Читать книгу The Queen’s Conjuror: The Life and Magic of Dr. Dee - Benjamin Woolley - Страница 17

After all the stormy, tempestuous and blustery windy weather of Queen Mary was overblown, the darksome clouds of discomfort dispersed, the palpable fogs and mists of most intolerable misery consumed, and the dashing showers of persecution overpast, it pleased God to send England a calm and quiet season, a clear and lovely sunshine, a quietus from former broils, and a world of blessings by good Queen Elizabeth.¹

Thus wrote the chronicler Raphael Holinshed in the 1570s. He could hardly have been further from the truth.

Legend records that she received the news of her accession while sitting alone beneath an oak at Hatfield House reading the New Testament in Greek, a scene that sublimely combines the Protestant virtues of humanism, piety and humility. One of the two nobles sent to make the announcement was the Earl of Pembroke, who, having switched allegiance from Northumberland to Mary, managed with equal agility to switch back again: he was rewarded with a position in Elizabeth’s council but never with her affection or admiration.

Entering London less than a week after her half-sister’s death, Elizabeth was received with rapture. Bonner stood in line at the walls of the City to welcome her. She offered her hand to the Mayor and aldermen to be kissed, but when Bonner approached and knelt before her she withdrew her hand and walked on. The message was obvious – here was a woman who was going to make a clean break with the past, theologically and politically.

Another sign of her intentions was her decision to appoint Robert Dudley, a radical Protestant and son of the disgraced Earl of Northumberland, as chief organiser of her coronation. Dudley enthusiastically accepted the role, and decided he needed the help of a scholar to set the date, someone who could draw on the most ancient and respected astrological and historical authorities to determine the best day. His appointment was a surprising one. He did not choose from among the ranks of persecuted exiles tentatively returning to the country. Instead he selected a man who, at least according to Foxe, reeked of the smoke from Bonner’s bonfires: John Dee.

Choosing the date of the coronation was far from a matter of scheduling. It was a highly sensitive decision. Her reign was by no means regarded with the unbridled enthusiasm that, following the triumph of the Armada, later Protestant chroniclers would retrospectively assume. England had just endured two troubled experiments in monarchy with Edward, the first sovereign anointed by a Protestant church, and Mary, the first Queen regnant.² The idea of a third that combined both apparently disastrous innovations aroused deep apprehension.

As daughter of Anne Boleyn and offspring of Henry’s assault on the unity of the Church, Elizabeth’s inheritance of the divine right of sovereignty represented a challenge to the political, even cosmic order. Her half-sister Mary had found the idea of Elizabeth being Henry’s child literally inconceivable and assumed her father must have really been Boleyn’s lute player, Mark Smeaton. Making Elizabeth queen meant that England would be committed to a course of Protestant reformation from which it would be very hard to return.

Elizabeth’s sex amplified the uncertainty. The combination of femininity with majesty was still regarded as highly combustible. Mary had been the first English queen to rule her subjects, rather than act as a king’s consort. Some speculated that it was her gender as much as religion that had made her reign such a difficult one. John Knox issued his famous First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Raiment of Women in 1558, the final year of Mary’s reign. For him the idea of female government was so outrageous it demanded a new term – ‘monstriferous’. John Calvin, the Protestant theologian, wrote to William Cecil that Elizabeth’s coronation ‘was a deviation from the primitive and established order of nature, it ought to be held as a judgement on man for his dereliction of his rights.’ The prognostications of the French prophet Nostradamus for 1559, the first full year of Elizabeth’s reign, seemed to confirm this view. Translated into English, they were widely read, foretelling ‘divers calamities, weepings and mournings’ and ‘civil sedition’ that would make the ‘lowest’ rise up against the ‘highest’.³

Thus, the selection of the date that inaugurated this experiment was crucial. It needed to muster all the favourable auspices that ancient authorities could offer, and show that God would bless such an ordination.

O, when degree is shak’d

Which is the ladder of all high designs

The enterprise is sick!

…observed Ulysses in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida.

Take but degree away, untune that string,

And hark what discord follows!⁴

Nostradamus had foretold such discord and Dee’s selection of the coronation day had to prevent it.

Dee was well qualified for the role. His Propaedeumata had established him as one of the country’s leading natural philosophers and revived interest in mathematically-based astrology (as opposed to the divination practised by Nostradamus). His frantic bibliographic activity during Mary’s reign had also armed him with a formidable array of ancient texts from which to cite precedents and authorities.

But this was not enough to erase the stigma of his association with Bonner, which, thanks to Foxe and others was already widely suspected, if not known. There must have been some other redeeming quality.

A clue lies in the treatment Dee received in Foxe’s account of Bonner’s persecutions. In the first edition of Acts and Monuments, which was being completed in Basle around this time, Dee’s involvement with Bonner is fully documented. However, by the 1576 edition, he has completely disappeared. His words are still there but every occurrence of his name (more than ten) has been deleted, or substituted with the anonymous ‘a Doctor’.

This erasure is almost unique in a work otherwise notable for naming names. For example, in one of Philpot’s interrogations, Dee is joined by another Doctor, one Chedsey, whom Foxe did not allow the same anonymity, not even when they appeared in the same sentence.⁵ Perhaps Foxe removed Dee’s name because he was threatened with legal action, or pressurised by the court. But this seems unlikely. Acts and Monuments rapidly became one of the most revered texts of the Elizabethan age; the Queen commanded a copy to be lodged in every cathedral library in the country. Far more probable is that Foxe learned more about Dee’s activities in Bonner’s household and this meant that the portrayal of him in Acts and Monuments as a Catholic colluder was unfair.

In a deposition made to a delegation of Queen’s commissioners in 1582, Dee states that his arrest and handover to Bonner resulted from him being engaged upon ‘some travails for her Majesty’s behalf.’ He had undertaken these unspecified travails ‘to the comfort of her Majesty’s favourers then, and some of her principal servants, at Woodstock’, Woodstock being the palace where Elizabeth was held under arrest. These ‘favourers’ undoubtedly included Robert Dudley. They also included John Ashley, who had since become Master of the Queen’s Jewel House. Dudley was dead by the time Dee came to be interviewed, but Ashley was still alive, and Dee invited the Queen’s commissioners to go and ask him about the Bonner years should they disbelieve his claims.

Of course, these ‘travails’ may have been an invention. But, as Dee well knew, his testimonial to the commissioners would be read by Elizabeth, who was obviously in a position to confirm whether or not, at least in this respect, it was true.

It seems reasonable to assume that Dee’s presence in Bonner’s household was known, perhaps even encouraged by Elizabeth and her supporters. This would explain why, having been deprived of the rectorship of Upton after his arrest in 1553, he was now awarded the living at Leadenham in Lincolnshire, which was presented to him by two members of the Stanley family, Sir William and Henry, Lord Strange.⁶

Thus it was not as a shamed member of a failed regime that Dee emerged into the limelight in late 1558, but as the loyal ally of a glorious new one, as an ‘intelligencer’, in all the possible meanings of that peculiar Elizabethan term: a seeker of hidden knowledge, philosophical and scientific, as well as a spy.

The Christmas festivities of 1558-9 provided Catholic onlookers with disturbing portents of Elizabeth’s religious policies. ‘Your lordship will have heard of the farce performed in the presence of Her Majesty on Epiphany Day,’ wrote a concerned Spanish ambassador to his Duke, referring to a Twelfth Night masque. He had been appalled by the ‘mummery performed after supper, of crows in the habits of cardinals, of asses habited as bishops, and of wolves representing abbots’. ‘I will consign it to silence,’ he added.⁷

In the midst of these revelries, Dee set about writing a long and detailed analysis of the astrological augurs for her reign. He chose 15 January 1559 as its start date. His reasons, along with the document setting them out, are lost, but no doubt he was swayed by Jupiter being in Aquarius, suggesting the emergence of such statesmanlike qualities as impartiality, independence and tolerance, and Mars in Scorpio providing the passion and commitment a ruler needed.⁸ Such a day would mark the nativity of a great reign.

Having set the date, Dee was invited by Robert Dudley for an audience with the Queen at Whitehall Palace.

At the appointed time, Dee passed through the three-storey entrance gate of chequered flint and stone and approached the Great Hall built by Cardinal Wolsey. He was presented to Elizabeth by Dudley and the Earl of Pembroke. Dee remembered vividly what she said to him: ‘Where my brother hath given him a crown, I will give him a noble.’ It was a clever play on the names of coins, the noble being a gold piece worth two silver crowns. But this was not an offer of small change. She was promising a doubling of the fortunes he had enjoyed under Edward. He was to become a favoured member of her court, a player in the great Protestant era to come.

Dee might even have imagined she meant more. Was there not a suggestion, a hint – Dee’s mathematical mind could have calculated the implications in an instant – that she was promising him not just a noble but nobility… title, money, lands, respect, reckoning for the ‘hard dealing’ that had ruined his father and deprived him of his inheritance? The Dee dynasty could be restored and he would finally have the independence to develop new ideas, the resources to build up his library and the influence to found his scientific academy.

But nothing had been explicitly promised and there was no time to dwell on such dreams. Only a few days remained before the coronation date Dee had selected and frantic preparations were already underway There was such a surge in demand for crimson silk and cloth of gold and silver that customs officers were instructed to impound all available stock. Such an order would once have been carried out by Dee’s father Roland, but he was dead by 1555, before the change of regime could rehabilitate him.⁹

On the eve of the coronation, Elizabeth proceeded from the Tower of London to the Palace of Westminster, where she was to make her preparations for the ceremony. A series of magnificent pageants were performed on huge scaffolds erected along the route: at Gracechurch Street a ‘Pageant of the Roses’ represented the Tudor dynasty on a three-tiered platform; at Cornhill and Little Conduit a play on the theme of time. At Cheapside (somewhat inappropriately named for this occasion) she paused to receive a gift of a thousand gold marks, presented by the City Recorder. She passed through Temple Bar, an archway marking the City’s western limit, upon which were mounted huge statues of Gogmagog and Corineus, giants featured in the story of Brutus, a legendary king of ancient Britain who was to play a prominent part in Dee’s future explorations of British mythology.

The following morning, with the streets ‘new-laid with gravel and blue cloth and railed on each side,’¹⁰ Elizabeth appeared at the doors of Westminster Hall attired in coronation robes, made of cloth-of-gold, trimmed in ermine and stitched with jewels. Her auburn hair was down, emphasising her maidenly youth. She processed towards Westminster Abbey beneath a canopy carried by the Barons of the Cinque Ports, followed by nobles, heralds and bishops. The carpet upon which she trod, dusted with snow, disappeared as she went, the crowds lining the route scrambling to tear off samples to keep or sell as souvenirs.

Dee would have had his place in the Abbey, though not in the nave, which was reserved for the nobles who were called upon to declare Elizabeth’s rightful claim to the throne. Illuminated by thousands of torches and candles, standing beneath a thick canopy of tapestries amid a forest of soaring Gothic pillars, surrounded by the singing of choirs and cries of acclamation, Elizabeth then played her role in the ancient act of pagan magic that works a mortal human into a sovereign.

She emerged from the Abbey bearing the enchanted instruments of government, the orb representing the cosmos; the sceptre, the magic wand of authority; and the crown, the halo of monarchy. Smiling and calling to the crowd in a way that at least one observer thought indecorous, she walked back to Westminster Hall, where a great banquet was held that lasted until one the next morning, culminating with the Queen’s champion riding into the hall dressed in full armour, to challenge anyone who questioned her title.