Transcript of 542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe

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Hi, everybody.

Dominic Sandbrooke from The Rest is History here. Now, as you can probably tell from the noise of the pool, I am joined by a friend of the show, Anthony Scarram Ruiaramuchi, who is on his island, surrounded by the luxurious trappings of wealth. He is, of course, the host of the Rest is Politics US. Anthony and I have a very special announcement. On Sunday, the 30th of March, Anthony is over in the UK, and we have decided to do a live show together at the Theater Royal Drury Lane in London. Haven't we, Anthony? We have. Thank God I'm not British because the Brits actually admire my American a riveste attitude about life. But in any event, it'll be the first time on stage with Dominic. I am very excited. We're going to be doing a show on US political history called The Rest is Assassin.

Assassinations from Lincoln to JFK, but Dominic and I both know on the 30th of March, 2025, it's the 44th anniversary of the attempted assassination on Ronald Reagan.

So there's not only assassinations here, which are terrible, but there's an attempted assassination, several of them, Dominic, throughout US history. And so we're excited to go through this and what the impacts were on American history and global history. Right. And there's so many great stories. So obviously, JFK, you and I disagree about JFK because I, of course, think it was Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone, and you think differently. But there are other stories. You mentioned attempted assassinations. So for example, FDR. Fdr was almost shot before his inauguration in 1933. And that's an attempted assassination that really could have changed the course of history because no FDR. Does the United States still enter the Second World War? Does the story of the 20th century play out completely differently? So there is so much to talk about, and I'm really, really looking forward to doing it. What are you looking forward to most, Anthony? Well, I mean, all of that, but I want to delve into a little bit of the secret service and some of the men in that service.

So Clint Hill is still alive. He was riding alongside of Jackie and John Kennedy on the 22nd of November, in 1963. We'll talk about what he saw. We'll talk about what other agents have written about recently. Of course, now that Donald Trump is releasing the JFK assassination files, I think there'll be a lot to talk about there.

I think people coming to the show are going to learn things that have never been said or heard before. If you're a patriotic Brit who loves the special relationship, if you're an American living in London, or if you're an American who just loves getting on planes across the Atlantic to see the very highest quality entertainment, we absolutely expect to see you there in the West End on Sunday, the 30th of March. To tell you the truth, what I'm really hoping is that on the night, Anthony will finally reveal the truth behind the JFK assassination.

Well, I'm probably going to Guantanamo for many reasons, Dominic, but that would be probably the top one.

But Anyway, we hope to see you there.

I think you'll learn a lot.

There'll be a lot of insight we'll provide and also provide great contacts on American and British and global history. Tickets for this event are on sale now. To buy yours, just go to therestishistory. Com. Unfortunately, this is not the book you seek. I discovered it in my boxes on my return from Bohemia. But one treasured book was missing. I believe Edward Kelly replaced it, a rare text larger than this one. It contained many mysteries which Edward could understand with divine assistance. The Emperor Rudolf took great interest in both him and this book. Edward said it contained a secret method for obtaining immortality. So that, everybody, was Dr. John D, who is a character in the TV drama, A Discovery of witches, which is a series based on the All Soul's trilogy by Deborah Harkness. Those people who've seen it will know that the series begins with a historian who goes to the Bodlin Library, and because she's a witch, she discovers all kinds of amazing stuff. So a vampire from Downton Abbey who is at the fall of Carthage, let's say it's a time travel. In In Season 2, Tom, which I don't believe you've got to yet because you've just started watching this, in season 2, they go back to London in the time of Elizabeth I, and this is when they meet the person I was just ventriloquising, Dr. John D.

Tell us about Dr. John D.

Well, in A Discovery of witches, he is a magician, he's an alchemist, he is the owner of the greatest library in London, and he has just returned home from Bohemia. This is by the witch and the vampire have gone to meet him because he has all these incredible books that are full of amazing details about the secrets of eternal life and so on. Now, obviously, the witch and the vampire are not real. Obviously. But Dr. D is. He's a genuine historical figure, and he really was a magician. He's the court magician of Elizabeth I, no less. He really did travel to Bohemia, where he met with the Emperor Rudolf II in Prague, which in the late 16th century is the great city of magic. He really did work with this guy, who's name checked in that passage you read, this guy called Edward Kelly, a medium who claimed to be able to communicate with angels, or perhaps, Dominic, these angels are in fact, demons, and to have penetrated the wisdom of the heavens.

What a story.

What's a story? Yeah, a It's an amazing story, and Dr. D is an amazing character. It struck me when we were doing the series about the Nazi invasion of Poland, we've actually done loads of stuff on the Nazis, but we haven't really done many episodes on that other great obsession of the British education system in the field of history, which, of course, is the Tudors. I thought that doing an episode on Dr. D would be a good way of making amends because he is a fascinating topic.

Well, just to be clear to the listeners, we're not It's really about making amends on the rest of his history because we do whatever we like. Today, we'd like to do Dr. D. Dr. D, one reason for doing him, quite apart from what a fascinating person he is, he is a brilliant way of getting into the story of 16th century England because he lives right the way through from the final days of Henry the eighth, all the way through to the advent of James the first, James the sixth of Scotland, and the dawn of a new era, doesn't he? This is the age when England is seesawing wildly from Protestantism to Catholicism and back again. Yes.

D holds a brilliant mirror up to this. I use that metaphor advisedly because he's very into mirrors and thinks that you can see all kinds of strange supernatural things within mirrors, as we will see. But the reason that he's particularly interesting on this is that particular period, say, when Henry dies, followed by Edward VI, who's a Protestant, followed by Mary, who's a Catholic, followed by Elizabeth, who's a Protestant. D has to negotiate all that, and he only succeeds in doing that by the absolute skin of his teeth. But as you say, he then lives right the way through the reign of Elizabeth, and he associates with lots of leading figures from her reign, including William Cecil, her great chief minister, Sir Walter Raleigh, the guy who, of course, puts his cloak in the puddle, but also goes off to found colonies in the New World and to search for El Dorado. As you said, he dies in the reign of James I, so in the post Tudor age, at the age of 81. So, yeah, his life spans much of the Tudor age. So I think that's a very good reason to look at him.

But also, another reason is that he has a key role to play in what is a crucial turning point in English history, a shifting of England's horizons from the continent of Europe to overseas. So 1558, which is the last year of Mary's reign, a fateful episode, the fall of Calais to the French, which, of course, had been won by Edward III in the Hundred Yearss War, had been kept by England ever since, but it falls to the French in that year. That effectively is the loss of England's last continental possession. In a way, that is almost the end of the Hundred Yearss War, the real end of the Hundred Yearss War. Mary is devastated by it. There's this famous comment she's supposed to have made that when she dies and people cut her open and look at her heart, they will find Calleys inscribed on it. Under her sister, so Elizabeth succeeds Mary in that same year of 1558. Under Elizabeth, her subjects start looking westwards to Ireland, but also beyond Ireland, across the Atlantic to the new world, which the Spanish have begun to colonize. The English start to think, Well, we would quite like a bit of this.

This is the age of the Elizabeth and sea dog, roughs, beards, gallions, all of that.

Francis Drake, Sir John Frobischer, all these great characters.

Yes. D knows them. He works with them. D himself is absolutely obsessed by overseas exploration. He is a particular enthusiast for the idea of planting and keeping colonies in distant continents. He coins a very portentous phrase to describe what this process of colonizing the new world would look like. He calls it a British Empire. He is Very possibly, it's debated, but I think generally accepted that he is the first person to coin that phrase. He, in a sense, is the first great cheerleader for the idea of a British Empire. Definitely, it's leading two auda advocate.

Part of that is because he's fascinated by cartography, astronomy, exploration. The idea of looking West across this vast expanse of sea comes naturally to him because it's intellectually fascinating to him.

Yes, but simultaneously, he has what I guess you could probably call a cult understanding of England's destiny, because as well as being a very practiced astronomer, he's also a very brilliant astrologer, England's most famous astrologer. Over the course of Elizabeth's reign, there are celestial signs that he interprets as presaging the end of days, but more specifically, the fact that before the end of days, Elizabeth will come to be entailed by both Catholics and protestants across Europe as the last empress, and that this is her great cosmic destiny. As Glyn Parry, who's written probably the definitive biography of Dee, the Archdecundurian, of England says, Elizabeth easily accepted these suggestions.

Of course, she does. Yeah.

It's, of course, unbelievably flattering to her.

Just to be clear for listeners who perhaps are puzz by the combination of these things, what we would call magic, the occult arts, and what we would now call science, so the stuff you do in school, these in the 16th century are not at all separate genres. They are seen as part of the same body of learning, and people don't really distinguish between the two. Hence, alchemy and chemistry, for example. Right.

I think this is the third reason why D is so fascinating, because he's a reminder of exactly that age, where what today we would call science and the occult arts can merge and bleed into one another. I guess that it's not just D who illustrates this, Elizabeth I does as well. She is famously intellectual and brilliant, incredibly learned, very well-educated, very scholarly, very mood. But this doesn't stop her from believing all kinds of things that to us today might sound completely mad, such as, for instance, that she's destined to be the last empress before the end of days. You mentioned alchemy. She and lots Lots of her ministers are absolutely obsessed by this idea that base metals can be turned into gold. She herself is the only English monarch known to have practiced alchemy personally. She's very, very keen on it in a way that actually slightly reminds me of the way that Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have been digging up AI recently as a panacea, a solution to the problem of stimulating England's economy and clearing the country's national debts and all this thing. This is what Elizabeth thinks alchemy might promise. If only they can find what they call the philosopher's Stone, this way of turning lead or whatever into gold, then this would be brilliant.

And England's economy will be absolutely flying.

The irony is that we now know that that was at Hogwarts, but they didn't know that then.

Yeah, they didn't know that, did they?

Anyway, so D, he knows about all these things, doesn't he? So you mentioned alchemy, astrology, astronomy. He knows about maps. He knows about all this stuff. But this is quite dangerous at the same time, isn't it? Because in a Protestant age, a lot of people are very suspicious of all of this knowledge.

Yeah, because they see it simultaneously as being Satanic, potentially, but also Catholic as papists. Of course, as protestants, they tend to conflate the Satanic and the papist. And D absolutely understands this for reasons that we will explore, because he's sailed very close to the wind a number of times. And He is actually an obsessively private person, and he makes sure to keep his most venturesome occult explorations absolutely secret. The most extraordinary of these occult explorations are those that take him to Prague, imbriol him with this extraordinary figure, this medium, Edward Kelly, and potentially open him up to very serious charges of necromancy. Essentially, what this great climactic adventure of D's life, and it reverberates so powerfully that a series set aboutampires and witches in the 21st century can allude to it. Dee wants to learn the language of the angels, and he believes that Kelly is the one man who can access it for him. This is because Kelly, I've described him as a medium, but he's more properly what the Elizabethans would have called a scryer, which is a man with a gift for contacting the dimension of the supernatural by gazing into a glass, so a crystal ball.

If you see things in a crystal ball, you're a scryer. But in the Elizabethen period, more properly into a mirror or a glass or a shining stone. Kelly does this, and D believes that the figures that Kelly sees in his mirror are indeed angels. But of course, the shadow hangs over this entire venture. What if they are actually demons?

Because how do you tell the difference?

What if these figures are pushing D and Kelly towards Satanic ends? As we will see, the revelations that Kelly supposedly has do indeed, in the end, lead him and D on a very dark path, and it ends in absolutely shocking scandal. It's a reminder that the occult is dangerous, both because those who practice it might end up being charged with necromancy, with witchcraft, but also because the supernatural itself may prove to be dangerous, may prove to shelter potentially deadly peril.

Exciting. But before we get into all that, before we get to the shadows and the deadly peril, what we haven't done is actually tell people exactly where we are and who we're dealing with. So let's do a bit of that. John Dee, he's born in summer of 1527. He's born in London in the shadow of the Tower of London. But actually, he is of Welsh descent, isn't he? So his father is called Roland, and he's from Radnishire.

Yes. And John Dee would always claim that he was descended from a great line of Welsh princes from Gwynid. But in reality, it seems that his forebears were impoverished cattle farmers. That is one of the reasons why Roland D ends up coming to London, because great expectations. Actually, he does amazingly well for himself. He's obviously a very smart, shrewd businessman. He goes into the textile business. He wins membership of the city's guild of Mercers. The City guilds are very, very powerful. He ends up being appointed to a position in the Royal Court as the gentleman soer to Henry the eighth. So a bespoke tailor, I guess. He sews the royal clothing, he orders in materials. Also, weirdly, part of being a gentleman soer is that you have responsibility for setting the table at royal feasts and supervising all that. He ends up becoming very, very wealthy. I suppose young John, growing up in his house, very close to the docks, he must be aware that his father's wealth is very dependent on international trade, all those ships going across to Antwerp and Amsterdam and whatever. It may be, I guess, that this is what fosters the interest for him in the idea of naval exploration and of naval imperialism.

We know that John Dee must have been an extremely bright boy. Of course, because his father has done very well, he's able to send his son to a grammar school and then send him to Cambridge University, where Dee, again, is brilliant. It's at Cambridge. It's a mixture, isn't it? Because there are some people there who are hot protestants, very evangelical at his College St. John's. It's famous for its evangelical protestants, but it's quite a lot of diversity. There are loads of Catholics as well. He's getting ideas and whatnot from everywhere, and he's quite ecumenical by nature.

Yes. St. John's College has been in existence for about 30 years when Dee goes there. As you say, it has these very, very brilliant Catholic humanists, but it is also getting a reputation for radical Protestantism. D, he's a instinctive centrist, almost a slippery centrist, you might say, bearing in mind what's going to happen as we'll see. But I guess a more generous way to put it might be to say that he feels the tug of aspects, both of Catholic and Protestant doctrines and religious practices. He seems to have been genuinely ecumenical, which is quite rare in the 16th century. He's definitely a very devout man, but he doesn't feel a instinctive sense that he has to stand on one side or other of this great religious divide that is opening up. Of course, in that, he will be a bit like Elizabeth I, who is also quite like that. That's an important aspect of his character that develops at Cambridge. Another is a taste for theatrical spectacle. So 1546, he graduates from St. John's and he goes to Trinity, Cambridge, which has been founded by Henry VIII. There's still a statue of Henry VIII at Trinity College.

D is appointed as one of the founding fellows. One of his jobs is to stage plays. So Cambridge colleges, they love plays. D does this Aristophanies comedy, so an ancient Greek It's a comedy. The stage directions require character to fly up to Mount Olympus on the back of a giant dung beetle.

Bizarre?

Yeah, it's a challenge. But D pulls it off with the amazing coup de théâtre. He has very innovative use of pulleys and mirrors, and people sat there watching this, can't believe what they're seeing. It's so impressive, this visual special effect, that in the long run, it leads to accusations that he could only have achieved it via witchcraft. D himself, later in his life, when he's complaining about all the accusations of necromancy that are being leveled at him, he says that this was the source of his reputation as a conjurer of wicked and damned spirits.

But as we will see, D is being very disingenuous here, isn't he? Because there are other very good reasons, more obvious reasons why he gets this reputation as a conjurer. Before we get on to the fact that he is genuinely a conjurer, part of this is religious because he's an ecumenical fellow by temperament. His more evangelical, hot Protestant friends think, Oh, you've got Catholic sympathies, and they love a bit of magic, and you're mixed up in all that, aren't you?

Yes, because it is part of the Protestant attack on the Catholic priesthood in particular, that they are magicians or actually, specifically, conjurers. Francis Young, very much a friend of the show, we had on The Rest of His History, I think a couple of years back, talking about his book, Magic in Merlin's realm: A History of Occult Politics in Britain. In that book, he points out that there is a measure of truth to this Protestant accusation that Catholic priests are conjures, because to quote Francis, Priests were quite literally conjures, since they received the minor order of exorcist on the way to the priesthood. And conjurer was just a synonym for exorcist. A priest exorcized or conjured every time he baptized, so revoking Satan and all that stuff. Traditional exorcisms of salt and water preceding the Mass were considered an integral part of the rite. The fact that D seems to have been quite fond of these practices and these rituals does cast him in Protestant eyes as a bit of a conjurer.

But if that's not sinister and unenglish enough, he's also really interested in maths, isn't he? Which is also a very- Yeah, very sinister. So calculating and conjuring are synonyms at the time. Yes. And so doing a lot of complicated equations and whatnot is an unmistakable sign that you're in league with the devil.

Yes. There's that as well. And D is such a brilliant mathematician that he actually gets offered to be professor of mathematics at Oxford. He turns it down because he's hoping for better things. But he's clearly, again, he is seen as being the best at maths in England. Again, this suggests he might be a conjurer to people who are not au fait with, as you say, simultaneous equations. But this isn't the only reason that D comes to be associated with magic, because actually, he is investigating it.

Exactly. He is a conjurer. I mean, there's no two ways about it.

He genuinely is. He's trying to keep this quiet But right from his earliest days as an undergraduate at Cambridge, he is genuinely studying the occult arts in some detail. He does it at St. John's, he does it at Trinity. Then he goes abroad, he studies in the Lowlands, he ends up studying in Paris. And everywhere he goes, he is combining his studies in mathematics, in philosophy, in astronomy, what you might call legitimate subjects, with an exploration of more magical and occult avenues to wisdom and knowledge.

So alchemy and astrology are two obvious ones, but even more exciting is the language of the angels, which he's absolutely obsessed by, isn't he?

Yes. So we mentioned this. He first starts thinking about this He's in Paris studying there, and he has his eyes opened to the possibility that he could access the language of the angels, which he equates with the language that God had used when he spoke to Adam in the Garden of Eden. D comes to think that this primal divine language, that it must have a grammar, it must have an alphabet, and that because God has created all the universe, therefore this language must interfuse the whole of nature, everything that you can see and everything that you can't see. And that if only you could unlock the secrets of this language, then the mysteries of the universe itself would be unlocked. There's something of almost of nuclear physics there. The idea that there is power to be obtained in unlocking the the secret dynamics of the Cosmos. This is what D is after. He wants to harness its power. D attempts to harness this power and to penetrate its secrets, partly through his own studies. So he accumulates an absolutely massive library. But of course, another option is also floating in his mind. That is, well, what if I reach out to these angels and what if I can find someone who can understand the angelic language?

This guy, Kelly, is going to come into view eventually, isn't he? But before we get to that, it's all kicking off politically. This is very challenging for Dee himself because he could be facing a very brief appointment with either a funeral py or whatever or the chopping block. This comes back to Edward VI, ultra-protestant, four years old or whatever he is. He dies in 1553. We did a podcast about this. We did a two-part about Lady Jane gray. There are protestants who want to stop Edward's sister Mary, who is Catholic, becoming queen, but that fails. Mary, who is determined to turn back the clock and restore Catholicism, is back on the throne. Now, why is that a problem specifically for Dee?

Well, Dee's dad seems to have been very imbroiled in these protestant attempts to stop Mary coming to the throne. When Mary successfully brushes these attempts aside, so Lady Jane gray is defeated, she has her head chopped off and all of that, which we did in those previous episodes, as you said. D's dad gets caught up in this. He gets sent to the tower. He's released, but massively fined, and basically this destroys his credit. So from that point on, he's ruined. And this has a massive knock-on effect on D, who had been relying on his father, basically, to subsidize his studies. And it means that D now to turn his academic studies, maybe his occult studies, into either money or into royal favor, which in turn would give him various perks and livings and enable him to live in the style to which he has grown up accustomed. But obviously, this is very tricky in a world where Mary is Catholic. She's, what would you say? I guess you'd say Mecca, making England Catholic again. That's her business. But looking in the background, her heir is Elizabeth, who's a Protestant. Yes. So D's approach to this problem is massively to hedge his bets.

So what solution? Despite the fact that actually under Edward VI, he'd seemed very keen on the Protestant Reformation. I mean, he'd said all the right things despite the fact that secretly he was quite into Catholic ritual. Under Mary, he becomes a Catholic priest, and he does it in a single day. So you have to go through six degrees of ordination, and these are rushed through. Very, very unusual that you can become a Catholic priest in a single day, I gather. He's able to do this because it is facilitated for him by the Bishop of London, the Catholic Bishop of London, a guy called Edmund Bonner, and he ends up being called by Protestant's bloody Bonner. That gives some idea of his reputation with the more evangelical wing of Christian. But actually, Bonner, he's a very shrewd, very charming man if he's not sending you to be burnt at the stake. He seems very keen on D, and it is thought that this is because they may well have been related. So Bonner as well seems to have come from the Welsh marches. That's good. D is now a Catholic priest. This will obviously help him with Mary.

But what about Elizabeth? How can he keep Elizabeth on board? Well, now that D is a priest, he can go to Woodstock, where Elizabeth, who essentially has been kept under house arrest, she is allowed to go and hear Mass in Woodstock, and he can make contact with her. When he makes contact with her, D's reputation as the best astrologer in England is already secure. He casts Elizabeth's horoscope, he casts Mary's horoscope, and he casts the horoscope of Philip of Spain, to whom Mary is married. This, of course, is exceedingly dangerous because essentially, he's letting Elizabeth know that the heavens have predicted that she will become queen. Presumably, that It means that the horoscopes that he's cast for Mary and Philip are not as positive.

Encompassing the death of a king or queen is a dodgy thing. He doesn't manage to keep this a secret, does he? So the word gets out. When people know that he's done this, he's in real trouble.

He really is. He's arrested. He's charged with calculating, conjuring, witchcraft. I mean, this is very bad. On top of that, this informer appears who accuses Dee of having used enchantments to kill one of this guy's children and to have blinded another. That's added to the tally of necromantic crimes. D, like his dad, is sent to the tower where almost certainly, although he never actually mentions it, but this would have been standard procedure, he's probably put to the rack, so suffers quite brutal torture and things that are really bleak for him, but he does still have this one Trump card, which is the Bishop of London, Edmund Bonner. D is brought before Bonner, who couldn't more charming. Not only does he license D's release, but he actually then employs D as his personal chaplain. In this role, D then takes part in the interrogation of suspected heretics. I guess a guy's got to do what he's got to do. It's a survival strategy, but it's not particularly glorious. No. Of course, he's now storing up all kinds of problems for himself if, as the horoscope had foretold, Elizabeth is to become which, of course, in due course, she does.

Mary dies in November 1558 and is succeeded by Elizabeth, who is a Protestant. D, he's become a priest. He's been hanging out with bloody boner. He's been taking part in the interrogation of protestants. I mean, it's not looking good for him.

Surely he's now massively exposed himself. He's changed sides enough times now for everybody to distrust him. But he's been this bloke sidekick. He's been interrogating protestants. Why is he not punished? Why is there not a massive backlash against him?

It's striking. Something quite admirable is that Dee does continue to visit Bonner even after he ends up being put in the Marshallsea Prison. So he does stand by him. He's not 100% repenting and recanting his role. But it is awkward. So Dee appears in Fox's Book of Martyrs, which is the great volume recounting the Marion persecution of protestants, the burning at Smithfield and all of that. And Dee features in it, one of the interrogations of these martyrs. It takes D over a decade to get this mention of him removed, which in due course, he does manage to do. But it is a embarrassment. In Fox's Book of Martyrs, he is referred to as the great conjurer. He's being cast not just as a papist, but as a necromancer. On top of that, his dad has been ruined. He's completely skint. He has to make his own living. It's looking really, really bad for him.

Does he not still have some it with Elizabeth for doing that horoscope? I mean, is she not still grateful to him for that?

That is his one crucial contact. It is enough to keep him secure from his enemies. But the question is, is it going to be enough to secure him? Status at court, financial security, all these things that he desperately craves. And so D knows that he has to prove his value. Elizabeth isn't just going to give him a living or her favor just because he cast a horoscope at a dangerous time. He has to prove that he is worth her investment of time and money. But fortunately, his reputation as England's greatest astrologer, I mean, that is still very much in Elizabeth's mind. And so it is D who is charged with fixing on the best date for her coronation. He looks into the stars to work out when will be the most favorable time for her to be crowned. What was it? Why don't you, like the witch at the start of a Discovery of witches, go into the Bodlian and tell us?

Well, I'll just actually look into this mirror that I've got next to my computer.

Do some crying. Ask the angels.

It was actually Sunday, the 15th of January, 1559, which is funnily enough, that's the date I would have chosen. So good choice.

Wow. That is very necromantic and very suspicious. Rather like you, a great scholar who decides not to stay in the university system, but to go out into the world and trust your future to strange supernatural voices that go out into the ether. D is aiming a similar thing. He knows that he has to offer Elizabeth something. But how? Through his learning, through alchemy, or maybe, just maybe by tapping into the language and the secrets of the angels, time will tell.

Well, that's very like me because I did it through the language and the secrets of the Daily Mail. He did it through the language of the Secrets of Angels. Some people would say the same thing. We'll take a break and we'll return with more John D. At four of the clock in the morning, my mother, Jane Dee, died at Mordlake. She made a godly end. God be praised, therefore. She was 77-year-old. The Queen's Majesty, to my great comfort, came with her train from the court, and at my door graciously calling me to her on horseback, exhorted me briefly to take my mother's death patiently, and with all, told me that the Lord Treasurer had greatly commended my doings for her. She remembered also how at my wife's death, it It is her fortune, likewise, to call upon me. That's John Dee's diary for the 10th of October, 1580. His mother, Jane, has died at 77 years old. Very good innings. It's a sweet little moment, Elizabeth I, Was she going to be the empress of all Catholic and protestants? But she's still not too grand to stop off and see how he's doing. Does that reflect well on Good Queen Bess?

I think it absolutely does. It's a touching glimpse of her concern for Dee, but it's also to contribute to her interest in his work, and I think also the resources that he has gathered in his home. Elizabeth, when she drops off on Dee, would almost certainly have been traveling either to or from her palace in Richmond which is down the Thames from London. The reason that she stops off to see D on the way is because he also has a house on the Thames between Richmond and London at a place called Mort Lake. He has this large garden that runs down to the banks of the river, and it's a great rambling pile. He's bought up various local tenements and turned them into alchemical workshops. Elizabeth, obviously, be very interested in that. But his house contains possibly an even greater wonder than his alchemical workshops, which is the largest private library in England. This is knowledge is power. This is why Elizabeth is interested in D and in these incredible resources of learning that he has in his house.

A great example of that is this project that he's fascinated by, where he has been fascinated by for most of the preceding decade, which is this idea that you mentioned in the first half of a British Empire. It's so interesting that he's using those words before there is even really a British Empire. The funny thing is he's obsessed by the sea and cartography and all of that, but he's never been to see himself.

Well, as you know, a lack of experience doesn't necessarily preclude one from pontificating about it. No, of course not. I mean, D is genius, and I think it's not an exaggerate. I mean, he is a remarkable man. It lies in the way that he is able to blend and fuse an amazing array of categories of information, fields of study in a way that no one else would be able to do. Because what D brings is, I mean, let's just say this incredible library, but also, I think just nerve, chutzpa, in blending it all together. So His project to promote a British Empire is drawing on all different kinds of books. He has, in his library, absolutely cutting edge books on navigation. We talked about how, as a young man, he had gone to study in the low countries. When he was there, he'd become a very close friend of the most celebrated cartographer of his day, Gerard Mercator, who is busy incorporating coastlines of the New World, the ports of that being brought back by Spanish and other sailors. He is banishing the maps that had been traditional in the Middle Ages, where you'd put Jerusalem at the center.

As Benjamin Woolley in his biography of Dee, the Queens' Condra, puts it very nicely I think, a picture of the world emerged that the 16th century eyes would have been just as startling and significant as the first photographs of Earth taken from space were in the 20th. It's opening up a new way of understanding the globe. Actually, Makedo had given D not just maps and volumes on cartography, but also a pair of globes, one of the Earth, one of the heavens, which are incredibly valuable. That's also part of this great library of knowledge that D can offer.

The second thing that he has, he's got lots of books about occult science, alchemy, astrology, of course he does. Then the third thing, Antiquarian books. Now, why are these Antiquarian books. They're going back to the time of King Arthur and Welsh princes and stuff. Now, why are they so important for the future?

Because it enables D to give to Elizabeth and her advisors what seems to be an absolute a foolproof legal claim to a British Empire overseas. You mentioned King Arthur, so that's an important part of it. D, adduces all kinds of ancient texts and histories proving that Arthur had conquered most of the continent, but had also conquered a whole chain of islands leading to Greenland and beyond Greenland into what people would now recognize as being America. This is brilliant. This proves that Elizabeth is absolutely destined to be the last empress. But there is also, intriguingly, a Welsh aspect. We talked about how Dee is of Welsh pedigree.

As is Elizabeth, of course.

As is Elizabeth. This is also something that ticks a lot of boxes. This is the story of a Welsh prince who lived in the late 12th century. That's going centuries and centuries back. This is a guy called Maddock. The story is that Maddock's father was the Prince of Gwynod, the most powerful Prince in Wales. He dies. Maddock's brothers all fall out with one another squabbling over the inheritance. But Maddock is a man of peace. He doesn't want to be part of this game of thrones. And so he resolves to leave Wales with refugees from this civil war and sail westwards in search of a new land. There are various accounts of where he went, but the most popular account says that he sailed up to the Arctic Circle, that he then went down the Coast of North America, past Florida, rounds it, goes to Mexico, establishes a colony, comes back to Wales, reports to everyone in Wales, Look, I found this new world. I founded a colony. Anyone else wants to come? Lots of people do pile onto his ships. They sail off, and that is the last that is heard of Maddock.

But those books that D has on Prince Maddock, let's be frank, their works of fiction. I mean, this didn't happen.

I agree that they are implausible. What adds to the implausibility of these stories is that actually there is no written record of this legend at all until the Tudor period. It's generally accepted that this probably was a tradition that was current in the Middle Ages. Part of this great swirl of stories and fantasies about lands beyond the Atlantic that inspired Columbus. But it doesn't seem to have been a particularly prominent one And as you say, the likelihood that Prince Maddock actually existed is minimal. But you can see why it appeals to D. You can see why it appeals to Elizabeth. Both of them, as you say, are Welsh because it enables her to lay claim to the new world on the grounds that people from Britain had got there and founded colonies long before the Spanish. It's not surprising that Elizabeth and her advisors are intrigued by these arguments. They are a mad and inimitable blend of the practical, so all the maps, the cult, the last empress, and the Antiquarian, Arthur, and Maddock, all mixed up, basically to provide the English with a justification for going abroad and making stuff from the Spanish and indeed in the long run from Native Americans.

Yeah.

So it actually genuinely matters, and it inspires particularly Walter Raleigh, doesn't it?

Yes.

You mentioned in the first half, him going off to El Dorado, or, of course, he famously went off to Virginia and founded the Roanoke Colony. He's been reading or listening to Dee. These ideas are rattling around Walter Raleigh's brain. So this actually has real-world consequences.

It absolutely does. Raleigh always remains Dee's patron. But the problem is he gets caught up in all kinds of faction fights and court intrigues. When Raleigh falls from favor, D risks falling from favor. Certainly by the 1580s, D is getting quite nervous that his credit at court is getting severely overdrawn, that Elizabeth seems to be a little less fond of him than she was. At one point, she was praising him as my philosopher. But those days, by the 1580s, are starting to fade away. There are very influential factions at Court, led by William Cecil, who is the greatest of all Elizabeth's ministers, who's very opposed to this vision of an overseas empire because he thinks it's quixotic, and even worse, very expensive. And so D, he's stuck. He doesn't have a private fortune. He needs the support of great figures at court. And so by the early 1580s, he's looking around for a new patron. And in the space of just over a year, so that's between 1582 and 1583, he meets not one, but two people who seem to open up to him dramatic new avenues of promise. The first of these is a man that we've been mentioning, alluding to, touching on throughout, but never actually saying who he is, where he comes from, why so significant.

And this is this mysterious figure, this medium, this scryer, Edward Kelly.

He's the bloke who's talking to the angels. We can't be entirely certain where he came from. He's probably of Irish descent, hence the name Kelly. But he's from the Midlands, from Worcester, possibly.

From Worcester, probably educated at Oxford. He certainly seems to have known Latin and Greek. He marries a woman called Joanna Dominic from Chipping Norton. Your neck of the woods. Yeah. He always seems to have had a quality of the disreputable. There are lots of stories that he had his ears cropped, which was the punishment for forgery. We don't know whether that's true, but it is telling perhaps that he always seems to have worn a cap pulled down over his ears, so who knows? A slightly shady mysterious figure. When he turns up at Dee's house in 1582, Dee thinks he is great. The reason for this is that Kelly proves himself very, very rapidly to be the most talented, the most formidable incredible scryer that Dee has ever met.

Hard to imagine how you'd measure that.

By the quality and richness of the visions that you have. D has been trying to contact angels for decades. He's been employing various people who claim to have this ability because Dee He himself doesn't. D gazes into mirrors and sees nothing. He has this incredible obsidian mirror that seems to have come from Mexico, so Aztec mirror, that is ideal for the purpose. This should be opening up massive He has a great visions of the heavens, but he can't do it. It's like having a computer being unable to switch it on or something. He needs someone to do it for him. Of course, the risk is this makes him an absolute gull for fraudsters and charlatans and crooks. All the people that D has been employing do turn out basically to be crooks. But Kelly seems to be the real deal. Dee records his first attempt to gaze into this Aztec mirror and to Summon up the angels. It happens on the 10th of March, 1582. So he describes Kelly. He then settled himself to the action, and on his knees at my desk, setting the stone before him, felt a prayer, an entreaty, et cetera.

In the mean space, I, in my oratory, did pray and make motion to God and his good creatures for the furthering of this action. Within one quarter of an hour or less, he had sight of one in the stone. I then came to him to the stone, and after some thanks to God and welcome to the good creature used, I required to know his name. He spake plainly to the hearing of Edward Kelly, so Dee can't understand what is being said, that his name is, which Kelly reveals is Uriel.

I mean, you made the noise of the angel there, but D can hear nothing. D, I think it's fair to say, can see nothing.

No.

Some listeners may say D is for an intelligent person. He is being unbelievably credulous in basically believing this bloke who says, I've seen an angel and I've heard him talking to me. I mean, you can neither see nor hear him, but I assure you he's there. Why is he so gullible?

Two things to say to that. One possibility, which I think is likely to be true, is that Kelly has an unbelievably vivid imagination and learning and understands what D wants. He's part of this occult world. He conjures up incredible visions of an astonishing richness. The things that he is reporting are the things that D is expecting, only better.

So Kelly's probably read the same books, in other words.

Kind of. He's plugged into the same world. The other possibility, which is one that occultists to this day uphold, is the possibility that he really was seeing supernatural beings.

So that is an alternative. We should leave that open as a possibility. And listeners can make up their own minds, I think it's fair to say. Yes.

Okay. This is an exciting development for Dee. But then the following year, there's another exciting development, and We've had quite a lot of polls in this series so far. Another poll, yeah. Here's another one. This is a guy called Obrack Lasky. He's a count, very flamboyant, very mysterious. He arrives by boat up the Thames at Dee's house on the 15th of June, 1583. He is notable for an absolutely massive beard. Big fan of a large beard on the rest of his history. Holland's Head, the historian whose account is inspired by so many of Shakespeare's plays, gives a description of Lasky's beard. It was of such length and breadth as that lying in his and parting it with his hands, the same over spread his breasts and shoulders, himself greatly delighting therein and reputing it an monument.

Okay, sounds lovely.

He's a very keen alchemist, very much aware of D's reputation. In fact, it's likely that that is one of the principle reasons. He's come to England and he's very restless, he's very ambitious, and he is desperate to know if the reigning king of Poland is long for the world, and if not, whether Lasky is himself destined to replace him.

Wow, what's the answer?

Kelly gets out the Aztec Obsidian mirror, does his scrying, contacts the Archangel Uriel, and Uriel answers, which Kelly reveals means, I will grant him his desire. Later that summer, there's another angel who has the brilliant name of Jubun Ladaik.

No angel would really have that name.

He reveals, and I won't give the angelic words, who shall pass into his country to help his kingdom be established again. So that's looking good. Poland? Yeah, Poland.

Wow, that's great.

This prospect, Lasky will become king and thereby be their great patron, combines with the fact that he's lost favorite court, that he's being harried by his creditors. He seems to have arrived at a bit of a dead end career-wise in England, and he decides that he will sail with Lasky from England to Holland and from there travel onwards to Poland. Kelly will have to come with him because otherwise they can't keep in touch with the angels. Both Kelly and Dee take their wives and their families with them. They all set out, all seem set fair. Everything looks promising. This is what the angels have promised. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, I mean, it's fair to say everything goes wrong, right?

Yeah, everything does go wrong.

What follows is an absolute and utter disaster. Yeah. So four months, they're on the road and they get to Lasky's hometown, which is called Lasko. It's when they get there that Lasky realizes that the angels have been misleading him because basically he's not going to become a king of Poland.

Right. And also been misleading Dee and Kelly because if he's not going to become king, then they have no prospects of success as the angels has been promising. In fact, as they start traveling to Poland, the angels keep popping up with all kinds of helpful comments along the lines of everyone back in England thinks you're absolutely losers, you're renegades, you're traitors, so that's bad. Also warning that Poland's in a condition of civil war. You don't want to be there. Why have you come there? But Kelly does not say, Well, you told us to come. But this is obviously lurking in the background. Then the angels say, Actually, forget Poland, go to the Emperor. This is Rudolf II in Prague. Rudolf is a famous patron of alchemists, astrologists, everything to do with the occult. He loves all that stuff. They don't really have any money, Dee and Kelly, by this point, but they think, Well, since the angels are telling us to go, we probably should. They arrive in Prague, and this, too, turns out to be a disaster. So D has this European reputation as an alchemist and astrologer, and so Rudolf is interested in him, allows him to have an audience.

But disastrously, an angel has popped up and told him to go to Rudolf and rebuke him for his sins, which D is absolutely terrified about doing, but the angel insists on it. So D goes and does this, and it doesn't go down tremendously well.

This is like Kelly winding D up, surely.

And what makes it even worse is that just before D goes in for his interview with Rudolf, Kelly has been arrested for brawling with one of the Imperial guards, has been locked up, and so D has to go and get him out. Adding to the fun is the fact that a particularly sinister angel has appeared on the scene, and she is called Madimi. She is called Madimi, and she has the appearance of an eight-year-old girl who wears a splendid satin dress, a gown that changes from red to green and back again. She starts warning them that Satan is after them, that Satan seeketh the destruction of thy household and the life of thy children.

Just for a second, your own personal view, what's going on with Kelly? He's conjuring up this, or he's pretending he can see this weird girl and all that. Is he mad or is this a colossal con? Is he a fraudster?

I really don't know. It's too distant. It's too strange. Kelly's visions are so consistent, and D keeps a very detailed record of them. It's hard to believe that he is just a bare-face fraudster. It's I suspect he does think that he has access to the dimensions of the supernatural. But obviously, I don't think that Madimi actually exists. I mean, it's in the border zones between fantasy, between charlatanism, a capacity for imagining that you are seeing things that aren't there.

He's deluding himself as much as he's deluding.

Well, except that on top of that, I suspect that part of what is going on is that Kelly is getting a bit fed up with D by this point, because Kelly's fortunes are actually on the upturn, because as well as a brilliant scryer, he turns out to be a very promising alchemist. And alchemy is potentially much more lucrative than talking to angels.

But it's not actually turning lead into gold.

Well, we will see. The fact that D is noting down the voices of angels, Kelly is starting to get into alchemy. Unsurprisingly, this starts to attract the attention of the PayPal nuncio in They are from a Protestant kingdom, even though D, of course, is an ordained Catholic priest. It's a treacherous position for them to be in. At the same time, Rudolf is starting to suspect that D might be a spy. D and Kelly are endlessly being banished from Prague, allowed back in, banished again. D's relationship with Kelly is going very badly downhill. D needs Kelly to keep him in touch with the angels because otherwise he's sunk. But because Kelly is increasingly more interested in establishing his reputation as as an alchemist, he's getting a bit bored with talking to the angels. It may not be coincidence that in 1587, when Kelly's reputation as an alchemist is becoming so impressive that it's not just Rudolf who is saying, Well, I might sign you up. People from England are coming and saying, Come back to England. It's this Keir Starmer and AI thing again. Please come back and help revive our economy by giving us loads of gold.

It's in this year, 1587, that you get an absolutely massive bombshell from Madimie, who has recently started doing stripteases. She started pulling her gown back and showing her private parts.

Which neither of them can see.

Well, Kelly can see it, he says. Madimi then announces that all things are possible and permitted to the godly, nor a sexual organs more hateful to them than the faces of every mortal. What does this mean? Kelly explains, because, of course, he understands what the angels are saying. He reveals that what Madimie is saying is that he and Dee should sleep with the other person's wife. Kelly basically has had the hots for Dee's wife right the way through their trip. Dee is completely appalled. He adores his wife. They're very close, but obviously, he can't disobey the angels. 21st of May, 1587, he writes in his diary, Pactum factum, the agreement has been fulfilled.

Two things to say. One, Dee surely is the most gullible person we've ever had on this podcast. And two, I mean, his wife has no say in this. What is this? Like, indecent proposal.

D describes the negotiations. She's very upset. He's very upset, but they seem mutually have to decide if this is what the angels are saying, then that's what they've got to do. But obviously, the consequences of this are devastating. Relations between the two men really, really break down. In 1589, D returns to England. He's had enough. He doesn't care that he won't be able to talk to the angels anymore. Maybe he is starting to suspect that the angels are actually demons. Kelly Kelly remains in Bohemia, where amazingly, despite the fact that he's been nothing but trouble for years and years in Bohemia, Rudolf employs him as his chief alchemist. He knites him, he lavishes him with all the riches that Kelly had secretly been hankering after all this time. But then there's the problem that Rudolf is expecting gold and Kelly can't provide it. Rudolf imprisons him, not Not so much to punish him for not turning up with gold, but to basically say, Well, you stay there and you give me the gold and don't go off and do other mad stuff. Kelly tries to escape, and it is said, dies in the attempt. But there are other accounts as well So some say that he did escape Rudolf and made off and did discover the philosopher's Stone.

Others say that he, a bit like the men who become the Nazgol, that he transmutes into a ghoulish specter and sees He's stalking the lands of Bohemia. There are others, occultists living today who say that Kelly never died, that he's still on the scene, he's still around. I mean, all of those, I guess, are pretty tragic ways to go.

Well, unless you're still around, that's great.

Would you want to live around? Maybe you would.

D is not still around, is he?

D is definitely not around. He goes back to England and he has a very miserable last few years. He goes back to Mortlake, to his house, and he finds that it's been absolutely trashed. His beloved library, people have gone in and they've nicked loads of volumes. These seem to have been some of his students. People basically knew what they were looking for. D complained that 500 volumes had been stolen and that some of these volumes had been worth hundreds of pounds, which is an inordinate amount of money back in Tudor times. Elizabeth doesn't completely abandon him, so she appoints him to a post in the Cathedral in Manchester, which gives him a income, but he is in exile from court. He feels it. Apologies to Mancunian listeners, but he really feels he's been sent into exile. He finally returns to Mortlake in 1605, by which point Elizabeth is dead. James is on the throne. James has no interest in D at all.

It's funny because James loves witches and demonology and stuff, doesn't he?

Well, he does, but he's quite hostile to witches. I think the taint of witchcraft hangs around D. It means that a bit like Walter Raleigh, he's been left over from the previous reign He dies pretty poverty-stricken. He's had to sell off such of his possessions as have been left to him. But he does leave behind this haunting reputation. I mean, it's why he appears in a discovery of witches. He casts a supernatural glamor over memories of Elizabeth's reign, I think. I mean, I agree. He clearly is unbelievably gullible, and the story of his deception by Kelly is a really tragic one. But he is also clearly very, very brilliant. The scope and scale of his learning, it was absolutely astonishing. I thought rather than leave listeners with thoughts of what an absolute idiot he was, it might be kinder to quote one of the greatest of the Elizabethan poets, Edmund Spencer, author of the Faerie Queen, this great allegorical portrait of the Elizabethan period. In it, he gives what is almost certainly a portrait of Dr. D. So Spencer describes a room decorated paintings of famous Wizards, and he goes on to write, There sat a man of ripe and perfect age who did them meditate all his life long.

So that's the paintings of the famous Wizards. But through continual practice and usage, he now was grown, right, wise, and a wondrous sage.

Lovely, Tom. What a fascinating, what a richly fascinating story. Some would say the story of a wise and wondrous sage. That's Tom, who is a much kinder person than I am. Some would say the story of an absolute mug, which is what I would say. But, listeners, you can make up your own minds.

You decide.

That's the story of John D. We'll be back next time with something completely different. Thank you very much, Tom, and goodbye.

Bye-bye.