LITMIR.BIZ

       V

      On 28 May 1555 the Privy Council despatched a letter ordering Francis Englefeld, Mary’s Master of the Court of Wards, ‘to make search for one John Dee, dwelling in London, and to apprehend him and send him hither.’¹ His house was to be sealed, and his books and papers seized as evidence. His living from Upton-upon-Severn was also confiscated, depriving him of his only regular source of income.

      By 1 June Dee was in the custody of Sir Richard Morgan, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas. He was taken to Hampton Court, to be held incommunicado ‘until Mr Secretary Bourne and Mr Englefelde shall repair thither for his further examination’.²

      This can hardly have come as a complete surprise. Many of Dee’s closest friends had already been arrested or forced into exile. Following an audience with Princess Elizabeth, Sir William Pickering had escaped back to the Continent, and been indicted for treason in his absence. John Day, a prominent printer who later published many of Dee’s works, had been imprisoned and, on release, also went abroad. The arrest of his own father must have further thickened the atmosphere of apprehension, casting suspicion on the whole family.

      Dee was arrested with several others: one Butler, whose identity remains unknown; Christopher Cary, a pupil of Dee’s;³ John Field, a publisher and astronomer who was soon to collaborate with Dee on the printing of a set of ephemerides drawn up according to the heretical Copernican principles; and Sir Thomas Benger, by far the group’s most senior member, who later became auditor to Queen Elizabeth and was now one of her ‘principal servants at Woodstock’, as Dee put it.⁴ This list is a telling one. It suggests Dee was identified as a member of a secret Protestant cell Mary’s government believed to be clustered around Elizabeth. A week later Elizabeth herself was brought to Hampton Court, where Mary, now married to Charles V’s son Philip, approached the term of what turned out to be a phantom pregnancy. Mary was under pressure from her advisors to dispose of Elizabeth, whose very existence was seen as a threat to the English re-establishment of Catholicism. There were repeated attempts to implicate the princess in Protestant schemes and plots. In Mary’s private chambers, the sisters had a tearful confrontation, apparently (according to Elizabeth) within the hearing of Philip, hiding in a suitably Shakespearean manner behind an arras. Mary demanded that Elizabeth reject her Protestant beliefs, and she refused once more.

      The many accusations against Dee focussed not on his religious leanings so much as his links with mathematics and magic. ‘In those dark times,’ John Aubrey later wrote, ‘astrologer, mathematician and conjuror were accounted the same things.’⁵ This was certainly the case with Dee. He was charged with ‘calculating’, ‘conjuring’ and ‘witchcraft’ on the grounds that he had drawn up horoscopes for Mary, her husband Philip and Elizabeth.

      He was probably guilty as charged. The remnant of his diary for this period includes an entry (inaccurately transcribed by Ashmole) showing the date and time of Mary’s marriage to Philip, and noting that the rising sign at the moment of their wedding – 11am, 25 July 1554 – was Libra (a good omen, as Libra, ruled by Venus, was the sign associated with marriage or partnership).

      The only other entry from his diary for this period, dated three weeks prior to his arrest, simply reads ‘Books brought from France to London’. Although it appears innocent enough, it may disguise an attempt to communicate with the exiled Pickering, one of Elizabeth’s partisans and a potential traitor. Dee may even have been acting as an intermediary between Pickering and Elizabeth because he was also in correspondence with the princess at this time.

      Whether there were grounds for such suspicions or not, the merest whiff of intrigue was sufficient to have prompted the Council’s decision to arrest Dee, but if they were to keep him imprisoned, they would need something stronger than the suggestion he had been drawing up royal horoscopes.

      A more serious accusation was duly found, and the very nature of its source hints at the political nature of the proceedings. Two informers were now cited who claimed to have evidence that Dee had ‘endeavoured by enchantments to destroy Queen Mary’. One of them was subsequently identified by Dee as ‘Prideaux’. A Catholic spy of that name later fled to Spain, seeking the protection of King Philip.⁶

      The other informer was a rather more conspicuous character called George Ferrers, a lawyer, member of Lincoln’s Inn, MP and convicted debtor.⁷ In 1553 he was appointed London’s ‘Lord of Misrule’, an ancient role bestowed during yuletide revelries. This tradition had been revived by the Duke of Northumberland for Edward’s last Christmas and it had been a huge success. Decked in satin robes, Ferrers fulfilled his duties admirably, presiding over a court of fools and illusionists. He repeated the part during Mary’s reign, though no doubt the ‘merry disports’ that formed part of the event did not include jesters dressed as cardinals, as in the inaugural year. Ferrers now accused Dee of using ‘enchantments’ to blind one of his children, and to kill another.

      Ferrers apparently bore Dee a longstanding grudge. In 1578 a suppressed edition of a pamphlet entitled Mirror for Magistrates included a story he wrote apparently lampooning Dee. It described a sorcerer hired by one Elianor Cobham to kill the Queen by sticking pins through a wax effigy of her. The story had a particular resonance at the time, as just such an effigy of Elizabeth had been found (at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where Ferrers practised as a lawyer), and Dee had been asked by the Privy Council to advise upon its significance.⁸

      On 5 June, Dee, together with Cary, Benger and Field, was brought before the Secretary of State Sir John Bourne, Francis Englefeld, Sir Richard Read and Doctor Thomas Hughes to be examined on his ‘lewd and vain practises of cal-culing and conjuring’.

      This tribunal was made up of Mary’s most loyal supporters. Englefeld was the man she later chose to investigate a conspiracy against Philip.⁹ Sir John Bourne was famous as ‘an especial stirrer up in such cases’, having ‘marvellously tossed and examined’ one of the leaders of Wyatt’s Rebellion. And Lord North was popularly reputed to have scoured the streets of London for a pauper’s baby to pass off as the male heir Mary was failing, after ten months of pregnancy, to produce.¹⁰ The atmosphere at Hampton Court was fraught with fears about the true nature of Mary’s ‘pregnancy’,

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