Witch, Warlock, and Magician. W. H. Davenport Adams
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prospects of the shining river. Elizabeth always came down from Whitehall on horseback, attended by a brave retinue of courtiers; and as she passed along, her loyal subjects stood at their doors, or lined the roadside, making respectful bows and curtseys, and crying, ‘God save the Queen!’ One of these royal visits was made on March 10, 1575, the Queen desiring to see the doctor’s famous library; but learning that he had buried his wife only four hours before, she refused to enter the house. Dee, however, submitted to her inspection his magic crystal, or ‘black stone,’ and exhibited some of its marvellous properties; her Majesty, for the better examination of the same, being taken down from her horse ‘by the Earl of Leicester, by the Church wall of Mortlack.’
She was at Dr. Dee’s again on September 17, 1580. This time she came from Richmond in her coach, a wonderfully cumbrous vehicle, drawn by six horses; ‘and when she was against my garden in the fielde,’ says the doctor, ‘her Majestie staide there a good while, and then came into the street at the great gate of the field, where her Majestie espied me at my dore, making reverent and dutifull obeysance unto her, and with her hand her Majestie beckoned for me to come to her, and I came to her coach side; her Majestie then very speedily pulled off her glove, and gave me her hand to kiss; and to be short, her Majestie wished me to resort oftener to her Court, and by some of her Privy Chamber to give her Majestie to wete (know) when I came there.’
Another visit took place on October 10, 1580:—‘The Queenes Majestie to my great comfort (horâ quintâ) came with her train from the Court, and at my dore graciously calling me unto her, on horseback exhorted me briefly to take my mother’s death patiently; and withal told me, that the Lord Treasurer had greatly commended my doings for her title royall, which he had to examine. The which title in two rolls of velome parchment his Honour had some houres before brought home, and delivered to Mr. Hudson for me to receive at my coming from my mother’s buriall at church. Her Majestie remembered also then, how at my wives buriall it was her fortune likewise to call upon me at my house, as before is noted.’
Dee’s library—as libraries went then—was not unworthy of royal inspection. Its proud possessor computed it to be worth £2,000, which, at the present value of money, would be equal, I suppose, to £10,000. It consisted of about 4,000 volumes, bound and unbound, a fourth part being MSS. He speaks of four ‘written books’—one in Greek, two in French, and one in High Dutch—as having cost him £533, and inquires triumphantly what must have been the value of some hundred of the best of all the other written books, some of which were the autographia of excellent and seldom-heard-of authors? He adds that he spent upwards of forty years in collecting this library from divers places beyond the seas, and with much research and labour in England.
Of the ‘precious books’ thus collected, Dee does not mention the titles; but he has recorded the rare and exquisitely made ‘instruments mathematical’ which belonged to him: An excellent, strong, and fair quadrant, first made by that famous Richard Chancellor who boldly carried his discovery-ships past the Icy Cape, and anchored them in the White Sea. There was also an excellent radius astronomicus, of ten feet in length, the staff and cross very curiously divided into equal parts, after Richard Chancellor’s quadrant manner. Item, two globes of Mercator’s best making: on the celestial sphere Dee, with his own hand, had set down divers comets, their places and motions, according to his individual observation. Item, divers other instruments, as the theorie of the eighth sphere, the ninth and tenth, with an horizon and meridian of copper, made by Mercator specially for Dr. Dee. Item, sea-compasses of different kinds. Item, a magnet-stone, commonly called a loadstone, of great virtue. Also an excellent watch-clock, made by one Dibbley, ‘a notable workman, long since dead,’ by which the time might sensibly be measured in the seconds of an hour—that is, not to fail the 360th part of an hour. We need not dwell upon his store of documents relating to Irish and Welsh estates, and of ancient seals of arms; but my curiosity, I confess, is somewhat stirred by his reference to ‘a great bladder,’ with about four pounds weight of ‘a very sweetish thing,’ like a brownish gum, in it, artificially prepared by thirty times purifying, which the doctor valued at upwards of a hundred crowns.
While engaged in learned studies and correspondence with learned men, Dee found time to indulge in those wild semi-mystical, transcendental visions which engaged the imagination of so many mediæval students. The secret of ‘the philosopher’s stone’ led him into fascinating regions of speculation, and the ecstasies of Rosicrucianism dazzled him with the idea of holding communication with the inhabitants of the other world. How far he was sincere in these pursuits, how far he imparted into them a spirit of charlatanry, I think it is impossible to determine. Perhaps one may venture to say that, if to some small extent an impostor, he was, to a much larger extent, a dupe; that if he deceived others, he also deceived himself; nor is he, as biography teaches, the only striking example of the credulous enthusiast who mingles with his enthusiasm, more or less unconsciously, a leaven of hypocrisy. As early as 1571 he complains, in the preface to his ‘English Euclid,’ that he is jeered at by the populace as a conjurer. By degrees, it is evident, he begins to feel a pride in his magical attainments. He records with the utmost gravity his remarkable dreams, and endeavours to read the future by them. He insists, moreover, on strange noises which he hears in his chamber. In those days a favourite method of summoning the spirits was to bring them into a glass or stone which had been prepared for the purpose; and in his diary, under the date of May 25, 1581, he records—for the first time—that he had held intercourse in this way with supra-mundane beings.
Combining with his hermetico-magical speculations religious exercises of great fervour, he was thus engaged, one day in November, 1582, when suddenly upon his startled vision rose the angel Uriel ‘at the west window of his laboratory,’ and presented him with a translucent stone, or crystal, of convex shape, possessing the wonderful property of introducing its owner to the closest possible communication with the world of spirits. It was necessary at times that this so-called mirror should be turned in different positions before the observer could secure the right focus; and then the spirits appeared on its surface, or in different parts of the room by reason of its action. Further, only one person, whom Dee calls the skryer, or seer, could discover the spirits, or hear and interpret their voices, just as there can be but one medium, I believe, at a spiritualistic séance of the present day. But, of course, it was requisite that, while the medium was absorbed in his all-important task, some person should be at hand to describe what he saw, or professed to see, and commit to paper what he heard, or professed to hear; and a seer with a lively imagination and a fluent tongue could go very far in both directions. This humbler, secondary position Dee reserved for himself. Probably his invention was not sufficiently fertile for the part of a medium, or else he was too much in earnest to practise an intentional deception. As the crystal showed him nothing, he himself said so, and looked about for someone more sympathetic, or less conscientious. His choice fell at first on a man named Barnabas Saul, and he records in his diary how, on October 9, 1581, this man ‘was strangely troubled by a spiritual creature about midnight.’ In a MS. preserved in the British Museum, he relates some practices which took place on December 2, beginning his account with this statement: ‘I willed the skryer, named Saul, to looke into my great crystalline globe, if God had sent his holy angel Azrael, or no.’ But Saul was a fellow of small account, with a very limited inventive faculty, and on March 6, 1582, he was obliged to confess ‘that he neither heard nor saw any spiritual creature any more.’ Dee and his inefficient, unintelligent skryer then quarrelled, and the latter was dismissed, leaving behind him an unsavoury reputation.
EDWARD KELLY.
Soon afterwards our magician made the acquaintance of a certain Edward Kelly (or Talbot), who was in every way fitted for the mediumistic rôle. He was clever, plausible, impudent, unscrupulous, and a most accomplished liar. A native of Worcester, where he was born in 1555, he was bred up, according to one account, as a druggist, according to another as a lawyer; but all accounts agree that he became an adept in every kind of knavery. He was pilloried, and lost his ears (or at least was condemned to lose them) at Lancaster, for the offence of coining, or for forgery; afterwards retired to Wales, assumed the name of Kelly, and practised as a conjurer and alchemist. A story is told of him which illustrates the man’s unhesitating audacity, or, at all events, the notoriety of his character: that he carried