LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

say you, would you have come to mass, or no, if the doors had been sooner opener?’

      ‘My lord, that is another manner of question,’ Philpot replied. And Bonner did not pursue it, instead engaging Philpot in a theological debate on the subject of the unity of the church and the papacy. In particular, Philpot was asked to discuss the works of the third-century philosopher St Cyprian of Carthage who, according to Bonner, declared, ‘There must be one high priest, to which the residue must obey,’ a clear endorsement of Papal authority. Philpot disputed this interpretation, arguing thiat St Cyprian was referring to himself, as he was then patriarch of Africa.

      At this point Dee intervened. ‘St Cyprian hath these words: “That upon Peter was builded the church, as upon the first beginning of unity”.’ Philpot replied with another quote, from a book of Cyprian’s that Dee himself would later have in his library: ‘In the person of one man, God gave the keys to all, that he, in signification thereby, might declare the unity of all men.’

      After a further exchange, Dee announced that he was leaving the room, whereupon Philpot, losing his temper, called after him: ‘Master Dee, you are too young in divinity to teach me in the matters of my faith. Though you be learned in other things more than I, yet in divinity I have been longer practised than you.’ It was a clear reference to Dee’s reputation as a magician, which was obviously understood by all those present. Dee did not reply.

      Dee did not attend any further interviews with Philpot which from this point on became increasingly hostile. However, at around the same time he did attend another examination with one of the newer arrivals at the Bishop’s palace, Bartlet Green. Dee mentioned Green in an account of his arrest written many years later, in which he described himself as having been a ‘prisoner long’ at the Bishop’s palace, ‘and bedfellow with Barthlet Green, who was burnt.’⁶

      This was an economical version of the truth. In a letter to Philpot intercepted by Bonner, Green reported the encounter as follows:

      I was brought into my lord [Bonner]’s inner chamber… and there was put in a chamber with master Dee, who entreated me very friendly. That night I supped at my lord’s table, and lay with master Dee in the chamber you [i.e. Philpot] did see. On the morrow I was served at dinner from my lord’s table, and at night did eat in the hall with his gentlemen; where I have been placed ever since, and fared wonderfully well.⁷

      That is the only reference to Dee that Green gave in his submission.

      Poor Bartlet did not fare so wonderfully well in the coming days, and neither did Philpot, who evidently attempted to engineer an escape. The Bishop’s men discovered a dagger sewn into the belly of a roasted pig delivered to him. In punishment, Bonner sent Philpot to be locked up in the coalhouse stocks, and a few days later himself came to the coalhouse to see his prisoner. Bonner claimed it was the first time he had ever visited the place and he thought it too good for Philpot. He ordered his guards to seize the prisoner, and to follow. He led them to the ‘privy door’ leading from his palace into St Paul’s, where his prison warder was waiting.

      The keeper led the prisoner up the nave of the cathedral, past the reinstated rites and shrines Philpot so despised, and up the stone steps that led to Lollards’ Tower. Many fellow heretics were already incarcerated in one of the tower’s chambers, and forced to sit or lie with their feet and hands locked into a wall of wooden stocks, half-deafened by the din of the bells. But Philpot was taken along the walkway across the west side of the cathedral, into a tunnel leading into the bell tower on the opposite side, the ‘Blind Tower’. There he was confined in a chamber ‘as high almost as the battlements of Paul’s’ with a single east-facing window ‘by which I may look over the tops of a great many houses, but see no man passing into them’. He was searched and a number of letters were found hidden in his clothes, which he tried in vain to tear up as the guards pulled them from him. One of these letters was addressed to Bartlet Green.

      Philpot’s interrogations did not stop, but they were now aimed solely at incriminating rather than converting him. His letter to Green, painstakingly pieced together, contained a reference to Dee, ‘the great conjuror’. ‘How think you, my lords, is not this an honest man to belie me, and to call my chaplain a great conjuror?’ Bonner asked the assembled Bishops. They obligingly smiled at his irony.

      Philpot realised that his position was now hopeless. He asked his servant, whose visits provided his only remaining link with the outside world, to procure a ‘bladder of black powder’, but it was intercepted by Bonner’s men. Philpot explained that it was to make ink, but Bonner’s suspicion must have been that it was filled with gunpowder. Philpot no doubt planned to hang the pouch around his neck in the event that he was burned, to provide an early release from lingering agonies.

      Formally condemned on 16 December 1555, Philpot was held in a small chamber in preparation for the handover to Newgate’s chief keeper – the moment when the ecclesiastical authorities returned to their chapels, leaving the secular arm of government to conclude the business. The first words of Philpot’s new keeper, Alexander, were: ‘Ah! Hast thou not done well to bring thyself hither?’ This cheery greeting was immediately followed by an order to hold the prisoner down on a block of stone, and lock his legs using as ‘many irons as he could bear’, which Alexander would remove only if Philpot paid him four pounds.

      An appeal to the civic authorities brought gentler treatment. The city sheriff, Master Macham, ordered that the prisoner’s irons be removed and his personal possessions restored. Philpot was then taken to Newgate where he was given a cell to himself. The following day he ate his final meal and was told to make his preparations. He was awoken at eight the following morning. His guards carried him to the place of execution as ‘the way was foul’. As they lifted him up, he apparently joked ‘What? Will ye make me a pope?’

      Bartlet Green was burned the next month. Beyond his brief encounter with Dee, little is known about his last days, although he was brought into one of the final interrogations with Philpot to identify the incriminating letter. On 27 January 1556, he followed Philpot’s short journey from Newgate up Giltspur Street to his pyre which was still smouldering from the burning of Thomas Whittle the day before. Bartlet was only twenty-five years old.

      The figure of Dee glimpsed through the pages of Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, of the ‘great conjuror’, Bonner’s ‘chaplain’, flitting in and out of interrogations, is a disturbing one. He was a favoured and apparently enthusiastic member of Bonner’s household. Indeed, the bishop had become his ‘singular friend’, and would remain so even into the late 1560s, when Bonner, stripped of his honours by Elizabeth’s Protestant government, lay dying in Marshalsea prison.⁸ A note in one of his books also reveals that Dee was staying, perhaps even living, at Fulham Palace, the bishop’s Thameside residence four miles upriver, between 18 and 24 September 1555, the weeks leading up to Philpot’s interrogations.⁹ Could Dee, so recently an enthusiastic member of Edward VI’s Reformist court, have been a closet Catholic?

      The Reformation did not split the world between Catholicism and Protestantism quite as neatly as many historical accounts suggest. Militants on both sides were prepared to kill and die for their cause but the vast majority, including many of the Reformation’s leading figures, were much more ambivalent. Throughout his life, Henry VIII himself clung to many Catholic rites and attitudes, even those concerning divorce. His was primarily a struggle for power rather than religious principles.¹⁰ Elizabeth I, a renowned symbol of Protestant sovereignty, told the French Ambassador André Hurault: ‘There is only one Jesus Christ… The rest is dispute over trifles.’¹¹ This, it seems, was Dee’s view as well.

      Dee always refused to commit himself to a particular religion, though it is certain he was not an orthodox Catholic. In 1568 – by which time England had reverted to Protestantism under Elizabeth – the Jesuit leader Francis Borgia received a secret report on the English

Скачать книгу