John Dee

• 1. Introduction

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  John Dee, an English mathematician and astronomer, once sent a flying beetle soaring up to the palace of Jupiter. The stage was at Trinity College, Cambridge, and the play was Aristophanes's Peace. Dee built the effect from pulleys and mirrors, possibly drawing on classical techniques that had recently been rediscovered. Years afterward he claimed that this single stunt was where his reputation as a magician began.

  The beetle at Trinity was only the first of many episodes that shaped how people saw him. Dee went on to serve as court astronomer to Queen Elizabeth I. In later life he spent years trying to speak with angels, and he wrote down what he believed they told him.

  This documentary asks how a young stage engineer became a trusted counsellor to a queen. It asks why a man who prized mathematics turned so completely toward the supernatural. And it asks why someone so admired in his own day was remembered for centuries as a dupe.

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• 2. Scholar Abroad

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  John Dee was born in Tower Ward, London, on the 13th of July 1527. His father, Rowland, was a cloth merchant and a gentleman courtier to Henry VIII, and the family was of Welsh descent. Even the surname carried that heritage, since Dee is an anglicised form of the Welsh word du, meaning black. Dee later traced his ancestry to Rhodri the Great, a 9th-century ruler of Gwynedd, and constructed a pedigree to match.

  Chelmsford Chantry School was where his education began, and he studied there from 1535 to 1542. In November 1542, aged 15, he entered St John's College, Cambridge. He took his BA in 1545 or early 1546. His abilities were noticed, and he became an original fellow of Trinity College when Henry VIII founded it in 1546.

  The late 1540s and early 1550s carried Dee across the Continent. He studied at the Old University of Leuven in 1548, then in Brussels, and he lectured in Paris on Euclid. He worked under Gemma Frisius and became friends with the cartographers Gerardus Mercator and Abraham Ortelius. In Italy he met and learned from the mathematician Federico Commandino, among others.

  Dee came home with a major collection of mathematical and astronomical instruments. In 1552 he met Gerolamo Cardano in London, and the two men examined a supposed perpetual motion machine. They also looked into a gem that was said to have magical properties. Those instruments and the friendship with Mercator would later matter to English seafarers.

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• 3. Danger Under Mary

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  Oxford University offered Dee a readership in mathematics in 1554, and he turned it down. He objected that English universities put rhetoric and grammar ahead of philosophy and science. He was also busy writing, and he may have hoped for a better post at court. By then he had been rector at Upton-upon-Severn since 1553.

  On the 17th of February 1554, in the midst of the Catholic reaction under Queen Mary, Dee took Catholic orders. Bishop Edmund Bonner, probably already a close friend, gave him special permission to receive every order from first tonsure to priesthood in a single day. The following year Dee joined the Worshipful Company of Mercers, as his father had, through its system of patrimony.

  That same year he was arrested. The charge was "lewd and vain practices of calculating and conjuring," and the cause was that he had cast horoscopes for Mary and for Princess Elizabeth. The accusation was raised to treason against Mary. Dee defended himself before the Star Chamber and was cleared, but he was handed to Bonner for religious examination. His lifelong taste for secrecy may have made matters worse.

  At some point Dee became Bonner's chaplain, possibly before the charges were formally dropped. Early editions of John Foxe's Acts and Monuments show him in that role, arguing with a Protestant prisoner named Robert Smith over the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Smith accused him of Marcionism, because Dee's defence of transubstantiation rested on the idea that Jesus had only a spiritual body. Dee also took part in the seventh examination of John Philpot. The arrest was the most dramatic of many attacks and slanders that dogged him.

  In 1556 Dee offered Queen Mary a plan to preserve old books, manuscripts and records and to found a national library. She did not take it up. Dee built his own collection at Mortlake instead, buying books and manuscripts in England and on the Continent. That library became a centre of learning outside the universities, the greatest in England, and it drew many scholars.

  When Elizabeth took the throne in 1558, Dee became her astrological and scientific advisor. He chose the date of her coronation, and he even became a Protestant.

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• 4. Mathematics Beyond the Universities

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  Henry Billingsley's English translation of Euclid's Elements carried a Mathematical Preface by Dee in 1570. The essay argued that mathematics shapes all the other arts and sciences. Dee aimed it at readers outside the universities, and it became his most influential and most frequently reprinted work. It included demonstrations that readers could carry out themselves, with no special training.

  Choosing English was a habit, not an accident. For most of his writing Dee preferred English to Latin so the public could read it. The Preface found a warm audience among the "mechanicians," a growing class of technical craftsmen and artisans. Promoting mathematics outside the universities was an enduring achievement, even though his own understanding of its role was mystical.

  Scholars have compared him with Francis Bacon on this point. Dee's insistence that mathematics was central to learning makes him more modern than Bacon in that respect. Some scholars think Bacon deliberately played down mathematics in the anti-occult climate under James I.

  In 1564 Dee had published a very different book, the Monas Hieroglyphica, or The Hieroglyphic Monad. It was a Christian Kabbalistic reading of a glyph he designed himself, meant to express the mystical unity of all creation. He dedicated it to Maximilian II, Holy Roman Emperor, hoping for patronage, and he tried to present it as Maximilian took the throne of Hungary. Many contemporaries admired it, and the royal secret service valued its treatise on cryptography. Today it cannot be fully understood without the secret oral tradition of its era.

  A question about the calendar reached Dee in 1583. Pope Gregory XIII had promulgated a new calendar from October 1582, and the queen asked Dee whether England should adopt it. He advised yes, with seven amendments. One was to drop eleven days instead of ten, which would return the calendar to the birth of Jesus rather than to the First Council of Nicaea in 325. Another was to start both the civil and liturgical years on the 1st of January. England rejected the proposals because they came from papal sources.

  Dee was a friend of Tycho Brahe, and he knew the work of Copernicus, which his ward and assistant Thomas Digges had translated into English. Many of his astronomical calculations rested on Copernican assumptions. Yet he never openly endorsed the heliocentric theory.

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• 5. Empire on Paper

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  Between the 1550s and the 1570s, Dee advised England's voyages of discovery. He supplied technical help with navigation and political backing for the idea of a "British Empire." He studied closely with Mercator and owned an important collection of maps, globes and astronomical instruments. He developed new instruments and special navigational techniques for use in polar regions. He personally chose pilots for the voyages and trained them. He knew Humphrey Gilbert, and he was close to Philip Sidney and his circle.

  From 1570 Dee pressed for a policy of political and economic strengthening and for colonies in the New World. His manuscript Brytannicae reipublicae synopsis, written that year, surveyed the Elizabethan realm and dealt with trade, ethics and national strength.

  In the late 1570s he published General and Rare Memorials pertayning to the Perfect Arte of Navigation. It was the first volume of a planned series that was never finished. Its symbolic frontispiece shows Britannia kneeling by the shore, begging Elizabeth to protect her nation by strengthening her navy. Dee argued that colonies would enrich England if a strong fleet guarded them.

  Medieval legend served his case. Geoffrey of Monmouth had included Ireland among King Arthur's conquests, and Dee used this to claim that Arthur had founded a British empire overseas. Dee is credited with coining the term British Empire. Humphrey Llwyd has also been credited with the first use, in a work of 1568 that appeared eight years earlier.

  On the back of a map drawn between 1577 and 1580, Dee set down a formal claim to North America. He noted that "circa 1494 Mr. Robert Thorn his father, and Mr. Eliot of Bristow, discovered Newfound Land." In his Title Royal of 1580 he wrote that Madog ab Owain Gwynedd had discovered America. Brutus of Britain and Arthur, he said, had also conquered lands there. That made Elizabeth their heir, with a claim older than Spain's.

  Patronage drove much of this work, and Dee's requests could be strikingly specific. In October 1574 he wrote to William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley, asking for support. He said he had occult knowledge of treasure in the Welsh Marches and of valuable manuscripts at Wigmore Castle. He knew that the Lord Treasurer's ancestors came from that region.

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• 6. Angels and Exile

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  By the early 1580s Dee was frustrated. His calendar proposal had failed, the colonial plans had stalled, and the voyages to North America had given mixed results. His influence at court was shrinking, and his hopes for political patronage had nearly ended. He turned energetically to the supernatural instead. He hoped scrying would let him reach the angels through an intermediary.

  His first scryers disappointed him. In 1582 he met a man then calling himself Edward Talbot, who was soon known as Edward Kelley. Kelley impressed Dee greatly, and Dee took him into his service. From then on Dee devoted all his energy to what he called "spiritual conferences" or "actions." They were held with intense Christian piety, after periods of purification, prayer and fasting. Dee was sure they would benefit humankind.

  Kelley is harder to judge. Some historians see cynicism in him, though delusion or self-deception cannot be ruled out. His output was remarkable for its volume, intricacy and vividness. Dee's journals record that angels dictated several books through Kelley, some in a special angelic language known as Enochian.

  In 1583 Dee met Albert Łaski, a poor but popular Polish nobleman who had overstayed his welcome at court. Łaski invited Dee to return with him to Poland. The angels, speaking through Kelley, encouraged the move, and so did Dee's slipping position at court. Dee, Kelley and their families left in September 1583. They then found that Łaski was bankrupt and out of favour at home.

  A wandering life in Central Europe followed, and the conferences continued. Dee recorded them in his diaries and almanacs. The pair had audiences with Emperor Rudolf II in Prague Castle and with King Stephen Báthory of Poland. The Báthory meeting took place at Niepołomice Castle, near Kraków, then the Polish capital. Polish historians and writers have analysed it since. The king was a devout Catholic who distrusted supernatural go-betweens. He opened by insisting that any prophecy must agree with the teachings of Jesus, the mission of the Catholic Church and the approval of the pope.

  Suspicion followed Dee as well. Some thought his tie to Elizabeth meant he was a spy, and he did write a covert letter to the spymaster Francis Walsingham. In it he said: "I am forced to be brief...That which England suspected was also here."

  A strange order arrived in 1587 at a conference in the Kingdom of Bohemia. Kelley told Dee that the angel Uriel had commanded the two men to share everything, including their wives. By then Kelley was gaining fame as an alchemist, a trade with serious money behind it among central European royalty. Dee cared more about angels, whom he expected to help him unlock the heavens through mathematics, optics, astrology, science and navigation. Perhaps Kelley simply wanted to loosen his partner's dependence on him as a diviner.

  The order caused Dee anguish, but he apparently never doubted that it was genuine, and the couples apparently did share wives. Dee ended the conferences immediately afterward. He returned to England in 1589, while Kelley stayed on as alchemist to Rudolf II. A son was born to Dee's wife in February 1588. Dee baptised him Theodorus Trebonianus and raised him as his own, though Kelley could have been the father.

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• 7. Poverty and Plague

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  Six years abroad ended with a grim sight at Mortlake. Dee found his house vandalised, his library ruined and many of his prized books and instruments stolen. Growing criticism of occult practice had left England even less welcoming to his magic and natural philosophy. He appealed to Elizabeth, who hoped he could coax Kelley back and ease England's economic burdens through alchemy.

  In 1595 she finally made him warden of Christ's College, Manchester. The former College of Priests had been refounded as a Protestant institution by royal charter in 1578. Dee had little authority over its fellows, who despised or cheated him. Early in his tenure he was consulted about the demonic possession of seven children. He took little interest, but he let those involved use his still-extensive library.

  Dee left Manchester in 1605 for London, though he stayed warden until his death. Elizabeth was gone by then, and James I offered no support. He spent his last years in poverty at Mortlake, selling possessions to keep himself and his daughter Katherine. She cared for him until he died there in late 1608 or early 1609, aged 81. The parish registers and his gravestone are both missing, so the exact date is unknown. A memorial plaque went up on the south wall of the present church in 2013.

  Dee married three times and had eight children. His first wife, Katherine Constable, whom he married in 1565, died in 1574 without children. He married again in 1575. His second wife, whose name is unknown, died in 1576, also childless. In 1578, aged 51, he married 23-year-old Jane Fromond, a lady-in-waiting to Elizabeth FitzGerald, Countess of Lincoln. They had seven or eight children.

  Grief ran through that family. Michael, born in Prague, died in 1594 on his father's birthday. Theodore, born in Třeboň, died in Manchester in 1601. Jane died in Manchester of bubonic plague and was buried in March 1604. No records survive for the youngest daughters, Madinia, Frances and Margaret, after 1604, so they are widely assumed to have died in the same epidemic. Dee had stopped keeping a diary by then.

  From 1577 to 1601 he had kept a sporadic diary, and it is the source of most of what we know about those years. Occasionally it shows ordinary parental worry. While his son Arthur was a student at Westminster School, Dee wrote to the headmaster in the manner of any anxious boarding-school father. The antiquary John Aubrey left a portrait of Dee as "tall and slender," with "a long beard as white as milk."

  Arthur had worked as an apprentice in much of his father's alchemical and scientific work, and he often served as his diviner before Kelley appeared. He became an alchemist and Hermetic author whose works were published by Elias Ashmole.

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• 8. Afterlife of a Magician

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  Around ten years after Dee died, Sir Robert Cotton bought the land around Dee's house and began digging for papers and artifacts. He found several manuscripts, mostly records of Dee's angelic communications. Cotton's son gave them to the scholar Méric Casaubon, who published them in 1659 as A True & Faithful Relation of What passed for many Yeers between Dr. John Dee and some spirits. The book was popular.

  Casaubon believed in spirits, and his long introduction attacked its author. He argued that Dee was the unwitting tool of evil spirits while thinking he spoke with angels. This book is largely responsible for the image of Dee as a deluded fanatic, which lasted two and a half centuries. Around the time of its publication, Rosicrucians claimed Dee as one of their own. There is doubt that an organised Rosicrucian movement existed in his lifetime, and no evidence that he joined any secret fraternity.

  The historians Charlotte Fell Smith and Frances Yates reopened the case in the 20th century. Both showed how magic, science and religion worked side by side in the Elizabethan Renaissance. Fell Smith wrote: "There is perhaps no learned author in history who has been so persistently misjudged, nay, even slandered, by his posterity." Dee is now seen as a serious scholar, a devoted Christian at a confusing time for that faith, and an able scientist. Elizabeth used him as court astronomer not just for his Hermetic arts but because he was learned, religious and trustworthy.

  Objects tied to Dee survive. The British Museum holds an obsidian Aztec hand-mirror, brought to Europe in the late 1520s, which Horace Walpole once owned. Walpole was first to connect it with Dee. When Lord Frederick Campbell brought him a round piece of shining black marble in a leather case, Walpole said, "Oh, Lord, I am the only man in England that can tell you! It is Dr. Dee's black stone." No surviving writing by Dee mentions the mirror.

  Other items in the museum include small wax seals that held up the legs of Dee's "table of practice," where the scrying took place. A large, decorated wax "Seal of God" supported the crystal "shew-stone." There is also a gold amulet engraved with one of Kelley's visions. A crystal globe 6 cm across sat unnoticed for years in the mineral collection, and its link to Dee is less certain. In December 2004 a shew stone once belonging to Dee was stolen from the Science Museum in London, along with a 17th-century explanation of its use by Nicholas Culpeper. Both were recovered shortly afterward.

  Wilfrid Michael Voynich bought the Voynich manuscript in 1912 and suggested that Dee might have owned it and sold it to Rudolf II. Dee's diaries show no such sale, and his contact with Rudolf was less extensive than once believed. He did own the Book of Soyga, another enciphered book.

  Fiction has kept Dee busy. Edmund Spenser may allude to him in The Faerie Queene of 1596, and Shakespeare may have modelled Prospero in The Tempest on him. Henry Gillard Glindoni painted him performing an experiment before the queen. John Crowley's novel Ægypt, whose first volume appeared in 1987, makes him a major character. Derek Jarman's film Jubilee has him carry Elizabeth to the 20th century. Donald McCormick claimed Dee inspired Ian Fleming's James Bond and the number 007, but the scholar Teresa Burns doubts that the number came from Dee.

  Later work includes Michael Scott's series The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel, where Dee is an antagonist. Damon Albarn wrote Dr Dee: An English Opera in 2011. Iron Maiden's song "The Alchemist" is about him, as is a track by the rapper Ghostemane. Robert Eggers's 2024 film Nosferatu has a professor reading Dee's Mysteriorum Libri Quinque. Video games such as Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception, Call of Duty: Black Ops III and ZombiU feature him or characters based on him.

  In the 20th century the Municipal Borough of Richmond, now the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames, named a street near Mortlake Dee Road.

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