The Heresy of Dr Dee

by Phil Rickman

  ‘Better.’

  As good as his word, for once, John Smart had indeed provided, for Dudley’s recovery, a good bedchamber with window glass. But not at the Bull.

  ‘How you could stay with the doxy after what she…’

  ‘Branwen Laetitia Swift,’ Dudley said.

  Almost fondly.

  ‘Did she give you a potion? Did she aid in your abduction?’

  All this yet worried me. How could Smart, in his role as her fishmonger and former associate of Gethin’s, not have been part of it? The most likely explanation, it seemed to me now, was that Smart had not realised for a while how high the plot went. Maybe not realised that the target was Lord Robert Dudley, panicked when he found out. Let’s say I thought it was ill-advised and might rebound. On him and his comfortable retirement.

  ‘Who knows?’ Dudley said. ‘I was taken in the street. Hit from behind, thrown into an alley. Dragged out as if drunk. And then beaten, tied down in a cart.’ He drained his cup. ‘Don’t want to talk about it. It demeans me.’

  Did it? I was inclined to think that now he was out of it, he found it perversely flattering, the lengths to which they’d gone. And that coming through it had strengthened his cause.

  He’d remained with Mistress Swift until he was fit enough to mount a horse his broken arm still bound. Three days – Dudley healed quickly. And ever thought the best of women, and they of him.

  ‘She had new boots made for me,’ he said. ‘Man must’ve been working day and night.’

  ‘With a sheath in the side?’

  We’d not discussed this. For all his soldierly training, I suspected this might have been the first time he’d actually fought for his life.

  ‘You’d taken out the blade after they searched you but before they stole the boots – as obviously they would, boots of such quality.’

  ‘Secreted the blade into my sleeve. It took a couple of painful hours, but eventually I had the ropes stripped to a thread. When the older man left us alone, it was the obvious time. The boy had been taunting me in his halting English. How they’d be cutting off my cock and what they’d do with it.’

  ‘So they knew who you were.’

  ‘Evidently. It delighted them. Lost count of the beatings.’ His jaw tightening at the memory. ‘When the moment came, the boy made the first move. When his brother hadn’t returned by first light, he was on his feet, blade out. I think he’d have cut my throat if I hadn’t snapped the threads and… Not at my best, I have to say, but with surprise on my side…’ He shrugged. ‘You seen Cecil since your return?’

  ‘He hasn’t summoned me.’

  Nor had his muscle come to snatch me into a barge. Cecil’s silence had said all I needed to hear.

  ‘However,’ I said, ‘a royal barge did arrive this morning.’

  ‘Jesu!’ Dudley sat up hard, with a clacking of the bench-feet on the flags. ‘Bess?’

  My mother also had wondered as much and had been driven into a panic.

  I shook my head.

  ‘Blanche.’

  My cousin. The Queen’s senior gentlewoman and closest confidante. A social visit. Much circumspect Border-talk with never a mention of either astrology or wedding dates.

  Dudley leaned forward across the board.

  ‘You told her?’

  ‘Everything.’

  Dudley expelled a long long breath.

  ‘Hell’s bells, John.’

  ‘Who better?’ I said. ‘She won’t tell the Queen unless it becomes necessary. But she might have words with Cecil.’

  ‘You clever bastard.’ He sat back, smiling again. ‘What about Legge? Did he know why he was sent to Presteigne?’

  ‘Only to an extent, I’d guess. He’d simply know his duty was to see that Gethin was acquitted. He’s not a fool. Had he asked too many questions, well… would he even have arrived back in London?’

  ‘How would he not, with several dozen armed men?’

  ‘It would take but one man,’ I said, ‘to smother him in his chamber during some overnight—’

  ‘God’s bollocks, John! I always took you for an innocent.’

  ‘Me too,’ I said ruefully. ‘What will you do now?’

  Soon wishing I hadn’t asked. In some awful way, fortified, convinced that God had brought him through for only one purpose, what he’d do was to continue as before, in pursuit of his life’s goal.

  A spear of late sunlight lit the glass eyes of my finest owl, sitting stately on his window sill. The one that flapped his wings and said woo-woo.

  As we walked down to the Thames, Dudley’s limp was barely perceptible; he stood tall again.

  Oh, dear God.

  ‘Well, of course I won’t give up,’ he said.

  I said nothing. The last barge of the day was returning empty to the Mortlake brewery as we went down the steps to the river’s edge.

  ‘Gather I’m to be honoured quite soon.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Earldom. And if that doesn’t make me more of a candidate for Bess’s hand…’

  ‘Or it might be a compensation,’ I said.

  ‘Bollocks.’

  ‘You could waste your life.’

  ‘John.’ He turned to face me, his face half in shadow. ‘It is my life. It’s me or no one.’

  ‘She’s told you that?’

  ‘Had it from an angel,’ Dudley said.

  When he’d gone, I sat on the top step and watched an olive mist floating over the water.

  He hadn’t mentioned the letter from Thomas Blount. Even before this, I’d begun to wonder whether John Forest had even shown it to him. Perhaps Forest had been to Blount and cautioned against revealing intelligence suggesting Amy Dudley had been unfaithful to her husband and on the most intimate terms with her murderer.

  That would most certainly demean him if it became public knowledge. And what would it achieve if Dudley knew? Murder by some Spanish assassin could never be proven now. There was little doubt that the inquest jury would return a verdict of death by accident.

  Forest had perhaps reminded Blount that messengers were apt to be blamed. He himself had been embarrassed, on his return from Ludlow with twenty-five armed men, to find that Dudley was back in Presteigne and had commanded him, without explanation, to return to London.

  My own greatest regret was that I’d not insisted on seeing Gethin’s body. I did not trust John Smart, who only wanted to protect his business and the reputation of Jeremy Martin.

  While I had no doubt that Gethin was dead, I realised that he was only dead in the sense that his hero, Owain Glyndwr, was dead. No one knew where his body lay and perhaps no one ever would. Which would make a legend of him – stories told to children that he would one day return, this black sprite, if the spiritual defences of Brynglas were ever lowered.

  And how could they be lower than they were now?

  While Dudley had lain at the home of Branwen Laetitia Swift, Roger Vaughan and I had met with Bishop John Scory in the privacy of the church in Presteigne. Scory, with many threats and much bad feeling, was in the process of prising Matthew Daunce out of Pilleth and would choose his successor with care. The statue would be scrubbed and the church lightened with more windows.

  Daunce, he said, would doubtless go to London where he had friends at the heart – if you could ever call it that – of the new Puritanism. I suspected his clerical career would rise. It was the way things were going.

  Pilleth, however, would require spiritual ministry, of a more traditional kind. An old magic. John Scory asked my advice, as he had about the mysterious map of the world. I’d told him that Brynglas and its environs were no less mysterious to me now.

  A lesson to be learned. I said I’d write in some detail to Scory when I’d given it more thought. It’s part of me now, that place, and I think I may have to return ere long.

  After Siôn Ceddol was buried, not far from the church, I’d sought to persuade Anna to return with me to London, but had known it was unlikely. By Christ
mas I’d learn, in a letter from Stephen Price, that she was betrothed to a schoolmaster in Hereford.

  Within three weeks of my return home, Thomas Jones came to Mortlake with my cousin Joanne, and we discussed these matters in some depth. I was intrigued to learn that five parish churches in the area of Pilleth and the Radnor Forest were dedicated to the Archangel Michael, which made me wonder if I’d not been drawn, that strange and tragic morn, into some archaic circus of power, long buried.

  Who can say? Yet while the Wigmore shewstone remained there, I did take something away, which I was able to demonstrate to Thomas Jones… and hoped one day to show to the Queen in the gardens at Richmond.

  The first instinct of it had been beside the tump, when the twig which had scored my head had twitched in my hand.

  In my mother’s garden at Mortlake, I found forked twigs, of birch and hazel, with which, to my great joy, I was able to discover a new well betwixt our orchard and the church.

  On another occasion, when Goodwife Faldo lost not a ring (thank God) but a copper brooch, I was able to find it for her – in the hedge by the road leading to the brewery – by walking with the twig held out before me and awaiting its response.

  Feeling my wrists seized by an unknown force. Learning, by trial, that I should simply let it happen, for, when I tried to study how it happened, it would not. It was about… setting aside all intellect.

  Several times, I’d swear that when my wrists moved I would look up and think I’d caught a bright bobbing movement over a hedge or a wall, like the progress of a red hat.

  But, of course, this was in my mind, for I do not See.

  THE END

  Notes and Credits

  A YEAR AFTER it was opened, the inquest into the death of Amy Dudley did indeed end, as John Dee expected, with a verdict of Accidental Death. It made no difference. Dudley would never marry Elizabeth.

  Most of the theories about Amy’s death are explored in depth in Death and the Virgin by Chris Skidmore and Elizabeth and Leicester by Sarah Gristwood. A letter, dated August 24 – a fortnight before her death – from Amy to her dressmaker, places an order for the alteration of a velvet gown.

  In these increasingly secular times, it’s easy to underestimate the influence of religion, superstition and magic in Tudor England and Wales. Often, advances in science only added credibility to the concept of magic.

  For anyone still sceptical, the classic Religion and the Decline of Magic by Keith Thomas and The Arch-Conjurer of England by Glyn Parry will explain everything in scholarly detail.

  Once again, I also relied on The Queen’s Conjurer by Benjamin Woolley, John Dee by Richard Deacon, John Dee, The World of an Elizabethan Magus by Peter J. French and The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age by Frances Yates. Some informed speculation about the Dee dwelling at Mortlake can be found in John Dee of Mortlake by Nicholas Dakin, published by the Barnes and Mortlake History Society. Damon Albarn’s music for his opera Dr Dee shows a sympathetic understanding of Mortlake’s finest and is well worth a listen.

  Dee’s abilities as a dowser are fairly well chronicled. John Aubrey records how he’d find missing items for his Mortlake neighbour, Goodwife Faldo. The Faldo family of Mortlake were long-time neighbours of John Dee and his mother. It may have been the daughter-in-law of the Goodwife Faldo mentioned in this manuscript, who, as an old woman, gave an account of the tall, good-looking and generous Dr Dee to Aubrey.

  Dee’s scrying sessions, in later life, with the medium, Edward Kelley, are well chronicled. He apparently told people his crystal had come ‘from the angels’ but where his scrying activities began is less certain. The Queen’s interest is well known, as is her visit to Dee’s house to examine his scrying equipment for herself. It’s likely she was accompanied on this visit by Robert Dudley. The beryl in the British Museum may have been Dee’s… or may not.

  Dowsing is the only fringe-psychic gift he appeared to have possessed. Thanks to Ced Jackson, John Moss, Graham Gardner and Helen Lamb of the British Society of Dowsers for background. And Caitlin Sagan for the BM pictures.

  The story of how Presteigne became the assize town of Radnorshire is well documented. The Mid Wales organised-crime syndicate, Plant Mat, based in a cave in the Devil’s Bridge area of Ceredigion, accepted responsibility for the murder of a judge at Rhayader and some of its members were subsequently hunted down.

  The Prices did finish their new home, still known as Monaughty and still the most impressive Elizabethan house in Radnorshire, standing alone, in a curve of the road from Knighton to Penybont.

  John Dee is recorded as visiting Wigmore in 1576, when he found discarded manuscripts, which he considered to be of some value, in the remains of the chapel at Wigmore Castle, already falling into ruin. Today, the castle is far more visible than the abbey. The abbot’s house is now the home of John and Carol Challis, who were kind enough to show us around… and put me on to Abbot Smart, more of whose alleged misdeeds were uncovered by John Grove, of the Mortimer History Society.

  Roger Vaughan went on to become MP for Radnorshire and, in the 1580s, bought Kinnersley Castle, just over the English border, which he restored extensively, putting in large windows to flood its rooms with light. A ceiling, decorated with esoteric symbols in its moulding, is said to have been designed by John Dee. As Dee was not known as an interior decorator, it can only be assumed that, if he was the designer, it was meant to serve some protective purpose, but that’s another story.

  Five years later, in 1565, local merchant John Beddoes, after whom Presteigne High School is named, left an area of land, the rent from which is still used to pay for the ringing of the nightly curfew. But that was another book.

  Twm Siôn Cati – Thomas Jones, of Tregaron – is still a well-known folk hero in south-west Wales, often celebrated as the Welsh Robin Hood. He was pardoned by Elizabeth not long after she came to the throne. And he did indeed become John Dee’s cousin by marriage.

  It was Tracy Thursfield, student of the Hidden, who first told me about the shewstone (which was last heard of at Brampton Bryan Castle, home of the Harleys, who were also connected with Wigmore Abbey) and gave regular advice throughout. Mairead Reidy, ace researcher, found more details and provided a rich assortment of relevant literature. Keith Parker, author of A History of Presteigne, provided the background on Dee’s family, Nicholas Meredith and Stephen Price, and Hilary Marchant suggested the sites of judicial premises.

  Thanks once again to the present owners of the two houses at Nant-y-groes. Also Duncan Baldwin and Lucille, for legal advice. Apart from those involving royalty and high government figures, there’s little evidence of the way Elizabethan trials were conducted, especially at assize level. It seems unlikely that there were barristers for the prosecution and defence, as we know them today, which suggests that most of the questioning of witnesses was done by the judge himself. The rights of the accused to offer up a defence were not automatic and might depend on the generosity of the judge.

  Thanks to Sir Richard Heygate, co-author with Philip Carr-Gomm of (every home should have one) The Book of English Magic for links to portals and John Dee; Ed Wilson for London geography and yet more legal assistance; Bev Craven, masterly graphic artist and connoisseur of the curious; Alun Lenny for the background on Plant Mat, Twm and Dee’s Welsh roots; my wife, Carol, for the usual massive and perceptive edit; and Sara O’Keeffe at Corvus for a final overview… and a lot of patience.

  Pilleth Church on Brynglas is well worth a visit. The holy well remains, if not the statue of the Virgin and – as someone said – it’s so light and welcoming up there these days that it looks as if ‘work’ has been carried out there.

  The name of Rhys Gethin, who achieved Owain Glyndwr’s greatest victory, at Pilleth, is still remembered in Wales – most recently as the professed author of communications from the small terrorist unit, Meibion Glyndwr, who ran an arson campaign against English-owned holiday cottages in north Wales in the 1980s. The most intriguing account of
Glyndwr’s campaign and its aftermath is Alex Gibbon’s The Mystery of Jack of Kent and the Fate of Owain Glyndwr.

  My apologies to Nicholas Meredith, who may have been an entirely honest and decent businessman and property dealer.

  The Mappa Mundi can be seen at Hereford Cathedral.

  Legends of guardians of ancient sites are well known on the Welsh border. And some stories of guardian manifestations are rather too recent to qualify as old legends. An archaeologist once told me he’d been refused permission to excavate a Bronze Age mound on a farm in Powys because the farmer had himself once sunk a spade into it and seen something so dreadful he’d not gone near it since, with any kind of implement.

  According to legend, the restless spirit of Amy Robsart at Cumnor Place was removed from Cumnor by ten priests with candles.

  Poor Amy. That seems wrong, somehow.

  Enjoyed The Heresy of Dr Dee?

  The Bones of Avalon, Dee’s first investigation, is also available from Corvus

  England, 1560

  A country divided

  Riven by religious strife and dynastic ambition

  Elizabeth Tudor

  The newly crowned queen

  Twenty-six years old, superstitious and desperately vulnerable

  Dr John Dee

  The queen’s astrologer

  Scholar, suspected sorcerer and now investigator, sent to Glastonbury to unearth the missing bones of King Arthur

  The Bones of Avalon

  Centuries-old secrets, unexpected violence, the breathless stirring of first love… and the cold heart of a complex plot against Queen Elizabeth I.

  Read on for a taste of this exciting adventure!

  Matters of the Hidden

  A foreboding.

  I MUST HAVE been the only man that morning to touch it. They’d gathered around me in the alley, but when I put a hand into the coffin they all drew back.