Читать книгу The Queen’s Conjuror: The Life and Magic of Dr. Dee - Benjamin Woolley - Страница 15

Old St Paul’s Cathedral was far larger than Christopher Wren’s replacement, an immense hulk of Caen stone that had loomed over London for centuries. During Edward’s reign, it had been the focus of London’s religious reforms. In 1549, within the cathedral’s precincts, an ornate chapel and charnel house filled with elaborate marble monuments was torn down by Protestants. The bones found beneath – apparendy amounting to more than a thousand cartloads – had been dumped on the fields of Finsbury north of the city, creating a hill high enough to support three windmills.¹ That same year, the cathedral’s altar and magnificent reredos were destroyed and replaced with a plain table, and the nave was turned into a thoroughfare between Paternoster Row and Carter Lane ‘for people with vessels of ale and beer, baskets of bread, fish, flesh and fruit, men leading mules, horses and other beasts’.² With Mary’s accession to the throne, many of these alterations had been reversed, and it was a very different St Paul’s that another heretic approached one autumn morning in 1555, to be examined by Bishop Bonner. The altar had been rebuilt, the animals ejected and an air of reverent hush restored.

The prisoner was John Philpot, and his capture was quite a coup for Bonner. He was the son of a knight, educated at Oxford, widely travelled and highly cultivated, having ‘knowledge of the Hebrew tongue’. He had spent some time at Venice and Padua, but was suspected of being a heretic and forced to leave. In Protestant England, he had advanced quickly to become archdeacon of Winchester.³

However, following the return of Catholicism, Philpot was arrested in 1554 for refusing to conduct Mass and was imprisoned in Newgate. He remained imprisoned for a year before hearings began.

His first examination was with a panel of Mary’s commissioners on 2 October 1555. According to Foxe’s not entirely impartial account of the event, the commissioners poked fun at Philpot’s weight, implying that even a Protestant with his puritan values was not immune from fleshly temptations. Philpot responded with an impregnable composure that quickly drove his interrogators to distraction. A further examination followed a similar course and ended with one of the commissioners calling him a ‘vile heretic knave’, ordering that he be taken away to face Bonner’s more formidable inquisition.

The Bishop’s palace squatted among the buttresses of St Paul’s south-west side, beneath Lollards’ Tower, one of the cathedral’s two bell towers. Philpot was left in the palace’s coalhouse, which Bonner was using as a temporary prison.

The coalhouse was already filled with fuel for the Smithfield fires – six suspected heretics in all, including a married priest from Essex who had withdrawn a recantation extracted from him after the bishop had ‘buffeted’ his face black and blue. It was probably a worse prison than Newgate. It was windowless, and despite the generous supply of coal, there was no provision for making a fire to provide warmth or light. There was only straw for bedding, and in the dark adjoining chamber, a set of wooden stocks.

The reception Philpot got from the bishop’s staff was quite at odds with the meanness of his accommodation. He was given a ‘mess of meat and good pot of drink’ and copious apologies for the inconvenience of being incarcerated; apparently the bishop had not known of his arrival. A little later, he was brought to the bishop’s private study, where Bonner, sitting alone at a table, was full of bonhomie, offering his hand and suggesting that the whole business was a frightful mistake. ‘I promise you I mean you no more hurt than to mine own person,’ Bonner said. ‘I will not therefore burden you with your conscience as now, I marvel that you are so merry in prison as you be, singing and rejoicing, as the prophet saith, “rejoicing in your naughtiness”.’⁴

Bonner sent him off to be given a glass of ‘good wine’ from the palace cellars, which Philpot enjoyed standing at the cellar door, before being taken back to the coalhouse, ‘where I with my six fellows do rouse together in straw as cheerfully (we thank God) as others do in their beds of down’.⁵

A series of other examinations followed, each one taking the form of a polite and learned discussion on theological particulars, conducted in the genteel surroundings of the Bishop’s Palace, and each ending with Philpot being ‘carried’ (i.e. manhandled) back to the coalhouse.

On 19 November, Philpot was once again led blinking out of his cell and brought before the bishop. This time, Bonner had company: the Bishop of Rochester, the Chancellor of Lichfield and a Dr Chedsey. And another young scholar was also in attendance, who Bonner introduced to Philpot as one of his chaplains: John Dee. What was Dee, who might have been a cohabitee in the coalhole, doing there? Had the Protestant poacher turned Catholic gamekeeper? Unfortunately, no record remains of Dee’s own interrogation by Bonner, nor of his subsequent treatment. He disappeared into St Paul’s a suspected heretic, and now emerged an obedient chaplain.

The only record of Philpot’s imprisonment and examination is contained in Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, first published in English in 1563, after Elizabeth had succeeded to the throne, returning the country to Protestantism. It is a significant historical document, but by no means a politically or religiously neutral one. Though covering the entire history of religious persecution, it focuses with particular intensity on ‘the bloody murderings’ of ‘godly martyrs’ during Mary’s reign. Through the testimony of Mary’s Protestant victims accompanied by gruesome illustrations of beatings and burnings, Foxe embroidered a vivid but decidedly Protestant picture of Catholic cruelty. It is thus hardly surprising that the account of Philpot’s interview, based on his own account, does not portray John Dee in a flattering light.

The examination was to prove a turning point. It began with Bonner asking Philpot why he had kept his interrogators waiting. The bishop’s tone was now very different to the friendly one of their first meeting.

‘My lord, it is not unknown to you that I am a prisoner, and that the doors be shut upon me,’ Philpot replied.

This did not satisfy Bonner. ‘We sent for thee to the intent thou shoulds’t have come to mass. How 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 Hospice in Rome. The hospice provided lodging for English pilgrims and later (as the English College) became a training camp for Catholic missionaries and spies. In the paper, probably written by the exiled Catholic militant Dr (later Cardinal) William Allen, a warning is issued to keep the hospice’s lodgers away from certain irreligious influences, including one ‘Ioannes Deus, sacerdos uxoratus, magicis curiosisque artibus deditus’ (‘John Dee, a married priest, given to magic and uncanny arts’).¹² This curious note contains two pieces of information for which there is no other direct evidence: that Dee was ordained and married. Philpot’s reference during one of his interrogations to Dee being so ‘young in divinity’ suggests it could well have been Bonner himself who ordained Dee. This would explain the origin of the ‘Doctor’ title so closely associated with his name, for which Dee himself never publicly accounted. But as Catholic priests must remain celibate, the marriage must have come later. This was why the Jesuit report ordered the English hospice’s inmates to avoid him – it proved he had renounced Catholicism. Being connected with ‘magic and uncanny arts’ only compounded the sin. It represented pagan heresy and unorthodox scientific interests.

However, Dee could not be counted a committed Protestant either. Although he was very much a part of the Protestantism that defined Elizabeth’s reign (for example, when consulted by the government on the issue of Calendar reform, he openly criticised the Pope and ‘Romanists’), he became partial to Catholic rites in later life, and was comfortable among Catholic activists, such as Sir George Peckham, whom he advised about setting up a Catholic colony in the New World.

Such mixed messages left many of those that met him wondering where his loyalties lay. One correspondent of Francis Walsingham’s, who encountered Dee in Germany, was so befuddled by Dee’s theology, he concluded that the philosopher must have ‘disliked of all religions’.¹³

In fact Dee’s diaries are filled with heartfelt expressions of piety, including accounts of lengthy sessions of anguished prayer and supplication conducted in his own private chapel. But he refused to accept that either Protestants or Catholics, the Bible or the Pope had the monopoly. He believed that God’s truth was also to be found in nature and in learning. It was to the movements of the stars and to ancient texts that humanity must look to find the common ground upon which the Christian Church had originally been built. Only on Peter’s Rock, the long lost foundation of faith, could the ‘first beginning of unity’ proclaimed by St Cyprian – and reiterated by Dee during Philpot’s interrogation – be restored.

This was his theology, a religion founded on ancient principles and confirmed by science, and his behaviour following his arrest was, as subsequent events were to show, aimed at its fulfilment.