition and writing to address political needs.
⁴⁹
This became particularly obvious after his father's catastrophe in 1547 demonstrated the crucial role of patronage in contemporary politics. In the short term this crisis explains Dee's second departure for Louvain in 1548, but its effects reverberated throughout his life.

While the imperious, terrifying Henry lived, the City had avoided directly challenging his Packer, Roland Dee. Until 1547 Roland shared the abundant rewards of his Packership with the mayor's appointee, William Brothers. After Brothers's death in mid-summer, Roland monopolised the profits for some months. Already by December 1543 Roland's growing wealth and status had earned him a place in the socially exclusive church Vestry of St Dunstan's.
⁵⁰
Thanks to devoted parishioners, St Dunstan's possessed some of the richest chantry endowments in London, which supported regular Masses celebrated with an abundance of luxurious vestments and plate.
⁵¹
Roland exploited his political connections and parish authority to acquire these resources. Henry VIII part-funded his French war by seizing assets through the Chantries Act of 1545, which established a commission to identify lands ‘wasted’ on ‘superstitious’ Masses chanted for the dead. By 20 May Roland had obtained an advantageous lease for sixty years of chantry lands belonging to St Dunstan's.
⁵²
In July he leased other parish properties near the Tower.
⁵³
After Henry began seizing chantry lands, Roland leased a former chantry property in St Dunstan's from the Crown.
⁵⁴

On 8 July 1547 the Vestry elected Roland as junior churchwarden for a year. Nine days later the Vestry authorised Roland and the senior warden to sell £92 worth of altar vessels to repair the church roof.
⁵⁵
During a time of rapid inflation many vestries resorted to this expedient to repair neglected churches. However, the sale process evidently gave Roland ideas, when his prospering career began to collapse a few weeks later. Following the death of Henry VIII, the accession of the nine-year-old Edward VI in January 1547 had shifted the balance of power between Crown and City. By the late summer the City felt able to reassert its rights, since the financially strapped government of the Lord Protector, the Duke of Somerset, needed London's money. In early August, Somerset's steward and adviser, Sir John Thynne, struck a deal with the City.

Thynne was a Russian oligarch of his day, ruthlessly exploiting his political connections to accumulate strategic positions and resources. He and his children would marry amongst the merchant princes of London. He squeezed his offices and vast estates to build Longleat House and
founded the dynasty now represented by the Marquis of Bath. Thynne sent the Dees plunging in the other direction. The former suggested that Edward should issue Letters Patent restoring the Packership to the City's control. Thynne would then replace ‘one Roland Dee’ as Packer to the Strangers. He undertook to inform Roland personally that Henry's grant had been annulled. Both Thynne and Dee were Mercers, and Thynne was probably settling a personal score. Furthermore, Thynne undertook to obtain the King's written promise under his Privy Seal never again to appoint a Packer. Thynne then surrendered his office to the City, and received it again for life from the Corporation. The City probably paid the avaricious Thynne for the privilege. He would hold the Packership from the City against all political challengers until his death in 1580.
⁵⁶

Roland could not afford to go quietly. In 1548 and 1549 he continued to haunt the quays and warehouses along the Thames, bluffing some ill-informed foreign exporters into paying him the Packer's fees. Finally, Thynne appealed to the Lord Protector to crush the upstart.
⁵⁷
Roland's experience of Thynne's persecution pushed him towards ultimately catastrophic support for Somerset's emerging rival, John Dudley, Earl of Warwick. More immediately, Roland's loss of the Packership slashed his income, forcing him into desperate expedients that destroyed his standing in London mercantile society.

The senior Aldermen who had resented Henry's imposition of the upstart Dee now demanded that Roland fully account for his Packership. He tried to avoid accurately admitting his profits, particularly during his sole control of the books in the summer of 1547. Roland also tried to duck the £66 per annum rent that the City demanded for the Packership. Though he signed bonds to provide a final accounting, it took the City until November 1549 to force him into merely paying its legal costs, without settling his actual indebtedness.
⁵⁸
While Roland ducked and dived to save his financial skin, for the first time John felt the cold wind of penury that would plague his life. For Dee, his father's crash reverberated in chronic financial insecurity, which undermined his self-perception as a leading European intellectual. The mismatch between his financial and intellectual status would provoke Dee into making overly ambitious
requests for patronage and spending wildly whenever he came into money.

Robbed of his income as Packer, Roland took desperate measures to conceal his cash-flow problems and maintain his financial and social credit. The 1548 tax assessment still rated him at £200 in ‘goods’, meaning not real possessions but his general reputation or creditworthiness in the City.
⁵⁹
To maintain this appearance of wealth, sometime after July 1548, Roland, by now senior churchwarden, purloined and sold further gold altar plate amounting to £94, ‘without the consent of any of the parishioners’, as the shocked St Dunstan's Vestry complained.
⁶⁰
Despite the outrage in the parish, Roland kept the money and refused to name the purchasers of the stolen plate. His junior colleague, William Ansteye, blamed Roland entirely, before making an emergency inventory of the remaining plate on 11 August 1549.
⁶¹

The age had witnessed much rapacious behaviour by the powerful, but Roland now lacked power. Just as he avoided accounting for his Packership, so Roland refused to submit his parish accounts after his term expired in July 1549. He had probably already fled the parish. John Dee later recalled that the calamity forced his mother to move home.
⁶²
In June 1551 the parish could still not audit its accounts ‘because of the great Hindrance and after deal of the said Rowland Dye and that he went out of London and dwelleth at Gravesend’. Roland fled to Gravesend, home to his wife's family the Wildes, because there he could shelter under the political protection of the local magnates, the Dudleys and Wyatts. This, and considerable bluff, enabled him to keep the money.
⁶³
Roland's fraud, however, inevitably reflected on John Dee's reputation in mid-Tudor London, especially since, as the Vestry reminded the King's commissioners in 1552, John Dee had paid his father £5 5s for stolen brass candlesticks from St Dunstan's.
⁶⁴

J
OHN DEE
responded to his father's crisis by leaving England and matriculating at Louvain University in August 1548. By then the little Netherlands town, famous for its beer, already sheltered many Henrician Catholic refugees, including several from St John's College, Cambridge. Dee arrived amidst a second wave of exiles from the Edwardian Reformation. The canon lawyer John Story, who signed the matriculation register just days after Dee, so vehemently opposed the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559 that he would be kidnapped from the Low Countries and executed for treason in 1571.
¹

Dee could have studied privately with Mercator, Gemma Frisius and Antonius Gogava. Instead he publicly swore allegiance to Catholic orthodoxy, which had been bloodily reimposed at Louvain just months earlier. Dee also swore to reject ‘the doctrines of Martin Luther and all heretics, in so far as they clash with the teachings of the ancient Roman Catholic Church’. He had denied the Pope's authority when graduating from Cambridge, but now swore ‘to live according to the Church's precepts and under the guidance of its supreme guardian, the Roman Pontiff’.
²
His later life would suggest he took neither oath particularly seriously.

Dee's matriculation enabled him to study Roman civil law at Louvain, bringing him into contact with particularly devout Catholic teachers, while equipping him for service at the English Court. Civil-law training qualified ambitious English intellectuals for the royal equity courts
of Chancery, Star Chamber and Requests, as diplomats and Privy Councillors, and in the higher ecclesiastical courts. Under Elizabeth I politically powerful civilians would include Francis Walsingham and Thomas Wilson, her first Master of Requests. Trinity College supported Dee's civil-law studies at Louvain because Henry VIII's suppression of the Catholic Church's canon law had undermined Cambridge teaching in the closely related civil law.
³
Henry, and Lord Protector Somerset, had tried and failed to amalgamate Clare College with Trinity Hall to train civil lawyers.
⁴

Dee later claimed to have astonished everyone at Louvain by applying his mathematical knowledge to reveal the ‘deep judgement, and just determination of the Ancient Roman Lawmakers’ in laws ‘accounted very intricate and dark’, particularly regarding inheritance and land rights. The science of numbers, by penetrating to the equity concealed within civil law, elevated it to the divine justice praised by Aristotle and Plato. In Dee's view, mathematics had even greater applications in canon law and English common law, both of which were inequitable.
⁵
Dee emerged from Louvain University clutching a Licentiate in civil law, being still too young for the doctorate. His civil-law training would inform his later advocacy of Elizabeth's imperial claims, since much civilian jurisprudence dealt with competing jurisdictions over land and sea.
⁶

The difference between Dee's world and our own is revealed by the fact that his studies in astrology with Mercator, Gemma and Gogava also turned him into the kind of specialist useful at Court. His Cambridge training in arithmetic, geometry, perspective and astronomy enabled Dee to participate enthusiastically in his Louvain teachers’ precise measurement of ‘the heavenly influences and operations actual in this elemental portion of the world’.
⁷
A recently rediscovered astrological disc, covered in complex systems for measuring and calculating stellar influences, reveals Mercator's influence on Dee's distinctive method of astrology.
⁸
Dee believed that it was theoretically possible to measure the invisible ‘rays of celestial virtue’ that emanated from the stars alongside their light. Measured geometrically, stellar distances, magnitudes, aspects and movements would determine the power of these rays. Dee claimed to have
invented while young a way of measuring ‘those fixed Stars whose Operation in the Air, is of great might’.
⁹

Dee's invention resembled the methods of Mercator's group, whose disc applied techniques developed for triangulating terrestrial geography to the precise measurement of heavenly influences. The disc enabled the student astrologer easily to measure ‘from physical explanations … what any planet signifies, what strength it has, what advantage or disadvantage it receives from elsewhere and in what order the planets mutually succeed each other in power’.
¹⁰
Like Dee, Mercator argued that a star's angle of incidence to the earth determined its power, perpendicular rays being the strongest.
¹¹